Samiul Bashar Samin
Some artists make it seem utterly courageous to follow their own muse. Neil Young makes it seem like there’s no other choice. For the last 45 years, Young has glanced at his options, shrugged for a moment, and lit off for the place that seemed right. Young has always kept his fans guessing, turning an array of stylistic corners — country twang here, poignant picking there, and a whole lot of blaring guitar rock everywhere between. It doesn’t matter if the songs are personal confessions, allusive tales, or bouncy throwaways — since the mid-1960s Young has filled each with immediacy and passion, two hallmarks of a career that has been utterly influential and wildly fun to follow. He’s like your weird old uncle — if your uncle were a rock & roll genius.
The 1980s were a particularly strange and erratic decade for the singer, even by his own unpredictable standards. Ultimately, it seemed he was going on a genre-hopping spree. A year later he released Re*ac*tor, a bruising hard-rock LP. In 1982 he moved to the Geffen label and released Trans, which introduced his audience to what he called “Neil 2”; the singer fed his voice through a computerized Vocoder and sang songs with compu-speak titles such as “Sample and Hold.” It was adventurous, and he explained that he was trying to put himself in the place where he could communicate with his speech-impaired son Ben who was born with cerebral palsy.
Young’s wanderlust got more extreme with Everybody’s Rockin’, a rockabilly album recorded and performed with a group he dubbed the Shocking Pinks. Despite an amusing video for the song “Wonderin’,” all this stylistic swerving started to irritate longtime fans, and the records began sliding down the charts. Old Ways was a country album with guest spots by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Landing on Water used synthesizers on standard rock songs. Life reunited him with Crazy Horse in lackluster performances.
Because of his renegade spirit and unruly music, Young was hailed by a new generation of post-punk musicians as “the Godfather of Grunge.” He had a major comeback beginning in 1989 with Freedom (Number 35), his biggest chart success since Trans, as well as his biggest critical hit in a decade. He introduced its single, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” in an unbridled, transcendent 1989 performance on Saturday Night Live — one of the greatest moments in all of rock television.