For an artist who would spend an entire career plotting his own course and taking no option off the table, it seems entirely fitting Neil Young released ‘AFTER THE GOLD RUSH‘ an era defining album, in the autumn of 1970.
The third solo record of an already groundbreaking contribution to popular music, to some ‘After The Gold Rush‘ is seen as the final instalment in a trio of albums to bear his name during the previous twelve months – others, with just as much validation, view it as a singular collection heralding the start of a new journey.
Either way the record is a masterpiece, an undisputed landmark recording not just in the vast and varied canon of Neil Young, but 70s rock as a whole.
Leaving aside his eclectic but overlooked self-titled debut of January 1969, prior to ‘Gold Rush‘ Young had released the raw and frenetic ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere‘ (May 1969).
This bewildering immersion into proto punk boasted feverish, obtuse lyrics, strident guitar work, its essence one of to hell with perfection, capture the moment.
Recorded with a ramshackle garage band dubbed ‘Crazy Horse,’ to whom overdubs were an anathema, his next move appears contradictory to say the least – teaming up again with Stephen Stills, alongside whom he had previously been a member of LA folk-rockers Buffalo Springfield. By now Stills was one third of an aggregation involving David Crosby and Graham Nash – their recent soft-rock debut LP taking the album charts by storm.
In extending the line-up to a quartet, Young took equal billing while appearing a semi-detached element of the group. Joining in time to help shape ‘Deja Vu‘ (April 1970), an impressive if compartmentalised record by four differing personalities, it required a reported 800 hours of studio time to create – this is in sharp contrast to the way Young preferred to work.
With its mix of introspective and politically honed lyrics, ‘Deja Vu‘ saw Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young appointed as spokesmen for the hippy counterculture. For his showcase cut, Young had contributed the mournful, country-tinged ballad ‘Helpless‘ – the difference for him as a concurrent member of Crazy Horse and CSN&Y akin to being in the Rolling Stones and The Beatles at the same time.
While on a break in the CSN&Y touring schedule during the summer of 1970 Young, in response to the shooting dead of four protesting students by the National Guard at Kent State University, wrote the searing ‘Ohio.’
The first recorded example of political activism to be found in his songwriting, Crosby, Stills & Nash join him for a passionate, instantaneous performance where they rock like a wild rather than crazy horse – the angry protestations making it the most effective track, rushed out in May 1970 as a single, CSN&Y ever recorded.
So, on retreating to the small, basic studio in the basement of his Topanga Canyon home, how would the songs Young was about to record be presented? More Crazy Horse-styled commotion or the layered panache of Crosby, Stills & Nash?
In the event Young straddles each. Existing in both worlds, he still manages to wriggle free of any ‘guitar-god,’ ‘singer-songwriter’ or ‘country-rocker’ straitjacket thrust his way.
With Neil it would be forever thus.
Indeed, ‘After The Gold Rush‘ has the same intensity as ‘Everybody Knows‘ although if anything the songs boast even greater resonance.
Quieter for the most part, but without surrendering an ounce of virtue or honesty, if there is a link between the albums it is they are both stirring without ever being slick.
With a clutch of songs to be recorded, (‘Tell Me Why,’ ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart‘ and ‘Southern Man‘ had been debuted on the recent CSN&Y tour), Young called upon Stills, Danny Whitten (guitar), Billy Talbot (bass), Ralph Molina (drums) from Crazy Horse, plus CSNY bassist Greg Reeves.
When unknown 18-year-old guitarist Nils Lofgren turned up offering his services, Young invited him to join the troupe – but assigned him piano duties, an instrument the teenager had never played before. His nervous, under-developed technique give several tracks a sense of hesitancy, serving as an eerie counterpoint to lyrics that often have darkness at their core.
Opening with ‘Tell Me Why‘ this gorgeous, acoustic ballad takes a pragmatic view on the vagaries not just of a love affair but uncertainties of the time. While hardly the most rousing note on which to begin, it could not be more affecting and sets the tone for what follows.
It is followed by the title track, one of his best known and enduring pieces, the simple piano melody offset by a deeply emotive lyric that conjures all manner of dream-scape imagery.
With the sleeve claiming, ‘Most of these songs were inspired by the Dean Stockwell-Herb Berman screenplay ‘After The Gold Rush‘ (relating to an impending environmental disaster, it never reached production), the story clearly had a profound effect on Young who pens the line ‘look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s‘ for this extraordinary composition.
