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Protesters dissect Neil Young’s new album of protest songs

Neil Young’s first album with Crazy Horse in nine years – Protesters dissect Neil Young’s new album of protest songs
Ben Kaplan Jun 4, 2012 – 4:16 PM ET
Illustration by Mike Faille, from Kiim Kong photo

Americana, Neil Young’s first album with Crazy Horse in nine years, is a collection of classic folk covers that describes an outsider’s America populated with travellers searching for the idea of a country they can’t find.

The activists listening to Neil Young’s new protest album think, by and large, the protests don’t go far enough. The album’s called Americana, it’s Young’s first with Crazy Horse in nine years and the songs — 11 classic folk covers such as This Land is Your Land and Travel On — describe an outsider’s America populated with death-row inmates, share croppers and out-of-sorts travellers searching for the idea of a country they can’t find.

“Living with War, which had Let’s Impeach the President, now that was a protest record,” says Ryan Peck, executive director of HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario, and host of our listening session this past Friday. “Here’s this Canadian reminding Americans what they’re really about — the good America, which of course is the idea of freedom.”

Young’s new record is above all else a Crazy Horse album, which means almost every tune contains a crunchy wall of harmony, wallop, feedback and guitar. Opening with Oh Susanna, a minstrel tune from the 1840s, and then bleeding into a threatening-sounding Clementine (a reworking of Oh My Darling, Clementine), the record doesn’t barnstorm so much as strike a note of curiosity.

“This is a song people thought was dead and buried. Something so stupid it was generally assumed no one would ever sing it again,” Kenneth Hale, director of Advocacy and Legal Services for Tenants Ontario, says of Clementine. The song, written during the California Gold Rush of 1848, is about the drowned daughter of a miner who takes up with his lover’s kid sister.
“Neil had an album called Freedom,” continues Hale, “but I still see him as a song-and-dance man.”

Covering folk tunes has been a fruitful pastime for aging lefties. In 1992, Bob Dylan released Good As I Been to You, an album of rearranged call-to-arms songs, and the record was widely seen as fuel for the re-emergence still driving him forward today. Likewise, Bruce Springsteen made The Seeger Sessions in 2006, which was sandwiched between the lesser albums Magic (2007) and Devils & Dust (2005).

This record’s a bunch of angry hippies in their garage playing songs that they loved when they were four
For Young, Americana follows Le Noise, which scored the 66-year-old a Grammy Award for best rock song in 2011. Clearly, this record is a chance for Young to flaunt his influences and make a statement, something achieved on the album’s wild version of the Silhouettes’ Get a Job, a ’50s-era ditty about joblessness.

“In an era of massive unemployment, Get a Job speaks to a reality that so many people are facing and it’s what every activist hears when we’re out on the streets with a picket sign,” says Yutaka Dirks, who contributes to the new book Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. “Many of us do have work, and we’re often out on the streets protesting the loss of good, stable, union jobs. You have to let the insult slide off your back.”

Crazy Horse, whose members backed Young on his first solo album, is a band best known for their thunder, but when the group formed in 1963, they were an a capella doo wop group in Los Angeles. It’s not lost on our activists that the band’s named for a Native American hero who went to war against the United States.

“Neil’s the kind of hippie who mixes his marijuana with tequila,” says Peck, “and this record’s a bunch of angry hippies in their garage playing songs that they loved when they were four.”
On Americana, the Crazy Horse harmonies stand out almost as much as their guitar sludge, and Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, perhaps the ultimate folk song, steers the album back into political territory. Young’s version also contains the oft-deleted lyrics that address the country’s property laws.

“Given the Occupy movement, I think he’s explicitly addressing inequality,” Dirks says. “This record’s about using music to keep hope. It’s saying, collectively, ‘We all have a voice.’ ”
In the end, the new Young album is modestly activist-approved, catchy and a tip-of-the-hat to the bygone days of America’s ragged early years, which seem to be resurfacing now. Young’s 35th solo album concludes with God Save the Queen, the British national anthem, which fades into America the Beautiful and a children’s choir for its final note.

