FEATURE:
After After the Gold Rush
Neil Young's Harvest at Fifty
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ON Valentine’s Day…
we mark fifty years of Neil Young’s fourth studio album, Harvest. Arriving a couple of years of, perhaps, his finest and most-acclaimed album, After the Gold Rush, some critics at the time felt Harvest was a retreat of After the Gold Rush. Some felt that Young offered no new ideas and felt flat. Retrospective reviews have rightful acknowledged Harvest as a classic album that ranks alongside the very best of all time. Containing the iconic tracks, Harvest, The Needle and the Damage Done, Old Man, Heart of Gold and A Man Need a Maid, it is hard to understand how anyone could have anything bad to say about Harvest in 1972! With some incredible and high-profile collaborators (including James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash), there is so much to admire and pour over. I am going to end with a review concerning the album. First, there are a couple of features that explore Harvest from different perspectives. Classic Rock spotlighted the album last year. They discuss how Harvest is a work that Young loved at first but has come to distance himself from. We also learn about the role and importance of Carrie Snodgress:
“In 1972, Neil Young released his fourth and what became his highest-charting album: Harvest. Acoustic – except for two tracks – out of necessity, because of a back injury that required surgery, it took him an entire year to finish, recorded piecemeal in between tours, hospital stays, surgery recuperations and a high-profile romance that would lead to his first child.
At one point Young called Harvest his “finest album”; then, in 1977, he derided it in the liner notes of Decades, his retrospective collection, all but dismissing it as an MOR aberration.
Forty years later, Harvest continues to confound critics and fans alike. It earned Young his only No.1 record, with the single Heart Of Gold, a song that continues to live on, sung at countless weddings and funerals, and covered by artists as diverse as Zakk Wylde, Boney M, Johnny Cash, Jimmy Buffett and even Young’s Farm Aid partners Willie Nelson and Dave Matthews.
Halfway thorough his solo tour, Young decided to separate the two songs, and began to play them on guitar, cutting one single line: ‘Afraid/A man is afraid’ when the two songs became standalones. But to be completely accurate, while it was released on February 14, 1972, the album was much more than a valentine to Carrie Snodgress.
It’s an album that deals with love of all stripes, chronicling his budding romance with Snodgress, his affection for his ranch hand Louis Avila, his sad regret over Danny Whitten’s dependence on heroin, his own search for self-love.
More so, Harvest is the result of a confluence of serendipitous events, equally weighted by Young’s back injury – requiring him eschew his hefty electric guitars for much lighter acoustic versions; hence writing on that instrument – and falling in love with Snodgress.
The romance unleashed something in the ordinarily emotionally austere Young, allowing him to be more forthcoming, autobiographical and less oblique than he had been before on record.
He even chronicled the beginnings of his romance-cum-conquest of the actress in the third verse of the (much-maligned by feminists) song, A Man Needs A Maid. That is, of course, after first expounding in the first lines that all he really needed was ‘someone to keep my house clean, fix my meals and go away’, lines much more indicative of the character of the relationship than anyone would have suspected in those early days of 1971 when the couple met: ‘A while ago somewhere I don’t know when/I was watching a movie with a friend/I fell in love with the actress/She was playing a part that I could understand.’
It’s intoxicating for the listener to be able to crack open the door into the personal life of this brooding romantic. But if it was absorbing for fans to find him documenting the history of his relationship, it was even more so for Snodgress, who previously hadn’t had any notion who Neil Young was.
“I wasn’t a rock’n’roll girl,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “I said, ‘Neil Young, Neil Young. Where do I know that name from?’”
What’s unnerving is that after the ambiguity of A Man Needs A Maid, and his rather offhand declaration of love for Snodgress, he follows that song with Heart Of Gold, signifying, like Bono a decade after him, that he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.
There are no accidents in album sequencing, and Young had to have thought hard about where he wanted to place Heart Of Gold in respect to the rest of the songs. Was the placement, the juxtaposition, a message to Snodgress, or to himself?
Young once described his music as being about “the frustrations of not being able to attain what you want”. When it appears that he had gotten what he wanted, if the love songs on Harvest are to be believed, he’s not completely comfortable with it.
Perhaps that “heart of gold” he’s searching for is his own, given the use of the personal pronoun: ‘I’ve been in my mind and it’s such a fine line that keeps me searching for a heart of gold.’ This particular journey may just be the search for self.
