Guest Listener - Brian Bilston
Who’s Brian Bilston when he’s at home?
I write poetry but I (and others) would hesitate to call myself a poet. I have been sharing my verse on Twitter and Facebook for the last few years with varying degrees of success. I write about the stuff of everyday life, with a particular emphasis on buses and bin days. My first collection of poetry, You Caught the Last Bus Home, will be published with Unbound later this year - https://unbound.co.uk/books/brian-bilston
Brian’s Top 3 albums ever?
Hatful of Hollow by The Smiths
Different Class by Pulp
Doolittle by Pixies
What great album has he never heard before?
Harvest by Neil Young
Released in February 1972
Before we get to Brian, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Harvest.
So much happens here, until the very best part - when nothing happens at all.
Let’s begin with a whistle stop tour of Neil Young’s childhood.
1) He was born in Toronto in 1945 and, by all accounts, was a bit chubby and grinned a lot.
2) He then contracted Polio at the age of 5 and it looked like he might die.
I know, that escalated quickly didn’t it?
3) Fortunately he survived and, at the age of 10, decided he wanted to be a farmer and raise chickens. He even saved up his pocket money and bought a coop.
4) He swapped the coop for a guitar when he heard Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry on a local radio station called CHUM.
5) CHUM is the best name for a radio station ever and, whilst not integral to the story, I thought it was worth mentioning and dedicating a whole point to.
6) His family were constantly travelling and he ended up going to something like 11 or 12 schools as a result. That’s basically a school every year, which is a bit mental. Eventually he dropped out in the eleventh grade having decided that school wasn’t really for him. He should know to be fair - he tried loads of them.
And this is where we pick him up.
He’s 16 years old and walking at 6 ft. 3 with an air of detachment befitting of someone whose chicken farming days are behind him.
So he starts to get busy.
After a short lived spell in an instrumental band called The Squires, Young hits the road as a solo artist under the influence of Bob Dylan. What follows is a series of impromptu performances at Canadian folk clubs and coffee houses, a fleeting figure with a guitar strapped to his back and sideburns that had taken on a life of their own. Along the way he meets Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell for the first time and on his 19th birthday he wrote Sugar Mountain - a song he must have known was a bit special.
His own image of himself at the time is of someone walking around in the middle of the night in the snow, wondering where to go next - always with another destination in mind. On the one hand he was thrilled at the troubadour life he was living, whilst on the other he naturally worried where it would all lead to as each year passed without any sign of breaking through.
Enter an admirer to give him a hand.
A bass player called Bruce Palmer was so taken by the sight of Neil Young just walking down the street that he introduced himself and suggested a jamming session.
Simple as that - “That tall fella looks dead cool, I wonder if he wants to come back to mine and be in a band with me.”
It worked though. Young went back to Palmer’s house and, before long, they formed a band called The Mynah Birds, with a young black singer called Ricky James. In keeping with the breakneck pace of this story they somehow got signed to Motown just three weeks after their first gig and were on their way to Detroit to record their first album.
But then disaster struck, which is why you’re not reading a piece about The Mynah Birds’ classic debut album.
Firstly, their manager had overdosed on heroin. Secondly, their singer was arrested and jailed after it was discovered that he was a deserter from the Navy. Neil Young returned to Canada a dejected figure and, in what must have been his lowest ebb, he was then beaten up whilst hitchhiking and left unconscious in a ditch. When he eventually came round, he decided to hit the road again.
He sold everything he owned, bought a hearse, and drove to L.A. to seek out an old friend - Stephen Stills.
It’s here that his next band, Buffalo Springfield, are formed. Despite being named after a particular type of steamroller they quickly caused a stir within the L.A. garage rock scene and were soon playing alongside contemporaries like Love and The Doors. They even had a huge hit, the Stephen Stills penned For What it’s Worth, which was quickly adopted as THE anti-war anthem of its time.
