- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- I have over a dozen Neil Young albums in my personal record collection, and After the Gold Rush is a favorite, with every song being a winner.
Neil Young – After the Gold Rush (1970): I have been a major fan of Neil Young since his early days with Buffalo Springfield up to the present day. His music has covered more ground than any major recording artist that I can think of. Even more than Bob Dylan, Neil Young has regularly shed large parts of his audience with his more eccentric albums. While primarily recording folk rock, country rock, and hard rock – often having different musical styles on each side of an album – Neil Young has regularly been a folksinger and a country singer as well; with other musical ventures that include punk-influenced rock on Re-ac-tor (1981), experimental electronic music on Trans (1983), rockabilly on Everybody’s Rockin’ (1984), blues rock on This Note’s for You (1988), noise rock on Arc (1991) – and that doesn’t include the last 30 years. The title song on This Note’s for You, “This Note’s for You” is a forceful polemic about the commercialization of rock music, particularly corporate sponsorship of rock concert tours – in other words, this music is for you, the fan, not for ads or corporations.
The music video for “This Note’s for You” mocks commercial appearances by rock stars and features lookalikes of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and the dog Spuds McKenzie; the song title is a takeoff on the longtime Budweiser ad campaign, “This Bud’s for You”. The video was initially banned on MTV, for fear of being sued by Michael Jackson and others; but after “This Note’s for You” became a hit on the Canadian music-video channel MuchMusic, MTV relented and ultimately awarded “This Note’s for You” the MTV Video Music Award for Best Video of the Year at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards show. I have over a dozen Neil Young albums in my personal record collection, and his third album After the Gold Rush is one of my favorites, with every song being a winner. The music is mostly folk rock and country rock, and some songs are acoustic. Neil Young wrote all of the songs on the album, with the exception of the Don Gibson song “Oh, Lonesome Me”. The words are frequently melancholy and introspective, and only on “Southern Man” does Neil Young really rock out. Within 15 months of the release of the #1 album Déjà Vu (1970) by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, each of the individual bandmembers released high-profile albums that all made the Top 15 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. Besides After the Gold Rush, they are Stephen Stills by Stephen Stills, If I Could Only Remember My Name by David Crosby, and Songs for Beginners by Graham Nash. Other than After the Gold Rush, all are debut solo albums. On some songs on After the Gold Rush, Neil Young is backed by the band Crazy Horse; their first pairing is on his prior album Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969), and they have collaborated on numerous albums over the decades since, most recently Colorado (2019) and Barn (2021). After the Gold Rush is the first album where Neil Young works with 18-year-old musical prodigy Nils Lofgren, of the band Grin. Lofgren has had a long solo career and has served as the lead guitarist for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band since 1984. Nils Lofgren performs on the debut solo album by Crazy Horse, Crazy Horse (1971) and is also a bandmember in the revamped lineup of Crazy Horse on the new Neil Young albums Colorado and Barn. The two singles from After the Gold Rush are “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” – not to be confused with the Gene Pitney hit “Only Love Can Break a Heart” – and “When You Dance I Can Really Love”. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” made the Top 40 and has been covered by numerous recording artists over the years. The title song “After the Gold Rush” is a moving apocalyptic tale about spaceships fleeing Earth after humans made the planet unlivable. The song is similar in theme to “Wooden Ships” (written by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane), one of the first songs that Crosby, Stills and Nash worked on together. “Wooden Ships” is included on their album Crosby, Stills and Nash (1969), and they performed “Wooden Ships” at Woodstock, and it is featured on the triple-album Woodstock soundtrack. “Southern Man” is one of the best-known songs on After the Gold Rush, where Neil Young vividly decries the horrid exploitation of slaves prior to the Civil War; the song’s lyrics include: “I saw cotton and I saw black / Tall white mansions and little shacks / Southern Man, when will you pay them back?”. Charlie Williams and I saw a rock band in a local club in Raleigh, NC perform a really fine cover of “Southern Man”; we loved the band so much that we went to see them a second time at the club. Neil Young has a similar song called “Alabama” on his next album, Harvest (1972), a #1 album with a #1 single “Heart of Gold”, and Young’s best-selling album. Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote their biggest hit song “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974) in response to Neil Young; they felt that he was unfairly blaming the entire South for slavery and racism. The lyrics famously comment about Neil Young directly: “Well, I heard Mr. Young sing about her / Well, I heard ole Neil put her down / Well, I hope Neil Young will remember / A southern man don’t need him around anyhow”. Neil Young was friendly with Lynyrd Skynyrd about the song from the beginning and said in 1976 of “Sweet Home Alabama”: “They play like they mean it. I’m proud to have my name in a song like theirs.” Neil Young has said that “Sweet Home Alabama” is more of a response to “Alabama” than to “Southern Man”. Writing in his autobiography Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream (2012), he writes that “Alabama” “richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue.” Other songs that I love on After the Gold Rush are “Tell Me Why”, “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”, and “I Believe in You”.