The Musical Transcendence of Neil Young
Author Martin Halliwell explores the artist’s long-running fascination with dreams
The cover of Neil Young’s 1975 album Zuma, based on a pencil sketch by James Mazzeo, depicts a dreamlike California. Two casually-drawn figures fly from the snow-capped mountains over a cactus-strewn desert towards the coast. A long-billed bird of prey carries a naked woman in its claws, her outstretched arms mirroring the angle of the bird’s giant wingspan as they fly together over a pyramid in the desert. A half-moon rises amid the early evening stars as the hazy sun sinks to the horizon. A ship is anchored near the shore. Its sails are at rest as though it has just returned from a long voyage. Its masts form two burial crosses, symbolizing death to balance the life-giving luminescence of the moon.
Despite this dark imagery the overall mood is comically exuberant, especially compared to the serious mythologies of many 1970s progressive rock album covers and the melancholic photograph of the musician looking out to sea on the cover of On the Beach the previous year. Mazzeo’s sketch might have been a frame from a low-budget animation, if it was not for the darkly etched border of “Neil Young” and “Crazy Horse” and the four contrasting white letters of the album title that hover in the sky. The drawing does not reflect the lyrics of Zuma with any precision, but echoes the eclecticism of Young’s music of the mid-1970s, blending an affinity with the West Coast landscape and imaginative journeys beyond the here and now.
Mazzeo sketched four versions of the cover image, based on a visual idea of Young’s about time travel, a “bird flying women over the desert, pyramids and stuff.” Rather than the grand mythologies that fascinated prog rock bands, Mazzeo’s image only provides a loose conceptual focus for the album. There are visual echoes of the final two tracks — the Aztec temple in “Cortez the Killer” and the shoreline of “Through My Sails” — but the clearest reference point is to the second, seven-minute song “Danger Bird.”
The song’s long, slow opening suggests that this mythological creature is just waking and preparing for a lengthy flight home. The bird is not as agile as he once was, but can still fly even though his wings have “turned to stone.” We may be tempted to read the image of stone wings as a metaphor for Young’s “fossilized relationship” with actress Carrie Snodgress. The song is both personal and epic, though, as the singer and bird soar above the dangerous city into a wind current that takes them homewards. The shadow imagery in the defiant closing lines of “Danger Bird” echoes the final verse of “Helpless,” but here there are no colours to soften the experience — no lyrical “yellow moon,” no “blue windows” — implying that this mythical flight is replayed in the singer’s emotionally stark journey. This epic quality is amplified by Young’s dramatic guitar, Billy Talbot’s heavy bass, and counterpoint backing and lead vocals — even more so on the extended live version on the 1997 Year of the Horse album.
The Zuma cover and “Danger Bird” are examples of dream imagery that punctuates Young’s 1970s albums, often without clear lines separating sleeping from waking life. This shifting between layers of consciousness is animated via the flight of “Danger Bird,” the composition of which Young describes in visual terms: “a series of pictures. You never see exactly the same thing. You go to new places.” We might associate a fluid state of mind with drug and alcohol intake during the 1970s — the recording of Tonight’s the Night was fuelled by tequila, Young ate marijuana-infused honey slides during the making of On the Beach, and Crazy Horse reputedly took angel dust before recording “Cortez the Killer” — but fluidity also emerges in a group of songs that explore the relationship between dreams and reality.
When he returned to dreams in the late 1980s, Young tended to signal their presence more explicitly, often harkening back to a particular time and place, such as the San Francisco of the late 1960s in “Big Time” and “Mansion on the Hill.” In these two songs reality is more stable than the all-enveloping “dreamland” to which the singer awakes every morning in the Tonight’s the Night ballad “New Mama.” But even in later songs, such as the penultimate Harvest Moon track “Dreamin’ Man,” Young recognizes that dreaming is both his problem and an imaginative resource that allows him to expand time and space. We might link this to the psychedelic scene of the late 1960s or to his live versions of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” in 2008–9, with its drug-induced daydream interlude. However, although his dreams might take him far from home, they have the capacity to reveal alternative cultures and expanded horizons. This tendency echoes the vision quests of many North American indigenous tribes, associated with states of heightened spiritual awareness experienced during a rites-of-passage journey, which taps into natural rhythms and tribal memories. Just as the vision of “Danger Bird” allows Young to overcome his earlier hesitancy and to escape the tormenting city, so transformative dream imagery opens up emotional and imaginative worlds for him.
