Linda and Emmylou’s Western Wall

You and I frittered away the 1990’s on education and innocence.

But Neil Young didn’t waste a precious moment that decade. When he wasn’t recording monumental and urgent music with Crazy Horse, or naming then destroying Bobfest, or providing our families with their meditative foundation, or blowing our tiny minds live on stage, he was sneaking into guest sessions with a few of the women he admired.

Just check him out, on the very cusp of that decade, providing an understated lead guitar and careful piano to 24 year old Tracy Chapman’s second record.

I love how soft Neil’s touch is here; he’s so careful not to upstage a young singer songwriter as she creates something profound. This doesn’t sound like a Neil Young track. It’s Tracy Chapman, unadorned and free. And that’s what Young wanted.

But let’s dedicate today’s post to one of Shakey’s far more forgotten 90’s contributions: two again understated, but no less vital, credits that came at the tail end of the decade. We’re talking about Like a Dancer and Across the Border from Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris’s final record together.

The album around those two songs, Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions, is a stumblingly titled mixed bag. Under the direction, bizarrely, of Get Back’s dressed-like-a-slapstick-supervillain Glyn Johns, the Dollar Bin’s joint goddesses bring a karaoke approach to a Sinead O'Connor track, tackle Leonard Cohen’s Sister of Mercy without a plan and spend much of the rest of the record hunting for a tone they never find.

Their confusion is reasonable in retrospect. After two smash Trio records with Dolly Parton, Linda and Emmylou knew that whatever they put their name on without her had to be different. Plus, Ronstadt was probably already sick at this point, though she kept working for another 5 or 6 years. And Harris was trying to find her next approach after completing her mighty run with Daniel Lanois.

Happily, Young set aside his simultaneous work on Silver and Gold and CSN&Y’s own utterly mixed bag, Looking Forward, to help his old friends sound wonderful together all over again.

Young carries little of the load here: he simply sings on the Jackson Brown penned choruses and adds in tossed off harmonica undercuts. But with his support, and the constant presence of her singing sister, Linda is able to tap back into her matchless, leading lady pedigree for perhaps the final time in her career. This is a good song.

The album’s closer, swiped from The Boss’s overwrought Tom Joad record, provides an even lovelier moment for the three old friends. Listen to Linda’s ease here; enjoy Young’s tasteful harp. This is an even better song.

My son headed out on his own once again yesterday, bound for international study. He’s on the other side of the world as we speak, trying to show Danish people that we Americans aren’t all assholes.

He crossed a whole slew of international borders to get there, but he also turned 21 this month: a far more significant border crossing to be sure. He’s such a wonderful young man. I’m so proud of him.

And, meanwhile, throughout our country, right now, all kinds of other, even braver, border crossers are living in fear, unable to partake in the good work our country is capable of.

How awful. How maddening. How dumb.

Hopefully there’s a light at the end of this troubling tunnel we find ourselves in. Hopefully there’s beauty soon in sight.

See You Sometime’s Early Take

Speaking of the many unappreciated gifts still waiting to be unwrapped by us all within Joni’s ongoing Archives project, check out this initial, full band studio take of For The Roses’ richest love song.

The pace and texture found here in a ticking drum set and a swooning bass are exciting outside of this take’s clumsy bridge; with a little more work this full band approach could have served as a much needed sonic departure within the universally lovely but somewhat monochrome textures still to be found today in the final record.

They also could have prepped us for all the shimmer, muscle and depth that lay just around the corner on Court and Spark. Joni was already a mama lion, leaping nude from boulders on the record’s gatefold and in her songwriting. She just wasn’t quite ready to sound like one.

That Song About the Midway

No one needs to be told through song that you should avoid romantic entanglements with a mustachioed dope who spent his heyday high as a kite, packing a gun, and on the phone, enjoying oral sex from strangers while eating a cheeseburger (often, apparently, all at the same time).

And so I’ve never been a huge fan of Joni Mitchell’s That Song About the Midway. Mitchell reportedly introduced the angular and plodding song to Crosby by staring him down and singing it deadpan, twice, as a means of escaping him as a sloppy producer and sloppier boyfriend.

