Yesterday I did a heart felt post about the life lessons offered by Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song, The Long Way Home. You will probably remember that Mary encouraged us all to slow down, relax, and enjoy life.
While I know that Mary’s advice is something that I ought to try to follow, I have to admit that I find it hard to do. I am, at heart, a workaholic that finds it hard to slow down, much less relax. So…..tonight Neil Young has agreed to present a dissenting opinion that is closer to how I actually live my life. Let’s listen to My My Hey Hey…….
The two key lines in the song that I most identify with are:
It’s better to burn out, Than to fade away
It’s better to burn out, Than it is to rust
I don’t expect to ever be accused of fading away or rusting 🙂 After all, Rust Never Sleeps!
Burning Out, on the other hand,…….is a daily possibility for me.
Here are the complete lyrics to the song in case you are interested. Let me know whether you follow the advice of Mary or Neil.
My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
It’s better to burn out
Than to fade away
My my, hey hey.Out of the blue
and into the black
They give you this,
but you pay for that
And once you’re gone,
you can never come back
When you’re out of the blue
and into the black.The king is gone
but he’s not forgotten
This is the story
of a Johnny Rotten
It’s better to burn out
than it is to rust
The king is gone
but he’s not forgotten.Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll can never die
There’s more to the picture
Than meets the eye.
Hey hey, my my.
As I mentioned several weeks ago I just finished reading Neil Young’s new book, Waging Heavy Peace. He tells some great stories in the book so I figured you might enjoy one more of them.
A few weeks before the people who would found Crazy Horse (as yet unnamed), Danny, Billy, Ralphie, and me got together in my Topanga living room, I had been sick with the flu, holed up in bed in the house. Susan was bringing me soup and good stuff, but I still felt like shit. I was delirious half the time and had an odd metallic taste in my mouth. It was peculiar. At the height of this sickness, I felt pretty high in a strange way.
I had a guitar in a case near the bed – probably too near the bed in the opinion of most of the women I had relationships with. I took it out and started playing; I had left it in a tuning I was fond of, D modal, with the E strings both tuned down to D. It provided a drone sound, sort of like a sitar, but not really. I played for a while and wrote “Cinnamon Girl.” The lyrics were different from how the song eventually ended up, but all those changes happened right there, immediately, until the song was complete.
Then I took the guitar out of D modal and kept playing. At the time, there was a song in E minor on the radio that I liked, “Sunny” or something like that. I remembered hearing it in the drugstore at Fairfax and Sunset while I was shopping for something to ease flu. The song kept looping in my head, endlessly, like some things do when I’m sick and maybe a little delirious. So I started playing it on the guitar, and then I changed the chords a bit – and it turned into “Down By The River.” I was still feeling sick, but happy and high. It was a unique feeling . I had two brand-new songs! Totally different from the last album!
Then I started playing in A minor, one of my favorite keys, I had nothing to lose. I was on a roll. The music just flowed naturally that afternoon and soon I had written “Cowgirl in the Sand.” This was pretty unique, to write three songs in one sitting, and I am pretty sure that my semi-delirious state had a lot to do with that.
So……with a story like that I know that you will forgive me for turning today’s Two’fer into a a Three’fer! Let’s listen to the three masterpieces that Neil wrote on the same day while delirious from the flu. Absolutely amazing…..
Cinnamon Girl
Down By The River
Cowgirl In The Sand
This post goes out to my friend Gerard who has been sick with the flu during January. Hope you are feeling better!
I have been reading Neil Young’s new book, Waging Heavy Peace, over the past several weeks. I got the book for Christmas and have really been enjoying it. I would highly recommend it for Neil Young fans but I doubt that others will find the it to be enjoyable. It rambles a lot, making significant leaps across Neil’s career as he tells his story and that alone is probably enough to put off all but hardcore fans.
I like it for the little insights that it provides about Neil and his music. As one example, the love and respect that Neil has for Stephen Stills comes through loud and clear in the book. This information helps me to understand how they have continued coming back together to make such great music over the last 40-50 years after having many rough patches in-between. The end of the Stills-Young band was one of those rough patches and I posted last year about the abrupt end of that tour. Speaking of the Stills-Young band, the book also helped me understand Long May You Run, a song that was recorded the band.
I noted in last year’s post that song was written about a car but I didn’t have the details until I read the book. Neil talk at length about Mort, a 1948 Buick Hearse that his mother bought for him. The demise of Mort is described as part of a discussion of Neil’s decision to leave Fort Williams where he and his first band, The Squires, had been playing.
