Music Arcades: Neil Young: Hawks and Doves

Remember the story of the two pieces I wrote about some of Neil Young's songs in the eighties, which got cited by David Downing's Neil Young biography?. Here's an excerpt from one of them:

Take the title track of Hawks and Doves: on the face of it this might seem a straightforward declaration of patriotism, threatening anyone who doesn't go along with the singer's way of thinking (Don't push too my hard my friend… if you hate us, you just don't know what you're saying). But, as Robin Hodder suggested in a letter in Broken Arrow 30, it is difficult to take Neil seriously when he sings (in a coarse, very Uncanadian accent), "I ain't tongue tied, just don't got nothin' to say". It sounds very much as though he is playing a part, rather than expressing his true feelings. If that were the case, you could interpret Neil as even caricaturing or undermining what he says as he says it. Rather than supporting the patriots, he might be attacking them for their simple-mindedness.

Yes, well… As you can see, one of the things behind what I wrote was a large dose of wishful thinking and liberal denial, as in, "I love Neil's music so much that he just can't be a Republican." The other thing was that I'd just been swotting up on literary theory and film theory, including Brecht, Godard and all that stuff. I wanted to show that Neil was into that stuff, too. Bizarre as it may seem, I think I was only half wrong.

Of course Neil is no intellectual, or, to the extent that he has intellectual interests, they're outweighed by his stubborn, small-f folk, seat-of-the-pants instincts. He did go through a stage of being semi-obsessed with film, was known to hang out with avant-garde film maker Bruce Conner, and said in an interview (NME, circa 1988, from memory) that, film-wise, Godard was his number one influence. You can see that clearly in the first half of his Human Highway film.

Several of his songs feature 'jump cuts' between scenes separated in time and space: Cortez the Killer, Sedan Delivery, Misfits, Look Out for my Love, and Around the World all have distinct, and sometimes multiple, discontinuities in their lyrics. And Lost in Space, possibly my favourite song on this record, as it moves with Alice in Wonderland logic between love song to someone lost in space, "working for the queen, keeping all the grounds around her clean", munchkins on the ocean floor, waves that "pound on my mattress door", and ultimately the deep sea blues (ouch) that the singer wants to lose.

Then there's The Old Homestead, a Shandyesque tale that hints at autobiographical allegory ("Why do you read that Crazy Horse?" coupled with three prehistoric birds that invite you to imagine Crosby, Stills and Nash), but of course never resolves into anything with an intelligible "point".

Hawks and Doves is one of those Neil Young albums it's easy to forget about, especially 30 years on. It's only 30 minutes long, and the songs have hardly ever been played live (Neil played only one full gig in the years 1979-81, because he was looking after his son). I know it well, though, because I played it a lot when I got it in the summer of 1983, around the same time as Comes a Time.

As it shared the portmanteau structure of Rust Never Sleeps, I was hoping for something of similar stature. Hawks and Doves falls far short of that, but I've still got a soft spot for it, and the songs stay with me in a way that those on the likes of Silver and Gold and Prairie Wind just don't. Via Wikipedia, I've just come across this review by Robert Christgau, which has some wise things to say, including

The man who wrote Ohio… has never stopped pondering the social and the historical, albeit in a cracked way… None of which is to recommend Young as a thinker — about romance, about private-versus-public, about the social or the historical, about anything but Neil Young. Like any lyric artist, he's more trustworthy [as a sensor] than an analyst, and though [he has changed stance] as tirelessly as Mr. Dylan, his fans have never gauged the progress of their lives by the vacillations of his art. In the end, this detachment serves him well — he's allowed, even expected, to make mistakes.

If you haven't got it, you can't really go wrong with it being available for £2.99 on Amazon.