Can you fly? I heard you can fly…

Like an eagle doin’ your hunting from the sky…

The song’s original iteration is lovely, of course - it’s Joni Mitchell - but it’s also strained and searching to my ears. I don’t like anyone I admire spending this long bidding farewell to a cheating devil with fake wings. When I hear the song on Clouds I’m always eager for Joni to move on to her future twin positions of grace: beside street corner clarinet players and lording over sweet talkin’ boogie woogie men.

And so I’m always surprised by just how much I love the live take of Midway released a few years ago on Mitchell’s second Archives collection. Her Archives records strike me as woefully unappreciated; I can’t even find the take I like so much on its own on Youtube. But here’s the whole show, with James Taylor in tow:

The song doesn’t transform in any huge, elemental ways between its studio debut and this show. But there’s a softening and a stretching to the melody and mood.

The whole thing must have been a risk initially. Joni wasn’t just sticking up a poetic middle finger at a former member of the Byrds when she sang it in 1968; she was also breaking just about every rule you can think of when she recorded it alongside the rest of Clouds: she had no producer, no male direction, no drums, no orchestra and not a single overdub.

And so I feel like one can hear a bit of reasonable anxiety in that first take.

But by the time of these live shows she’d shrugged all that doubt off. She was suddenly JONI MITCHELL: ready to stand over a few hundred thousand seemingly indifferent mortals while giggling, tuning and then mesmerizing us.

Freaking Out at 50

I turn 50 in three weeks. And I’ve had it.

I’ve had it with the evil moron we handed our country over to, and I’ve had it with my gluten free diet brought on by long COVID, and I’ve had it with the bean and rice burritos I can no longer eat no longer costing $1.99, and I’ve had it with record stores that lack fully stocked Steeleye Span sections and did I mention our president - why doesn’t some other country disregard their constitution, put him in sweat pants and spirit him away for good in the middle of the night to Stephen Stills’ private island or Graham Nash’s private planet, where he can sit on a golden toilet drinking Diet Coke and tearing missives he has not read unrelated to the running of our country in half all day without any effect whatsoever instead of us spiriting their evil moron away without a plan - coherent or ethical or constitutional or legal - of any kind while we continue to be led by our own evil moron?

And I’ve had it with all the people who don’t want to play three hour board games with me in which I’m an evil Dungeon Lord and I’ve had it with the cat sitting next to me at all hours, waiting for me to scratch its ass, and I’ve had it with the climate change that’s flowering my fruit trees in December and I’ve had it getting sunburnt on my bald spot in January and I’ve had it with anyone who does not bow humbly and say thank you to all the refugees who have bravely escaped from their own, even dumber countries, and arrived here by any means whatsoever, eager to do the essential work all around us and, in return, reap the simplest of benefits of our land.

And, good God almighty, I’ve totally had it with Spodify.

I don’t pay for a Spodify plan: this is the Dollar Bin not Elon’s Pantry. But my kid has a free account and today I had an hour to burn in an empty parking lot, reading Russian literature and listening to tunes while they had a driving lesson.

And all I wanted to do for that hour, other than read about gulags, was listen to Across the Water, Neil’s expanded version of Odeon Budokan, which celebrates his unparalleled Crazy Hour 76 tour, and freakin’ Spodify, home of COVID deniers and all things bullhonky, would not let me do so. Rather they playing me McDonalds ads spoken by deep throated bots posing as deep throated jerks and “recommended” Santana songs.

“Screw this!” I hollered at the empty and utterly indifferent parking lot around me. “I’ve had it!”

Five minutes later I had done the preposterous and poneyed up for a year of Qobuz, the French alternative to Pandora / Spodify / Apple / Amazon and Mar-a-Lago that sponsors my famous brothers big deal Shakey podcast (Note to the Wise: I’m hearing rumors already about Season Two of All One Song and the rumors are VERY EXCITING).

Can I afford a music streaming service? Certainly not. I can’t afford any services whatsoever. But can afford to spend my final fifty years on the planet without immediate access to this blistering and bonkers version of Drive Back at any given moment?

HELL NO.