Dreams for Young are sometimes a puzzle to solve and at other times a new geography to explore, corresponding to the two dominant dream theories of the 1960s: the Freudian theory in which dreams are a working through of repressed psychic matter; and the existential humanist view of dreams as an alternative topography. Dreaming is rarely a doorway to the state of lost innocence for which Young yearns in “Sugar Mountain,” but it has the capacity to transport the singer and the listener elsewhere. Through the act of dreaming Young can drift purposefully, pulling together sounds, images and colours in creative ways, and can explore the twists and turns of the unconscious where one image blurs with the next. The nature of dreams means that their shape keeps morphing. This can lead the dreamer towards deeper meaning, but can also drift away into impressions and noise. At times Young searches for direction–such as the quest on his 2007 track “Spirit Road” to discover the “long highway” within — and at other times escapes from meaning into a play of imagery and sound.
We can identify this second trend in one of Young’s early dream songs, “Broken Arrow.” This six-minute coda to the second Buffalo Springfield album Buffalo Springfield Again seems to be inspired by the early-summer release of The Beatles’ concept album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, leading Young to incorporate crowd noises from a Beatles concert and the opening distorted snippet of a live performance of “Mr Soul,” sung by drummer Dewey Martin. Despite its musical variety there is little input from the band, except for backing vocals by Richie Furay, added after Young had recorded the song in September 1967. Its power stems from Young’s sound experiments and the visually arresting figure of a Native American standing alone on a riverbank with an empty quiver. This image of the ‘vanishing Indian’ with a broken arrow suggests either surrender to an unstoppable force or an offering of peace. What makes this a mysterious image is that there is no discernible enemy in sight; instead the verses describe a triad of social pressures (fame, adolescence and marriage) as if modern social organization has defeated the nobility of the Native American.
The question “did you see him in the river?” incorporates the listener in a historical story in which nature is replaced by social ritual. This transition is reinforced by the river imagery, which seems more urban than rural and permits the figure no room to flourish. The complex phrasing that Young uses to describe the unarmed Native American is developed in the song’s structure, where forward movement is interrupted by sound snippets: the burst of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the end of the first verse, the military drums in the second and the closing lounge jazz suggest that the Native American’s voice is difficult to hear beneath layers of cultural sediment. But the subjects of each verse also find it hard to sustain their stories: the concert audience waits expectantly outside in the rain; the anxious adolescent “hangs up his eyelids” and the king and queen vanish in the midst of a wedding parade. Each new scene takes us back to the haunting image of the Native American with his broken arrow; only the fade-out heartbeat suggests that his spirit survives in the face of debilitating modern forces.
The three parts of “Broken Arrow” constitute probably the most formally arranged track of Young’s career. More often he prefers to work fluidly with themes and sensations that meld into one another, as they do on another three-part song, “Country Girl (Medley),” from CSNY’s Déjà Vu album. Taking a more domestic subject as its focus, the song is nevertheless mythical. It links back to “Broken Arrow” via the short song “Down Down Down,” which he had recorded with Buffalo Springfield but not released. This track has two moods: the first stems from the chorus of “Broken Arrow,” but with the enigmatic Native American replaced by a mysterious woman; the second mood stems from a set of unanswerable questions which Young revisits in “Country Girl.” There are echoes of “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” in the singer’s frustrated attempt to see and think clearly, but here the questions cluster around the motives of the female figure who has committed a transgression that seems to require the singer’s forgiveness. We have seen these elements before. The woman in the river is a similar kind of beckoning figure to the “Cowgirl in the Sand” and arouses suspicions that she has been sharing her love around. But in “Down Down Down” it seems as if the singer, too, has been unfaithful or has let her down. The lyric suggests equivalence between the two, but also confusion on behalf of the singer, particularly about the sequence of events, which words have meaning and who is most to blame.
