Though Harvest is now lauded as Neil Young’s “signature album” and has outsold all past and future efforts, the initial critical reaction fell somewhere between negative, disappointed and What the Fuck?
Negative: John Mendelsohn of Rolling Stone bemoaned “the discomfortingly unmistakable resemblance of nearly every song on this album to an earlier Young composition—it’s as if he just added a steel guitar and new words to After The Gold Rush.”
Disappointed: “Ken Viola, who had been somewhat disappointed by what he felt was the lighter direction of After the Gold Rush, felt cheated by Harvest. The lyrics were full of “surface vagaries” and “simple chord changes”; there were none of the mind-altering surprises Viola had come to expect from his hero.” (McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (p. 373). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)
What the Fuck?: Bill Mann of the Montreal Gazette opined, “One almost is led to believe that Young includes lyric sheets so that listeners can pore over them for hours, just trying to decipher them. Don’t bother; I doubt if there’s too much there.” He then proceeds to wrap up his assessment as follows: “By and large, the album, despite some embarrassing moments, is an interesting one lyrically. Most of the time, when Young’s musicianship falters, his lyrics carry him through.”
Mr. Mann did make one insightful comment in his review, entirely by accident: “Even when Young is happy, as he seems to be in some cuts, he sounds like he’s in pain. Needless to say, many chicks dig this because Young brings out the mother hen in them.”
No shit, Sherlock, and he wasn’t faking it in a desperate attempt to trigger maternal instincts. The pain was as real as it gets:
I was in and out of hospitals for the two years between After the Gold Rush and Harvest. I have one weak side and all the muscles slipped on me. My discs slipped. I couldn’t hold my guitar up. That’s why I sat down on my whole solo tour. I couldn’t move around too well, so I laid low for a long time on the ranch and just didn’t have any contact, you know. I wore a brace. Crosby would come up to see how I was, we’d go for a walk and it took me 45 minutes to get to the studio, which is only 400 yards from the house. I could only stand up four hours a day. I recorded most of Harvest in the brace. That’s a lot of the reason it’s such a mellow album. I couldn’t physically play an electric guitar. “Are You Ready for the Country,” “Alabama” and “Words” were all done after I had the operation. The doctors were starting to talk about wheelchairs and shit, so I had some discs removed. But for the most part, I spent two years flat on my back. I had a lot of time to think about what had happened to me.
Neil’s health problems and his penchant for living in the moment resulted in a rather haphazard recording process spread out over eight months in four different locations across two continents. After reading various sources covering the making of Harvest, I gave the album a nickname: “The It Just So Happened Album”:
- After injuring his back in December 1971, he launched a solo acoustic tour in January where he debuted some of the songs that would wind up on Harvest. Some of the gigs were recorded based on the assumption that the next album would be a live acoustic offering. Result: one song for Harvest.
- It just so happened that Neil received an invitation to perform on the Johnny Cash Show scheduled for February 17 in Nashville. Shortly after arriving, it just so happened that he met producer Eliot Mazer, who mentioned he had recently opened his own recording studio, a converted two-story house in Nashville’s Music Row: “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 . . . We called it ‘Quadraphonic’ as a joke, although it did have four speakers in the control room.” It just so happened that Neil was eager to record some of his new songs, so Mazer rounded up a group of Nashville studio musicians who were later christened the Stray Gators. Though he had never played a lick with these guys, it just so happened that they clicked (for the most part).
- It just so happened that James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt happened to be in town, so Neil recruited the pair for background vocals; Taylor would also provide the banjo fills on “Old Man.” Two more songs for Harvest.
- Neil then headed over to London to record two more songs for Harvest with the London Symphony Orchestra on March 1, arranged and produced by Jack Nitzsche.
- Continuing to rack up the frequent flier miles, Neil returned to Nashville in early April and recorded another pair of songs for Harvest with Elliot Mazer and the Stray Gators.
- In mid-August, Neil chose to have surgery to remove those pesky disks, and though back surgery can be risky, it just so happened that the surgery was a success.
- Still recovering from the surgery with the help of painkillers, Neil was reluctant to return to Nashville to finish the recording. It just so happened that he had recently bought a ranch in Northern California and thought that a ramshackle old barn on the property could be transformed into a fair imitation of a recording studio. Mazer set up loudspeakers to replace the usual headphones worn by the musicians, resulting in recordings filled with leakage from the microphones, but it just so happened that everyone involved liked the sound (though Neil would have preferred “more barn”). As the surgery allowed Neil to play electric guitar, the last three songs recorded for Harvest are known as “the electric songs.”
