NEIL YOUNG (WITH CRAZY HORSE)

NEIL YOUNG
WITH CRAZY HORSE
BROKEN ARROW (1996)
320 KBPS

The term "grunge" has often been associated with Neil, and no one epitomizes the term better than him. Broken Arrow is rock at its slow, crawling, best. To understand why so many people virtually worship this guy's music, especially when he melds with Crazy Horse, you need to let yourself enter his music as if you were entering a dark and turgid river, and then just let it take you on a journey. If you try to analyze this album, you'll never figure it out.
Broken Arrow is all about deep longing, and struggling for some light in a dark world. The first three tracks on the album create a trance-like mood that can evoke a mystic state in the listener. There is a sense of the divine underlying the best music, from Beethoven, to Mahler to Robert Simpson. It's there in the jams of the Dead, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and Eric Clapton in his heroin days. If you let yourself go into this album, you will sense the mystic as strongly as in other great Neil and Crazy Horse jams (Powderfinger, Cortez the Killer, Change Your Mind, Love and Only Love, Down by the River, Last Dance, etc.).
In "Big Time," every pluck of Neil's guitar is a quest for something beautiful that has been lost, or a dream that is fading-an recurring Neil Young image. About six minutes into the song there's a classic Neil Young and Crazy epiphany that explodes with beauty.
"Loose Change" starts out optimistically, but becomes is a quest for something that is never found. It's like a cry for the sun during a horribly dark and gloomy day and, no matter how powerful the cry, the sun never seems to break through. About half way through the song, it's as if Neil and Crazy Horse get stuck in the mud, and the river just goes round and round the same notes. I've read somewhere that this part of the song was a sort of an aural wake for David Briggs, a long time collaborator and friend of Neil's.
"Slip Away" makes me thing of the great jams of the seventies (I was only a kid then) that are missing in the instant-gratification I-Pod stuffing music of today. Almost symphonic in scale, it's long, abstract, and has moments of true profundity.
Some folks have criticized the rest of the songs as throwaways, but they're not. The dark river runs through each of them and, although they seem lighter and more tuneful, oddly transcendent images of old souls flying through darkness ("Scattered) and not being asleep when he's lying down ("This Town") abound.
The last song on the album, "Baby What You Want From Me", sounds like a bootleg recorded from the back of a small but noisy bar while Neil and Crazy Horse were playing. The band is distant and you hear a lot of the clatter of drinks clinking. There's one part where someone in the audience actually says, "Where's the door?" When listening to this song with my friends, we'd wait for that line to come. Somehow it fits in with the song and finishes the album with a strong sense of otherworldliness.
Broken Arrow is Neil and Crazy Horse at their slow, dark, turgid best. It's not for surface dwellers, but once you get caught up in its powerful undercurrents, you will never be able to leave.

1. Big Time
2. Loose Change
3. Slip Away
4. Changing Highways
5. Scattered
6. This Town
7. Music Arcade
8. Baby What You Want Me To Do (Live)