Despite all the fireworks—maybe because of them, who really knows—the tour was incredible musically, and once it was over, Young and Briggs set out to mix tapes for both a live album and video, which would result in the biggest battle of them all.
“The more you think, the more you stink,” went the Briggs/Young saying, and unfortunately a lot of thinking went into Weld. Young, Briggs and John Hanlon mixed the tapes at Indigo, but Young wasn’t satisfied. They continued working at the ranch, redoing mixes and overdubbing background vocals to the point of mania. Even Young’s own equipment tech thought it was a bad idea—they’d just purchased a new Neve mixing board that was far from ready. “Neil forced Briggs and Hanlon to try and do it on the ranch,” said Harry Sitam. “He should never have done it. The board was in terrible condition.”
Hanlon—like most everybody else I talked to—knew they’d already mixed a great version of the album at Indigo. “The very advice Neil gave me if I wanted to play ball on that team was ‘Don’t second-guess yourself. Be great the first time.’ He didn’t follow his own advice on that one.”
Briggs had informed Young that he had a prior commitment a few weeks down the road, thinking it was no big deal. But as mixing dragged on, Briggs pushed back his other session a week. It became apparent that Young still wasn’t going to let go. Briggs was backed into a corner and told Young. Neil accused him of pulling a Niko Bolas, with another gig waiting in the wings. “Then hire Niko!” Briggs screamed. “Fuck You!” The producer got into his rented Skylark and tore off. (Bolas had the best retort concerning the exit of David Briggs: “Neil should be the first one to understand leaving.”)
With Briggs gone, Young and Billy Talbot mixed the album into the ground. The bass-heavy murk of the two-CD Weld, released in October 1991, was not an improvement over the original Indigo mixes. But there were compensations. Arc, a third CD included in the package, was a thirty-five-minute nightmare edit of feedback endings and lyric fragments—the most noxious sonic assault released by a major artist since Lou Reed’s un-listenable two-record set of electronic jibber-jabber, Metal Machine Music. “Those guys with the pickup trucks and blaring speakers—if you wanna make a statement, guys, put this on!” Young told Tony Scherman. “This is white rap!” *
The other high point was the Weld video, which featured the original Briggs mixes. Produced and edited by Larry Johnson—who would really come into his own in the nineties as Young’s most interesting documentarian—the ultra-real Video Hi-8 footage features the Horse live, intercut with audience shots of extremely intense fans mouthing words, playing air guitar and acting out the songs in weird Kabuki-like dances. When future races want to look back on the obsessive relationship between artist and audience in the rock era, this is one document they will want to peruse.
And while Young and Talbot might not have been the greatest mixing team, the Weld video of “Welfare Mothers” proved that as a comedy duo they were carrying on in the grand tradition of Willie Tyler and Lester. As the song crumbles into feedback, a beyond-hoarse Talbot screams, “No more pain! No more pain!” Young and Talbot go into a call-and-response mini-drama over a delayed welfare check. “Where’s the check?” demands Young. “Check’s in the mail!” yells Billy. Seemingly experienced in such situations, Talbot plays the role of starving child, yelping, “Hey Mom, I’m hungry!” “Tell those kids to shut up!” snaps Young. Horror sets in as the song starts all over again, with Young whining—and Talbot rasping—over and over, “Welfare mothers make better lovers.” Billy finally exclaims, “That check is here! All right!” As he pounds feedback out of his bass, the song collapses into a miasma of noise.
Once Weld was finished, Crazy Horse were put out to pasture again, with Young turning back to the Stray Gators, the band from Harvest. The tortured Weld experience would leave a bad taste in more than one mouth. Poncho was crestfallen when he saw Billy Talbot’s production credit on the CD. “I’d been there every Bluenote recording session, mixdown … Niko and I even mastered Freedom—Neil didn’t show up. I did tons of work and I didn’t get that type of credit. It seemed like Billy just showed up … I don’t know how much of it was to spite Briggs.”