Given all the starts, stops, travel and uncertainty, one might assume that the unrelenting chaos would have worn out poor Neil. Guess again. “Harvest was just easy. I liked it because it happened fast, kind of an accidental thing . . .” (McDonough, p. 365, Kindle Edition)
It might have been easy for Neil but not so easy for his supporting cast. Though Neil could be as demanding as Alfred Hitchcock in managing the players, he respected good musicians and would never think of referring to them as “cattle.” Still, some of the players found his direction excessive and over-controlling. Drummer Kenny Buttrey claimed that “Neil tells everybody what to play, note for note. If you play somethin’ he doesn’t like, boy, he’ll put a look on you you’ll never forget. Neil hires some of the best musicians in the world and has ’em play as stupid as they possibly can.” (McDonough, p. 364) Linda Ronstadt’s take was less judgmental and more accepting of the director’s methods, realizing that Neil’s concept of perfection embraced spontaneity and imperfection:
I have a very, very meticulous way of working. I’m an oil painter—I take a long time to get all the parts real in tune, get ’em right with multiple tracking, doing it over and over. With Neil you don’t get the chance—you’re lucky if you’ve figured the part out, he does things so fast. Neil’s a sketch artist. He just washes the color over it, it’s done and it’s brilliant. He’s really got an uncanny instinct to go for the throat.” (McDonough, p. 364)
Neil responded non-defensively to Buttrey’s comments in Shakey: “I wouldn’t say that. I don’t like musicians playin’ licks. Buttrey’s got a real good feel—he can get a pocket goin’, he’s very organized and he does take direction really well. He’s an incredible drummer.” (McDonough, p. 365-366) Peter Buck of R.E.M. offered a credible explanation of those two vastly different perceptions in his comments in the tribute section of Shakey: “I’m always inspired when I look at Neil Young and realize he’s doing whatever the fuck he wants.”
Despite the bumpy ride, the odd recording set-ups and Neil Young’s shaky physical condition, Harvest is an artistic triumph, loaded with memorable songs that have stood the test of time. And while the fame he earned from Harvest and “Heart of Gold” led him to “head for the ditch” and gave the impression that he was disowning both the album and the hit record, he later clarified his position in an interview with NME (from Songfacts): “I think Harvest is probably the finest record I’ve made.”
*****
One thing that struck me while culling through the sales data for Harvest was its universal appeal. It’s hardly surprising that the album topped the charts in Canada and the USA, but Harvest also hit #1 in the U.K., Norway and the Netherlands (where it became the best-selling album of the year), #4 in Spain and Germany, and #12 in Sweden and Finland. When released ten years later in Japan, the album peaked at #6. In La Belle France, Harvest sold over a million copies.
I came up with several hypotheses to explain the album’s appeal to music fans all over the world. The melodies are simple and often quite beautiful, encouraging listeners to sing or hum along to the music. The chords used on the album are familiar to any guitarist with six months of practice under their belt, providing rookies with new material to play at parties, around the campfire or in the local coffee house. In reviewing the fan commentary on songmeanings.com, I ran into several variations of the phrase, “Yeah, I’ve been there,” confirming that Neil’s lyrics had touched hearts and souls.
In the end, I decided that the best explanation for the worldwide embrace of Harvest came down to one thing: Neil Young is a great songwriter. Linda Ronstadt explained why in Shakey:
“Neil has those classic elements of sturdy song construction,” said Linda Ronstadt, “but still gives you something new and unique. There’s just some completely classic support structures in his chord progressions—that often seem to run off the key of D—that are just so sturdy and so right, like Greek architecture. The strength of the classic traditional stuff, even though they’re completely unique, they’re all completely Neil.” (McDonough, p. 372)
*****
Side One
Though it may not be apparent at first, Harvest develops into a fairly diverse album in terms of style, sound and arrangement. The first four songs form a mini-suite about relationships with an emphasis on male vulnerability.
