Neil Young’s hot streak, roughly 1973-1980, left us with some of the deepest, darkest, most hallucinatory music of the great singer/songwriter era. Tonight’s the Night, On the Beach, Zuma, American Stars ‘n Bars, Comes a Time and Rust Never Sleeps were all idiosyncratic masterpieces, each one different in its own way, yet each one bearing the unmistakable stamp of a brilliant and utterly unique artist.
Young was on fire during this period. The songs were pouring out of him like quicksilver, like floodwaters, like a hurricane.
On an autumn evening in ’76, under a full moon (he’s always been superstitious like that), Young and his longtime producer David Briggs entered a Malibu recording studio. He brought his acoustic guitar and harmonicas. And there, between hits of weed and cocaine, Young committed 12 of his newest songs to tape.
Would they later be re-recorded as thunderous rockers with Crazy Horse? Or left as acoustic numbers, perhaps done up in sumptuous harmony with Linda Ronstadt, Nicolette Larson or Emmylou Harris? He didn’t know yet. He simply wanted to lay them down, right there, on that night.
The results of that evening’s impromptu session have now seen the light of day as Hitchhiker, part of the ongoing Neil Young Archives series. It’s a window into the past – when Young was at his writing, playing and vocalizing best – and, with the benefit of hindsight, a revelatory glimpse into the artistic process.
With the exception of “Human Highway,” which had been debuted live during the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion tour of two years previous, these songs were hot of the press of Neil Young’s ever-turning imagination. There’s a rawness and immediacy to these performances that’s simply breathtaking.
Young obviously recognized that – the take here of “Pocahontas” was used on Rust Never Sleeps (with a few studio overdubs); “Campaigner” wound up on the anthology Decade (with its second verse edited out; it appears here in its original form); “Captain Kennedy,” from this session, found its way onto Hawks and Doves.
But “Powderfinger,” a chilling Civil War narrative that was at one time to be a gift to Young’s pals in Lynyrd Skynyrd (they never got the chance to record it), later became an electric gem in the Young/Crazy Horse catalog. Here, it’s a stark, simple plea for mercy in the face of impending doom, its young southern protagonist terrified and trembling as the Yankee gunboat turns its focus on him.
“Ride My Llama” was always one of Young’s weirdest songs (see “The Old Homestead,” “Lost in Space,” “Misfits” and countless other examples). On Rust Never Sleeps, it took on the spacey trappings of an alien nightmare. The Hitchhiker version reveals it for what it really is – a stoned hippie’s time-traveling dream.
Performed on piano, “The Old Country Waltz” is beautiful and sad – the more uptempo band version on American Stars ‘n Bars was strange and humorous. It seems he only added the punchlines later.
“Hitchhiker,” the title song, is a rambling jumble of words and images, the sort of song that only makes sense in the context of a Neil Young album. He re-visited it many years later, electrically, on the Daniel Lanois-produced Le Noise. You can forget that one right now. This is the real deal.
“Give Me Strength” was played live a few times in the ‘70s; “Hawaii” is the sole number that no one, outside of Young’s inner circle, has heard before.
They’re both great.
Neil-o-philes know, from bootlegs and the odd hint dropped in interviews, that there are dozens, maybe more, of other unreleased songs in the man’s cold-storage vaults. Supposedly, he has entire albums recorded, mixed and mastered – albums that were yanked from release at the last minute.
There’s a great solo acoustic take on “Hold Back the Tears” out there in boot-land, which I would’ve bet you was done at the Hitchhiker session. But it’s not here, so maybe not.
Likewise, a 1976 live/studio performance of the aching ballad “Stringman” has been circulating for a few years (an inferior version appears on the 1990s set Unplugged).
Now that Neil is an old man (take a look at my life) putting out one immediately-forgettable record after another, hipsters wondering what all the fuss was about would do well to investigate Hitchhiker. THe truth is, Harvest is a relic; this is an unearthed gem from an exceptionally fertile field.
Listen, kids: It’s an artist, fresh, immediate, creating something wholly unique and unprecedented, right before your very ears.
Hear "Powderfinger" below and listen to the entire album via NPR. Call your local record store to see if it'll carry the album.
Critic's rating — 5/5