‘Homegrown’
Alex Abramovich
‘I fell in love with Neil’s pain,’ Carrie Snodgress said, recalling her life with Neil Young. Apparently, she meant physical pain: Young had back injuries from polio contracted at the age of six or seven, type 1 diabetes and epilepsy. But no matter how chronic, pain does not make for a solid foundation. The marriage ended. Young made an album about it, then shelved it. ‘It was a little too personal,’ he told Cameron Crowe in 1975. ‘It scared me.’ ‘You gotta keep changing,’ he said. ‘Shirts, old ladies, whatever.’
It was the seventies, man. But last month, Young posted a note to his website:
I apologise. This album Homegrown should have been there for you a couple of years after Harvest. It’s the sad side of a love affair. The damage done. The heartache. I just couldn’t listen to it. I wanted to move on. So I kept it to myself, hidden away in the vault, on the shelf, in the back of my mind … but I should have shared it. It’s actually beautiful. That’s why I made it in the first place. Sometimes life hurts. You know what I mean. Anyway … this is the one that got away.
A few days later the album arrived: twelve songs, and a cover drawn by Tom Wilkes, who’d drawn the cover for Harvest. Chronologically, Homegrown would have followed On the Beach, appearing in 1975. As it was, Tonight’s the Night was released in its place. But the chronology is confusing. Of the three albums, Tonight’s the Night – a drunken threnody for Danny Whitten, who played guitar in Young’s band, Crazy Horse, and Bruce Berry, a Crazy Horse roadie – was recorded first, in 1973. And even that is confused, because the album’s fifth song (‘Come On Baby, Let’s Go Downtown’) was recorded live in 1970, and Whitten plays and sings on the track – making a cameo appearance on his own memorial album. It’s haunting, it’s haunted. ‘The whole thing is about life, dope and death,’ Young explained at the time. But Homegrown frightened him more. Why is that?
It’s revealing, sure, and direct, but Young’s ‘too personal’ sounds to me more like an aesthetic judgment. On the Beach was wild-eyed and dark: ‘I see bloody fountains/and ten thousand dune buggies, coming down the mountain’ – but that was about Nixon and Manson, the start of the nation’s collapse. Tonight’s the Night was a howl of pain – but it, too, was directed outward. Those albums were exorcisms because the pain had been processed, however partially. On Homegrown, Young doesn’t know which way to turn. He starts off by singing ‘I won’t apologise.’ In the next song, he pivots: ‘And I try to wash my hands/And I try to make amends.’ Some of the songs that follow sound barely finished or are – generously – tone poems. Some are opaque. Some are blistering. Some are beautiful. The old idea that art can describe confusion, but should not itself be confused, keeps coming to mind.
But so what? Neil Young is a master of right-wrong things. On Tonight’s the Night he rhymed ‘ignition’ with ‘hood ornament’ and got away with it (in fact, it’s a high point of his catalogue). Most of the time, he’s perfectly imperfect, and if Homegrown is merely imperfect, what of it?
Another way of looking at it would be to say the album’s unfinished. Not that it doesn’t compare to other great chronicles of divorce – Shoot Out the Lights by Richard and Linda Thompson; Willie Nelson’s Phases and Stages; Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks; Aretha Franklin’s Spirit in the Dark – but it doesn’t resolve as those other records do. That, in itself, makes it truer to divorce, as divorce really is. But there’s still something missing. Phases and Stages and Shoot Out the Lights describe heartbreak, but also the start of new narratives; pearls forming around the old wounds and abrasions. On Homegrown, Young’s half in and half out of the oyster shell, stuck between stages, unstable, untenable, turned inside out, dying. Somehow, he survived.
Snodgress died in 2004, waiting for a liver transplant. ‘I fell in love with the actress,’ Young had sung in 1971. ‘She was playing a part that I could understand.’ In 1970, Snodgress had won two Golden Globes (best actress and ‘new star of the year’) for Diary of a Mad Housewife. She walked away from her career to live with Young on his ranch, but the divorce left her as a single mother. Film roles weren’t so easy to come by. At some point, she took up with Jack Nitzsche, who’d produced and played piano on ‘A Man Needs a Maid’. In 1979, he was arrested for pistol-whipping and threatening to kill her.
Was it worth it? Snodgress didn’t know who Neil Young was when he first asked her out. Did she know in 1974, or on her deathbed? She tended to speak of him fondly. ‘I decided I was going to be in love,’ she once said. ‘I was going to give it everything I had. It was like heaven up on that ranch. I don’t know why we broke up. We never fought.’
Comments
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8 July 2020
at
9:15pm
Mark Weinstein
says:
It’s strange to listen to this now, 40+ years after the run of great Neil Young records that were produced in the first half of the seventies. Taken together, surely these do constitute the high point of his career. Given the familiarity that Young fans will have with those other records, it’s hard to hear it with one’s 2020 ears. Having said that, it’s a very good record and one that stands up with some of the his best. I’m eagerly awaiting the release of volume 2 of Archives.
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13 July 2020
at
5:00pm
John Sweeney
says:
Neil shoots first and moves on to "a new shirt". He likes to record the first take and move on. On the floor production. Musical genius can get away with that sometimes. Great live. But grouchy old man in the end whose burned many bridges and "too old to repaint" the others. He's kind of a wise old farmer with a shotgun to me. Prickly. Wonderful music.
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15 July 2020
at
7:30am
Helmut Simon
says:
I have to admit I am totally perplexed that anyone likes Neil Young. Am I the only one?
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15 July 2020
at
11:45pm
judgefloyd
says:
@
Helmut Simon
You're not the only one, but a thread of responses to a blog post obviously premised on him being a great singer/songrwiter/musicial is an odd place to ask.
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16 July 2020
at
4:16am
Alex Abramovich
says:
@
judgefloyd
I'm enjoying this exchange.
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16 July 2020
at
12:53pm
John Guilfoyle
says:
@
Helmut Simon
I sympathise.. when Neil Young made his breakthrough I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. I found his voice whiny and annoying. Here's a slightly different take from Alex's: Listen to "Out on the Weekend" on as good a sound system as you can, so you can hear the bass. The classical simplicity of it may get through to you. I think the reason I like it even more now I'm older is that he takes his time, it's slow...
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17 July 2020
at
4:24am
Bob Beck
says:
@
Alex Abramovich
Here's a good cover of "Winterlong":
Read moreI really like Young. That's why I bothered reading the blog post. Can't wait to get Homegrown, his 70s stuff was indeed wonderful.
And I won't try to convince Helmut Simon - I'm guessing others have tried - but if I could recommend just two introductory songs: "Helpless" and "Winterlong." If you don't like those, the man's just not for you. If YouTube's easier, this is a beautiful version of a beautiful song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0LN19bZHec&feature=emb_logo
https://youtu.be/rjMAesNFUhQ