Whatever it was, this prospector’s search led Young to the top of the Billboard chart, giving him the only No.1 record in his long career, but also making him back away from his fame, all but disowning it.
He dismissed and denigrated the song in the liner notes for Decade. “This song put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.”
Decades after Harvest’s release, it’s somehow still polarising people. It’s been called the Neil Young album for people who don’t like Neil Young. Some critics discounted it for being too simplistic, too obvious. Others said it was too overblown and ponderous, using as evidence A Man Needs A Maid and There’s A World, both recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Rolling Stone trashed the record upon its release, all but calling it a retread of After The Gold Rush with a steel guitar. In 2003, the magazine recanted, calling Harvest the 78th greatest album ever made.
Long-time Young stalwart Cameron Crowe called Harvest a “regression,” said the lyrics were “cliché”, and pounced on Taylor and Ronstadt for their “soggy background work”.
That dean of rock critics, Robert Christgau, damned it with faint praise, explaining that “the genteel Young has his charms, just like the sloppy one”. But there is a part of Young that doesn’t mind keeping people off-balance, a dedication to never doing the expected, even in small ways”.
I would encourage people to read the entire article from Classic Rock, as it provides so much information about the creation of Harvest. We learn about the band Young recruits to help bring a masterpiece. Regardless of what some critics have said – and Young’s changing relationship with it -, there is no denying the fact Harvest is a classic that deserves huge admiration. Guitar talked about the genius of Harvest in an article from last year. The collaborative nature of Young’s 1972 album is one of its great strengths:
“Despite his notorious hard-headedness… Despite his super-long raging electric guitar solos… Despite his ‘grand concept’ albums that cover every topic from drug death to ecology to anti-agrarian corporations… Young’s always been a serial collaborator. And Harvest is really no different. Although his name alone adorns the cover, he hooked some celebrated Nashville country session musicians he dubbed The Stray Gators, and also the London Symphony Orchestra. He also tapped future folk/country ascendants Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, while previous bandmates David Crosby, Steven Stills, and Graham Nash all provided backing vocals.
Sounds confused? It was, a bit. In a now-fabled performance at Toronto’s Massey Hall in January 1971, Young shuffled in front of his hometown crowd and remarked of his songs: “I’ve written so many new ones that I can’t think of anything else to do with them other than sing them.” Potent, stripped down songs called Heart of Gold, Old Man and The Needle And The Damage Done were duly tested. Young liked them, his audience loved them. As part of his then Journey Through The Past tour, a newer image of Young alone – free from Buffalo Springfield and CSNY – hunkered over his Martin acoustic hammering out those clanking chords, was one soon set in stone.
In fact, Young’s relocation to ballad-ville was purely a practical concern at first: persistent back problems, which later required surgery, had made it painful for him to play his weighty “Old Black” Les Paul or other electrics and he simply couldn’t perform properly cranked or even standing up. A month after Toronto, while playing with Taylor and Ronstadt for a Johnny Cash TV Show session recorded in Nashville, Young was still travelling light with just his Martin D-45.
While in Music City, Young accepted a dinner invite from young producer Elliot Mazer (1941-2021) who had just launched Quadrafonic Sound Studios, a converted two-storey house in Nashville’s Music Row. Mazer knew early the “romance” a place like Quad could offer: “The control room was the old porch. The living room and the dining room became the two live rooms, and the kitchen became a drum area.” The name though? “We called it ‘Quadraphonic’ as a joke,” Mazer later explained, “although it did have four speakers in the control room.”
Young started at Quad in February 1971. It was a Saturday night, and Mazer had to quickly assemble a band of whoever he knew who was in a fit state to record. Some of them, Young didn’t even know.
Mazer later told TapeOp.com, “Neil was very specific about what he wanted. When Neil Young plays a song, his body language dictates everything about the arrangement. Neil sat in the control room of Quadrafonic and played Heart Of Gold. Kenny [Buttrey, drums] and I looked at each other, and we both knew it was a number one record. We heard the song and all we had to do was move Neil into the studio and get the band out there, start the machine and make it sound good. It was incredible!
“At one point [on Out On The Weekend], Neil said to Kenny that his hi-hat was too busy, so Kenny said, ‘Fine. I’ll sit on my right hand.’ He played the whole take sitting on his right hand.” By only three days in, Young had already cut the versions of Old Man and Heart Of Gold to be released. “Neil and the band played live,” said Mazer, “same as every song on Harvest.”