Enjoy this take, especially the train wreck that occurs between Neil’s Sedan, making another delivery of chemicals and sacred roots, and his Train of Love at the 4:10 mark. Everything collides like Ira Kaplan’s own solo on Sinatra Drive Breakdown and then transmutates into spiraling panic and rage.

In summation: the fact that I will never again listen to a Spodify ad or Dr Feelgood when I tell my phone to play Marquee Moon makes me no longer want to wake up with no one around.

2026: it better be better.

Oceanside Countryside, Part 3

Neil Young felt the same way about releasing great new records in the mid-to-late 70’s as Napoleon supposedly did about petting kitty cats 160 years earlier: both men avoiding doing so at all costs.

I don’t know which of them was more nuts: Bonaparte, who tooled around Elba plotting revenge and keeping a wary eye out for marauding feline terror, or Shakey, who tooled around a zillion different studios from Florida to Hawaii to England and back again in his creative heydey, laying down hour after hour of lovely tape and then studiously not releasing any of it.

(Just in case you think I’m making crap up, here’s my count: Young could have easily issued Homegrown as a double record, added a second disc to Zuma, and put out a double album worth of Chrome Dreams plus single discs of Hitchhiker, Odeon Budokan, and Oceanside Countryside, all to universal acclaim, all between 1975 and 1977. That is eight albums worth of music he shelved in three years. And that is ridiculous.)

At least Old Boney was consistent: when Napoleon died on Saint Helena in 1821 it was without a black cat in sight. Neil, meanwhile, put off issuing Oceanside Countryside for nearly 50 years and then did the Napoleon equivalent of cuddling up with Buttons, Misty or Garfield: he then immediately issued two totally different versions of it.

That’s right folks: if you got weird and purchased Archives 3 and the stand alone vinyl version of Oceanside Countryside you wound up with two entirely different records with the same name. We’re talking different run orders and the initial existence, then complete absence, of Neil’s utterly superfluous “raps” which essentially consist of him reading you his own liner notes on the off chance that you’re an ailurophob who fears a cat might be ready to lurch out at you from within them.

None of this is too earth shaking, I admit. But there’s a third difference to be found between the two versions which is both puzzling and illuminating. So let’s talk about it!

To begin, let’s listen to Neil’s first elegant solo pass at Peace of Mind. Without Nicolette Larson, Ben Keith and the whole football team worth of autoharp wielding Nashville types who appear on the song’s Comes a Time iteration, one can hear Neil alone, layering up stately piano, some sharp guitar work, a surging Stringman and even a slurred and somewhat stumbling surprise bonus verse.

I dig it. The song, which usually bores the hell out of me, has fresh legs here and even a little edge. If you like this version as well, and want to get your hands on it, go find $400 and a CD player because, you guessed it, the song appears on the Archives edition of Oceanside Countryside and not on the vinyl.

And that’s just weird.

If I roll up to Neil’s door tomorrow morning with a six pack of Moosehead lager, some of his official Homegrown rolling papers and a demand that he explain why the hell Peace of Mind got shafted off of my vinyl copy of the record, he’ll surely kill the power on his six barns worth of model trains, ask Daryl to delay dinner, and give me his complete attention while explaining that:

1. Including the song would have swelled the record’s vinyl run time onto a second piece of wax, (which is ridiculous: there’s more than enough space for the song on either side of the relatively brief record) or…
2. Peace of Mind simply doesn’t work with either this Ocean or Country theme (which is also ridiculous: Pocahontas is about the Astrodome, Native Americans and aliens, not about the countryside, and it made the cut) but he still wanted to share the song in isolation within his Archives project, or…
3. That he’s saving the song for inclusion on the record’s upcoming third, Gary Larson inspired, iteration entitled Oceanside Countryside Farside.

If he makes that final argument I will crack open another Moosehead, offer him one as well, and absolutely accept his thinking. After all, he ain’t Napoleon. He’s Neil Young.

Oceanside Countryside, Part 2

Fittingly, I sat On The Beach earlier this week, device in hand, while enumerating all the reasons why Neil’s lost 77 record appears unworthy of respect.