The disorientation of “Down Down Down” is lighter when it is recycled in the second part of “Country Girl.” It is still a mazy song, though, introduced via the half-rhyme of the first couplet: “Winding paths / through tables and glass.” The musical opening is drawn from “Whiskey Boot Hill,” a short orchestral piece that begins the second side of Young’s debut album. In “Country Girl” the piece is less dramatic and segues into the main theme of the song, where we see a dreamlike woman serving drinks at a celebrity bar. Just as “Danger Bird” might be read biographically as referencing Young’s split with Snodgress, so this waitress figure may be a reference to his first wife Susan Acevedo, even though the two were divorced by the time Déjà Vu was released. But “Country Girl” transcends Young’s biography and floats on a dreamlike plane. The song retains the theme of belatedness and the unanswerable questions, but then abandons confusion for an upbeat final section with harmonies by Crosby and Nash. There is again the sense of an indiscretion and fallen purity, but the early shattered images give way to rural courtship in the final verse as the singer finds an emotional clarity that the “winding paths” of his dreams fail to deliver.
Young revisited dream imagery frequently in the late 1960s and 1970s, from the vision of the “silver spaceships” seen from his basement prison on “After the Gold Rush” to the uncertain haziness of “Like a Hurricane,” where the singer thinks he remembers once seeing his loved one in a “crowded, hazy bar.” In both songs, he manages to find transcendence within a dream world, perhaps inspired by the rural tranquility he briefly experienced in Topanga Canyon in 1968–9 and then in La Honda from 1970. But there is often a groping for expression in this group of songs. We have seen in “Tell Me Why” how the singer pushes himself to speak even though meaningful words do not come easily. Sometimes this inarticulacy seems like nervousness in the presence of a loved one and sometimes a deep incapacity that stops him from thinking and speaking clearly. It also links to Young’s growing awareness that sound can often be a more meaningful medium of expression than lyrics. Slippery language can sometimes be an inspiration, sometimes a curse.
The eight-minute “Like a Hurricane” is one of Young’s best examples of musical transcendence. The bar transforms into the night sky, hovering between a poetic description of a music club and celestial imagery of light and stars. It is followed in the chorus by the song’s central simile of a powerful storm which blows away the singer and envelops his attempts to express his love. The singer describes himself as “just a dreamer” and his loved one as “just a dream,” the word “just” suggesting that this “foggy trip” is on the edge of reality, but also that this is a half-expression of a feeling that lies beyond words. The dreamy image of the woman blurs with the fantasies of his earlier songs, but he does not descend into wish fulfilment or sentimentality or hound-dog lonesomeness. Instead the swirling images become the focus of the song in his search for a quiet centre within the tumult. This tallies with Young’s comment that he often sees “a big blur of images” where one thing is “seemingly unrelated” to another, explaining that “if I see it and keep seeing it” the blur can sometimes return as “a little glimmer of something.” “Like a Hurricane” locates these hints of understanding in a calm, sacred place, but the music moves in another direction when his driving lead guitar soars on the line “getting blown away.” He uses this technique on other power tracks, such as his electrifying cover version of “All along the Watchtower,” which in its “large dramatic gestures” is more reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix than Bob Dylan. Young has acknowledged that the bridge into the chorus of “Like a Hurricane” is inspired by Del Shannon’s 1961 hit “Runaway,” before moving into the central guitar melody. After the first chorus the intensity ebbs slightly ahead of the second verse, but the trance-like guitar solos that follow the second and third chorus are a fuller expression of his dreamscape than the lyrics, especially in live performances where the dream expands through extended solos.
Neil Young: American Traveller by Martin Halliwell is a part of the Reverb series from Reaktion Books Ltd and is available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine retailers.