“Out on the Weekend”: I can understand why Neil-starved fans like Ken Viola who had waited a year-and-a-half for the new album might have felt a twinge of disappointment when first encountering the minimalist arrangement of this opening track. “Out on the Weekend” is about as far as you can get from a “Ta-da! I’m back, everybody!” moment.
“‘Less is more’ is the phrase he used over and over,” recalled Kenny Buttrey in Shakey (much to his chagrin). The core arrangement consists of drums and bass locked into a slow-to-moderate, steady beat, strummed acoustic guitar and Neil’s vocal; Neil’s harmonica solos and Ben Keith’s brief swoops on the pedal steel guitar are the only bits of ornamentation in the piece. The sole variation from the repetitive beat appears at the end of the truncated verse that leads to the chorus, where instead of using the space for the classic drum fill that Buttrey was likely itching to deliver, Neil limited the drummer’s contribution to four whacks in the snare in sync with his acoustic guitar strums.
So yes, this is Neil Young doing whatever the fuck he wants, paying no attention to expectations and defying common notions of what constitutes a listener-grabbing opening track. “Out on the Weekend” is an inspired and compelling opener in part because it’s understated and unpretentious.
Once you engage with the singer and the song, you realize that the story is equally compelling, capturing the competing emotions common to a relationship in its infancy: hope that the other feels the way you do and a nagging feeling of insecurity that the other might have just wanted a little fun, one-and-done. The key to understanding the song is to apply Linda Rondstadt’s depiction of Neil as a sketch artist who doesn’t want to bore you with details. The first two verses reflect that orientation:
Think I’ll pack it in and buy a pick-up
Take it down to L.A.
Find a place to call my own and try to fix up
Start a brand new dayThe woman I’m thinking of, she loved me all up
But I’m so down today
She’s so fine, she’s in my mind
I hear her callin’
As children, we were all conditioned to believe that stories start at the beginning and move steadily towards the end. In this case, you have to apply a bit of postmodernist thinking and view the tale as non-linear, for the meaning is easier to grasp if you flip the order of the verses. In the second verse, the narrator tells us he had one of the greatest erotic experiences in his lifetime but for some reason, he’s down in the dumps. Well, that’s weird! Let’s see . . . he hears her callin’, so that must mean she lives elsewhere. What did he say in the first verse? ” . . . buy a pick-up/Take it down to L.A.” Ah! He’s somewhere in Northern California and she’s in La-La-Land! The one-night-stand hypothesis is validated by his decision to “Find a place to call my own.” It’s too early in the relationship for him to assume that she’s already made room for his clothes in the bedroom closet.
Now comes the tricky part: the chorus. I think most people can handle the shift to third-person narrative, but we’ll need a little help to get at the meaning. Fortunately, I have a copy of Johnny Rogan’s Neil Young: Zero to Sixty: A Critical Biography. When Rogan asked Neil about the lines “Can’t relate to joy/He tries to speak and/Can’t begin to say,” Neil responded, “That just means that I’m happy so that I can’t get it all out. But . . . the way I wrote it sounds sad.” I think the problem is “Can’t relate to joy” makes the guy sound like he’s anhedonic, contradicting the obvious joy he felt when “she loved me all up.” I think “Something more than joy” might have been more helpful.
Continuing the non-linear narrative, we go back in time to learn about the place where our hero had his sexual epiphany:
She got pictures on the wall, they make me look up
From her big brass bed
Now I’m running down the road trying to stay up
Somewhere in her head
His attraction to this woman forces him into the truck and he passes the time on the drive down I-5 playing disaster movies in his head. Human mating is an inherently awkward process filled with moments of bliss and doubt, and I find the narrator’s expressions of vulnerability quite touching and so very, very human—and the song is an absolute beauty.
“Harvest”: Neil keeps the burner on low for the pretty title track, another minimalist arrangement consisting of guitar, piano, rhythm section and even fewer steel guitar swoops. The mix adds a touch of reverb to Neil’s voice, adding a stance of reflective distance to his performance. The chording is as simple as simple gets, with the D, A, G, Bm, Em combination firmly set in D major. The sheet music says 4/4 but the sway is definitely 2/4, giving the song the feel of sitting in a rocking chair on a quiet Sunday afternoon.
I’ve cited several passages from Shakey because McDonough does a good job of describing the recording process, but Rogan’s Zero to Sixty and his A Complete Guide to the Music of Neil Young are much more helpful if you want to understand Neil’s music. McDonough tends to take Neil’s interpretations and evaluations of his songs at face value, while Rogan approaches Neil’s work with greater objectivity.
