Music Arcades: Neil Young: Chrome Dreams II

Times have changed since twenty years ago when I'd devour each new Neil Young album on repeat listen on the day of release. Now I like to put them on the backburner and simmer gently over a few months before digesting slowly. Sometimes (whisper it) I don't get the new album for quite a few weeks after its release.

So it was that the first time I heard Chrome Dreams II was while being driven along Skyline Boulevard in the days before the International Rust Fest and Bridge School Benefit. In the company I was keeping, I certainly couldn't admit that I didn't own the album.

Spirit Road was the first song I remember noticing then, and it's still probably my favourite of the new songs on the album. It sounds like Neil giving himself a really good talking to, spitting out the words, and he's often at his best in that mood. I thought he played it brilliantly and with gusto at his Hammersmith shows in March.

I say 'new' songs because some of them are decades old. Boxcar has been around I can't remember how long, and, along with many others, I'd been waiting for the release of Ordinary People since first hearing it on a bootleg of the 1988 Blue Notes tour about 18 years ago. Now that it's finally arrived, I have to say it feels like a bit of anti-climax. A song so grand as this — in its 18 minutes it seems to cover as much ground as a time-travelling John Dos Passos (and closer to the spirit, if not the letter, of his writing than another Canadian's attempt at a rock adaptation of JDP) — needs to stand out more. Hell, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands got a whole side of vinyl to itself and it's not even two thirds as long as People, which seems hemmed in in the first half of a 66 minute saga.

Neil is quoted on Wikipedia saying,

Like many of my recordings, this one draws on earlier material here and there. I used to do that a lot back in the day. Some songs, like 'Ordinary People,' need to wait for the right time. I think now is the right time for that song and it lives well with the new songs I have written in the past few months.

I'm not so sure. Was this version from the late '80s or is it a more recent 21st century recording? The album notes don't specify, but I'm guessing from the list of musicians credited that it's the former.

No Hidden Path is the other 'epic' song on the album, and I'm guessing this was written more recently. As I mentioned in passing before it might include a reference to Neil's producer David Briggs in the lines "I feel my missing friend / Whose counsel I can never replace", but it could refer to so many other, broader things as well. As with Rockin' in the Free World and so many other Neil songs, there's an element of "the song is a [something] on the one hand, but on the other hand it's not, it's the opposite". So on the one hand we have a song about following…a teacher…a mentor…a guru, "Show me the way and I'll follow you today", and on the other a rejection of the very idea of any mystical insight, "And with you I feel no hidden path" (no guru, no method).

At the Bridge Benefit shows, it was great to hear Neil doing his customary guitar freak out with No Hidden Path as set-closer, but on an acoustic guitar. Lucy and I are going to see him tomorrow at the Hop Farm where we're sure to be treated to an electric version.

Of course, I got the version of this album with the extra DVD as well as the CD. The Prairie Wind and Living With War DVDs both feature extensive footage of the recording of those albums. But this DVD just has the audio track plus what can only be described as vintage auto porn: close-up stills of the curves and crevices (with rust, natch) of Neil's extensive collection of old cars. So what's the point of that? Are we just to revel in the audiophile quality of the DVD audio? In which case I'll have to wait until I get a player.