The Neil Young album he made to spite his record company
It’s never a good idea to test Neil Young. Compared to the other rock luminaries who have their own sound and stick with it throughout their career, Young doesn’t care about what his critics, bandmates, or even you have to say about where they want his music to go, often going down weird sonic detours regardless of what anyone says. When his record company started to stick their nose where it didn’t belong, though, Young ended up turning in the record Everybody’s Rockin’ purely out of spite.
If anyone was getting into business with Young for the first time, they had to have seen something like this coming. Ever since the days of Buffalo Springfield, Young was known to be an extremely fickle man and notoriously hard to satisfy, which often led to him to fluctuate between every creative outlet he fancied.
After ditching Buffalo Springfield for a solo career, Young would eventually get the call to work with his former bandmate Stephen Stills in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Even though Young’s contributions to albums like Deja Vu would become the most celebrated folk-rock of the early 1970s, Young didn’t want to spend the rest of his life resting on his laurels.
Throughout his solo albums like After the Gold Rush and Harvest, Young began making songs that were far more ramshackle than the soaring harmonies of his counterparts. Outside of the occasional like ‘Heart of Gold’, Young continued following his muse until he became a free agent and signed with Geffen Records from Warner Bros.
While music mogul David Geffen would have rightfully expected a collection of folk-tinged rock songs from Young, he was already in the middle of one of the most absurd periods of his career. Coming after the album re.ac.tor, Trans was one of the last things most fans were asking for from Young, complete with crazy synth textures that made his nasally voice sound atrocious.
After leaning on Young to deliver a rock album or he’d be dropped from the company, Young would eventually go into the studio with the band The Shocking Pinks to crap out a collection of old-time rock and roll. Instead of the rockers expected from ‘The Godfather of Grunge’, this was the kind of music that even Elvis Presley would have scoffed at, taking the rudimentary elements of rockabilly and making a handful of dance tunes that wouldn’t be out of place 30 years before its release.
When talking about his new direction, Young said that going so far in the rockabilly direction was his way of putting Geffen in his place, telling Long May You Run, “They said, ‘Hey Neil, you’ve got to make a rock and roll record, you just have to.’ I said, ‘Do you know what rock and roll is?’ Then I thought in my mind, ‘Rock and roll, what the hell is rock and roll? Let’s go back in time to when rock and roll started and try to see what it is’”.
Even though Young may have been sincere when delivering most of the songs, the lyrics on the album tell a different story. Outside of half of the album being made up of covers, the handful of originals like ‘Payola Blues’ are good indicators of what was really on his mind, talking about the sliminess of the music industry. Young may be able to give the label what they want every now and again, but this insane experiment is a good indication of what can happen when you cross him.