For example, McDonough essentially mimics Neil’s opinion when assessing the value of “Harvest” (The one truly great moment on Harvest is “Harvest”), describes the piano part that a third-grader could play as “empathetic and evocative” and accepts Carrie Snodgress’ explanation as to what the song is all about:
. . . Young explores the darker side of the Snodgress clan: The way Carrie tells it, Young pumped her for details of her bizarre family life as she and a friend tripped on acid. She revealed her mother’s many false-alarm suicide attempts, which Young perhaps refers to with: “Did she wake you up to tell you that / It was only a change of plan?”
McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (p. 373). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Putting aside the fact that someone on acid hardly qualifies as a reliable source, I find it incredible that anyone could believe that Neil Young would write a song through such a narrow lens. The experience Neil relates in “Harvest” is common to every budding relationship—once the connection is made, the parties involved want to know more about each other before making a solid commitment. They want to explore past relationships, family influences and how much the other is willing to give and take. Every verse in “Harvest” begins with a question designed to gain more information and gauge the mutual willingness to reveal vulnerabilities through open and honest communication. The line quoted by McDonough may indeed be a reference to “false-alarm suicide attempts” but Neil penned the lyrics with sufficient breadth so that the line could apply to divorce, an unexpected family move or an adverse change in the family’s financial situation. My favorite verse echoes the theme of male vulnerability presented in “Out on the Weekend,” where Neil questions his capacity to accept love:
Will I see you give more than I can take?
Will I only harvest some?
As the days fly past will we lose our grasp
Or fuse it in the sun?
In short, “Harvest’ is a beautiful, melancholic real-life tale of what relationships are all about.
“A Man Needs a Maid”: Oh, boy—another opportunity to defend a male rock star from feminist accusations of misogyny! Well, if I can rush to the defense of an alleged serial offender like Mick Jagger, I can certainly go to bat for Neil Young!
I heard the song hundreds of times growing up but didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics until I was in my pre-teens. My first reaction to hearing Neil sing the line “A man needs a maid” was “That’s a great idea!” After having spent a lot of time with the Irish side of the family and the four men in the brood, I was disgusted that none of them (including my father) could consistently manage to piss into a foot-wide toilet bowl. Shit, guys, that’s like kicking a field goal from the one-yard line! Easy peasy! If you can’t get your weenie to shoot straight and lack the skills or desire to clean up your mess, hire a fucking maid or install a urinal!
I became aware of the accusations of male chauvinism sometime later. I thought they were silly then and even more so now. I wish WordPress had a feature that gave me access to frequently used phrases so I could just click a button instead of having to type what I’ve typed a hundred times. The first two phrases I would save are “Oh, for fuck’s sake” and “DOESN’T ANYBODY READ THE FUCKING LYRICS?”
In this case, paranoid feminists fixated on one line—“A man needs a maid”—and ignored every bit of the surrounding context. The first two verses tell us that Neil is suffering from a fear of intimacy, doubting his ability to give himself to another and return the love he receives. Relationships are so damned complicated . . . maybe it would be better to go with an employer-employee arrangement:
My life is changing in so many ways
I don’t know who to trust anymore
There’s a shadow running through my days
Like a beggar going from door to doorI was thinking that maybe I’d get a maid
Find a place nearby for her to stay
Just someone to keep my house clean
Fix my meals and go away
He explains his ambivalence with greater clarity in the verses that follow the one-line chorus. He expresses some worry about how a relationship will transform life as he knows it and uncertainty in his ability and willingness to give and take . . . but he really wants to see her again.
It’s hard to make that change
When life and love turns strange
And oldTo give a love, you gotta live a love
To live a love, you gotta be “part of”
When will I see you again?
I’ve been there, we’ve all been there. Do I really want to get close to this person? Will they still love me if they knew the real me? Can I trust this person with my heart? Relationships take a lot of work—can I make that kind of commitment?
As for the music, even Neil admitted the arrangement was “overblown.” Few vocalists can stand their ground when faced with a symphony orchestra and Neil’s thin, reedy voice didn’t have a chance. The 2009 remaster managed to provide a better balance between Neil’s voice and the orchestra but really, a string quartet with the cello taking the lead would have been the way to go. Even with its flaws, “A Man Needs a Maid” is a fabulous and courageous piece of work, one that shakes me to the core every time I hear it.