Town house to Town Hall to farm barn
That said, Harvest had three very different stages. Young was soon on the move again, to London, for BBC TV’s In Concert (another legendary show, some is on YouTube) and a live date at the Royal Festival Hall. On the same visit, A Man Needs A Maid was one of two songs recorded with Young on piano and with backing from the London Symphony Orchestra, the glamorous recording location being… Barking Town Hall.
Like Phil Spector’s strings on The Beatles’ Let It Be, the arrangements of Jack Nitzsche – notably also Spector’s production sidekick – have often been criticized as overbearing and ill-matching. But Rolling Stone said the strings on A Man Needs a Maid made for “a moving union of grandeur and vulnerability.” Young doesn’t care for critics and, anyways, he was happy: “Bob Dylan told me it was one of his favourites,” Young noted. “I listened closer to Bob.”
Young took a break for most of April to September ’71, when he reconvened his makeshift Stray Gators at the California ranch he’d called Broken Arrow. Time for more electric cropping this time, as in the expansive wooden barn they nailed down Alabama, Are You Ready For The Country? and Words (Between The Lines Of Age).
There was one more recording needed. And for another Young classic, The Needle And The Damage Done. A deeply-emotional songs about the perils of heroin addiction, its descending chord pattern is reminiscent of The Beatles’ Dear Prudence and is centred around Young’s recognizable flatpicking style. He didn’t even bother with a studio or a barn for capturing this: the album track is taken from an early live recording from Los Angeles’s UCLA on 30 January 1971, the day after Toronto, the day after Neil Young said “I can’t think of anything else to do…” September had come, and the Harvest was all but over”.
I hope that there is a lot of celebration on 14th February for an album that, to me, sits alongside the very best. Fifty years after it came into the world, people are still playing Harvest. Its songs are being covered and, as I have proven, deep articles are being written about its background and reputation. The retrospective reviews have been more glowing than many of the contemporary ones from 1972. This is what AllMusic wrote in their review:
“Neil Young's most popular album, Harvest benefited from the delay in its release (it took 18 months to complete due to Young's back injury), which whetted his audience's appetite, the disintegration of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (Young's three erstwhile partners sang on the album, along with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor), and most of all, a hit single. "Heart of Gold," released a month before Harvest, was already in the Top 40 when the LP hit the stores, and it soon topped the charts. It's fair to say, too, that Young simply was all-pervasive by this time: "Heart of Gold" was succeeded at number one by "A Horse with No Name" by America, which was a Young soundalike record. But successful as Harvest was (and it was the best-selling album of 1972), it has suffered critically from reviewers who see it as an uneven album on which Young repeats himself.
Certainly, Harvest employs a number of jarringly different styles. Much of it is country-tinged, with Young backed by a new group dubbed the Stray Gators who prominently feature steel guitarist Ben Keith, though there is also an acoustic track, a couple of electric guitar-drenched rock performances, and two songs on which Young is accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra. But the album does have an overall mood and an overall lyric content, and they conflict with each other: The mood is melancholic, but the songs mostly describe the longing for and fulfillment of new love. Young is perhaps most explicit about this on the controversial "A Man Needs a Maid," which is often condemned as sexist by people judging it on the basis of its title. In fact, the song contrasts the fears of committing to a relationship with simply living alone and hiring help, and it contains some of Young's most autobiographical writing. Unfortunately, like "There's a World," the song is engulfed in a portentous orchestration. Over and over, Young sings of the need for love in such songs as "Out on the Weekend," "Heart of Gold," and "Old Man" (a Top 40 hit), and the songs are unusually melodic and accessible. The rock numbers, "Are You Ready for the Country" and "Alabama," are in Young's familiar style and unremarkable, and "There's a World" and "Words (Between the Lines of Age)" are the most ponderous and overdone Young songs since "The Last Trip to Tulsa." But the love songs and the harrowing portrait of a friend's descent into heroin addiction, "The Needle and the Damage Done," remain among Young's most affecting and memorable songs”.
A happy fiftieth anniverssary to Neil Young’s Harvest. Now considered one of the most celebrated albums ever, it took quite a while for critical perception to shift. Knowing that most of Harvest was written about or for Carrie Snodgress and, after its success, Young sort of resented the fame he found and how his life changed. I hope that Young has made peace with Harvest and sees it in a different light. Whilst not quite as acclaimed and great as After the Goldrush, Harvest is definitely a staggering record that deserves a lot of love. This Valentine’s Day, I am sure we will see so many people expressing their love…
FOR the wonderous Harvest.