Neil Young - "Harvest" (1972)

    Early 1971. CSNY had gone their separate ways, Crazy Horse were working on
their own material, and Neil Young was nearing the end of a lengthy solo tour, performing a significant batch of new material with a view to releasing it as a live album.

In the end, as so frequently happens throughout Young’s career, fate and impulse hatched another plan. The idea of a live album consisting entirely of unrecorded compositions would be resurrected on Time Fades Away, while Live At Massey Hall, released in 2007 as part of the Archive series, is in essence the record initially intended to follow After The Gold Rush.

Instead, Young took the sonically low-key ethos from the stage and brought it into the studio, helped by a group of Nashville session men he dubbed The Stray Gators. The result was Harvest, the commercial peak of his career, a watershed singer-songwriter album, home of his only No 1 single - and the record he spent the next decade running away from.

The best-selling record of 1972 in the US, Harvest later assumed a canonical status to match its vast popularity, but at the time of its release it attracted more than its fair share of critical brick-bats: it was too staid, too comfortable, too similar to its predecessor.

Some of these misgivings remain pertinent, but although on the surface it appears as on-message as Young would ever get, Harvest has a distinctly troubled undertow - this is an album of two sides, musically and lyrically.

Among the reflective nods to the domestic idyll of life on his new ranch, Broken Arrow, and his relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, there are conflicted ruminations on drug abuse, success, getting older and finding a place in the world. Its creation was similarly disjointed. Recorded in four distinct sections in scattered locations, the main business was conducted at hastily arranged sessions in Nashville in February 1971, while Young was in town to appear on The Johnny Cash Show. Having worked up his new material while touring solo, he went into Elliot Mazer’s Quadrafonic Sound Studios at short notice with local musicians Ben Keith (steel guitar), Tim Drummond (bass) and drummer Kenny Buttrey, the latter a veteran of the previous four Dylan albums.

Young’s No ι/albatross “Heart Of Gold” set the template for the sound they settled on. The rhythm section is pushed right up front, bass and drums locked together in meaty union, Keith’s keening pedal steel and Young’s voice and harmonica weaving around them. “Out On The Weekend” and the underrated title track, the prettiest song on the record, are cut from the same cloth: the pace stately, perhaps a tad stiff and sluggish, but with a calm, strangely hypnotic quality.

The other Harvest song cut in Nashville is one of several to reckon with the changes wrought by increasing fame and newfound fortune. “Old Man” was inspired by a conversation between Young and Louis Avila, the elderly caretaker on his ranch. They may have been divided by age, wealth and experience, but the song is an unambiguous assertion that reluctant hippy superstars also “need someone to love me the whole night through/Look in my eyes and you can tell that's true” James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, in Nashville to appear on The Johnny Cash Show, dropped in to add backing vocals, while Taylor’s sinewy banjo- guitar overdub slices through the mix.

“A Man Needs A Maid” tells a similar story, though it raised the wrath of feminists at the time and long after, and little wonder. “Just someone to keep my house clean" he sings, “Fix my meals and go away”. The sentiment is graceless, the expression clumsy, but an emotional rather than literal response to its crystalline vocal and Jack Nitzsche’s (over-) ambitious string arrangement gives the overwhelming impression of a man reaching out for a lifeline. The “actress” in the lyric is Snodgress - having recently won plaudits for her role in Diary Of A Mad Housewife, she took the song to heart by putting her promising career on hold. It was one of two songs recorded in the unlikely environs of Barking Town Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra, while Young was performing in London at the end of February. The second orchestral track, “There’s A World”, is a misfire, the extravagant arrangement and Young’s overwrought philosophizing serving to expose rather than disguise the inherent slightness of the song.

Woven into this mix, not altogether seamlessly, are three electric tracks recorded when Young and The Stray Gators later reconvened back in California, recording in a barn at Young’s ranch, using the valley as a vast echo chamber. Crosby, Stills and Nash contributed backing vocals to all three, further filling out the sound. The good-time boogie of “Are You Ready For The Country”, later a hit for Waylon Jennings, leads with Nitzsche’s rolling piano and bottleneck guitar. The crunching “Alabama” returns to the same sonic and thematic territory as “Southern Man”, Young using his outsider status as a Canadian - “Ym from a new land/Icome to you/And see all this ruin ” - to call out (again) the state’s inglorious history of slavery and segregation.

As perhaps befits an artist occasionally content to dress up old ideas in new clothes, “Words (Between The Lines Of Age)” finds Young looking for creative inspiration - “sitting here hoping this water will boil” - while “out in the fields they were turning the soil.”

As with much of Harvest, the lasting impression is of a man cut adrift by success, feeling rather more angsty and agitated than the music might suggest.

The stark solo performance of “The Needle And The Damage Done”, recorded live at UCLA’s Royce Hall at the end of January 1971, is the only remaining evidence of Harvest's original “new and live” premise. Its quiet passion, its soulful power, provides eloquent proof that restraint need not equate to vaporous mellowness. Not every song on Harvest walks that line so assuredly, but Young was already moving out of the rocking chair. In this lament for those dying or already dead from substance abuse, his most outwardly accessible album reveals its hidden depths, and gives the clearest glimpse of much bleaker, considerably more challenging times to come.