“Heart of Gold”: Most musicians would be thrilled to make it to the toppermost of the poppermost, but Neil Young isn’t like most musicians. His reaction to the success of “Heart of Gold” was “Oh, no! I’ve made a hit record! We can’t have that now, can we?”
Well, buddy, it’s your own damned fault. You wrote a great song with easy-to-understand lyrics about the search for “the one,” a quest that nearly everyone on the planet can relate to, recorded it in two takes when the musicians were fresh and full of energy and your decision to double up on the guitar with Teddy Irwin to reinforce the melody on the fretboard intensified its memorability. Sorry, dude, but there was no way in hell this song couldn’t have made it to the top of the charts. I guess you’re fucked.
The expression of vulnerability in the song—“And I’m getting old”—seems an overreaction for a guy in his mid-twenties, but Neil had already experienced one failed marriage and societal expectations of the era assumed that heterosexual couples would have the marriage thing wrapped up in their early twenties. The age hangup was particularly acute for Boomers who cherished their youth and embraced the “Hope I die before I get old” ethic, hence the preoccupation with aging that Neil wrote about in this song and that Stevie Nicks would later address in “Landslide.”
Well, Neil, you’re still rockin’ in your late seventies, so I suggest you cover the Tina Turner hit and change the lyrics to “What’s Age Got to Do With It?”
“Are You Ready for the Country”: After a heavy dose of the ups and downs of relationships, it’s time for a change of scenery, and Neil’s barn is as good a place as any. The barn songs on Harvest are easy to spot with their loose feel, rougher sound and the presence of electric guitar. This playful little number opens with musicians fiddling and fucking around with their instruments and features Neil and the Stray Gators with guest stars David Crosby, Graham Nash (vocals) and Jack Nitzsche (piano). The song could be interpreted as an embrace of the roots music movement . . . or not, but it is a lot of fun.
Side Two
“Old Man”: Y’all know that I break out in hives when I hear a banjo but I weathered the storm long enough to conclude that James Taylor is one shitty banjo player, even when handed a banjo tuned like a guitar. Yeah, it was his first shot at banjo pickin’ but a more self-aware person would have told Neil, “I suck at this. Find someone else.” I would have been much happier with a simple acoustic guitar and piano arrangement. Thankfully the song is solid, Neil is in fine voice, Linda Rondstadt reaches for the top of her range and finds it, and the lyrics are exceptionally well-written.
The inspiration for the song came from conversations Neil had with the male half of the caretakers he inherited when he bought Broken Arrow Ranch in the early 70s. As he related in the documentary Heart of Gold, “I had purchased a ranch, and I still live there today. And there was a couple living on it that were the caretakers, an old gentleman named Louis Avila and his wife Clara. And there was this old blue Jeep there, and Louis took me for a ride in this blue Jeep. He gets me up there on the top side of the place, and there’s this lake up there that fed all the pastures, and he says, ‘Well, tell me, how does a young man like yourself have enough money to buy a place like this?’ And I said, ‘Well, just lucky, Louis, just real lucky.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s the darnedest thing I ever heard.’ And I wrote this song for him.”
My father interpreted the song as an olive branch to the previous generation, “an attempt to close the Generation Gap.” I’m sure that was a takeaway for many listeners, but what I find most compelling is how Neil bridged the gap—by confessing his loneliness and revealing his vulnerability:
Old man, look at my life
Twenty four and there’s so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of twoLove lost, such a cost
Give me things that don’t get lost
Like a coin that won’t get tossed
Rolling home to youOld man, take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you
I need someone to love me the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes and you can tell that’s true
Though most people are reluctant to do so, the most effective way to build trust with another is to share one’s weaknesses. We humans waste a lot of time and energy on arbitrary divisions involving age, race, gender and social status, building walls and making judgments when we should be reaching out to others with empathy and understanding. That’s my takeaway from “Old Man.”
“There’s a World”: The author of the Wikipedia article on Harvest covered every song on the album except this one. I don’t think it was an accident.
