June 27 - July 4, 1 9 9 6

In the groove

Neil Young plays slow and dirty on his latest

by Brett Milano

On the one occasion I interviewed Neil Young, he and Crazy Horse had just released 1990's Ragged Glory (Reprise), the bristling neo-punk album that remains his recent best. "There's one thing I can do with Crazy Horse that we didn't do on this album . . . " he noted, then paused as if building to a major pronouncement about . . . pondering the nature of the soul? Writing songs to address social issues? Turned out he had something more elemental in mind: " . . . What we didn't do is to play really, really fuckin' slow."

That's exactly what Young does on his new album with Crazy Horse, Broken Arrow (on Reprise July 2 -- the album title is both the name of Young's ranch and that of a 1967 Buffalo Springfield song, whose dislocated mood is echoed here). A lot of people will hear Broken Arrow as an album about taking stock at midlife, holding on to '60s dreams, standing proud for love and individuality. It isn't. Yes, those lyric threads are occasionally thrown about, as they always are on a latter-day Neil Young album. But Broken Arrow is still as subtext-free an album as he's ever made, hinging less on lyrical meanings than on the gargantuan plod that he and the band can create when the spirit's right. More than anything else, it's an album about playing really, really fuckin' slow. One could sum up the entire CD as a 49-minute version of "Cortez the Killer" without doing it much of a disservice -- the groove harks back to that epic track (from 1975's Zuma), and it's worth sustaining for the length of a disc.

Young's pattern nowadays is to mine one mood for the duration of an album, whether it's the folkie reassurance of Harvest Moon (1992), the blurry foreboding of Sleeps with Angels (1994), or the high-volume idealism of last year's Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam. If the latter album found Young thinking like a modern-day hippie, Broken Arrow finds him playing like one. The performances follow a very stoned kind of spur-of-the-moment logic. How else to explain the closing number, a live version of Jimmy Reed's "Baby What You Want Me To Do" that's not only haphazardly played but recorded the same way, with audible clinks of glasses and snatches of audience conversation throughout?

The real meat of Broken Arrow is the three tracks, each between seven and 10 minutes, that make up the album's first half. The opening "Big Time" is the closest thing to a Young standard here, a blurry memory of his first teenage trip down from Canada to hit California in the '60s: "Gonna leave the pain behind, gonna leave the fools in line, gonna take the magic potion/Getting in an old black car, gonna take a ride so far, to the land of suntan lotion" (now there's a line that probably wouldn't have survived a rewrite). When the chorus comes around, he slides into that whiny post-teenage falsetto that he's somehow still able to access at age 50: "I'm still living the dream we had/For me it's not over." Sounds like a reassuring enough statement until you consider that he never specifies which dream he's talking about. (Changing the world? Forming Buffalo Springfield? Making money and meeting girls?)

Doesn't matter, because the band sound here is its own reward. Crazy Horse are always at their best with the most basic of riffs, and those are plenty basic here. "Big Time" permutates into Link Wray's "Rumble" before it's through. Young's guitar solos remain unique in that you hardly ever notice specific riffs that he's playing; more often the point is to sustain the big sonic wash. And the wash here is as satisfying as it was on Ragged Glory. Played against Mirror Ball it gives evidence that Crazy Horse are still a grungier band than Pearl Jam. "Loose Change" has four minutes' worth of song, six minutes of fadeout, and one chord's worth of structure. "Slip Away" sports the most haunting tune on the disc, which the band seem intent on trashing (Ralph Molina's tom-toms are all over the place) before Young stops singing and joins the fray.

Unfortunately the album comes close to falling apart in the second half: "Changing Highways" is a loping rockabilly that sounds too much like other loping Young rockabillies (notably "White Line" on Ragged Glory) and doesn't last long enough to get anywhere. The vaguely foreboding "Scattered" and "This Town" would have fit better on Sleeps with Angels, where the Kurt Cobain subtext would have given them resonance. "Music Arcade," his latest reflection on the relationship with his audience, is an acoustic track that doesn't connect, less because he leaves it purposely oblique than because the lyrics needed one more draft.

But that's Neil Young, who seems to get off on putting unrehearsed jams and clinking glasses on albums as much as he does from putting great songs on them. If he acted like everybody else, polishing his songs and releasing albums every two years, his career would likely be more consistent. But it wouldn't be as much fun as the eccentric, fitfully inspired one he's got now.