When I caught up with Briggs months later he was still furious. * Decades of resentments came out over Weld. “I told Neil, ‘It’s a live LP, we’ll mix it in two weeks, it’ll sound great.’ Then he started worrying. I remixed every song on the record three times, and it only got worse and worse and worse. What’s the point of making a live record if you wanna go back and put on giant stacks of background parts? He wanted it more slicked up. Plus I had to mix it on the ranch so Neil could be there in his own little cave and just turn off the world and escape to his trains every ten minutes. I don’t know what it is, but it ain’t rock and roll.
“I can remember the old days. All these things about Neil being the brooding artist—it was bullshit, all bullshit. He was a loose, happy, fun guy. Now he’s like this fuckin’ recluse. He doesn’t have contact with people anymore. Neil just throws everybody away like old tissue paper…. He’s alienated everybody who ever cared about him by treatin’ ’em all like shit and showin’ ’em no respect—so what he’s got is him and his fuckin’ trains.
“I think Neil is a great fuckin’ artist, but his vibe—and the whole trip that surrounds it—is a sick kinda deal. Just this inbred, uptight program that makes me very uncomfortable to be around.”
Briggs saw Young’s home studio as a hippie Graceland. “I don’t know why anybody would wanna work there. It’s like working at the Pentagon—as long as they live in his little world, then everything’s okay. I guess Neil doesn’t wanna deal with the big world. People laugh, have fun, go out to dinner, do the kinda things people really do …
“I don’t know what’s happened to the guy. I don’t know what’s happened to his life, his mind, and in all honesty I don’t give a shit.
“Ragged Glory is the best fuckin’ record he’s made in a long time, and that was it. Now he’s back to the same old trip, back in the same old train barn, with the same old bad attitude, and the same old uptight people around him all the time…. He’s in a cage. A velvet cage.”
Nearly a year later, Briggs would be back working with Young. It was the only game in town—for both men.
The production credit on Weld—if you look at the laser disc, it’s different. Those are the mixes David Briggs did, and David Briggs gets the credit there.
But when David Briggs wasn’t in the studio working on the record, he didn’t get credit. Y’know, that’s the way life is. Billy and I stayed and worked on it—for good or for bad. Briggs had another job to do and he had to take off. So instead of putting his foot down and saying, “Neil, I really think this is done, let’s take a couple of weeks off and listen to it again,” he was outta there. So I had no feedback from Briggs. So Briggs got what he deserved on that one.
I need people to be there all the way. If they’re not, they’re not. The people who are there through the whole thing are the ones that get the credit. If I was wrong in going on, Briggs should’ve made sure I stopped.
I have a lotta respect for Briggs and I don’t hold anything against him. I understand what he had to do there. I’ve made some mistakes, that was one of ’em. Number one, because I hurt my ears mixing it. That’s why I really regret it. I hurt my ears and they’ll never be the same again.
—Yeah, but there’s also this vibe of “Neil would be happy if we all lived on the ranch and he could just use us whenever—until we were all used up.”
Hey, that’s their problem—not mine. They’re not forced to go to the ranch.
—You make it hard for anybody who has another gig.
Listen, when we did our best work during the seventies, there were no other gigs. I think that if everybody had the same energy for the music they had in the seventies and were into it the same way, it wouldn’t make any fuckin’ difference where we were or what was going on. This would be it.
I don’t wann
a record like I’m workin’ in a fuckin’ factory. I don’t wanna do it that way, and anybody who wants to do it that way and puts fuckin’ form on it, and restricts how long it’s gonna take or not take, is not in tune with what the fuck’s goin’ on and the way we’ve made our best work. The way we made our best work is no form. Play when you wanna play, go home when you wanna go home. Ralph used to just leave. He’d go home and feed his cat, he’d be back in a day and a half.
—Briggs was furious after Weld. He had some things to say about you that’ll put your hair in curlers.
Oh, I know. But that’s why we love each other. Unfortunately, he couldn’t say that stuff to me as easily as he used to. He stopped telling me. But I knew he felt it.
—Why do you think he stopped telling you?
’Cause … maybe he thought I wasn’t listening. But I listened to everything he said. And he was right. But he never came to me and said, “I’m David. I’m telling you it’s fuckin’ finished.” He didn’t say that. Never once. And then Billy came in and we kept on going. We did some things that were okay, but the real record of Weld is the laser disc. And it should be that way. It’s not just listening to Weld—you wanna watch it. I mean, we may be hard-pressed to be that bombastic again.
