The Neil Young Album That Blew Apart the Last of Hippie Nostalgia

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Like many of his contemporaries, Neil Young will forever be associated with the 1960s. Psychedelic Pill arrived on Oct. 30, 2012 to tear that whole notion down to the studs and concrete.

He’s rejoined by Crazy Horse in this fiery requiem for the decade, but they also chart a path away from its crushing disappointments – beginning, I think brilliantly, at the end: “Driftin’ Back,” a staggering epitaph for the 1960s, intrigues because it’s initially presented as an utterly offbeat, pastoral reverie – something that’s maybe as far away as you can get from the familiar garage-rock glories of Crazy Horse.

Instead, Young is floating feather like over what appears to be his own jagged personal history. Then, as the song moves into a shared vocal for the chorus, Crazy Horse finally comes charging forward – and their ass-whipping feedback and skull-dragging rhythms blow apart whatever sense of twilit reverie remains. “Driftin’ Back” surges into a broiling, rough-hewn instrumental segment and when the lyric returns, there is a new edge to Neil Young’s thoughts.



As “Driftin’ Back” continues rattling along, he launches into a more direct accounting of how the broader goals from the ’60s ran aground. Religious leaders are revealed as charlatans, artists are turned into greeting-card product. Crazy Horse again offers its own thunderous musical retort, completing the transformation of “Driftin’ Back” from a moment tinged with regret into a song completely engulfed by thunderous anger.

Twenty minutes into the nearly half-hour “Driftin’ Back,” Young then makes it clear that this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg: “When you hear my song now, you only get five percent. … Blocking out my anger now, blocking out my thoughts.” From there, this round-house raging against the dying of the light ensues. “Driftin’ Back” seems to slow, then a titanic interlocking exchange of guitar with Frank “Poncho” Sampedro renders that anger viscerally real. Young makes one last pass at the chorus, but he sounds spent and almost at a loss for words, so draining has this journey been.

[SOMETHING ELSE! INTERVIEW: Nils Lofgren stops by for an emotional talk about his time with Neil Young, Crazy Horse and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.]

By the end, “Driftin’ Back” has equaled and, in some cases, surpassed so many of the songs that seek to contextualize the 1960s. I’m not sure anyone has better illustrated the impotent fury that followed for those who worked so hard toward change, only to see it all come to such a thudding conclusion.

The album might have ended right there, if Psychedelic Pill were sequenced differently, if it only sought to look back. Instead, we’re hurtled directly into Ralph Molina’s grinding “Cinnamon Girl”-style groove over the album’s good-time title track, and Crazy Horse is granted a chance to do what it does best – to recall every one of its earlier, floor board-rearranging triumphs with Neil Young.

Meanwhile, the 17-minute “Ramada Inn” and the 8-minute “She’s Always Dancing,” at their heart, seem like the kind of resilient, third-act love songs that could have found a home on Young’s acoustic Harvest projects, but they’re imbued here with a boisterous moral authority that’s become a patented element of these collaborations.

“Born in Ontario” is perhaps not much more than a throwaway saloon song, but all is forgiven by the time Young’s offered a gnarled tribute to musical confederates like Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead on “Twisted Road” – and then a quiet, deeply connective call for basic human empathy during “For the Love of Man.” In his way, Young ends up reconstructing the soaring promise, and the boundless joy, of the decade he started out eulogizing here.



Finally, there’s the grungy 16 minute-plus “Walk Like a Giant,” which connects Psychedelic Pill back to its opening track’s torrent of emotion, and does so again without even a hint of romanticism about what came before: “Me and some of my friends, we were going to save the world – we were trying to make it better,” Young sings, before tearing that nostalgic notion to shreds: “But then the weather changed … and it fell apart. And it breaks my heart.”

Yet Neil Young, and Crazy Horse, keep going. After all of the years, all of the disappointments, all of the triumphs and the dead ends, they keep going. “I try to hold on to my thinking,” Young sings, as much to himself it seems as to us, “and to remember how it felt.”

His old friends, meanwhile, are constructing this bloody-knuckled storm of rock ‘n’ roll noise behind him, the very personification of the 1960s’ horizon-less sense of freedom. And you’re reminded all over again: It must have felt just like this.


Jimmy Nelson