After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"On The Beach" by Neil Young
When I was in 9th grade, I had an English teacher who nurtured my interest in rock 'n' roll by loaning me copies of The Rolling Stone Record Guide and Greil Marcus' Mystery Train, and by making tapes of anything I asked for from his collection. I moved on to a different school in 10th grade, then in 11th grade—for reasons too complicated to get into—I was reunited with my favorite English teacher, who was still willing to tape for me whatever I was interested in. Only by then I had extended my music studies in directions that diverged from his; and even when we overlapped, it wasn't exact. He loved Van Morrison's Moondance; I wanted Astral Weeks. I requested Plastic Ono Band; he preferred Imagine. And while he was into Neil Young's Harvest, I was into Rust Never Sleeps and Tonight's The Night, two albums he didn't much like.
I'm sure my musical mentor chalked up my interest in drearier, moodier records to adolescence. I was also listening to a lot of The Cure, The Smiths, Bauhaus and Sisters Of Mercy at the time, and wearing my hair all swooped over my eyes so I'd look mysterious and brooding. Yet here I am in my late 30s, with a wife and two kids, and still one of my favorite things to do in this life is to drive around on a rainy afternoon, listening to slow, sad music.
Is this impulse common? I'd like to think that we all enjoy a good wallow, except that I've met plenty of people who can't stand depressing music or depressing movies, and can't understand why anybody would want to be sad. For me though, a melancholy song is like a mood-alterering drug. My breathing slows, my heart rate lowers, and my whole brain chemistry changes. It's not unlike sleeping. And when the song is over, it's like waking up from a disturbing dream, feeling refreshed and relieved.
A dark album can be transporting in a different way. When I listen to Plastic Ono Band or Tonight's The Night, I'm not focused on myself at all. I'm joining a musician on a journey through their most pessimistic thoughts and soul-crushing experiences, and commiserating. I feel sympathetic, concerned—connected. I don't mean to imply that I understand exactly where the artist is coming from, but I at least get a rough feel. I can't fully imagine what Young was going through when he wrote and recorded Tonight's The Night, but the context is built into the music, which sounds washed-out and ramshackle, like the work of man just trying to make it to the end of the day.
In 1973, Neil Young was enjoying the success of Harvest and preparing for a tour when he fired his heroin-addicted guitarist Danny Whitten—who died of an overdose the same night Young dismissed him. Despondent and unstable, Young embarked on an erratic three-month tour that saw him playing new, crankier material to sometimes hostile crowds, and recording the results for the album Time Fades Away (which bombed when it was released in 1973 and has never been available on CD). Then Young's roadie Bruce Barry also died of a heroin overdose, and Young continued his trip into the darkness with Tonight's The Night, an album that in its original form reportedly featured long spoken-word sections in between bouts of loping, disjointed country-rock. The label didn't want to release it, so Young headed back into the studio and pumped out the relatively cleaner On The Beach, another mournful record that at least sounded professional, and contained the optimistic "Walk On." When that record bombed too, Young recorded an album called Homegrown, which both his label and all his closest associates felt was the true follow-up to Harvest, and a definite hit. But Young waffled about releasing it, and instead insisted that Reprise put out Tonight's The Night in a new, more truncated form.
I've never heard Time Fades Away and I'm up-and-down on On The Beach, but Tonight's The Night is one of those albums that makes me glad to be alive and listening to rock 'n' roll. Young has always taken an active interest in the literal sound of the records he makes, and during the early '70s he was kicking around ideas about a new kind of music, a sort of "audio verité," in which a record would be a document of the musician was going through, captured in the moment, unedited and unaltered. You can hear that impulse in songs like Tonight's The Night's "Speakin' Out:"
"Speakin' Out" by Neil Young
The song starts with a slowed-down barrelhouse piano riff, acquires a touch of bluesy guitar and cowboy slide, and then Young ambles in, slurring his words, following seemingly unconnected trains of thoughts about movies and loneliness. Each band member sounds like he's off in a room by himself, with the playback turned so low on his headphones that he only has a rough idea how what he's playing fits into the mix. "Speakin' Out" recreates the feeling of a group of people each off in their own worlds, barely understanding each other, but going through the motions of camaraderie regardless.