Neil’s pithy assessment in Shakey rings true: “’There’s a World’ is overblown. ‘A Man Needs a Maid’ is overblown, but it’s great. There’s a difference.” The symphonic arrangement creates an expectation that something of great significance is on its way but Neil failed to hold up his end of the bargain with the appallingly insignificant lyrics. Short version: You live in the world (duh), so look around (okay) and stop worrying and moaning (got it!).
Can’t win ’em all!
“Alabama”: The best thing to come out of this piece was a great Lynyrd Skynyrd song. The problem is that “Alabama” begs comparison to “Southern Man” and falls far short of the birth mother’s power and impact. Neil didn’t think much of the song and inadvertently admitted that his vision for the piece was a bit muddled:
In his 2012 autobiography Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young said of this song, “I don’t like my words when I listen to it today. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue.”
Neil Young said that “Alabama” was never meant to be specific to the state, he simply wanted a Southern state that seemed to fit what he had to say. “Actually, the song is more about a personal thing than it is about a state,” he explained. “And I’m just using that name and that state to hide whatever it is I have to hide . . . I don’t know what that means.”
There is a second-best thing about the song, and McDonough hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “You might skip this one altogether if it weren’t for that gorgeous howling guitar.” (McDonough, p.373). Neil’s riffs are some of his nastiest on record and after a long period of electric guitar celibacy, I bet he felt positively orgasmic about the reunion.
“The Needle and the Damage Done”: Listening to this song triggered a childhood memory of the moment when I first learned about the existence of heroin.
Sundays were “folk music and classical guitar days” on the home stereo (unless the 49ers were on TV). I used to curl up on the living room couch and read my books with the soft music playing in the background. Sometimes a song would catch my ear and I’d stop reading to listen.
I was probably about eight years old when on one of those Sundays, a song by Bert Jansch commanded my attention. I liked the sound of his voice and the way he played the guitar but the words didn’t make a lick of sense to me:
One grain of pure white snow
Dissolved in blood spread quickly to your brain
In peace your mind withdraws
Your death so near your soul can’t feel no painYour troubled young life
Had made you turn to a needle of death
I thought the person in the story had eaten contaminated snow but I had no idea what a needle had to do with it. I got up off the couch, found my mother and demanded an explanation. “The snow isn’t real snow. In this case, ‘snow’ is like a nickname for a very powerful drug called heroin. Some people use a needle to inject the drug like the doctor does when he gives you your shots. It’s a very dangerous drug.” “Then why do people use it?” “They use it to make them feel better.” “Like medicine?” “No, not like medicine. Some people, like the boy in the song, use it because they’re sad inside.” “Sad enough to die? That doesn’t make any sense.” My mother sighed and said, “No, it doesn’t and I hope it never makes sense to you.”
My mother got her wish, largely because the risks involving heroin were reinforced in nearly every jazz musician bio I read (you can read a comparatively succinct summary of the heroin epidemic in jazz here). The risk-reward imbalance of heroin will never make sense to me.
Bert’s “Needle of Death” is a longer, narrative poem focused on the impact of heroin on families and society at large. Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done” is stark, poetically economic and based on personal experience with a talented musician who took up heroin to relieve the pain of rheumatoid arthritis. The subsequent addiction inexorably corroded Danny Whitten’s guitar talents (Neil fired him halfway through After the Gold Rush) and led to his death two years later at the age of twenty-nine.
The version that appears on Harvest is a live performance at UCLA that took place during Neil’s acoustic tour in January 1972. The recording is excellent, capturing the subtle intensity in Neil’s voice and the varying dynamics of his guitar. His phrasing is marked by clear intent as if he wanted to make sure that listeners felt the impact of every word:
I caught you knockin’ at my cellar door
I love you, baby, can I have some more?
Ooh, ooh, the damage doneI hit the city and I lost my band
I watched the needle take another man
Gone, gone, the damage doneI sing the song because I love the man
I know that some of you don’t understand
Milk blood to keep from running outI’ve seen the needle and the damage done
A little part of it in everyone
But every junkie’s like a settin’ sun
Three of the lines may require some explanation. Heroin users have been known to withdraw blood from their veins to pick up remnants of the drug and inject it to elongate the high (“Milk blood to keep from running out”). “A little part of it in everyone” acknowledges the truth that we are all subject to addiction in one form or another, but there’s a big difference between craving and dependence. “But every junkie’s like a settin’ sun,” describes the slow but certain march to self-extinction.