It was lovely out: wide, whispering breakers crumbled beneath a between-storms-sun then rolled slowly in; a whole pack of the marvelously monikered Marbled Godwits paced through the water’s last rippling sighs, hunting for sand crabs on their spindly legs.

And me? I took it all in while pounding out my complaints: Oceanside Countryside appeared too redundant, too commercially suspicious and too dedicated to seeing some annoying girl dance, dance, dance.

But I just can’t quit Neil Young. Every time he does something incredibly stupid…

(like opening an angry and ugly new record with back to back songs dedicated to denouncing his surely beleaguered daughter for her decision to cut him, and his doughnut powered Hummer, outta her life [Parenting note to Neil: using your exclusive bully pulpit to publicly shame and deride a child you claim to love is an even less effective technique for bridge building than whatever you did to earn their ire to begin with.])

Where was I? Oh year, every time he does something that stupid I proceed to make a public statement, usually while standing in my kitchen with no one around to listen, except the cat, who stares at me with unbridled belligerence, demanding satisfaction through tuna. My public statement usually goes something like,

“That’s it! I can’t take it any more! I’m taking a big deal break from all things Neil Young!”

But it never works. I just can’t help myself. My greedy hands (watch out for the greedy hands, greedy hands…) simply can’t resist every new Neil title.

And so, before you know it, I’m undercutting my own Tumblred pronouncements and utterly grooving out to the happily strangled stoner vibes one can find in Neil’s pre-Nicolette Larson background vocals department.

Yep, it’s definitely plowing time AGAIN!

So let’s do this: let me bore you with this story of how Oceanside Countryside won me over.

First off, Neil’s whole double tracked, Jekyll and Hyde, vocal approach is sprinkled throughout the project and it’s always a big grin producer. Comes a Time, the record Young issued in place of Oceanside Countryside, boasts none of this wonderfully blown out, flat-tired-pick-up-truck-full-of-loose-tools, vocal quality. Instead, Nicolette Larson and four thousand strumming guitars polish Neil’s rig into parade condition.

Indeed, much of the joy to be had in Oceanside Countryside comes from hearing Neil’s initial efforts to create Comes a Time’s eventual wall of sound all by own damn self. Check out the hammered vibes and swirling Stringman he works into his initial, self-produced, Plastic Ono Band version of Going Back:

Don’t get me wrong: I like many of the vocal and orchestral touches that wound up on Comes a Time, even if they are too damn pretty. But Oceanside Countryside is by comparison a joyful, easy listen, and I love picturing Neil in the studio alone, mallets in hand, adding touches.

Plus, check out all his humble but stunning 12 string guitar work to be found beneath all the eventual overdubs:

And that brings us to the new album’s opening and its two best songs. Sail Away and Lost in Space have always been personal favorites for me: I sang my kids to sleep with them, filling up their dreams with roads that stretch out between us, like a ribbon on the high plain, and the unknown dangers that lie on the ocean floor.

Oceanside Countryside brings the two songs together for the first time, which is fitting, as they were recorded back to back in the same environment. The tracks are suddenly parts two and three of a vital trilogy Neil initiated with Will to Love: each are testaments to Young’s too infrequently tapped skills when alone in a room full of instruments.

Wow, nothing beats Lost in Space’s sea-bound munchkin choir (you’ll encounter them at the later song’s 2 minute mark). I wish Neil had used such B-Movie studio trickery in place of the 100 person Stop Shopping Choir vibes on Living With War.

Oceanside Countryside is also a low stress twin concept record, a format Young would embrace in a more domineering and annoying fashion with 1981’s Hawks and Doves.

Its first side, Oceanside, totally fits this concept record bill: first we Sail Away, then we shudder and sway on the ocean floor before sailing with Captain Kennedy to the cities sunken deep within Goin’ Back. Admittedly, I can’t find a single reference to anything nautical or watery in Human Highway, but let’s generously declare that it is a transition to the B Side’s Countryside: a springtime place of easy cultivation, barn dancing and small town schmaltz:

Alright, that’s enough for now. I gotta go get a life quick before it’s officially 2026. It looks like Neil earned himself an upcoming Part 3 for this record; after all I have yet to even mention Pocahontas or the weird mysteries within Neil’s wandering and drooling sidekick to Danger Bird, The Old Homestead.

