Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Re.ac.tor

So Neil went down well on Sunday. Our unborn boy got a dose of parental indoctrination (he'll be getting another tonight). A quite different balance to the set, compared with the Hammersmith shows in the spring, and a quite different balance to the audience. Lucy asked if he'd be doing anything from Harvest — and he played almost as many songs from Harvest as he played unreleased songs earlier in the year.

Unsurprisingly, none from Re.ac.tor — though Southern Pacific and Shots would have been way preferable to Words and Needle and the Damage Done as far as I'm concerned. To be fair, the former are the only two 'significant' songs on this album, and some might make the case that both exist in better versions elsewhere. Neil played a great country version (lots of fiddle) of Southern Pacific with the International Harvesters in 1984/5, and then there's the solo acoustic version of Shots featured on the 1978 Boarding House bootleg.

I first heard Shots on Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show just at the time the album came out. I must have recorded it, because I can still remember TV back-announcing the song with a comment about the amount of distortion Neil got from his guitar. I thought Neil had surpassed this more recently with albums like Arc and Eldorado, but actually Shots is still able to send your cat running for cover and a raise your hair in the places where your hair still rises.

There's a relentlessly hard edge to many of the other songs (excepting Get Back on It, which I'm guessing is a leftover from Side 2 of Hawks & Doves). T-Bone is the most extreme, almost to the point of comedy, in its numbing repetition. There's a line of explanation for this that connects it to the numbing repetition of the programme Neil and his wife put themselves through (and later abandoned) to help their son who was suffering from cerebral palsy. But there's something a little reductionist and suspect about that explanation. I prefer to ignore what we know about personal context and listen to it just as a long, repetitive song, kind of like Neil's Neu song, refracted through The Fall's Bremen Nacht.

Re.ac.tor has possibly my favourite cover of all of Neil's albums (for the back, as well as the front).

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