Another transitional album from Neil. When this came out in 1987 his stock had dropped to its lowest point. Trans, Everybody's Rockin' and Old Ways still got feature-size reviews in the music press, even they were dismissive ones. Life, however, got just a three-inch, one-column review by (if memory serves) Jane Solanas. She was mostly dismissive, too, while conceding that there were moments of real guts on the album. I think she was right, probably on both counts. It's a bitty piece — as albums go, not really an album — so I'm going to take it in bits.
Mideast Vacation and Long Walk Home
He's no Noam Chomsky, but Neil's little foray into US Foreign Policy is, briefly, diverting. Mideast Vacation has Neil role-playing someone who starts off as an anonymous misfit "I used to watch Highway Patrol, whittling with my knife / But the thought never struck me I'd be black and white for life" before he morphs into Ronnie Reagan in the wake of his bombing of Libya: "I was Rambo in the disco, shooting to the beat / When they burned me in effigy, my vacation was complete."
Long Walk Home is a straightforward sentimental tie-a-yellow-ribbon ballad about how difficult it is to get out of the places America has got into. Sounds familiar? It's pretty ponderous and slow, but the vocal harmonies give Crazy Horse the chance to revisit their origins as a doo-wop band. Both this and Mideast Vacation were regulars on the 1987 European tour, and I've got an old audience bootleg of the Birmingham show (which was my own first experience of Neil live) where some wag can be heard answering Neil's repeated refrain of "It's such a long walk home" with a smart, "Yeah, and I've got the car keys!"
Around the World
I bracket this as another of Neil's experiments with the form of songwriting, under the influence of film theory (see earlier this month). The jump-cuts this time are not just lyrical — hopping between lines about Reagan's "Star Wars" defence initiative and stuff from the catwalk at a fashion show — but also musical — jumping from Crazy Horse heavy riffing to synth pop. It doesn't quite work, but Bruce Conner would have been proud.
Inca Queen
Very obviously a close sibling of Like an Inca Trans, and, like that track, it feels like it's just parachuted into the album without any connection to the context around it. Unfortunately, both songs have been parachuted from the same place: the pile of discarded drafts for Cortez the Killer, the shoelaces of which they are not fit to tie. Inca Queen plods.
Too Lonely, Prisoners of Rock'n'Roll and Cryin' Eyes
This is where it gets interesting. A long time ago I was going to write an essay about this trilogy of miniatures, but I don't think I ever got round to it, so I'll have to do it now. Firstly I aimed to assert that these tracks form a self-contained unit within the album: they're all around or just under three minutes (Prisoners is slightly over, but only because of the extended feedback squall). This conciseness is actually pretty rare with Neil and Crazy Horse — the next time they'd play together, on Ragged Glory, everything was stretched out. Whereas Crazy Horse try to sound fairly polished and well-produced on the rest of the album, these three tracks all have them in their third-best-garage-band-in-the-world mode.
Secondly, the theme of the trilogy is, loosely, people who do their own thing and don't take advice easily. Too Lonely (to fall in love) is a crude, throwaway song, mostly in the third person, about a woman too restless and emotionally detached to commit. Is it just my ears or, after Neil's sung the line "Working for a big tip", do the rest of the band come in on backing vocals with "big tits!"?
Prisoners is now the best-known of these three songs. The focus has now switched to the first person: "We don't want to be watered down, taking orders from record company clowns." Sounds familiar? But Neil rarely does the unequivocal hooray-for-us thing, and so he mocks the band, "We don't want to be good"
Cryin' Eyes has always been my favourite. Addressed in the second person to an non-specific loner, it's musically and lyrically vicious, uncompromising and anti-sentimental. Just two short verses plus two-line chorus:
You say that all your life you've been a free bird
There's been nobody over you
And you always have to have the last word
Because one feels better than two.
Who's gonna dry your cryin' eyes?
Who's gonna wake you up to that big surprise?
You say your life's like riding on a fast train
It's easy to see far away
But right up close it's just a blurry haze
Flyin' by from day to day.
In case you thought Neil was flying the flag for "heroic"" f-you individualism, he lets you know how vacuous, futile and self-destructive it can be. I hear it as a forerunner of Eldorado, and, specifically, Don't Cry from that EP.
When Your Lonely Heart Breaks
Along with the first two tracks on the album, this was played at the Birmingham show in June 1987. Again it's Crazy Horse in careful, well-crafted vocal harmony mode. And again, I find it plodding and ponderous. There was one time I heard this song and recognised that it had some charms, but that was a long time ago, and has never been repeated.
We Never Danced
This feels like an afterthought that was just included to fulfil the contractual length of an album. It wasn't written for the album, but for Alan Rudolph's film, Made in Heaven. In the film, Neil has a cameo role as a truck driver who paraphrases the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland: "If you don't really know where you wanna go / It makes no difference which road you take". Or maybe that's not his exact line in the film, but it's how he sings the line in We Never Danced.
As you will have forgotten, Dave Godin very kindly booked Made in Heaven into Sheffield's civic cinema at my request. I think the song appears over the closing credits of the film, but in a version sung by someone other than Neil. In this it prefigures Neil's contribution to the Philadelphia soundtrack — and it sounds not dissimilar, too.
Although the album cover suggests that Neil was serving a Life sentence with David Geffen's record label, this was his last recording for the label. With this throat clearing, desk clearing and rehearsal out of the way, Neil was ready to "get back on it" — which is exactly what he did.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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