I sure ain’t his kid on any level, and I’m glad for that. Because I just can’t quit him, can I?

Oceanside Countryside, Part 1

I approached Neil’s lost 77 record, issued a year ago in conjunction with Archives 3, with a jaundiced eye.

A glance at the track list told me that Oceanside Countryside was no Homegrown, Chrome Dreams or Hitchhiker: three legendary mid 70’s records Neil shelved for no good reason, then made mythical through decades of quotable teases, liner note mischief, live-take miracles and record shop folklore, before finally unleashing them upon on us in the past decade or so, each of them instantly revealed as yet another head on Young’s personal, slathering and magnificent, Lost Record Cerberus: they are fanged, mighty and utterly vital.

Oceanside Countryside appeared, at first glance, to be the runt of this litter at best, or, at worst, to be a smoking hot pile of Neil’s Cerberus’s smoking hot shite.

Let me count the reasons why:

1. No truly new songs are included. Everything track found its home somewhere else in Shakey’s mammoth discography long before the record’s release. (The incredibly slight It Might Have Been does not count as new: it’s on A Treasure.)
2. There were barely even any new recordings to be had. Aside from the aforementioned It Might Have Been and the focus of #6 below, the record is simply a compilation of Hawks and Doves, Hitchhiker, and Rust Never Sleeps outtakes, along with a whole slew of base tracks from Comes a Time.
3. And besides, I’ve never been a big Comes a Time guy. Too pretty!
4. Young himself has rarely spoken about the record. I mean he talked up the whole Rick-Danko-influenced Homegrown vs. Tonight’s the Night debate for decades and, in true Shakey fashion, entitled an entire record Chrome Dreams 2 prior to even issuing Chrome Dreams and then went on to at least partially name his latest crummy band after it as well; those records are clearly way more important to him.
5. What’s more, Neil’s fabulous biographer Jimmie McDougal barely mentions Oceanside Countryside either. He spends far more time describing the set up for Neil’s toy trains. All of this leads to the question: is Oceanside Countryside even a real lost record? Or is it just a barrel scraping mirage intended only for the funding of Neil‘s new Toblerone shaped solar powered dog sled?
6. But perhaps most significantly, I initially shrugged and dawdled when it came to Oceanside Countryside because it includes yet another take of what can arguably be called Young’s weakest and most often attempted 70s song. We are talking, of course, about Dance, Dance, Dance. Neil’s ode to who-cares-what does not appear in his original 70s cannon simply because the song sucks. SUCKS! Nevertheless, I dare you to name any of his original 70s records that he did not consider Dance Dance Dance for. You cannot do it.

That’s right: for reasons which remain unclear to science and philosophy alike, Neil recorded Dance, Dance, Dance on a seemingly daily basis for a full decade.

To begin, there’s the version intended for his aborted Crazy Horse follow up to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere…

It’s then included on every one of the four thousand and seven live albums he has so far released from 1970 and 71.

Then there is the Harvest take….

And Homegrown’s improved-upon-Doppelganger…

Then there’s my personal favorite - if one can use that term while describing one of their least favorite Neil Young songs - which comes as a toss off at the end of what is perhaps Neil’s greatest live show of all time…

And then, finally, there is the even more redundant than my dunce cap version offered up on Oceanside Countryside.

Mercifully, it seems as though Neil finally stopped singing about Mississippi mud’s inaccess to his ladyfriend’s digits after that.

But who knows, Archives 17 may very well turn up a Ragged Glory take of the song which finally rocks, and/or a Mirror Ball exploration with hundred-mile-an-hour drums, and/or a fully orchestrated pensive and dull version which will nevertheless be better than everything that actually made the cut on Storytone.

OK, that just about sums up all the reasons why I initially wanted nothing to do with Oceanside Countryside.

But life is a beautiful thing. Here’s why: I just got myself a dollar bin copy (14 bucks) of the record and complemented its first play through with a brand new needle installed on my turntable.