“If this is a political record, it’s a subtle political record, but I like what Neil does to these songs,” Peck says. “In a way, he does sort of what lawyers do — we slightly change the law and adapt them slowly to the times.”

Americana by Neil Young is available June 5 from Warner Music.
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thanks go to sharry w.

Tags: Americana, Living With War
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Tour dates: Rolling Stone also lists a Dallas date / omits others

Neil Young And Crazy Horse Set U.S. Tour Dates
After brief warm-up in August, tour kicks off in early October
Neil Young performs with Crazy Horse at the MusicCares Person of the Year Tribute to Paul McCartney event in Los Angeles.

By Andy Greene
June 4, 2012 6:35 PM ET

Neil Young and Crazy Horse will launch an American arena tour in early October that will run through early December, according to tour dates that appeared on Ticketmaster on Monday evening. There are some gaps between shows at the moment, and it’s highly likely that the complete itinerary will be announced shortly. Ticket prices range from $47.00 to over $255 and go on sale this Friday at 10 a.m.

Young and Crazy Horse haven’t performed a full concert together since their Greendale tour wrapped in March of 2004, making this their longest hiatus since forming in 1969. The group reformed last year to record a series of folk covers for the disc Americana, which hits shelves tomorrow. They have also recorded an album of original material, which should surface sometime later this year. “There are lots of instrumentals, lots of excursions,” Young says in the next issue of Rolling Stone, on stands this Friday. “But they’re real songs. It has one that’s 26 minutes long … [the tour] is going to be [songs from] the past, the present and the future.”

Though the bulk of their tour dates are in October and November, Young and Crazy Horse will play the Red Rock’s Ampitheater in Morrison, Colorado, and the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco in August.

Here are all of the known dates for Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s U.S. tour:
8/5 Morrison, CO – Red Rocks
8/6 Morrison, CO – Red Rocks
10/08 Cleveland, OH – Wolstein Center
10/09 Pittsburgh, PA – Petersen Center
10/11 Chicago, IL – United Center
10/17 Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Bowl
10/25 Dallas, TX – Verizon Theatre at Grand Prairie
11/10 Seattle, WA – Key Arena
11/11 Vancouver, BC – Rogers Arena
11/13 Calgary, AB – Scotiabank Saddledome
11/14 Saskatoon, SK – Credit Union Centre
11/16 Winnipeg, MB – MTS Centre
11/19 Toronto, ONT – Air Canada Centre
11/26 Boston, MA – TD Garden
11/27 New York, NY – Madison Square Garden
11/30 Fairfax, VA – Patriot Center
12/04 Bridgeport, CT – Webster Bank Arena

Read more: www.rollingstone.com/music/news/neil-young-and-crazy-horse-set-u-s-tour-dates-20120604

Other known tour dates are here.

Tags: Americana, tour dates
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NY/CH Hit The Road This Fall for First Tour in Eight Years

Neil Young & Crazy Horse Hit The Road This Fall for First Tour in Eight Years
–YOUNG, BILLY TALBOT, RALPH MOLINA, AND PONCHO SAMPEDRO LAUNCH FIRST CRAZY HORSE ALBUM IN NEARLY NINE YEARS – AMERICANA – AVAILABLE JUNE 5TH –Tickets on sale in select markets beginning June 8th at LiveNation.com

LOS ANGELES, June 4, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Having already thrilled fans with the news that they will release “AMERICANA”, their first album in nine years, Neil Young & Crazy Horse have announced that they will hit the road this fall for their first tour together since 2004.

“AMERICANA” is a rich collection of classic American compositions, some dating back 200 years or more and each has its own unique history veiled with multiple meanings and relatable, lyrical significance as applicable today as they were in the America of yesteryear. Have a look at the following video links for a view into our past as evidence: Oh Susanna, Jesus’ Chariot (She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain), Clementine.

Crazy Horse: Young, Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina, and Poncho Sampredo will hit the road to perform for audiences across North America beginning October 3rd and continuing on for two months. The tour will visit cities from coast to coast, including stops to the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Madison Square Garden in New York City, and Air Canada Centre in Toronto.

“AMERICANA” was produced by Neil and John Hanlon along with Mark Humphreys, and engineered by John Hanlon with John Hausmann and Jeff Pinn. It was recorded at Audio Casa Blanca by John Hanlon.