Success, but it was far from perfect. Stephen Stills was very much the boss and, to make matters worse, he often wore a cowboy hat. Young rebelled and felt he could never quite realise his own vision within the band - despite the fact that he was turning out brilliant songs of his own like Burned and Mr Soul. It’s also at this point that he experiences his first epileptic seizure and is put on medication that made him even more moody and withdrawn than he was anyway. After a couple of albums, multiple arguments with Stills, and a seizure live on stage, Young decided to quit Buffalo Springfield for good in May 1968.
You’d think he’d relax for a bit now, be a bit more Neil Young, and take it easy. But no, he’s on the move again.
Over the next 18 months he releases two solo albums, forms a new backing band with a bunch of tough guys called Crazy Horse, and starts hanging around with the singer songwriter and would-be serial killer Charles Manson. At one point he even tries to convince Warners to sign Manson in what would have been the worst decision by a record company since Motown decided to sign The Mynah Birds.
Inexplicably, he also decides working with Stephen Stills again is a good idea and joins the board of the worst firm ever - Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Why he thought this was a good idea is anyone’s guess and the inevitable happened straight away. Not only was he clashing with Stills, but now he had to put up with Crosby as well - the pair of them taking so much cocaine that they once considered calling the band The Frozen Noses.
Can you think of anything worse?
OK - Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, and Manson would be worse, but you get my point.
After one album that took over 800 studio hours to complete, the band descended into a predictable haze of drugs and competing egos. When Nash ran off with a woman that Stephen Stills fancied the band thankfully broke up for good - but not before Neil Young had wasted a load of time on them and some great songs like Helpless and Ohio.
He momentarily returns to Crazy Horse, but after seeing them beset with drug problems of their own he finally decides it would be best for everyone if he stopped messing about with a load of dysfunctional bands and just became Neil Young Solo instead.
He’s starting to slow down. He’s getting there.
In September 1970, he releases the brilliant After the Gold Rush and celebrates by moving to a big isolated ranch in L.A. And finally, it’s here that it happens - the pivot from which the whole story revolves.
Whilst moving some slabs of polished walnut, Neil Young does his back in and spends the next few months in bed.
At last, we now have him where he want him.
After a lifetime of perpetual motion and bad company he finally takes shelter in solitude and inactivity - it’s the part where nothing happens, where he takes time out and just reflects. He didn’t even have the strength to lift his electric guitar so he had to play an acoustic instead. And the songs start pouring out of him - songs about the old man that lived on the ranch, the friends he’d seen ravaged by drugs and, best of all, a song about a lonely boy that just packed it all in and went down to L.A. Gone was his clawhammer style, his wild abandon, and instead came a sparse finesse that suited the material perfectly.
It was the sound of someone recuperating - not just from his present ailment but from everything that had come before.
He now just needed an opportunity to do them justice in the studio and, again, a happy accident provides the solution.
In February 1971, Young travelled to Nashville to appear on The Johnny Cash Show and, whilst in town, had dinner on the Saturday night with a producer called Elliot Mazer. Throughout the dinner Mazer tries to convince Young to record his next album in his studio. After the meal Young effectively says “Ok, ready when you are”.
Mazer probably thought that meant they were going to schedule a slot in the studio for some future date but Young actually meant he was READY, i.e. let’s do it now. Mazer made a few calls to see who was about and rounded up a bunch of local session musicians including Kenny Buttrey who had played drums Blonde on Blonde. They went to the studio and started recording Harvest - THAT EVENING!
How mad is that? One minute you’re having dinner and the next minute, completely unplanned, you’re recording one of the best albums ever.
“Oh but hang on, who can we get to play drums?”
“Will the fella who played on Blonde on Blonde do?”
“Of course he will!”
The bass player was found because he just happened to be walking down the street at the time - a great example of why you should never stay in on a Saturday night.
But look, the whole thing gloriously comes together. Young is in charge like never before and embraces a bunch of musicians who were content to play from the sides. Everyone did as they were told and they did it REALLY quickly - most songs being completed in just a couple of takes. Any attempts at virtuosity and showmanship were outlawed in favour of a sound that was simple yet beautifully effective. On the song Harvest, for instance, Buttrey plays the whole thing with one hand yet it’s some of the best drumming you’ll ever hear.
