I've got a feeling that this was the second Neil Young album I bought, from Aerco early in 1983, a year after I got my first copy of Decade. I wasn't yet a Neil Young fan, though I would grow into one over the next 6-9 months. People might imagine that it was tough becoming a Neil Young fan at this point, at the start of what is commonly believed to be his longest barren period, but actually it was fine. Sure, it was some years before he fully hit his stride again, but it always seemed there were redeeming moments, and the series of disappointments (e.g. 1, 2) were, you know, "character-building". I learnt never to take Neil for granted, for one thing.
I'd heard about the use of electronic and vocoders on this album (but, to my regret almost ever since, decided against seeing the Trans Band tour in 1982, though Matt Seaton got leave from school to go). It wasn't that that attracted me. It was Tommy Vance playing Like an Inca on the Friday Rock Show — a splash of 'classic' Neil in Cortez the Killer (i.e. spouting uninformed romanticised hippy tosh about South American Indian tribes). The lines "Who put the Bomb on the sacred altar? / Why should we die if it comes our way? / Why should we care about a little button / Being pushed by someone we don't even know?" particularly appealed to the 17-year-old hippy me.
I'd read in an NME interview with Neil a few months earlier where he talked about his son, Ben, with severe cerebral palsy and how the computer theme — particularly on Transformer — was related to the challenges of communicating with him. We now know more about the relentless and repetitive rehabilitation programme that Neil and his wife went through with Ben around that time. Ultimately they gave up on that programme and founded their own Bridge School for children with impaired communication. Ben, now not far short of turning 30, was at the back of the stage at the annual benefit, which I attended.
You can hear that harsh relentlessness in songs like Computer Cowboy and We R in Control (as with the earlier Reactor album), songs that otherwise have not stood the test of the time very well.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
|
Comments