And it sounds amazing! Neil Young‘s personal Lost Album Cerberus, it turns out, has a laid-back and wacky fourth head.

I’ll tell you all about it in Part Two…

Warning, Mature Content

Perhaps you noticed that my last post earned a mature content warning designation from the mysterious powers-that-be behind Tumblr.

This has happened twice of late and I have no sure explanation - after all, you may have noticed that I do not curse in these posts beyond a mild “I curse thee!” now and then directed at Stephen Stills, and you have surely noticed that I write mostly about fairly gross old white men with whom no one wants any sexual content connected, ever, and perhaps you’ve noticed that the only violence I reference comes with its own musical notation, like the gunfire one can find within Neil Young’s Shots…

But I do have a few theories.

The first flagged post contained reference to a famous Dick, namely Moby. You know, the whale. I have one of my own, but I have no interest whatsoever discussing it here with you, ever. Rest assured!

Anyway, perhaps Tumblr finds Melville’s cannibalistic descriptions of Queequig problematic on a post-colonial level and therefore warned you all of my reference to the novel; I could see that. Or maybe their AI algorithm is simply too dumb to understand my intent when using the word dick.

The second occurrence of this mysterious labelling occured with yesterday’s post discussing The Dark End of the Street. What could be the cause? Well, that post does indeed describe someone employing a chain - perhaps Tumblr’s crack team of investigators are reasonably on the hunt for any talk in favor of human bondage, sexual or literal? If so, I get it.

But, then again, Tumblr’s crack team of investigators also tell me I have a typo every time I type the word Tumblr, which is the freakin’ name of their freakin’ platform, and you’d think they would train their program to recognize that it is not a typo, so maybe they’re just idiots.

What’s more, the chain I referenced yesterday was connected to Aretha Franklin setting free a whole pack of metaphorical hounds. So maybe Tumblr’s “crack team” is, again, just a cracked-into-utter-incompetence algorithm.

So what could it be? I know! Maybe yesterday’s post was flagged because it included a photo of Linda Ronstadt fully clothed. And we all know that Linda Ronstadt, even when fully clothed, is seriously mature content.

Anyway, let’s test my theories and see if I can earn another mature content label again today.

Here’s a photo of Linda, once again clothed, and another use of the word dick, as in Moby.

Holy smokes! Moby Dick himself would cease to pummel the Pequod were Linda aboard.

And here’s another equally lovely Linda track. This one actually is problematic from a post-colonial angle because Randy Newman wrote it and Randy is forever grinningly problematic.

Sail Away!

Update: Okay, it didn’t work! No matter how many references I made to Linda clothed and Moby the whale, rather than anyone’s swinging bit of manhood, Tumblr did not grant me another mature content warning for this post.

I apologize for failing to endanger your innocence once again here in the Dollar Bin. Now someone please teach Tumblr how to spell its own name.

The Dark End of the Street

We’ve tracked the changes over time for one of Carole King’s masterpieces, for Bob Dylan’s Dream and for Roberta Flack’s final uplift of a Nina Simone deep track. Let’s wrap up a largely lousy year by charting the chronological transformation of another archetypal track: a classic soul brooder entitled The Dark End of the Street.

Dan Penn entered Nashville in the mid-sixties like every other musical Southern white male of his generation: he wanted to be Elvis.

Here he is, assuming the stance.

Somehow he hooked up Spooner Oldham, who, at age 168 or so, currently mans the keys in Shakey’s chrome farts, assuming the almost inaudible role of Methuselah.

60 years ago Penn and Oldham had plenty of musical potential and no lyrical clue. Here’s their “greatest” hit:

Oldham cleared out quick after that, allowing Chips Moman, an Elvis insider, to swoop in and provide Penn with the missing poetic touch. They soon enlisted James Carr and a classic began to take shape:

The song’s masterful structure is already in place: a building melody grows over a steady beat, promising the great heights that indeed arrive when they find us, You and Me. Carr walks with us down the song’s troubled avenue, providing the kind of strength and reassurance Penn and Moman could have never assembled on their own.