After the sessions in Nashville, Young then enlists the help of The London Symphony Orchestra whilst on a visit to the UK and records a couple of songs with electric guitars in a massive barn on his ranch. Unbelievably, he invites Crosby, Stills, and Nash along to provide some backing vocals.
Once the album was finished Mazer set up a huge outdoor stereo system with one stack of speakers in the barn and another in Young’s house. He then plays it to Neil Young whilst he’s rowing in a nearby lake.
Young, from his boat, shouted “More barn!”
It’s the image that sums the whole thing up for me - Neil Young having a massive laugh whilst listening to his new album on a lake.
Whilst some tough guy music critics have accused Harvest of being compromised, I prefer to see it as pure - as the work of a man who was forced to slow down and enjoy the sound of his own company. Glistening and still, it represents a noble ambition - that doing nothing can be productive, and being busy can get you nowhere.
That’s the album in a nutshell, the luxury it affords - the imposition of time and space, from the artist to the listener.
And it’s why I love it so much. Because, whatever I’m doing when I hear it, it always slows me down.
Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)
The Critics on Harvest
In a retrospective review, Pitchfork gave it 9.3/10
Rolling Stone ranked it as the 78th best album of all time after initially deciding it was rubbish.
Lol @ Rolling Stone
So, over to you, Brian. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
Requiem
for the Things I Haven’t Done
My life is a litany
of things unachieved,
unbegun tasks, unfinished deeds;
the unwritten novels
and untaken goals,
unfulfilled words, unfilled holes,
jobs unhad
and places unbeen,
unchosen paths, unfollowed dreams,
unseen films, plays, artists,
and all that unlistening to
Neil Young’s Harvest.
But why? Such reasons
are long since lost
to the passing of the seasons.
Maybe I saw him wearing a hat.
I never like it
when musicians do that.
Or did I think it rather
the sort of thing
liked by my father,
some kind of AOR accident,
a middle of the road spill
on the Highway to Grownupville.
For I have never held
much stock
by either country or rock,
it said nothing to me
about my life
and besides, I was busy
in my unachieving prime.
I had so much not to do
and so little time.
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
Harvesting
Out on a weekday, earplugs in,
iPod synced in to my plod,
preparing for the worst.
The opening bars plod along, too,
catch up with me and, together,
we head into the verse.
His tenor comes to greet me
with the resignation
of the condemned
and I listen in close
to the words he’s penned
See the lonely boy out on the weekend
and it’s then that I know
I have a new friend.
You made me feel, Neil Young.
You made me feel as though Spring had not
sprung.
You made me feel when your songs were sung.
And although I thought
I would never be ready for the country,
I became a harvester,
went out into the fields,
reaped, gathered, stored.
A few crops left me bored
but I brought them in anyway,
and grew to love them over the days.
Because a man needs some maize.
But others rippled proudly
in golden fields
and those I played loudly
until pins and needles begun
to tickle my ears,
and the damage was done.
I carried these songs inside,
having chopped them down
with my scythe,
and ‘though I wonder
what my young self
might have thought,
I’ve
been in my mind,
it’s such a fine line
that keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
and now that I’m getting old,
I think I’m getting Young.
Would you listen to it again?
I’m all out of poems now, thankfully.
Yes, absolutely. I found it something of a ragbag of an album but, almost in spite of itself, it somehow seems to hang together. The highs when they come are glorious and I can see myself returning to this many times.
A mark out of 10?
8
RAM Rating – 9
Guest Rating – 8
Overall – 8.5
So that was Week 57 and that was Brian Bilston. Turns out he’d never heard Harvest before because he may have seen Neil Young wearing a hat. So we made him listen to it and he loved it so much that he gave it an 8.
I know, I wished hat and 8 rhymed too.
Next week, Bonnie Greer listens to something from 1966 for the first time.
Until then, here’s Out on the Weekend from Harvest