neil young & crazy horse - americana

Giving Neil Young and Crazy Horses’s Americana another blast today and perhaps I’ve been a little hasty to dismiss it as a throwaway record. 

This is the Great American Folk songbook as thrashed out by curmudgeonly old men in denim and flannel shirts, standing in a draughty old barn trying to avoid the horse poo. Then the contrary old git has had the gall to overdub choirs and backing vocals as if these songs were actually substantial enough to warrant such treatment. Most of the tunes have been Horsed and so don’t really sound like the more familiar folk songs / nursery rhymes that many of these songs became. Most contain surprisingly dark lyrics that were lost as the songs became sanitized over the long years. Neil has put them back. So lots of death and hangin’ and shootin’ as befits songs written a century and half ago.

I'd say that about the half the record is very very good indeed. Solid Horse. The record works best on the less familiar songs – six minutes of "She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain" blasted out Horse-style is not really my cup of tea, but a song like "High Flying Bird" sounds exactly like the sorts of Neil / Horse tracks that found their homes on Zuma or Ragged Glory. Some of the songs are perhaps too long – at 8 minutes "Tom Dula" is maybe twice as long as it needs to be – but others work well at their lengths. For example, "Travel On" is nearly 7 minutes but doesn’t seem like it.

The oldest songs are from the 1800s, "Oh Susannah" (which was later reworked in the 1960s as "Venus" – you know, ‘she’s got it, oh baby she’s got it…’) and "Clementine" both sound great as done by the Horse. If those good ol’ frontiersmen back then had had access to whacking great Marshall stacks, Billy Talbot’s monstrous bass, Poncho’s growling guitar, Ralph’s thudding drums and Neil’s faithful Old Black guitar, then these good ol’ folk songs would have sounded exactly like this.

Still not sure what to make of the Horses’s electric doowop attack on "Get A Job" (a relative newie from the 1950s) although it’s worth noting that Billy and Ralph started their careers singing doowop on street corners with Danny Whitten as Danny and the Memories in the early 1960s. "God Save The Queen" still completely baffles me, however. What on earth were they thinking? But on the whole the album is growing on me and it certainly blows the cobwebs away.