Music Arcades: Neil Young: Freedom

There's no denying this is a really good album, but I could never say I really loved it — except, maybe, in the first month or so after it came out, when it seemed so timely, coming four months after Tiananmen Square and one month before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And two months before I saw Neil play a solo show at the Hammersmith Odeon from the sixth row, which ranks as an equally defining moment.

The backstory is that Neil had gone the best part of a decade producing a series of genre-defined albums. Nearly all of them were patchy, but a few included some top songs that ended up getting passed over as the albums were increasingly ignored. I think he knew he had some great material in the Eldorado/Times Square sessions, as well as other unreleased songs like Rockin' in the Free World amd Crime in the City — and he didn't want it to be overlooked. He wanted a hit. And why shouldn't he? Even mavericks need to have a hit now and again, because a maverick, like a stopped clock, has to be right occcasionally. If they're never right, they're not mavericks, they're irrelevances.

So Neil spliced the new material with songs like Too Far Gone, which had been heard at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1976 (but never released until Freedom). He was candid about the rationale for this: as he said in a BBC Radio 1 interview, broadcast on 16 December 1989, "People can hear these songs… and relate them back to whatever they liked about me fifteen years ago… it's like a root." This is from someone who said, a few years later, "I'm someone who's always tried systematically to destroy the very basis of my record-buying public". Top marks for avoiding the split infinitive there, Neil, but the "always" seems a bit disingenuous after you've admitted to trying to win back the old record-buying audience from time to time.

Less than a year later, Neil was back with Crazy Horse, with Ragged Glory, a title that embodied the freewheeling absence of calculation within. And that turned out to be just the ticket to consolidate his rejuvenation in the public and critical eye.