REVIEW: Neil Young revisits musical comfort food on 50th anniversary ‘Harvest’
Neil Young, “Harvest (50th Anniversary Edition).”
Harvest, released in 1972, was the fourth solo album from Neil Young after the dissolution of Buffalo Springfield, with whom he made his name as the idiosyncratic guitar-playing genius. And though his solo career largely veered farther into non-commercial, even experimental territory from there, Harvest remains one of the most popular albums of Young’s career, and contains what remains his only No. 1 single in the United States, “Heart of Gold.”
“Harvest (50th Anniversary Edition)”
Neil Young
Reprise/Warner, Dec. 2
8/10
It may have been too popular for Young, who famously said later that his trip to the top of the charts “put me in the middle of the road [and] traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch.”
Young soon traveled to darker places after Harvest, so this album ends up being somewhat of a respite between the towering After the Gold Rush and subsequent efforts like On the Beach and, especially, the bleak Tonight’s the Night.
Indeed, Harvest is a more upbeat album than these others, many of its tracks warm acoustic guitar and harmonica sitdowns, flavored with Ben Keith’s pedal steel. And several of these album tracks – “Old Man,” “A Man Needs A Maid,” “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “Heart of Gold” – have become FM radio (and more recently, Sirius XM) standards. They’ve evolved from hip radio fare to old-shoe comfort food for listeners of a certain age.
These songs represent not only a simpler time for popular music in general, but for Neil Young himself, who after Harvest presided over a career defined by changing styles including straight country (Old Ways), horn-band R&B (This Note’s For You), rockabilly (Everybody’s Rockin’) and electronic experimentation (Trans), as well as his tried-and-true mix of folk and heavy rock and roll.
The 50th Anniversary Edition of Harvest brings the spotlight back not only to the familiar acoustic material but to the electrified “Alabama,” a sort of follow-up to the earlier “Southern Man” in its accusations of racism, and two orchestrated songs, the aforementioned “Maid” and “There’s a World.” Some listeners may take these, especially the latter, as pretentious or overblown 50 years later. But they retain a certain power and majesty “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man” don’t really have.
The 50th Anniversary Edition also includes three outtakes from the Harvest sessions. Two of them, “Bad Fog” and “Journey Through the Past,” would have been worthy inclusions on the original album, and are in the style of most of the rest of the album.
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That latter song – the title track of a film Young would release later in 1972 – was also one of the seven songs on the “BBC In Concert” disc of this package. That song and “Love in Mind” appear on the subsequent Time Fades Away live album. Also here are live versions of “Maid,” “Heart of Gold,” “Old Man” and “Out on the Weekend” from Harvest and “Don’t Let it Bring You Down” from After the Gold Rush, Young’s album just before Harvest. These are either solo acoustic guitar or piano performances, and offer slightly more intimate takes on what are already, other than “Maid,” personal, relatively sparse performances.
The “BBC in Concert” disc offers nothing extraordinary, but rather pleasant takes on songs you already know and may well love. And that’s exactly what buyers of this 50th anniversary special package are looking for.
Follow journalist Sam Richards at Twitter.com/samrichardsWC.