My daughter is working on a piece for her stage motion class about a baby bird figuring out how to fly out of its nest. She told me about it a few minutes ago, waiting for the school bus. Timing was appropriate because of this song. I hated his songs on Deja Vu at first, didnt fit with what I liked about the album Crosby, Stills and Nash. Knew nothing else about him. Nothing. Then, listening at night to WLS, I started hearing this ad for an album After the Gold Rush that I found, to use the Lee-Ditko sobriquet on the splash of Amazing Fantasy 15, a bit different. It reminded me of what Id heard of the second Band album, another I at first disliked, and then there was the single, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, that for the life of me sounded like an epileptic (which it turns out the author was) doing Burt Bacharach. I am not sure why I bought it, but I found something within the songs that was hauntingly incomplete, begging for a listener to finish it in his or her head. In time, I associated that with his epilepsy as well, reading him tell a Rolling Stone interviewer that the disorder was about synapses not quite finishing. Yes. That was it. This was the first song on the album I learned to play, and I actually played it in front of people one night in 1971. Neil - Im allowed to call him Neil once a year - came of age doing a coming of age song, as I think a lot of people know, called Sugar Mountain. But After the Gold Rush had several coming-of-age songs, in particular the pairing of this one about baby birds and a parent (I started to type mom at first, but it was really Neils dad who flew away without him, leaving him - similarly to fellow Canadian turned Californian Ken Millar - to be raised by a mom and her sisters.) who pretty much says you have to learn some things for yourself, and a song I think sounds a lot like it, I Believe in You, that is about love, madness and I think implicitly the difference in age between Neil and his first wife. I wanted so much to hear one of these songs when David Montee and I went to see Young 3/1/73 at the Myriad in OKC and we did, only because Linda Ronstadt did the latter song as an opening act. By then, I knew about Expecting to Fly, but was not smart enough to have associated it with Birds, or for that matter See the Sky About to Rain, and if there was anything to be taken from that near-sold out show, it was that coming of age for Young hadnt been all that great a thing. He wanted out. Anyway, Grandpa Granola turns 70 today, and this is a toast to him, even as he sheds wife two and supposedly takes up with someone who wasnt born that autumn of 70, when the Gold Rushed, the Harvest had yet to be reaped, it was not yet the Night, and his band hadnt begun to rust. youtube/watch?v=tkYzavYZlug
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 12:57:20 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015