The Definitive 1000 Songs Of All Time 1955 to 2005: Number 938

Number 938

Neil Young

"After The Goldrush"

(1970)
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................Genre: Rock...............

This is one of the few times you will see me holding hands with Rolling Stone Magazine, but Neil Young is one of my all time favourite artists. I was lucky enough to catch him in concert way back in 1984 at Western Springs, Auckland Dirkadirkastan (New Zealand) Since then i aquired every Neil album, bootleg and cd. (They all gone now, because everything is on mp3) To sum it up.... A world without Neil Young is like a world without trees.

Here is some interesting blurb about the Grandfather of Grunge...........

Fill her up sonny

In the 15 months between the release of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush, Neil Young issued a series of recordings in different styles that could have prepared his listeners for the differences between the two LPs. His two compositions on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album Déjà Vu, "Helpless" and "Country Girl," returned him to the folk and country styles he had pursued before delving into the hard rock of Everybody Knows; two other singles, "Sugar Mountain" and "Oh, Lonesome Me," also emphasized those roots. But "Ohio," a CSNY single, rocked as hard as anything on the second album. After the Gold Rush was recorded with the aid of Nils Lofgren, a 17-year-old unknown whose piano was a major instrument, turning one of the few real rockers, "Southern Man" (which had unsparing protest lyrics typical of Phil Ochs), into a more stately effort than anything on the previous album and giving a classic tone to the title track, a mystical ballad that featured some of Neil Young's most imaginative lyrics and became one of his most memorable songs. But much of After the Gold Rush consisted of country-folk love songs, which consolidated the audience Neil Young had earned through his tours and recordings with CSNY; its dark yet hopeful tone matched the tenor of the times in 1970, making it one of the definitive singer/songwriter albums, and it has remained among Neil Young's major achievements. ~ [William Ruhlmann]

For more Neil Young see #391, #417, #479, #677
For Crosby Stills Nash & Young see #660

Now light up that Joint, put the song on and chill listening to a time long gone and probably now in reality, lost.

What does Moaning Stunned think of Neil Young? Neil Young devotees will probably spend the next few weeks trying desperately to convince themselves that After The Gold Rush is good music. But they'll be kidding themselves. For despite the fact that the album contains some potentially first rate material, none of the songs here rise above the uniformly dull surface. In my listening, the problem appears to be that most of this music was simply not ready to be recorded at the time of the sessions. It needed time to mature. On the album the band never really gets behind the songs and Young himself has trouble singing many of them. Set before the buying public before it was done, this pie is only half-baked.
There are thousands of persons in this country who will buy and enjoy this record. More power to them, I suppose. But for me the test of an album is whether or not its quality is such that it allows you to grow into it a little more with each subsequent listening. And I find none of that quality here. To the 70 or 80 people who wrote to Rolling Stone in total rage that I could be anything but 100% delighted with Deja Vu, I will simply say: this record picks up where Deja Vu leaves off. ~ [source: Rolling Stone - 1970]

I know it was 1970, but boy, did the reviwer miss the concept or what?