The Neil Young albums that were never meant to supposed to be successful
Neil Young would never be satisfied playing one genre of music for the rest of his life.
He went wherever his muse told him to go, but even for someone known for taking some wild left turns, there were bound to be a few records where people wondered whether he had lost the plot.
Then again, Young always knew exactly what he was doing when putting out records. An album like Everybody’s Rockin’ might be dumb and proud of it half the time, but knowing that he had written the album as a means to get as far away from his record company as possible, it’s almost respectable how far he would go to put some of the corporate suits in their place.
But if that was all for a joke, the 1980s were about to be an incredibly dark time for him. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were officially a thing of the past, and even if Young was one of the most successful musicians of the bunch, he was never cut out for the neon-coloured era of MTV. The music video format didn’t cater to the kind of songs that Young was working with, but before he even started making proper videos, albums like Trans were throwing people for a loop.
No one wanted to hear what Young’s take on Kraftwerk sounded like with all those synthesisers, but Young always had a vision beyond what his fans wanted. He had made the record as a means of communicating with his son suffering from cerebral palsy, and while the rest of the 1980s saw him moving further into synthesised music, Young was never ashamed of working on the projects for a second.
In his mind, they were outstanding, but everyone made a critical error when they thought he was trying to go pop, saying, “I don’t make excuses for those records. I think those records are going to stand up in time. I don’t feel the records are not as good as the records I’m doing now, I just feel that they’re not aimed at success—in any way. Yet if you put them on a wall—I look at them as if you’re walking through a museum. You see somebody’s paintings. You go, ‘Wow, look at this period here!’”
And listening to the album with fresh ears, Trans is wildly inventive for its time. Not everything from the synthesised era of MTV has held up the greatest, but when listening to Young experimenting with different soundscapes, it’s almost like he was taking a page out of Paul McCartney’s playbook when he made McCartney II, always coming up with new sounds and seeing where it took him.
Admittedly, some later albums like Landing on Water don’t necessarily have the same punch or weirdness to hold up on their own, but compared to the successful stuff happening at the time, Young was much better suited to taking risks than whatever the hell was going on with his old band when he got his friends back together for American Dream.
There has probably never been an artist more allergic to keyboards than Neil Young, but anyone who lines up to bash this album should realise that ‘Uncle Neil’ didn’t make it for them. He was making the kind of music that he could look back and be proud of, and even if it wasn’t the most commercial record in the world, Young was much happier doing whatever the hell he wanted than having to play industry games.
