Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Released - May 1969

Genre - Hard Rock
Producer - Neil Young & David Briggs
Selected Personnel - Neil Young (Vocals/Guitar); Danny Whitten (Guitar/Vocals); Billy Talbot (Bass); Ralph Molina (Drums/Vocals); Bobby Notkoff (Violin); Robin Lane (Backing Vocals)
Standout Track - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

I'm breaking the chronological nature of this blog once again in order to momentarily zip back to 1969, although this time not to include an album I've only recently become familiar with. On the contrary, I've known Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere for a long time now and have always struggled as to whether or not to include it on my list of great albums. Initially, it did little to really excite me and it's only over time that it's come to grow on me. As is evident by how long it took me to eventually decide to include it on this list, it's still far from being my favourite Neil Young record, but ultimately I came to realise that, while there's stuff on it I don't particularly like, it's still well over half the record that I do really enjoy (particularly considering the length of two of the tracks), so not including it just seemed churlish. As I think I detailed in my review of Young's 1970 masterpiece After The Gold Rush, for a long time all I knew of his work was that album and its equally brilliant followup, Harvest. It was only over the last year or so that I gradually took more interest in Young's wider work and was surprised to find, given his reputation as one of the greats in country and folk music, that he had had an enormously significant role in the development of hard rock. In later years, his work with Crazy Horse would even see him heralded as the "godfather of grunge," the accidental forefather to the rise of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam in the early 90s - an idiosyncratic legacy for the man who wrote "Heart Of Gold."

Since learning of the breadth and diversity of Young's work I've become much more familiar with his Crazy Horse work, and it all starts here in 1969. Having released a fairly unremarkable folk record under his own name, Young set about doing something radically different for his next album, and hand-picked guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina from a band named the Rockets and made them his backing band. Dubbing themselves Crazy Horse, this collection of musicians would prove to be a key part of Young's music over subsequent years. He would periodically switch between albums that were predominantly acoustic and focused more on his songwriting, and albums with Crazy Horse that focused more on extended jams and grooves and the collective musicianship of the band members. Crazy Horse would even develop a musical life of their own outside of Young, releasing occasional albums as a separate entity without him, though their best work would always be that which had Young as its creative lynchpin.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is a hybrid album of sorts, given that the Crazy Horse sound and identity were in their infancy and quite what Young was able to achieve with them hadn't been carved out yet. It's a far cry from being an out-and-out garage rock album of brutal, punishing riffs and jams in the vein of 1990's Ragged Glory or their most recent effort, 2012's Psychedelic Pill. But it's also notably different from Young's solo work, with its emphasis on melody and lyrical content. Essentially, it's an album split down the middle between the simpler country rock songs and the more raw, free-form jams and heavy rock numbers. Overall, it's the latter that really shine here - quite why is a mystery, as Young would ably demonstrate the following year with After The Gold Rush that he was more than capable of writing simple folk songs with devastating effectiveness, but perhaps in the midst of writing more raucous material for Crazy Horse the shorter songs just didn't work as well.

The opening "Cinnamon Girl" has become a Young classic, and the first ever evidence of the loose, ramshackle power of Crazy Horse's sound, with its crunching, defiantly simple guitar riff. It's too short to really go anywhere, but acts as a brilliant distillation of the plodding, amateurish noise this band would come to excel at. Refinement and musical perfection were far from the order of the day here (as is evidenced by Young's infernally brilliant one-note guitar solo on "Cowgirl In The Sand"), shifting the focus onto the feel and the gut impact of the music. The other two hard rock numbers are the album's two lengthy jams, "Down By The River" and the brilliant aforementioned "Cowgirl In The Sand." The former is the weaker of the two, and is perhaps a little overstretched, but still provides ample evidence of the band's ability to play around with a song structure and inject it with some passion and energy. "Cowgirl In The Sand," meanwhile, is pure brilliance. The simple vocal refrain is memorably angry and defiant, and the band simply let loose with an intense free-form jam as Young and Whitten trade blistering guitar licks. It's undoubtedly the clearest evidence here of the kind of fearsome music Young would be able to make while allied with Crazy Horse, and one of the all-time great rock jams.

Still, although "Cowgirl In The Sand" is the most obviously great song here, for me, the song that's always endeared me the most is the cheerfully simple title track. It's a country song so upbeat and feelgood it almost feels like a pastiche, with all the requisite guitar twang and "la-la-la" choruses of a great country number, but its melody is so brightly irresistible that it's always been my favourite song on offer. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, the other more typical folk songs on offer are fairly disappointing. "Losing End (When You're On)" is another country song, but this one plodding and unimaginative where "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" was fun and exciting, and "Running Dry (Requiem For The Rockets)" is made interesting by the inclusion of Bobby Notkoff's violin, but is still ultimately a bit of a drag to listen to. "Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)" is pretty enough, but again too slow and by-the-numbers to do anything to excite.

For a long time, those three tedious songs prevented me from really loving this album, but on balance, the presence of four great songs, two of which are getting on for ten minutes in length, means it's impossible to deny that this is ultimately a great record. It's a long way from his best, as I said - ultimately, I love Neil Young as a folk singer/songwriter more than as the head of a ramshackle hard rock outfit, undeniably brilliant as his work with Crazy Horse would go on to be, so the early muddled sound of them all trying to figure out how they would work together is fun to listen to, but a far cry from my sense of the most essential Young albums. Young would continue working with Crazy Horse sporadically over subsequent decades, and perhaps the fact that he has never relied on them consistently but only recorded with them when he felt the need to is the key to how they are still able to make music that's exciting and passionate even today - they've never exhausted one another creatively, but have simply known they can rely on each other when they need to. Crazy Horse would appear on a few select tracks on After The Gold Rush the following year (most notably the brutal rocker "Southern Man"), before Young abandoned the sessions with them and decided to focus more on his own songwriting than on full-band sessions.

One other point of interest for Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is that it's the only full album Young made with Crazy Horse to feature the band's original guitarist Danny Whitten, whose death in 1972 from his drug habit would haunt Young for years and would be a crucial inspiration for the bleak Tonight's The Night that he recorded the following year. Whitten would crop up on the odd Young song between 1969 and 1975, but this, their first full outing together, is the only place where his talent is fully showcased alongside Young's.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Neil Young.

1. Cinnamon Girl

2. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

3. Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)

4. Down By The River

5. The Losing End (When You're On)

6. Running Dry (Requiem For The Rockets)

7. Cowgirl In The Sand