Late one night I was hanging out with a bunch of guys from local bands, some guys from the Bonnevilles and Terry Erickson, a bass player who also played good guitar. We were thinking of him becoming a Squire and had even taken some pictures together. I decided to drive Terry to Sault Set. Marie in Mort. We jumped in the hearse and left. Just like that. Ken was back at the YMCA, so he missed the trip and was left behind. Bob Clark and the Bonnevilles came along with us. We took Terry’s motorbike with us in the back of Mort.
We were about halfway there, near a town called Blind River, when we broke down. Mort’s transmission was toast. We got towed to Bill’s Garage, a harrowing experience with the hearse being towed backward, the rear tires in the air and me steering in reverse. After holding on for dear life at high speed and terrified, we finally got to Bill’s Garage in Blind River, Ontario. Bill said he could find us a part to fix the hearse and get us going. Several days later, we were still there and running out of money; we were living on roasted potatoes from the market . We hung out in an old junkyard/dump near the edge of town.
A graveyard was just across a gravel road from that dump. We were a funky lot. The Bonnevilles hitched back to Fort Williams for a gig they had that weekend. Bob went with them. Realizing that Mort was gone, I thought that being in Fort William without the hearse would be nowhere. It was a feeling. The hearse was just part of the whole thing. The picture the image. There is an intangible to a group and a persona. You can’t lose that. If you do, you have to start again. I felt that Mort was a large part of my identify, so I took off with Terry to North Bay…..
So that was the end of Mort! Here is the song that Neil wrote many years later about Mort…..
This sequence of events ended up being a big turning point in Neil’s career. It’s funny how fate, in this case the death of Mort, can have such a huge impact a person’s life! In case you are interested, here is a picture of The Squires with Mort.
See how many references to the events described above you can find in the lyrics to Long May You Run.
We’ve been through
Some things together
With trunks of memories
Still to come
We found things to do
In stormy weather
Long may you run.Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes
Have come
With your chrome heart shining
In the sun
Long may you run.Well, it was
Back in Blind River in 1962
When I last saw you alive
But we missed that shift
On the long decline
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes
Have come
With your chrome heart shining
In the sun
Long may you run.
Maybe The Beach Boys
Have got you now
With those waves
Singing “Caroline No”
Rollin’ down
That empty ocean road
Gettin’ to the surf on time.
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes
Have come
With your chrome heart shining
In the sun
Long may you run.
Let me leave you with another great Neil song from the Sills-Young band album. Neil wrote this one about the hotel in Miami that the band was staying at during the recoding of the album.
So it’s mid-November in North Alabama and autumn is definitely upon us. The fall leaves are beautiful, college football rules the airwaves, and there is a nice chill in the air when I head to work each morning. What a glorious time of year! I hope all of are having a wonderful fall wherever you live.
To celebrate this time of year I have picked my favorite fall songs to help you start your weekend. As always, let me know what you think.
Autumn Almanac – Kinks
Fall In Philadelphia – Hall and Oates
Forever Autumn – Justin Hayward
This is not just one of my favorite fall songs…..it is close to the top of my list of favorite songs of all time.
Indian Summer – Poco
The Boys Of Fall – Kenny Chesney
This video features my Alabama Crimson Tide team……..Roll Tide Roll!
We are into October and it is now less than a month from the US Presidential election. The root word that came to me for this week’s word of the week is “dream”. Myself, and many of my fellow citizen, are spending the time between now and the election dreaming about President Obama being re-elected and the ways he can make the United States better. I invite all of you to dream with me!
In picking “dream” as my word, I have to say I have hit the motherload. I was absolutely amazed at the number of “dream” songs in my music collection! As a result, “dream” will be word of the week for every Friday in October, “dream” songs will be the focus of every Long Song Tuesday posts in October, and I will still will have unexplored “dream” songs left over at the end of the month.
This first of four “dream” word of the week posts is a special “Southern California Sound” collection. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what your favorite “dream” songs are.
Yes I am a huge Neil Young fan but if you read this blog you have probably figured that out by now. Today’s cool concert chatter is a great Neil Young boot from a 1974 performance at the Bottom Line. Both Neil and the audience appeared to be in very talkative moods. As a lead in to singing Motion Pictures, Neil tells two great stories: one about why he quit performing Southern Man and a second one about how to make “honey slides”. Let’s listen……..
The website thrasherswheat.org offers a few further details about the Southern Man story that Neil tells in the video.