Fans purchasing their concert tickets on-line will receive a copy of the brand new CD – AMERICANA, available in stores Tuesday, June 5th, released by Reprise Records.
Tickets for Neil Young & Crazy Horse will go on sale starting June 8th in select markets at Ticketmaster.com and LiveNation.com. General admission floor tickets are available in all markets, with the exception of Los Angeles.

$1.00 from every ticket sold will go directly to benefit The Bridge School, which assists children with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs.

Tags: crazy horse, tour dates
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Album Review: The Globe and Mail

DISC OF THE WEEK
Neil Young reinvents songs the old-fashioned way
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jun. 01 2012, 5:00 PM EDT, Last updated Saturday, Jun. 02 2012, 3:09 PM EDT

Long before sampling came along, there was an even more dynamic process for reusing and rearranging the materials of existing songs. It was called folk music.

Folk music in that sense began to disappear when scholars started noting down songs that had existed only in people’s shared recollection. The ancient ballad known as The Maid Freed from the Gallows had several other names in other languages, and other tunes and lyrics too, before the Harvard folklorist Francis Child studied its American variants in the 19th century.

Neil Young’s new disc with Crazy Horse celebrates the fluidity of the folk process, and implies that a good transformative cover carries on that tradition. The album includes heavy blues-rock versions of genuinely old songs such as Clementine and Gallows Pole (Young’s version of the ballad studied by Child), and of fifties radio hits such as Get a Job and Travel On.

Young’s Clementine is a towering, doom-laden number with only a ghostly trace of the lilting dance rhythm most people know. He focuses your mind on the fact that the narrator’s darling ends up dead – the latter half of this lengthy track is one long lament. In Tom Dula (a.k.a. Tom Dooley), Young simplifies the familiar rhythm and bears down for eight minutes on the murder and the execution that will pay for it. For Oh Susannah, he sets aside the jaunty Stephen Foster original and covers the raw variant recorded as The Banjo Song by the Big Three in 1963 (cunningly reworked as Venus by Shocking Blue in 1969). Jesus’s Chariot goes back to the spiritual that became She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain, with a simplified melody and lots of heavy grinding on the song’s tonic root.

Throughout the album, Young’s vocals strive for something primal and true beneath the songs’ familiar surface. His slurry yet precise electric-guitar solos move powerfully through the darkest lyrical moods.

After a few of these intense, gloomy performances, you sense that this project is partly a belated retort to the mellowing tendencies of groups like the Kingston Trio, whose wistful Tom Dooley was a No. 1 hit in 1958. Lead Belly’s 1939 recording of Gallows Pole, by contrast, was about as raw and scary as they come. Young’s version, while still dark, has a jauntier gait and an almost comic feeling when he yelps out the repeated line, “Did you come to see me hang?”

In This Land Is Your Land, Young foregrounds Woody Guthrie’s seldom-heard political verses, and omits the more pastoral ones. But surely Guthrie’s point in combining the two was to contrast the beauty of the land with the ugliness of what sometimes goes on there.

The newest numbers, Get a Job and Travel On, feel stodgy compared to the Silhouettes’ 1957 version of the former, and Billy Grammer’s live rockabilly performances of the latter. Crazy Horse fans will probably get a kick out of hearing this revered and rugged ensemble sing doo-wop, but their tools aren’t the best for the job.

The closing number, God Save the Queen, seems like a surprising choice for a disc called Americana, till a children’s choir chimes in with verses from America (“land of the Pilgrims’ pride”) that were laid on the English tune in 1831. It would have been fun to hear Young sing a little of the German variant: Under Kaiser Wilhelm II, this song was known as Heil dir im Siegerkranz and was used as the German anthem right through the First World War. How’s that for a transformative cover?

Tags: Americana, Clementine, review
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“Journeys” Premiere screening, Omemee, Ontario

FYI – Youngtown Museum will present Journeys Premiere just outside of Omemee in Lindsay Ontario on June 23rd. See blog link for details.

Thanks very much. Hope all is well with you.

Tags: Journeys
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