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Sweet Hitchhiker: 41 years ago

Hitchhiker - Neil Young
Hitchhiker - Neil Young

Any rock star who hangs around long enough becomes venerated. But that doesn't mean the whole enterprise isn't faintly ridiculous. I'm of the mind that Neil Young has the right to put out a record whenever he wants to; I just don't have to care much about any of them.

Sometimes I'm asked to write about them, so I've listened to some of his recent albums. The last one I was charmed by was 2014's A Letter Home, a tossed-off collection of acoustic covers. I thought The Monsanto Years (2015) had "an underwritten quasi-punk buzz that feels improvised ... and not in a good way." Last year's Peace Trail was a little better, though "Texas Rangers" features some of the most inelegant electric guitar work Young has ever committed, and "My New Robot" was simply bizarre, the sort of outtake that, back in the day, a record company might release as revenge on an artist with whom they'd gotten contractually sideways.

Young doesn't care about my qualms. He's rich and old and can scream at the sky if he wants. He'll always be an artist capable of strange and wondrous revelation as well as self-indulgence. For more than 50 years he has somehow kindled a naif-like innocence. (You have to give him that even if you feel solidarity with ex-wife Pegi, whom he divorced after 36 years of marriage. At least she got 2016's Raw -- a magnificent if hard-to-listen-to breakup album -- out of the deal.)

But just when you think maybe you don't need to hear anything new from him, this record comes along.

It isn't new, just rediscovered.

Hitchhiker (Reprise) is a document of a single evening, reportedly Aug. 11, 1976. It's just 30-year-old Young in the studio in Malibu with his guitar, longtime producer/collaborator pro David Briggs on the board and actor-gadfly Dean Stockwell hanging out. It's terrific, a strummed acoustic set that presents some of Young's best -- and darkest -- work in its earliest form.

The track list will appear familiar to anyone reasonably conversant with Young's oeuvre; eight of the album's songs would be recorded and released on later records. One of the exceptions, "Give Me Strength," is a song Young has occasionally performed in concert; the other, "Hawaii," is probably the album's weakest track (though it might have been the strongest on a few of Young's recent outings). The three songs that open the album -- "Powderfinger," "Captain Kennedy" and "Pocahontas" -- feel like a counter-argument to the American myth that was being celebrated in the bicentennial year. While all three of these songs have become touchstones, placed in context with one another they form a violent suite.

"Powderfinger" is perhaps the finest lyric Young ever wrote, with its eerie blend of the specific and the vague. We don't know the war -- we only sense the threat. And the young protagonist isn't a soldier, just a defender who acts because he's the only one left to act. He sees the numbers on the side of the approaching warship, the guns --

Daddy's rifle in my hand felt reassuring ....

Now there's a twist. If you're familiar with the song from the version on the 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps or any of the subsequent live or cover versions you know the next line is:

He said "Red means 'run,' son, the numbers add up to nothing"

But here he sings:

He said, "Red man run, the numbers add up to nothing"

The later, more familiar line is superior. It's better for the scansion, the extra syllables providing an internal rhyme that feels like natural speech, and "red" refers back to the menacing beacon our hero spied in the first verse. One wonders if Young simply flubbed the line -- if he'd meant to sing the more familiar line -- or whether he revised and improved the lyric later.

Still, "Red man run" has a bite all its own, and it thematically links "Powderfinger" to the song that precedes it, album opener "Pocahontas" (which also first surfaced on Rust Never Sleeps). Is the singer an American Indian? It might seem unlikely given the names he's bandied about -- John, who's been drinking since the river took Emmylou -- but the literal mind is a blunt instrument. I'd always vaguely thought "Powderfinger" was about Vietnam, our young protagonist was reacting to the approach of an American patrol boat, like the ones in Apocalypse Now. (Though the song was obviously written and recorded before the 1979 movie.)

My wife, Karen, regards it as a Civil War song.

Which is its beauty, presented here without the G-to-C power-chorded riff that marks the Rust Never Sleeps (the version Young strums here is in E, making it less jubilant and bluesier), the way it accommodates and invites the listener's participation while at the same time remaining precise and rooted in human experience. When he gets to the key line -- "I saw black and my face splashed in the sky" -- the effect is devastating.

(While we look to Young more for noise than poetry, I might nominate that line for one of the most concise and horrorful in the canon. It's right up there with Randall Jarrell's "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose" from "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" and the Bible's "Jesus wept.")

This flows into "Captain Kennedy," a narrative about a young mariner -- pointedly American -- who tells us "when I get to shore I hope that I can kill good" that was previously released on 1980's Hawks and Doves.

The highlight of this brief (33 minutes) album's back half is a version of "Campaigner," a poignant and compassionate sketch of Richard Nixon inspired by Young's hearing a report about the disgraced former president visiting his ailing wife, Pat, in the hospital. This version has an extra verse and affords one of the era's great villains a full measure of dignity.

A 30-year-old Young did that. Let's cut the 71-year-old a break.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

photo

AP

Neil Young performs at the Farm Aid concert in 2015.

Style on 09/17/2017

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