The song “Southern Man” was at the center of an unfortunate event on the 1973 tour and has been recounted by Neil in concert. The incident ocurred on March 31, 1973 in Oakland, CA. During the performance of “Southern Man”, an excited fan approached the stage dancing and having a good time. A security guard approached the fan and proceeded to “beat the crap out of him” and have him removed. Young stopped playing the song, left the stage, and abruptly canceled the rest of the performance. Young believed that the assault flew directly in the face of the song’s message of tolerance and diversity and was sickened by the attack. A final irony of the Oakland “Southern Man” performance was that the officer was black and the beaten fan was white.
The honey slides that Neil talked about seem to have been the band’s preferred drug during the recording of On The Beach and based on Rusty Kershaw’s liner notes for the album it must have been some powerful shit.
Not to speak of the fun we had. We laughed so hard we all had bruised ribs. On revolution blues, I turned into a python then an aligator, I was crawling like one making noises like one.
Plus I was eating up the carpet and mike stands and such and in the meanwhile I started to crawl up towards Neil, which is pretty spooky.
The life of a rock star! Stay tuned for future editions of Cool Concert Chatter. As always, let me know what you think.
This week our word of the week is Hurricane. Unfortunately, we currently have Hurricane Isaac headed into the Gulf of Mexico. Don’t know for sure which direction it will head at this point but it certainly has everyone’s attention. So….while we are watching to coverage of Isaac, and keeping our finger’s crossed that it doesn’t cause any significant damage, let’s listen to some of the best Hurricane songs ever recorded.
After listening to the music, please take the time to read my note after the last song in the post. Have a great weekend!
Hurricane Carter – Bob Dylan
Rock You Like a Hurricane – Scorpions (with full orchestra)
This is probably the word that all of us heard most often often as kids. I recently looked at my iTunes library and I have almost 200 songs that start with Don’t…can’t be a coincidence!
Enjoy the music…let me know if you have a favorite “Don’t” song.
Don’t Be Denied – Neil Young
Don’t Fear The Reaper – Blue Oyster Cult
Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right – Bob Dylan
Don’t Keep Me Wondeing – Allman Brothers Band
Don’t Let It Bring You Down – Neil Young
Any suggestions for Word of the Day for next Friday?
For the second post in this new series we, once again, have Neil Young as the artist whose music generated a response from another group. In this particular case, Neil wrote and performed a couple of songs about the south that rubbed the boys from Lynyrd Skynyrd the wrong way. First us is a song called Southern Man, a song from Neil’s album After the Gold Rush that focuses attention on the south’s history of slavery and racism. Let’s listen…
Not content with just one song about one negative song about the south, Neil “doubled down” by including the song Alabama on his Harvest album. Alabama picks on the state of Alabama highlighting it’s poverty and the weigh of it’s burden from the days of slavery. Let’s listen to it.
Lynyrd Skynyrd, decided to respond to Southern Man and Alabama with their song Sweet Home Alabama which calls out Neil in one of its verses:
Well I heard mister Young sing about her Well, I heard ole Neil put her down Well, I hope Neil Young will remember A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow
Let’s listen to Sweet Home Alabama. As Ronnie Van Zant says at the beginning of the song….turn it up! (sorry about the ad!)
In reality, there was a lot of respect, and no real animosity, between Neil and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Did anyone else notice that Ronnie Van Zant was wearing a Neil Young t-shirt in the Free Bird video I posted yesterday 🙂
This will not be the case in my next Response Song post which is based on real animosity and bitterness. Stay tuned for that one, you don’t want to miss it.
Bonus….still haven’t had enough Skynyrd? Check out their second album, Second Helping, below.
Today’s post is the first in a new series that is titled Response Songs. Response songs are ones that were written in response to another song. To kickoff this new series we have Neil Young performing Sugar Mountain. In the introduction to the song he mentions that Joni Mitchell wrote a song in response to Sugar Mountain. Let’s listen to Neil…
Joni did indeed write her song The Circle Game after hearing Sugar Mountain. Her is the story, in her own word, as provided by thrasherswheat.org (a website about Neil).
“In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a Rock’n’Roll band in Winnipeg/Manitoba near where I come from on the prairies to become a folk singer a la Bob Dylan, who was his hero at that time, and at the same time there were breaks in his life and he was going into new and exciting directions.
He had just newly turned 21, and that meant in Winnipeg he was no longer allowed into his favorite hangout which is kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you’re over 21 you couldn’t get in there anymore, so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it’s one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn’t play in this club anymore. But he was over the hill.
So he wrote this song that was called “Oh to live on sugar mountain” which was a lament for his lost youth. And it went like this… [sings a few verses].
And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there’s nothing after that, that’s a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It’s called The Circle Game.”
Let’s listen to Joni singing the Circle Game……
Let me know if you like the premise behind this post. Also, let me know if you know of other response songs that I can include in future posts.