I think at the end of every record that we did I drove Briggs crazy. I don’t think there were any records that weren’t crazy. We had to get away from each other. Towards the end of Weld, towards the end of Ragged Glory, towards the end of … shit, you name it.
“Playing that hard and that loud for that long is like spending the winter in the Arctic and then spending the summer in the Arctic and then finally deciding, ‘Well, let’s go to Florida this winter,’” Young told Greg Kot. “You gotta have relief. That’s what acoustic music is like to me.”
John Nowland recalls a trial by fire at the beginning of what would become Harvest Moon. “Ben showed up one day and said, ‘Neil’s comin’ in to do demos. He’ll be here in twenty minutes.’” Nowland, who had never worked as an engineer with Young, was scrambling to get things together when he walked in, sat down and immediately launched into “Silver and Gold.” “Me and Ben are in there workin’ on guitar tone,” said Nowland. “And there’s no tape rollin’, ’cause we’re working on the sound. So I got somethin’ I liked in a verse or two, and I hit the talkback and said, ‘Okay, we’re all set now. You ready to go?’ It was like the speakers froze. Neil said, ‘I’ve been tryin’ to cut this song for ten years, and that was the take. I was right fuckin’ on it.’ Ben and I looked at each other and we felt about one inch tall.”
Nowland struggled to regain his composure as Young whipped through a handful of new songs—rough performances that Nowland thought were demos. Some would end up on the album. As usual, Young had particular requirements for his new direction. This time he played guitar with his fingers instead of a pick. He chose big old analog mikes “so he could hear the vocal comin’ back at him,” said Nowland. And, disillusioned with digital echo, he built his own echo chambers at Broken Arrow. Young created an intimate setting, out in the woods in his own studio, and the result was, as Young told Gavin Martin, “the quietest record I’ve ever made.”
The Weld tour—and decades of playing at deafening volume—had left Young with a condition known as hyperacusis. The feedback junkie was suddenly hypersensitive to the slightest whisper. “He can hear everything,” grumbled Larry Cragg. “I was plugging in a Farfisa and it made a soft little crackle sound—he goes, ‘Turn that thing off! Get it outta here!’”
Young assembled most of the Stray Gators from the original Harvest sessions—Tim Drummond on bass, Ben Keith on steel, Kenny Buttrey on drums, plus the harmonies of Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor. Elliot Mazer, who had coproduced Harvest, was not invited back, and while Jack Nitzsche did arrange “Such a Woman,” the keyboard chores were assigned to another equally idiosyncratic player: Spooner Oldham. The harmonies of Nicolette Larson and Young’s half sister, Astrid, were another prominent new ingredient. “I kept hearing female voices in my head—choirs at first,” Young told Mary Campbell. “There’s a lot more feminine representation on this record than there has been on my recent records … I wanted to feel the feminine side of the content of the songs.”
Buttrey, recalling his miserable experience on the Time Fades Away tour, was apprehensive over the reunion, but once the sessions got under way, his enthusiasm was unbridled. “The vibe was incredible, it was just so different. Neil’s actually smiling now. He’s so much more mellow—he looks younger than he did at twenty-six. He’s no longer slumped over like an old man … he used to not seem to care what he looked like, now he’s wearin’ cool clothes. Every aspect is totally different. He’s a super guy now.” But soon Buttrey would be cursing Young’s name more than ever before.
With Harvest Moon, Young finally made the follow-up many had been waiting for: an acoustic album of relationship songs, although one has to admire his perversity in waiting two decades to do it. Young himself would float the “sequel” idea in the press even before the record was done, and later would back away from the idea when pressed. “I’m not trying to go back and re-create where I was when I did Harvest,” he told Greg Kot. “The idea is I sang about the same subject matter with twenty years more experience … I’m stronger than I was then.”
