10 Greatest Neil Young Songs (Part 2)

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3)Down By The River

I heard this song when I was just a kid and I remember being shocked when the chorus came. It's a big moment, everything's flipped upside down, the whole world's not what you think it was. Like cold water in the sunshine, you expect it's just another day and there's bodies in the woods. It wakes you up, he draws you in. A hippie starts with a guitar and ends up burning Vietnam; a stranger turns and he's Neil Young.




4) After The Gold Rush

When Rolling Stone reviewed After The Gold Rush they said it was horrible. I disagree with almost everything they wrote about it but it's a great album review and really well written. Here's a link to it). My favorite part is where the writer, Langdon Winner, talks about the title track. He writes,

"...on this album [Neil Young's] intonation often sounds like pre-adolescent whining. The song 'After The Gold Rush,' for instance, reminds one of nothing so much as Mrs. Miller moaning and wheezing her way through "I'm A Lonely Little Petunia In An Onion Patch." Apparently no one bothered to tell Neil Young that he was singing a half octave above his highest acceptable range."

I love reading bad reviews of things now generally held as sacred. They remind you that nothing ever is and that nothing should ever be. I once saw a Rolling Stone article where Jon Landau, before he became Bruce Springsteen's manager, wrote a scathing review of the The Godfather. Telling it like it is. Things that are great should stand on their own; like the first two Godfather's and After The Gold Rush did. Is Neil singing in too high a key? I don't know, but I can hear what Winner was reacting to. The song puts you on edge, it's not relaxing, it's cold, it's bare, it's a pale white horse in a freezing mountain stream. Beautiful and deformed; like it shouldn't be there but it is. It sticks out like a sore thumb or like a diamond; (depending on your point of view) and I've got mine and Langdon's got his.




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