Neil Young and Crazy Horse Ride Again
Things change rather quickly in Neil Young's world. After a year that saw the release of his solo effort, Le Noise, and a reunion set with Buffalo Springfield that gave last summer's Bonnaroo Festival one of its finer moments, Young has just announced that he is once again recording with Crazy Horse. This, after the much anticipated Buffalo Springfield reunion tour seems to have gone belly up.
The 66-year-old Young broke the reunion news late last month at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where he and director Jonathan Demme were promoting Neil Young Journeys, their latest concert film/documentary together. (Check out a clip here.) The complete Crazy Horse line-up hasn't backed Young on an album since his 1996 masterpiece, Broken Arrow, though they did cut an LP together in 2000 called Toast that Neil ultimately opted to shelve. The newly reformed band apparently have one record in the can already, titled Americana, which features a children's choir singing a variety of rearranged kindergarten songs with Crazy Horse. Song titles from the upcoming album are reported to include "Clementine," "This Land is Your Land," "Oh Susanna," and "She'll be Coming Around the Mountain." It's unclear if Toast and Americana are one and the same as some speculate.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse played their first live performance in 8 years last weekend as part of the GRAMMY Foundation's MusiCares Person of the Year Gala honoring Sir Paul McCartney. They paid tribute to the former Beatle by transforming "I Saw Her Standing There" into what Rolling Stone called "a raucous scrap heap of guitars, feedback and good old fashioned garage rock." Prior to the charity event—which also featured Coldplay, Foo Fighters, and James Taylor, among many others—Young and Crazy Horse hadn't performed together since the conclusion of their Greendale tour in March 2004.
Out of all the backing bands Neil Young has recorded and performed with over his much celebrated half century in music, the most well known of the bunch, and long considered one of the greatest garage bands ever, remains Crazy Horse. Producer/keyboardist Jack Nitzsche, who worked with Young on Broken Arrow, calls the band the American equivalent of The Rolling Stones. "Crazy Horse is to Neil Young what The Band was to Bob Dylan," he says. "As perfect a complement as tequila and salt." Although Young began playing with Crazy Horse in 1968, the band's roots reach back even further, to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, when Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot, and Danny Whitten sang in an obscure doo-wop band called Danny & The Memories. Molina eventually took up the drums, having previously played them in a high school marching band, while Whitten began concentrating on guitar and Talbot learned bass and piano. With the addition of electric violinist Bobby Notkoff and guitarists Leon and George Whitsell, the trio eventually evolved into a rhythm and rock outfit called The Rockets.
Playing L.A. clubs in the late '60s, including the famed Whisky A Go-Go, the sextet attracted a following and recorded one self-titled album, which sold about 5,000 copies. One of those copies landed in the hands of Neil Young. According to Talbot, "We first met Neil and jammed with him a little in Laurel Canyon when he was in the Buffalo Springfield and The Rockets were just coming together. Later, Neil heard our album, really liked it, and he sat in with us at The Whisky." Young, who had left Buffalo Springfield to strike out on his own, immediately asked Whitten, Talbot and Molina to play on a few new songs he'd written—"Down by the River," "Cowgirl in the Sand," and "Cinnamon Girl." The trio accepted and the newly christened Crazy Horse went on to back Young on what would become his sophomore solo effort, the 1969 classic Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
After a string of US concert dates, the band headed back into the studio to work on Young's third solo release, 1970s After the Gold Rush. At the same time Young joined up with Crazy Horse, he'd accepted an invitation to team up with Crosby, Stills & Nash, so with extended periods of down time on their hands, Crazy Horse inked their own recording contract that resulted in their 1971 self-titled debut. Although the record failed to match the success of their work with Young, it turned out to be an inspired effort, proving that the group wasn't merely Young's backing band. But just as their own recording career began to take off, Whitten became addicted to heroin. His worsening habit made it difficult for him to keep it together during rehearsals for Young's Harvest tour, and he was ultimately fired by the band. Danny Whitten died of a heroin overdose on November 18, 1972, the same day he was sent home to L.A. by his bandmates. Just a few months later, Young's friend and CSN&Y roadie, Bruce Berry, met the same fate.
Devastated, Young carried on with the tour backed by a new group of country-music session musicians whom he named The Stray Gators. He and the surviving members of Crazy Horse, still grieving their loss, reconvened in the summer of 1973 to work on a set of dark songs Young had written. Two years later, in June of 1975, the classic album Tonight's the Night was issued. Later that same year Crazy Horse found their official replacement for Whitten in Detroit native, Frank "Poncho" Sampedro, who joined Crazy Horse to record Zuma, which was released in November 1975.
In the ensuing years, Neil Young and Crazy Horse would release a slew of albums, including 1979s half acoustic/half electric live album, Rust Never Sleeps. Young also released a film version of the album under the same title as well as Live Rust, a compilation of older classics interwoven with the Rust Never Sleeps track list. Rust Never Sleeps won Rolling Stone's Album of the Year in 1979. Amid the flurry of recording, Crazy Horse managed to issue a fourth album on their own. Crazy Moon, which was released in 1978, featured Young guesting on a few of the tracks. It was easily the band's finest and most focused effort since their debut release seven years earlier.
Although Young took a break from the concert stage and tried a variety of musical styles with other musicians through the years, various members of Crazy Horse still appeared on his studio recordings over the coming decades, culminating in the release of the concept album, Greendale, in 2003, and the wrap of what had been their final tour together a year later. Until now, that is.
After such a storied run, news of Young's reunion with his old colleagues was met with much applause. A new video of a 37-minute jam session titled "Horse Back" was posted on the singer's website just days before the big announcement. On it we hear a little bit of “F**kin’ Up” before a sweet version of “Cortez The Killer” about twenty minutes in. Lyric sheets for songs that are rumored to on the upcoming album are also shown. Word is Americana may see a spring release. There is also buzz of an second album already in the works as well as an upcoming Crazy Horse reunion tour, though no plans have been made public as of this writing.
In addition to his ever changing musical status and occasional forays into film, Neil Young is also hard at work on his memoir titled Waging Heavy Peace, which is set to hit shelves in the fall of this year. "I felt like writing books fit me like a glove," Young says. "I started and I just kept going. That's the way my Daddy used to do it on his old Underwood up in the attic. He said, 'Just keep writing, you never know what will turn up.'"
Image By Andrea Barsanti (Hey hey, my my rock and roll will never die) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
