Love To Burn
Twenty years on, the long-awaited Toast – and it’s very well-done, says Sylvie Simmons.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse
★★★★ Toast REPRISE. CD/DL/LP
BARELY HALF a year after Barn, Neil’s second album in a row with the Horse, we have a third. Named for the San Francisco studio where it was recorded in 2001, Toast’s legendary status among Neil’s abandoned albums was up there with Homegrown (1975) until he finally released that record in 2020. It’s interesting the reason Neil gave for shelving Homegrown was the same he gave for Toast: that it was “too sad”. Both concerned love gone wrong, first Carrie Snodgress, then Pegi Young. “I couldn’t handle it at that time,” Neil said. “I just skipped it and went on to do another album in its place.”
That album was Are You Passionate? (2002), made with Booker T And The M.G.’s, the Stax house band he’d been playing with since the mid ’90s. Passionate was hardly a cheer-fest either. Three of its songs were on the original Toast, including Goin’ Home, one of the highlights on both albums and featuring the Horse, not the M.G.’s. Neil knew there was just one band to do justice to a heavy, heartbroken song about Native Americans, General Custer, the Battle of Bighorn and Neil’s own marital battleground.
Toast has just seven tracks, but most are lengthy. Two are epics. Boom Boom Boom, the 13-minute closer, is a strange, slinky-murky song that didn’t make it onto Passionate and might have sounded better there. Gateway Of Love was listed on Passionate’s sleeve, but not actually included on the album; with a melancholy, melodic ’60s pop feel and female backing vocals (Neil’s half-sister Astrid and wife Pegi), it sounds great. Quit, meanwhile, which seems a bit too downtempo and downcast for the role of Toast’s opening song, feels more at home as track four on Passionate.
And the rest? How Ya Doin’ has a slow, doomy intro, a touch of sad ’60s Beach Boys – “that happy glow” – tender vocals and guitar. While Timberline – minor key, grungey guitar intro – tells a strange story that seems to be about a lumberjack who can’t cut trees. But to these ears, the finest moments come when the Horse have a song like Standing In The Light Of Love to cut loose on and set about building that glorious, messy, monolithic sound – in this case, around a riff that sounds an awful lot like Smoke On The Water.
“Where they let me go, where they took me, was unbelievable,” Neil said. “Toast stands on its own in my collection.”