Released - August 1970
Genre - Folk Rock
Producer - Neil Young; David Briggs & Kendall Pacios
Selected Personnel - Neil Young (Vocals/Guitar/Piano/Harmonica); Danny Whitten (Guitar); Nils Lofgren (Guitar/Piano/Vocals); Jack Nitzche (Piano); Billy Talbot (Bass); Greg Reeves (Bass); Ralph Molina (Drums); Stephen Stills (Vocals)
Standout Track - Southern Man
It's fair to say that, during my most intense period of musical epiphany, from approximately 2008 to 2010, my focus was principally on classic rock and prog. I sought out the whole discographies of classic rock artists, and generally gave, for instance, folk music, only cursory attention to the odd album that stood out to me, despite the fact that a lot of folk music was already very high in my estimations, most notably Joni Mitchell. It wasn't until later that I began to give folk music the same level of attention as I'd given to rock music, the level of attention it deserved, and that was largely down to this album and a girl called Emily. Emily's been a very good friend for many years now, and we've always enjoyed a kind of cultural exchange of music we think the other might appreciate, but she was alarmed back in 2010 to learn that my awareness of Neil Young was virtually nil. Slightly shame-faced, I explained to her that folk music had passed me by ever so slightly, and for my next birthday I received After The Gold Rush on CD with a handwritten instruction to "feed my folk side." Out of my ensuing love of Neil Young stemmed a single-minded desire to find out more about the folk movement, and my affection for Simon & Garfunkel, Joan Baez, etc etc, all tumbled out from that starting point. After The Gold Rush, then, was a critical tipping point for me in making me realise that folk music was a far bigger and more exciting world than just my limited knowledge of Mitchell or Cat Stevens, even if it never quite captured the obsessional part of my brain that prog managed to tap into.
Neil Young had first risen to prominence alongside Stephen Stills in the mid-60s as one of the principal figures behind Buffalo Springfield, the band that would come to be credited as one of the major bands that created the folk rock movement. After the demise of Buffalo Springfield, Young had released the influential Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere with his backing band Crazy Horse and had shortly afterwards joined the folk rock supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, along with his former Buffalo Springfield cohort Stills, former Byrds man David Crosby and Hollies man Graham Nash, all of whom at this time were active figures in the West Coast folk rock scene, with many of them having already collaborated with Mitchell by this point. Young's third solo album, After The Gold Rush, would go on to be the album that catapulted him to stardom, capitalising on the breakout success of the CSNY supergroup partnership. It's perhaps telling that it was also Young's first truly concerted effort to make a truly solo album that wasn't equally defined by a group of backing musicians - although a few tracks were recorded with the Crazy Horse band, Young eventually decided he wanted to have more control over the sound and recorded further tracks with selected members of CSNY and other assorted sidemen (including future Bruce Springsteen sideman Nils Lofgren). The result was an album which, for the first time in Neil Young's career, truly felt like the product of one man's singular vision, and is all the stronger for it.
Coming to this from the point of you of a total Neil Young initiate, the Canadian's vocals were initially a major hurdle for me - there's none of the nuance of Joni Mitchell here, none of the mellow tones of Elton John. Neil Young's voice is one of the most singular voices in music, a high-pitched nasal whine devoid of any real variation or resonance or subtlety. Initially, I found it a real barrier to enjoying the music until I realised that effectively it's exactly the opposite - the plainness and the unadorned nature of that weird voice strips back these songs to their ingredients, to the melodies and the harmonies and the lyrics, so that you're really paying attention here to the workings of the mind of a particular singer-songwriter, rather than being distracted by the complexities and nuances of a performance. Only on the hard-rocking "Southern Man," where Young multi-tracks his own vocal, is the vocal fleshed out enough to lose that weird, alien, reedy quality, but with time and patience it becomes a virtue rather than a distraction or an irritation.
The songs themselves are largely sparsely arranged country-rock, with a couple of exceptions. "Southern Man" is a full-pelt hard rock number spewing vitriol about the treatment of black people in the south (and a song that would later inspire a defensive riposte from Lynyrd Skynyrd extolling the virtues of the south and name-checking Young himself on "Sweet Home Alabama"), while "When You Dance I Can Really Love" is a similar full-band workout. Pretty much all the other songs are stripped down so that the focus is placed squarely on Young's acoustic guitar and piano arrangements, with the occasional harmony vocals rounding out the sound. With such sparseness defining the record's sound, the isolated moments of variation stand out as starkly beautiful, most notably the plaintive horn halfway through "After The Gold Rush," a grimly apocalyptic account of dreamlike imagery that Young initially intended to be the soundtrack for an unmade screenplay of the same name.
Although "Southern Man" sticks out the most simply by loudly and brashly demanding attention, a number of the album's best moments are its simplest and most beautiful. The opener, "Tell Me Why," is a moving account of the passing of time, and the uncertainties and trials of growing up. Though even then, it's a song whose lyrics are subject to discussion - one of the great virtues of Young as a lyricist is that things are never clear, never overtly personal or directly socio-political, but nor are they abstract and vague to the point of aloofness. There's a sense of careful ambiguity about them, a sense that these short fragments can be about anything we want them to be about. The other truly beautiful standout is the remarkable "Birds," which looks at the pain of having to soothe and reassure a loved one that you have to leave behind.
What this album lacks overall, when looked at as a part of the wider context of Neil Young, is a single, true, out-and-out classic standout song, in the way that 1972's Harvest offers up "Heart Of Gold" as one of the crowning achievements of Young's songwriting. But despite the lack of a true standout, After The Gold Rush is by far the more accomplished and mature and consistent album, and also the one that holds a higher personal place in my affections given the way it opened up a whole new world of music to me that I had up to that point been largely ignorant of.
Track Listing:
All songs written by Neil Young except where noted.
1. Tell Me Why
2. After The Gold Rush
3. Only Love Can Break Your Heart
4. Southern Man
5. Till The Morning Comes
6. Oh Lonesome Me (Don Gibson)
7. Don't Let It Bring You Down
8. Birds
9. When You Dance I Can Really Love
10. I Believe In You
11. Cripple Creek Ferry
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