(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Rock and roll is not designed to sound perfect. There are plenty of musicians born into a world based on click tracks that make every song sound perfect in Pro Tools now, but the magic behind the biggest names of the 1970s was that it often sounded like everything could go wrong. whenever. . Neil Young usually prefers his music to be a little ramshackle than most, but he admitted that his performance on ‘Like a Hurricane’ was probably a lot less precise than he probably intended.
But Young was never much into editing. While he certainly had quality control over everything he was working on, there were many moments where it felt like he was improvising half the time, including albums designed to piss people off, like Everybody’s rockin’.
When working in American stars and stripes, However, Young was still in the golden age of what Eddie Vedder would call his “mountain funk” era. Despite coming out with the heaviest of the 1970s in Rust never sleeps projects like Zuma took what he was doing Harvest and brought it back to Earth, almost as if you were watching a jam session rather than getting the full experience of a studio album.
It’s easy to get that same energy on this album, with Young working with Crazy Horse every time he plays a song. Although ‘Like a Hurricane’ has all the makings of a great Neil Young song and even has his signature black guitar that he used on Rust never sleepshe thought everything had been ruined by letting him do a solo.
Young has his own unique vocabulary when it comes to taking a break, but admitted he was a little rough on ‘Like A Hurricane,’ saying in Making intense peace, “’Like a Hurricane’ is probably the best example of Old Black’s tone, although if you listen too closely, all the mistakes and glitches in my playing completely ruin it. However, it was a memorable recording because of the feeling that comes from our instrumental passages.”
Then again, it’s hard to really call what Young heard a “failure” in the truest sense. Are the notes always accurate? Not really, but that’s not really the point. A recording like this is supposed to document the emotions as well as the instruments, and even if everything isn’t perfectly in tune, it still sounds like a desperate band trying to get the best out of everyone.
Of course, it’s also hard to know when Young’s style ends and total chaos begins. Take for example a song like ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’. That melody is probably one of the most enduring statements any rock and roll artist has ever made, and yet the main break oscillates somewhere between a strange improvised solo and the kind of freakout a guitarist would drive out of himself. after playing too much. drinks.
It’s nice that Young can at least see the few mistakes left in his classic tracks, but this is far from a botched take. It’s just another example of an artist being human, and since the rest of the world would gravitate toward technical guitarists after this record came out, it’s refreshing to hear someone play like they’re on the brink of chaos from time to time. .