Later in the album, the playing is more cohesive on songs like "Albuquerque:"
"Albuquerque" by Neil Young
Here, Young sounds more sober and the band is more in concert, but tamping down the recklessness of "Speakin' Out" has had consequences. The music now feels muted and mournful, shot through with shame and regret. This is morning-after music—fraught with the awareness that while partying hard wasn't as much fun as we might've hoped, waking up the next day is even worse. And so it goes with Tonight's The Night, an album about drugs, death and existential despair that doesn't express much hope, aside from the fundamental faith that getting into a room and making music with friends will eventually bring order and meaning to a life spinning out of control.
I can understand why some people wouldn't want to put themselves through that kind of experience voluntarily, as a leisure activity, but when I listen to Tonight's The Night I can smell the dank practice spaces and taste the warm beer and feel the gastric juices burning my esophagus—and when it's over I'm me again, and can hear my son reciting the total cash and prizes of some game show contestant he just saw on TV, and watch my daughter pretending to be a cat. And I can go into the kitchen and start washing and slicing the fingerling potatoes I'm going to roast to go along with the cheese omelet and fruit salad I'm going to make my family for dinner. And I can be grateful.
P.S. I have a long list of "dark albums" that take me on very specific bum trips: American Music Club's California, Nick Drake's Pink Moon, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, Wilco's A Ghost Is Born, Joy Division's Closer, and on and on. What are your downers of choice?
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
The Moody Blues
Years Of Operation 1964-present
Fits Between The Alan Parsons Project and Genesis
"Lunch Break: Peak Hour" by The Moody Blues
Personal Correspondence Two Moody Blues memories recur every time I hear their music. The first is recent: In a Sunday Nancy comic strip by Guy Gilchrist—a cartoonist who's increasingly used Ernie Bushmiller's strip to voice his own appreciation for all things sacred to boomers—Aunt Fritzi announces that she's going to a concert, and when Nancy asks if it's a rock or classical concert, Fritzi says, "Both." The big reveal? She's going to see The Moody Blues! Corny, yes, but I have to say: Not entirely off-the-mark. My second lingering memory of The Moody Blues involves listening to Days Of Future Past with my folks. When they got their first car with a tape deck, my mom and stepfather went cassette-shopping at Wal Mart, plucking a handful of their favorites from the bargain bin to play when we all went on long trips. My favorite tape they bought was Steely Dan's Aja—a subject I'll be getting to in a couple of months. My second-favorite was Days Of Future Past, which never ceased to surprise me. First off, the record honestly does sound traditionally symphonic—to the extent that I'd often be surprised when the orchestra faded and the spoken-word poetry and trippy pop songs started. And those trippy pop songs flow in and out of the classical passages so fluidly that sometimes it was hard for me to remember how exactly I ended up in the thick of a thumping rock number. Days Of Future Passed is completely kitschy, from its "day in the life" conceit to its grandiose "rock as art" pretensions. But it's one of the rare concept albums where the sum and the parts are equally well-conceived. Each fragment sounds rich and fully realized, and the whole listening experience is oddly satisfying too.
Enduring presence? My Moody Blues expertise is low, I have to confess. I have Days of course, and a cheap anthology that includes a smattering of the band's hit singles, from the Nuggets-y "Ride My Seesaw" to the AC favorite "Your Wildest Dream." But I haven't properly connected the dots, and every time I listen to Days Of Future Passed, I think that any band who can pull off this particular fusion so successfully probably has other triumphs I'd enjoy. (I also think of The X-Men; comic book fans will know why.)
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