Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It: Neil Young

At first glance, it would seem that I have given myself no challenge here at all. Can’t live without it for Neil Young? Put down “After The Goldrush” or “Everyone Knows This is Nowhere”, and 90% of readers will nod their heads and say “Well, ok, but you should’ve said “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere” or “Well, ok, but you should’ve said “After the Goldrush” depending on which I had plumped for. The other 10% will have gone for “Harvest” or unbelievably, and yet I believe it is possible, “Harvest Moon”, which is only one step away from abysmal. So – easy, easy. And for the ‘Can’t Live With It’ – well, take your pick of the Geffen albums, and, yeah, I probably will at that.

But this is called ‘Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It’ – not what are Young’s best and worst albums. My choice of ‘Can’t Live Without It’ is certainly not Young’s best album, and yet I have a strong emotional attachment to it. However, tradition demands that we first look at ‘Can’t Live With It’.

Can’t Live With It: “Everbody’s Rockin'” (1983)

There are certainly any number of albums to pick from here. “Americana” is rather overblown for its song content – does ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain‘ – here named ‘Jesus Chariot‘ – really need such a big Crazy Horse production? And where’s the “she’ll be wearing pink pyjamas” verse? Ridiculous. But what about “Trans”? Surely that’s a dire mess of electronic fiddling? Yeah, but it does have ‘Like an Inca’ to balance out the worst-ever version of ‘Mr Soul‘. So, no. “Old Ways”? Harmless covers. “Landing on Water”, then? Surely. Yes, it is a painful, ugly Eighties mess, and don’t ask me to name the song that saves it. It is dreadful in all its shallow, tinny, eighties synth production, a true and undoubted stinker that the world would be better without. But, again, no. What’s worse? Almost anything can be forgiven – except for taking the piss out of your fans just to enable you to stick a finger up to one’s record company. You’ve guessed it, the cynical, soulless, deliberately bad “fuck you” of “Everybody’s Rockin'”, an album of which the best thing that can be said is that it is only 25 minutes long. The four covers on the album are its best moments—and that’s not necessarily saying much. It’s rockabilly by the numbers on ‘Mystery Train‘ as Young channels his inner Shakin’ Stevens. ‘Betty Lou’s Got A New Pair Of Shoes‘ is so poor it may as well be a spoof, but then there’s Young’s own contributions to measure it against. In one minute and fifty seconds, Young scrapes the bottom of the barrel on ‘Kinda Fonda Wanda‘ where he quite clearly can’t even be bothered to keep a consistent Fifties feel – ‘did the bop with Miss Anne, the swim with Mary Anne [nice rhyme of Anne with Anne there Neil], the stroll with Betty Lou, screwed run around Sue.” Oh, nice, real nice. To record such a stream of drivel is one thing; to deliver it and demand it is released is another. If it had never seen the light of day, or just as a bootleg, then the “Fuck you David Geffen” would have had some credibility – but instead, people paid – and still pay – good money for this crap, and that’s making your fans the butt of the joke, which is, frankly, a dick move. So – certainly can’t live with ‘Everybody’s Rockin’ ‘, and Young should have apologised properly by now.

Can’t Live Without It: “A Letter Home” (2014)

Not the album I imagine many would have been expecting. “A Letter Home” was recorded solo on Jack White’s recording booth machine, and it is an album that is a mixture of spoken missives home and covers of songs that are important to Neil Young. It could not be more “lo-fi” – all those millions of “lo-fi” recordings made in bedrooms, outdoors, in cabins or wherever are a thousand times more sophisticated than the terrible, creaky, crackly and frazzled recordings that the Voice-O-Graph recording booth was capable of capturing. And yet, there’s a kind of magic in the sounds that have been recorded.

Although these booths were used for all sorts of recordings, one of the uses was to send a spoken word communication to the folks back home, friends, or lovers or, as in the case of Young’s opening track on the album, a letter to his parents and specifically his Mother. It’s a message that swings between political concerns with the environment and Al Gore’s unheeded climate change warnings to direct communication with a deceased parent: “I’m glad to be able to send you this message and tell you how much I love you and also to tell you that I think you should start talking to Daddy again. Since you’re both there together, there’s no reason not to talk“. If ‘heartfelt’ is a word that should be used, then it’s this recording that deserves it.

And then there’s the songs. The fragile ‘Needle of Death‘ encompasses the whole of “Tonight’s the Night” in just five minutes. ‘Early Morning Rain‘ is a great tribute to Gordon Lightfoot. It’s Young busking for sure, but it’s also one Canadian tipping his hat to another. Lightfoot’s ‘If You Could Read My Mind‘ is, ironically, a rich-sounding recording that goes beyond the capacity of the medium used to capture the sound.

‘Crazy‘ had to be there – Young was in Jack White’s studio to record for a Willie Nelson tribute when he encountered the recording booth, so it makes for a beautifully fragile acknowledgement of that little piece of synchronicity. And if ‘Girl from the North Country’ stands as an inevitable Dylan tribute, there’s also more modern fare in Springsteen’s ‘My Home Town’ which has a barely-there vocal married to sparse chords – and it reached across the years, becoming a dust bowl epic in the hands of Neil Young.

Maybe, I concede, not everyone’s choice, but “A Letter Home” is so full of soul that, for me, it is one item from Neil Young’s almost endless release history that is so special that it becomes an essential listen – over and over again.