And then along came Aretha…

The song is suddenly epic. She leashes it on a gold chain, dragging its tempo to a nearly perfect stop before unleashing a whole pack of show dogs upon the avenue at the 2:30 minute mark. Forget the song’s original sense of darkness and dread: Franklin is in the illumination business here. And she’s striding into the light.

Well, clearly no one will ever compete with her take. Happily, the great covers that have followed have not sought to do so.

Check out Ry Cooder in 1972. He can’t sing worth a damn, but his slide guitar sure can, and he lets it do all the work here, reinstating the song’s core, aching melody.

Next it was Linda’s turn. Her 1974 take, which dwells at the heart of the greatest Dollar Bin record of all time, forges the perfect marriage of Franklin’s epic gesture and Cooder’s grace. The song even boasts a great guitar solo, a rare feature in a Ronstadt track.

The darkness threatens once again in Linda’s take: this is no safe street to pace. But we’d risk doing so if it meant we could walk alongside her.

It sure seems like that should be the end of the story: four great versions were in place by 1974, each of them vital and unique. There are only four cardinal points to follow when it comes to questing the song’s pavements, right?

Well, apparently not. Richard and Linda Thompson offer a fifth direction: they take to the sky.

Another Very Shakey Christmas

I’m not into Christmas Movies.

My wife and youngest have watched their fair number this year, all without me. I don’t know how things worked out for the lady in the midst of a bad break up whose car spun out in the vicinity of a solitary and surely sexy mountain man during a tough winter storm, or for the woman who decided the only way to get her daughter the ski or skating or dog sledding lessons she desperately needed was for her to go full Drag Santa in disguise, or for the family who all body swapped, dog included, due to a bizarre Solstice astrophysical event.

I don’t know how things worked out for any of them because I spent the hours in which they streamed joyfully puttering around in some other fashion, my dollar bin pair of bluetooth headphones projecting Neil Young from my turntable into my skull all the while. Trans, Chrome Dreams, Toast, last year’s Xmas focus, Dorothy Chandler, Life: Christmas Movie season means I have plenty of chances to revisit Shakey records that my family does not want to hear.

Neil has never recorded a Christmas album. I think this is a good thing, especially as I feel the same way about Christmas Music as I do about Christmas Movies. I see Ben Keith made one, and I guess I’d listen to that, hoping it would get weird. But unless Neil unearths a previously unissued version of him teeming up with Ringo and Billy Talbot for a rendition of Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer I’m good having never heard Shakey’s take on our invented-by-Dickens-then-reinvented-by-Capitalism holiday substitute for Winter Solstice.

After all, I’ve already got the one, fairly perfect, Christmas song that Neil actually appears on dialed up on the turntable for later today.

If Neil ever feels compelled to do anything Christmas related on his own I’d prefer that he go ahead and make his very own Christmas movie. I could totally see him and his New Robot greeting a friendly Jawa/Road Eye out in the desert just as a freak winter storm hits. He’d pile them all in his donut-fat-fired-Hummer and then hit the open road, regaling us with stories about both Elvises - his dog and the man - before finally pulling into a blissful winter cabin filled to the gills with Daryl’s giant dogs and his Rust Never Sleeps Stonehenge-sized fake amps and perform Dirty Old Man on the pump organ before a crackling fire. The whole thing would end with us travelling into the alien’s consciousness to find that they and Neil’s robot are in love and plan to dedicate the rest of eternity operating his giant barn worth of toy trains.

It sounds kind good! Or at least more understandable than Human Highway….

Anyway, if you want the closest thing to a Neil Christmas Movie check out his film version of what I’d say is his last totally solid studio record, Barn. The album opens with the very pretty Song of the Seasons, includes the retirement-community-watching-Loony-Tunes vibes of Shape of You, features, in Heading West, a pretty rockin’ and far more concise rewrite of his first, largely interminable, sonic biography, Don’t Be Denied, dabbles with a semi-return to psychedelic songwriting on Welcome Back and They Might Be Lost and closes with the very slight but still pretty Don’t Forget Love.

It’s good! I listened to it yesterday while the family engaged in normal Christmas behavior around me.

And the movie makes it even better…