Is it just me (and a few tens of thousands of die-hard fans), or is it quite difficult to be dismissive of this album? Like a Hurricane apart — and many better versions of Hurricane are available on official and bootleg releases — it's definitely more lightweight even than its predecessor Zuma. Hawks and Doves, three or four years later, followed the same format of tongue-in-cheek country songs on one side and eccentric folk and rock explorations on the other — to similar lack of effect.
I'm not going to look it up, so I risk getting this arse about face, but I remember reading in (I think) one of Johnny Rogan's biographies of Neil that American Stars 'n' Bars was originally intended to be a rather grand kind of concept album, with one side about America's mythic heroes and one about the country's bar culture, but Neil was quoted to the effect of, "I spent a lot of time researching the bars side, so much so that the stars side got forgotten." I've always assumed that Pocahontas, eventually released on Rust Never Sleeps, was left over from the stars side. If there are more songs with such a quirky take on mythology then I'd like to hear them. Maybe on Volume 2 of The Archives. But perhaps what Neil meant was that the other 'stars' songs weren't up to scratch, so he put Hurricane at the centre of Side 2 and raided his still-early-days-then archive to pad out around that. Having said that, Will to Love is an interesting curio in it's own right. I think Johnny Rogan had a story about the recording of that, and a take on the significance of the fish metaphor at its centre — but I've forgotten both of them.
Hurricane is pretty much sui generis, a towering song that casts a long shadow (cf. other versions here by The Mission and Roxy Music, and just last night The Coal Porters played a bluegrass version at the Magnolia down the road). So much so that it never quite feels like a convincing part of this album. What really gives American Stars 'n' Bars its character and cheeky charm for me is the cheerful embrace of casual adultery on Saddle up the Palomino:
If you can't cut it, don't pick up the knife.
There's no reward in your conscience stored
When you're sleepin' with another man's wife.
I wanna lick the platter, the gravy doesn't matter.
It's a cold bowl of chili when love lets you down,
But it's the neighbor's wife I'm after.
Great cover! We are all in the gutter, but Neil is emphatically not looking up at the stars.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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