The songs came from many different periods—Young sang three lines of “You and Me” as an introduction to “I Am a Child” at a Los Angeles solo performance in 1971, then abandoned the song in the mid-seventies when Tim Drummond excitedly told him it sounded just like the hit Harvest material. “Unknown Legend” was another years-old song that Young decided to finish after Joel Bernstein showed him a lyric fragment in passing. “One of These Days” dated back to the mid-eighties, “Dreamin’ Man” to 1989. The rest were new.
There was definitely a concept at work on Harvest Moon. “The real sense of the album is: How do you keep going?” Young told Chris Heath. “How can you keep an old relationship new? How do you make love last? How can you bring the past with you?”
Young worked on Harvest Moon for months. Some feel he was sent over the edge by the project. At one point, he poked a finger at Joel Bernstein and muttered, “Don’t ever make records … don’t ever make records.” Even coming up with the album’s final running order was an agony. Nowland recalls Neil, Pegi, Ben Keith, Elliot Roberts and his girlfriend, Alexa, shuffling three-by-five cards with the titles written on them, creating countless track sequences. Songs came and went. At one point “Such a Woman” was axed, but Elliot fought for it to be put back.
The finished album, despite its live-demo origins, was the most meticulously crafted Young had made in years. The band’s playing is impeccable. Spooner’s you’re-not-even-sure-he’s-there-but-you-feel-it minimalism is exquisite and Ben Keith graces “Unknown Legend” with proud but sad steel accents. The latter song is perhaps the most empathetic portrait of a woman Young has ever created. “You and Me” is the kind of distillation of relationship malaise he excels at, and “Dreamin’ Man” offers weird girl-group-in-hell backing vocals and disquieting Aerostar van/loaded gun imagery.
“Natural Beauty” evokes a world-weariness that seems infinite. It was “about survival in nature in general and survival in any situation really,” the ever cryptic Young told Gavin Martin before cheerfully elaborating on the song’s jumbled sense of space and time. “It’s like I took a completed album of all kinds of different songs and threw it up in the air and [that song] came crashing down.”
Ultimately, though, “Natural Beauty” feels obtuse and impenetrable, and the rest of the album is a similar dead end. The bland title track (musically reminiscent of the Everly Brothers’ 1961 pop hit, “Walk Right Back”) is more synthetic-Neil Young than America’s “Horse with No Name,” and Young’s unedited stream of consciousness heads down very peculiar paths in scattershot lyrics that careen from the cliché to the indelible, sometimes in the same verse. “From Hank to Hendrix” contains sublime turn
s of phrase alongside some of the most hackneyed lines imaginable.
Certainly the most extreme creation on the album is “Such a Woman,” a ballad of love so supplicant that it borders on masochism. Young called Jack Nitzsche in to arrange an eighteen-piece string section, a chaste, bittersweet touch that manages to avoid the bombast of the Harvest work. It is their best collaboration since “Expecting to Fly,” although Jack loathed Young’s murky mix. “Live, the strings were beautiful—clean, very sad, so much dynamic range. I hear the record and I think, ‘What did he do?’ I don’t know what Neil dumped on there, but it’s like toxic waste.”
The song, which Young would perform in interminable solo performances designed seemingly to torture his audience, drew extreme responses. “Undoubtedly right up at the top ten of the most trite, meaningless songs Neil’s ever written,” said David Briggs. “The cry of pain and love Young labored the entire 1980s to express,” countered critic Eric Weisbard. Love it or hate it, Young bares his soul on “Such a Woman” with a candor largely absent on the rest of the album.
Harvest might be one of Young’s schlockiest creations, but its openness remains endearing. For all its excesses, you never doubt that the musician is grappling with something real. On Harvest Moon, Young sounds conflicted—and guarded—to the point of oblivion, his emotions so restrained that, for me, at least, the album is a profoundly disturbing experience. “I think Harvest Moon is about continuance,” Young told Allan Jones. “About trying to keep the flame burning. It’s about the feeling that you don’t have to be young to be young.” On Ragged Glory, Young threw himself into these same themes with abandon. But he doesn’t sound young at all on Harvest Moon. Paul Williams was the only critic who nailed it: “Ironically, what’s lacking on this journey into sensitive-songwriter land is vulnerability…. Harvest Moon doesn’t deliver.”
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