Neil Young
Are You Passionate?
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Neil Young
Are You Passionate?
Reprise, 2002
RiYL: Neil Young, in all his bizarro glory |
Picture the check-out line of your local record store, where a 25-something male is forking over $8 for a used copy of Young's 1986 album Landing On Water. Despite his age, the buyer is already well into the advanced stages of his Neil obsession. He bought Harvest at 15, just so he could own "Heart Of Gold," and here he is, ten years of Neil listening later, searching for another On The Beach, trying desperately to find another diamond in the rough.
Instead, he gets home to find out that Landing On Water is Neil Young's answer to the "Ghostbusters" soundtrack. He makes it through the first track, "Weight Of The World," and actually manages to keep an open mind. But by the second song -- once the San Francisco Boys Chorus kicks in -- he's losing hope. And by the fourth, he realizes he's just spent his hard earned cash on another one of the many absurd disasters in the topsy-turvy career of Neil Young.
Unlike most of his aging contemporaries, Neil Young has never stopped trying to move forward. He's continued to push his own boundaries and experiment with new sounds and new bandmates. Whereas Bruce Springsteen has played with the same band on all but one of his tours for the past 30 years, Neil Young can rarely keep himself interested in playing with the same group of guys for more than 30 days.
And while Neil's ADD attitude has yielded some amazing records, it's also yielded some serious duds. Unlike like Bruce, Neil doesn't seem able to seem to discern between his hits and misses. Therefore Neil freaks must be able to celebrate his good output with a sigh of relief and swallow his weaker albums, like his newest severely flawed effort Are You Passionate? with a tolerant smile.
Passionate finds our complicated hero recording with members of the legendary Stax Records house band Booker T & the MG's -- Booker T. Jones (keyboards), Donald "Duck" Dunn (bass) and Steve "Smokey" Potts (drums) -- as well as longtime collaborator and Crazy Horse veteran Frank "Poncho" Sampedro (guitars). Not surprisingly, the songs frequently play off MG classics and soul standards, revealing a softer, more upbeat side of Neil. But while his bandmates do their damndest to back our plaid-clad hero and his patented whine with their pulsing Stax groove, Neil's voice and Canadian-bred whiteness simply just can't pull this sound off.
It's hard to pin-point exactly where this album goes wrong. Unlike Landing On Water, which was pretty much doomed from the moment Neil entered the studio, this album feels like it coulda been a contender. The songs are very catchy, perfectly tailored for this setting in fact, and every performer is playing well. But the catchy songwriting doesn't sit well next to Neil's crunchy soul, and the performances feel so stiff it makes for an unusually uncomfortable listen.
It's easy to equate most of these tunes to the sort of soulless, harmless crap your parents used to play in the car on the way home from church. The songs are typically thin, repetitive, and absolutely torturous on repeated doses. Neil delivers lines like "I got to live long and be with you" with the coolness of Dr. Evil. "I'm hip. I'm cool," he implies. It makes you cringe and feel intensely embarrassed.
Case in point: "Let's Roll." This 9/11 tribute song is unspeakably bad. The song trades the "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" tart of the album's earlier songs with a balls-out porno groove that would make Pamela Anderson blush. Over this sexy strut, Neil steps into the persona of a Todd Beamer, the passenger on fated Flight 93, who talked to his wife via cell phone just before leading the attack on the terrorists. Instead of being a touching tribute to a fallen hero or an emotional remembrance of that dark day, Neil offers his listeners a shockingly red-neck anthem.
The lyrics instantly call to mind those gritty bastards that drove their pick-up trucks up and down your street in the wake of the attacks, sporting "Your Dead Towel Head" bumper stickers and blaring Lee Greenwood's "God Bless The USA" at full blast:
Let's roll for freedom / Let's roll for love / We're going after Satan on the wings of a dove
Who wrote this? Tarzan?
"Me good. They bad. Let's go kill."
I guess we should of known the song was a joke when it started out with the sound of cell phone ringing in the background. It instantly begs the question: Who in that studio owns a wireless device of any kind? Poncho? Booker T? Neil? E tu, Brute?
I hope not.
Thankfully, our man is able to churn out at least one good song here. And in typical Neil fashion, he offers this gem -- the album's title song -- on the very next track. Here, he drops the red-neck bravado in favor of a sensitive soul, as he injects doubt and vulnerability into his dream-like lyrics:
Once I was a soldier, I was fighting in the sky / And the gunfire kept coming back at me / So I dove into the darkness and I let my missiles fly / And they might be the ones that kept you free.
The slow song isn't necessarily about 9/11 or any other current event. But it relates to the human emotions that surrounded us then and still haunt many of us today. It doesn't negate those feelings of loss with amped up patriotism but instead focuses on the personal solitude of one individual. And, not surprisingly, this is the only track on the album that still sounds even remotely good after 20 listens.
In the 1974 Roman Polanski classic "Chinatown," John Huston's character says even old whores and ugly buildings get respect with age. Most critics have given guarded praise to the new Neil album, which is understandable. It's probably a lot easier to digest than most of the albums released in the artist's Geffen years. For instance, we know now that he can follow Landing On Water and This Note's For You with Freedom and Ragged Glory. And so we can listen to Are You Passionate?, find maybe one track worth celebrating, and confidently await his next great release.
Let's just hope we don't have to wait another five years.
BEN FRENCH | Ben founded NATN in the winter of 1998-1999 with fellow IU alums Troy Carpenter and Jonathan Cohen. During the day time, he's working for Nielsen Business Media, publisher of Billboard. Ben's favorite acts include Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys.