Random Access

Had to shake my head the last couple of weekends while looking at the papers and seeing that the No. 1 bestselling CD in Canada is Neil Young’s Live at Massey Hall.
This rather unsettling nugget of information tells you several important things.
It confirms that young people have stopped buying CDs in favour of downloading, leaving the real purchasing power in the hands of bald, grey 50-something ex-folkies such as yours truly, where it rightfully belongs.
It tells you that a lot of music from 1971, when the album was recorded, can be just as invigorating now as it was then.
And it tells you Neil Young is a man with a prodigious talent, if not a prodigious voice.
The album is all acoustic, mostly guitar but with a few tunes where Neil works on the piano.
There is an energy here that plugs straight into your solar plexus. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young man, with attitude, at the height of his creative powers. In this era of multi-tracking, digitally-altered, pitch-fixing technical equipment, you forget the raw power of the basics: a guitar, a song that speaks directly to you and the ultimate emotive instrument, the human voice.
It is particularly interesting to hear many of Young’s songs, that we know so well in different contexts, recast in new moulds.
For instance, Cowgirl in the Sand and Down by the River, from Everybody Knows This is Nowhere retain their power, even without the scorching, elongated electric leads that first made them so beloved by all those air guitarists who used to be part of the Clearisil set and are now part of the Geritol set.
There are, however, some disconcerting elements to reliving past glories. You still expect David Crosby to pop up at you at the end of (Four Dead in) Ohio and ask how many more, how many more in that harrowing tone.
The lyrics have changed in A Man Needs A Maid. A man is now afraid (probably of housework), before he needs a maid.
On The Way Home is one of my favourite Buffalo Springfield songs, one of several Young’s tunes from that era that seem to be about about how fame changed him and others’ perceptions of him, in this case someone extremely close. Neil originally sang back-up with Steve Stills on this, the opening cut of Last Time Around, with the wonderful voice of Richie Furay on lead. That was a pop song and a great one.
This version, which again leads off the album, is much more intimate than the original. Still love that line, “I went insane, like a smoke ring day when the wind blows.”
A word about the vocals. On Tonight’s The Night, Young talked about his roadie Bruce Berry singing late at night in a “shaky voice that was real as the day was long.”
It’s a description that suits Young perfectly. He quavers so long on some notes that you feel as if his voice will snap.
It creates a tension that leaves you – yes — helpless... helpless... helpless.