In the bridge between verses two and three where the obvious move would have been a harmonica break accompanying the piano, Young opts instead for a plaintive flugelhorn in giving the song another vivid dimension. One challenge thrown up by the album is deciding which tracks owe something to the ‘Gold Rush‘ script – another is deciphering the most gloriously ambiguous line Young has ever came up with, verse two ending on:
‘I was thinking about what a friend had said, I was hoping it was a lie.’
The menacing sound of Crazy Horse becomes a further distant memory with the country-waltz of ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart.’ Comprising a melodic mesh of piano, acoustic guitar and gently rolling drums, it is a song of great immediacy (the Eagles would structure ‘The Hollywood Waltz‘ in much the same way a few years later) – yet here we are, three tracks and ten minutes in, with an electric guitar still to be heard.
But all that changes with ‘Southern Man‘ which marks the first appearance of tough-rocking Neil. Framed by snarling, distorted guitars, Young points his finger at racial prejudice and, just as he had done on ‘Ohio‘, depicts America as a fractured society riven by injustice. Later on the record, he plugs in again for ‘When You Dance I Can Really Love,’ a powerful ode to primal instinct that twists one way and then another through its sharp wordplay and dense rhythms.
Neither is there any shortage of power in the three emotive ballads populating side two; ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down,’ ‘Birds‘ and ‘I Believe In You.’ There is not a wasted second to be found anywhere as Young explores themes of alienation, uncertainty and disaffection, his words delicate but rarely obvious.
If the sparse, stripped back arrangements are comparable with the emerging breed of self-absorbed songsmiths making headway at the time, his terse, sometimes uneven, but sincere lines have him standing in a different place altogether.
Delivering the material in an edgy, fragile voice, there is no shortage of emotion in his tone, giving rise to a belief the songs would not sound so effective with a more accomplished singer. Paired with such intuitive lyrics, Young substantiates his mysterious persona, a lone figure at the microphone – but when rendering a heartfelt, ‘It’s over, it’s over,’ as the heart-stopping ‘Birds‘ comes to a close, he sounds less an outlaw poet and more an incarnation of the great Roy Orbison.
The cover of ‘Oh Lonesome Me‘ a late-50s hit for country singer Don Gibson, dispenses with the happy-go-lucky inflections of the original, conveying the heartbreak overtones with a soupcon of Gram Parsons.
On an album where only one of the eleven tracks (‘Southern Man‘ – 5:31) is over four minutes long, the two most accessible songs are the shortest, the comparatively jaunty ‘Till The Morning Comes‘ (1:16) and the closing ‘Cripple Creek Ferry‘ (1:34).
The latter is an instantly engaging pastiche of The Band – being discussed in the audible background chatter perhaps – Neil appearing to inform fellow Canadian Robbie Robertson he is not the only one to have absorbed Americana.
Despite recording so many exemplary songs Young still had reservations at the direction he had taken, expressing his doubts to Lofgren.
‘About halfway through ‘Gold Rush‘ Neil was like “God it sounds really good” Lofgren told Young biographer Jimmy McDonough many years later, “but it’s been so easy to do. I wonder if people are gonna get it’”
Young need not have worried – ‘After The Gold Rush‘ was rapturously received. The claim of one reviewer that it was ‘a farewell note to the 60s‘ may overplay the allegory card, but few disagreed with the New Musical Express when they declared it ‘an absolute tour de force.’
In fact such was the gravitas attached to ‘After The Gold Rush‘ Young was quickly elevated to leading singer-songwriter of the day status – a title he let slip when his contempt for the music industry and unease with stardom manifested on ‘Harvest‘ (1972), which outsold ‘Gold Rush‘ by some distance, but was inferior in almost every other respect.
Adopting a contrary, dismissive attitude toward his career, Young was also deeply affected by the heroin-related deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry.
Four years would pass until Young recorded another work of such significance, the magnificent ‘On The Beach‘ as important to 1974 as ‘After The Gold Rush‘ had been to 1970.
As a footnote but worth noting, in 2015 readers of the Neil Young fanzine ‘Broken Arrow‘ voted ‘After The Gold Rush‘ second only to ‘On The Beach‘ as the greatest album Young has made.
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH (Released September 19 1970):
Tell Me Why/After The Gold Rush/Only Love Can Break Your Heart/ Southern Man/Till The Morning Comes/Oh Lonesome Me/Don’t Let It Bring You Down/Birds/When You Dance, I Can Really Love/I Believe In You/Cripple Creek Ferry;
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NEIL SAMBROOK is the author of ‘MONTY’S DOUBLE‘ – an acclaimed thriller now available in paperback and as an Amazon Kindle book.