29/08/2024
ON THIS DATE (54 YEARS AGO)
August 29, 1970 - Neil Young: After the Gold Rush is released.
# All Things Music Plus+ 5/5 (MUST-HAVE!)
# Allmusic 5/5
# Rolling Stone (see original review below)
After the Gold Rush is the third studio album by Neil Young, released on August 29, 1970. It reached #8 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart, and features two Billboard Hot 100 singles - "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" ( #33), and "When You Dance I Can Really Love" ( #93).
After the Gold Rush is one of the four high-profile albums released by each member of folk rock collective Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in the wake of their chart-topping 1970 album Déjà Vu.
Most of the album was recorded at a make-shift basement studio in Young's modest Topanga Canyon home during the spring of 1970 with Greg Reeves, Ralph Molina of Crazy Horse, and burgeoning eighteen-year-old musical prodigy Nils Lofgren of the Washington, DC-based band Grin on piano.
After the Gold Rush mixes up the hard rock of Everyone Knows This is Nowhere and the folk and country leanings Young pursued with Crosby, Stills And Nash in one of his most eclectic and satisfying releases.
The acoustic picking on the opener, "Tell Me Why," frames Young's vulnerable warble beautifully, signaling the softer aspect of the album. But the electric crunch of "Southern Man," a raging tour de force protest song that captures the special chemistry between Young and backing group Crazy Horse, balances Young's sensitivity with aggression and amplification. The album continues its collage of styles, from the wistfulness of "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" to song fragments like "Til the Morning Comes" to the transformation of Don Gibson's "Oh Lonesome Me" from canter to ballad. But the crowning achievements are the album's magnificent title track, a vividly drawn portrait of post-'60s melancholy, and the gorgeous, aching "Birds," a swan song heralding emotional departure. Both songs are graced by Nils Lofgren's delicate piano, and stand as two of Young's finest compositions. In a catalogue filled with rock classics, After the Gold Rush still ranks among the best.
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ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW
Neil Young devotees will probably spend the next few weeks trying desperately to convince themselves that After The Gold Rush is good music. But they'll be kidding themselves. For despite the fact that the album contains some potentially first rate material, none of the songs here rise above the uniformly dull surface. In my listening, the problem appears to be that most of this music was simply not ready to be recorded at the time of the sessions. It needed time to mature. On the album the band never really gets behind the songs and Young himself has trouble singing many of them. Set before the buying public before it was done, this pie is only half-baked.
"Southern Man" is a good example. As a composition, it is possibly one of the best things Neil Young has ever written. In recent appearances with Crosby, Stills and Nash, the piece has had an overwhelmingly powerful impact on audiences. But the recording of "Southern Man" on After The Gold Rush fulfills very little of this promise. By today's standards, the ensemble playing is sloppy and disconnected. The piano, bass and drums search for each other like lovers lost in the sand dunes, but although they see each others' footprints now and then, they never really come together. Young tries to recover the dynamics of the piece with his voice alone, but can't quite make it: On this and the other really interesting tunes on the album -- "Don't Let It Bring You Down," and "I Believe In You" -- the listener hears only a faint whisper of what the song will become.
Another disturbing characteristic of the record, oddly enough, is Young's voice. In his best work Young's singing contains genuine elements of pathos, darkness and mystery. If Kafka's story "The Hunger Artist" could be made into an opera, I would want Neil Young to sing the title role. But on this album this intonation often sounds like pre-adolescent whining. The song "After The Gold Rush," for instance, reminds one of nothing so much as Mrs. Miller moaning and wheezing her way through "I'm A Lonely Little Petunia In An Onion Patch." Apparently no one bothered to tell Neil Young that he was singing a half octave above his highest acceptable range. At that point his pathos becomes an irritating bathos. I can't listen to it at all.
There are thousands of persons in this country who will buy and enjoy this record. More power to them, I suppose. But for me the test of an album is whether or not its quality is such that it allows you to grow into it a little more with each subsequent listening. And I find none of that quality here. To the 70 or 80 people who wrote to Rolling Stone in total rage that I could be anything but 100% delighted with Deja Vu, I will simply say: this record picks up where Deja Vu leaves off.
~ Langdon Winner (October 15, 1970)
TRACKS:
All songs written by Neil Young except when noted
Side one
"Tell Me Why" – 2:54
"After the Gold Rush" – 3:45
"Only Love Can Break Your Heart" – 3:05
"Southern Man" – 5:31
"Till the Morning Comes" – 1:17
Side two
"Oh Lonesome Me" (Don Gibson) – 3:47
"Don't Let It Bring You Down" – 2:56
"Birds" – 2:34
"When You Dance I Can Really Love" – 4:05
"I Believe in You" – 3:24
"Cripple Creek Ferry" – 1:34
