Music Arcades: Neil Young: Comes a Time

I think it was around this time of the year back in 1983 that I bought Comes a Time, during my first job at Crown Life. (It was £5.29 then; it's £3.98 new now.) Let's see: by then I guess I already had, or knew, Decade, Rust Never Sleeps, Live Rust, After the Gold Rush and Trans. But I think this was the one where my momentum picked up and started to become a real fan.

So it's surprising to find out what a patchy affair it is. The title track and Four Strong Winds were already old favourites in 1983, tuneful and mellow. Goin' Back is a great opening. But Look Out for My Love and Lotta Love demonstrate the patchiness. The former is my second favourite Neil Young love song after Pardon My Heart. It's the second half that lifts it out of the ordinary, when My Love sublimates into an object and they send out a search party for it — "men with walkie-talkies, men with flashlights waving" — and as the "hydraulic wipers pump", the guitar scrape-thwacks on the windscreen. On Thursday night I arrived at the Alasdair Roberts gig in time to hear the support act, Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo, play this song, but inevitably they didn't do that part. I remember you saying you'd listened to the song, and located the electric and acoustic guitar in the stereo spectrum: the acoustic was a little higher, you told me, because the guy playing it (Neil or Poncho?) was sitting on a hay bale. I've never quite understood how you detect height in stereo, let alone the seating surface.

Lotta Love is a whole different kettle of fish. Back in the early days of the Rust List in 1994, there was a thread called "songs that suck". I thought it said a lot about Neil that his fans could enjoy swapping notes on songs that they hated. Lotta Love would definitely have got my vote then. I think Let's Roll might give it a run for its money now, but Lotta Love is so limp and fatuous. It got a kind of reprieve from a radical cover version later in the '80s — but that's another story.