In response to rumors that he had picked up a heroin habit (some still claim the song is about his addiction, not Danny’s), Neil told Rolling Stone, “I smoked a lot of grass in the Sixties, continued to smoke grass into the Seventies and dabbled around in other drugs. But I never got hooked on . . . you know, never got out of hand with the harder drugs. I experimented, but I think I’m basically a survivor. I’ve never been an alcoholic. Never used heroin . . . There was never any heroin directly around me, ’cause people knew how I felt about it. Anything that killed people, I didn’t want to have. Anything that you had to have, that was bigger than you, I’m not for that.”
“The Needle and the Damage Done” is the masterpiece Neil probably wished he didn’t have to write, but he would have to face the tragedy of heroin addiction once again on Tonight’s the Night.
“Words (Between the Lines of Age)”: Neil’s explanation of the song in his memoir Waging Heavy Peace sounds like someone trying to describe an uncomfortable feeling but has a hard time collecting his thoughts:
“Words” is the first song that reveals a little of my early doubts of being in a long-term relationship with Carrie. It was a new relationship. There were so many people around all the time, talking and talking, sitting in a circle smoking cigarettes in my living room. It had never been like that before. I am a very quiet and private person. The peace was going away. It was changing too fast. I remember actually jumping out the living room window onto the lawn to get out of there; I couldn’t wait long enough to use the door! Words—too many of them, it seemed to me. I was young and not ready for what I had gotten myself into. I became paranoid and aware of mind games others were trying to play on me. I had never even thought of that before. That was how we did Harvest, in love in the beginning and with some doubts at the end.
There isn’t the slightest hint of Carrie Snodgress and the relationship in the lyrics, so you have to work a bit to put two and two together. In this case, the equation is Rock Star + Movie Star = Forget About Having a Private Life, a highly disturbing situation for an introvert. In a conversation with Jimmy McDonough, Neil admitted he had a hard time getting his head around fame and the strange adulation that comes with it:
I spend too much of my life thinking about fame and what’s hard about it . . . I’ve covered that, I’ve gotten into that, I’ve tried to figure it out. May have learned some things—I don’t know how to articulate them—about how to survive. You can’t dwell on it. You can’t take it seriously. You can’t believe too many of the good things that people tell you. Nobody should be told that many good things about themselves. Makes you kinda cold, kinda gets so you don’t feel it. Because if you feel all those things, you just can’t help but get addicted to “You’re different.”
McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (p. 371). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
In the second and third verses, Neil describes his discomfort with the trappings of fame while resisting the notion that the work he performs somehow makes him “special”:
When I look through the window and out on the road
They’re bringing me presents and saying hello
Singing words, words between the lines of age
Words, words between the lines of ageIf I was a junkman selling you cars
Washing your windows and shining your stars
Thinking your mind was my own in a dream
What would you wonder and how would it seem?
In response to all the hoo-hah surrounding Taylor Swift, a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London by the name of Samantha Brooks explained the likely motivations behind celebrity worship: “It might be that we identify with someone who has attributes we feel are lacking in our own life, or it might be that forming an attachment to a celebrity—even a parasocial, unreciprocated one—can be a kind of compensation for lacking real-life relationships, real intimacy, real attachments, to people in our own lives.”
That, my friends, is the definition of “fucking sad.”
Though this barn song is rock-powered, the mood is somewhere between somber and “emotionally uncertain.” The Am-F-G-Am pattern in syncopated 4/4 time dominates the proceedings and creates a dirge-like feel, but there are rhythmic variations aplenty with truncated measures reflecting a sense of instability. Neil’s guitar licks are frequently cut short, highlighting his underlying discomfort the kind of life he stumbled into. It just so happened that the leaks into the microphones worked out pretty well, supplying the piece with gritty texture. Of all the great songs on Harvest, this is the one I relate to the most because I can’t imagine a worse fate than fame.
*****
Talk about predictable . . . after bashing the crap out of the album when it first came out, Rolling Stone now rates Harvest as the 82nd best album of all time (knocked down four spots since the previous listing so they could cover other bad calls and add more rappers and contemporary pop stars to ensure their relevance).
I don’t think Neil Young gives a rat’s ass about the ratings, the reviews or the recognition. He has always done whatever the fuck he wants to do and that’s more than good enough for me.