Neil Young and Crazy Horse - Ragged Glory

Another excellent album that's chiefly great not necessarily because the songs or ideas are good (though there is plenty of quality writing here), but simply because it sounds so good.  In a lot of ways, the fact that Ragged Glory is such a good album defies belief.  At this point, Young was well over 20 years into his career as a musician and had been playing with Crazy Horse for nearly as long.  For artists of his vintage, 1990 didn't exactly yield a bumper crop of mid-career creative comebacks--the fact that Young and company manage to produce such a cohesive and vital album in the same style they've been playing since 1969 is another marvel in itself.

The heavily-distorted arpeggio and thunderous wash of overdriven rhythm guitar and bass that opens "Country Home" (apparently a 70's-penned track) is like a warm blanket for longtime Neil Young fans--aside from perhaps a small increase in heaviness, there is no difference between the band's sound here and on Young classic fuzz-rockers like "Cowgirl in the Sand," or any number of tunes on Zuma.  What's more, there's almost no diversion from the template in the entire album--two guitars, a bass, drums, Neil on lead vocals and the inimitable low-rent beauty of Crazy Horse backing vocals.  "Then why's it so great?" you may ask.  Well, as is often the case with classic Neil Young, it's hard for me to put my finger on it.  The man's best albums usually sound pleasant but generic to me on first listen then gradually unfurl their unassuming craftsmanship and casual splendor over several repeated plays.  I wish I could say it's the subtlety of the songwriting, but Neil's got better collections of songs than this--"White Line," "Mansion on the Hill" and cover "Farmer John" are pretty forgettable in terms of melody and structure, and by the time "Love and Only Love" comes on it's difficult to distinguish it from the album's previous epic jams "Over and Over" and "Love to Burn."  And still, there's something about the band's well-worn chemistry that carries the songs past their substance.

As always, Young's lead guitar lines are simple, often eschewing speed and multi-string complexity for melody, a wealth of subtle variation in ideas and that unquantifiable alchemical quality that makes anything Young plays--no matter how technically or melodically clichéd--sound like manna from heaven.  It must be a combination of the man's ear and his taste, neither of which are easy to fault when it comes to his guitar playing.  Then there's the matter of Old Black, Young's 1953 Les Paul Goldtop, and his 50's Fender Deluxe amplifier, which provide a tone so thick and so completely unique that it almost doesn't matter what Young plays, the sound is self-justifying.  Though I earlier mentioned that the songwriting is occasionally forgettable, there are some classic moments--"Fuckin' Up" is as humble and self-dissatisfied a self-admonishment as can be imagined from a star of Young's caliber, and it's got a main riff that could have invented grunge all by itself (apparently this album was quite popular with the up-and-coming grunge stars of the day, and it's easy to hear why with its "don't give a fuck" rough attitude).  "Days That Used to Be" interestingly addresses the lapsed hippie ideals of an unnamed contemporary while simultaneously borrowing the melody from Dylan's "My Back Pages," while "Love to Burn," "Over and Over" and "Love and Only Love," despite their extended jamming and overlapping subject matter, are actually founded on functioning and potentially concise songs with thought-provoking lyrics.  In actuality, despite its heavy sound, Ragged Glory is populated by relentlessly optimistic songs and a rough-edged, weathered wisdom that ought to be expected from Young at this point in his career.  In reality, the only major misstep is the album-ending live cut, "Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)," which marries the melody from "The Water is Wide" with some preachily facile lyrics about respecting Mother Earth and her healing ways--not exactly the subtlety we expect from Young's pen, and the faux-Hendrix-"Star Spangled Banner" guitar doesn't really help.

Sometimes, you're not hoping to have your ears challenged or assaulted with earth-shattering ideas--sometimes you just want to roll the windows down and crank some rock and roll, and Ragged Glory is the perfect album for that mood.  It's tough to dispute that artists experience fewer and fewer creative epiphanies as they age, but in my mind Neil Young remains a paragon of self-reinvention.  After his often ill-received experimental period of the 80's this album is at once familiar and striking in its consolidation of Crazy Horse's hard rock strengths, an incrementally unique moment in Young's discography.  Though his casual approach to songwriting and recording results in a seemingly nonstop stream of workmanlike albums and songs, these days we rarely get a whole album quite this solid from Neil.  If I'm still writing songs at his age, I'll consider myself lucky to strike gold half as often as Young manages to still do after four decades of songwriting.  May the gold keep coming, even if it's accompanied by a little more silver and bronze with each passing year!