GIVE ME STRENGTH!

To celebrate the imminent arrival of Hitchhiker – 41 years late! – Uncut takes a revelatory trip inside the archives of Neil Young. Our mission? To piece together some of rock’s most legendary lost albums: Homegrown, Chrome Dreams, Oceanside-Countryside, Island In

The Sun, Meadow Dusk, Times Square, Toast and more. Tyler Wilcox forensically pieces together the alternate discography all Neil fans have dreamed of for decades. “Quite often I’ll record things that don’t fit with what I’m doing,” as Young said, “so I just hold onto them for a while…”

A S early as 1978, the rumour mill was already churning in regards to Neil Young’s unprecedented stash of unreleased material. Before an intimate solo show at San Francisco’s Boarding House, some of the era’s leading rock critics – Paul Nelson, John Rockwell and Cameron Crowe – traded breathless tales about 175 songs that Young had discarded, entire albums cast aside, hours upon hours of incandescent live tapes resting in the vaults. Almost 40 years later, Young’s stash has only grown. “There’s quite a few albums,” Young admitted to Uncut in 2012. “Sometimes I finish things and I go, ‘I don’t want to put this out. I don’t want to put it out now.’ But that’s a different thing from playing it. Making it.” Young continued by updating Uncut on the status of Toast, an album he’d recorded with Crazy Horse more than a decade earlier that remains unreleased to this day. “Toast is a good record, it’s a very dark record,” he said. “Some people are not going to like it, some people are going to really like it. We’ve mastered it. It’s ready to go. It’s not a perfect record, but it’s really an essential record. But I don’t want to get in the way of what I’m doing right now. There’ll be a time for it.” Toast fell on and off the schedules, a victim of Young’s unpredictable and hyper-productive creative energies, meaning that barely one project can be finished before he is already off to the next one. It’s resurgence in 2012 seemed implicitly connected to Young’s return to active service with Crazy Horse for Americana and Psychedelic Pill; but once Young had moved back to solo projects, Toast was no longer germane. But Toast was not the first example of such creative restlessness. Young has a tendency to announce archival releases and then put it on hold – in some cases indefinitely – for new material. One such album is Hitchhiker. A previously unreleased record from 1976, Hitchhiker was rumoured to be finally on the schedules for summer 2017; instead, Young released “Children Of Destiny”, his latest collaboration with Promise Of The Real. Hitchhiker is rumoured to be out later this year; but still remains one of many lost albums that remain unheard in full.

Clearing away the cobwebs that have gathered around these records is no mean feat. But clues are there to be found, and following them gives us an alternate timeline – a tantalising secret history of Neil Young’s life and work, no less, stretching through lost albums like Homegrown, Odeon-Budokan, Hitchhiker, Chrome Dreams, OceansideCountryside, Island In The Sun, Old Ways 1, Meadow-Dusk, Times Square and Toast. “I’m sure he values those songs and how well he sang,” says Elliot Mazer, who produced Homegrown and Old Ways 1. “He just loves what he knows.”

“Quite often I’ll record things that don’t fit with what I’m doing, so I just hold onto them for a while,” Young explained to Uncut. “Some of them are so strong that they destroy what I’m doing, and I really don’t want that to happen. It’s like if you have a bunch of kids and one of them weighs 200 pounds and the other ones are 75 pounds, you’ve got to keep things in order so they don’t hurt each other. That’s why I hold certain things back.”

ALTHOUGH the span of these unreleased albums reaches into the Noughties, it is no surprise that the bulk of them originated during Young’s fecund ’70s. Since it was first mentioned in 1975,

Homegrown has become legendary among diehard fans as the ultimate unreleased album in Young’s canon. To some collaborators, writers and close friends, it’s one of Young’s finest, most nuanced works. “I think that to Neil, Homegrown was Harvest part two,” says Mazer, who produced both albums. “But it wasn’t Harvest. It was something else.”

Homegrown was teased as part of a forthcoming Neil Young Archives Special Release Series back in 2010. Though it remains unreleased, Young continues to remain optimistic that it will eventually see the light of day. “I really think Homegrown is one of my best albums,” he wrote in his memoir, Special Deluxe. “And I hope it gets out there in its original form someday.” The roots of Homegrown are knotted into his relationship with the actress Carrie Snodgress. She inspired Harvest’s “A Man Needs A Maid” as well as some of Young’s most lovestruck ballads, including “Love In Mind” and “The Bridge”. Domestic bliss was not forthcoming for the pair, however. After the deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and CSNY roadie Bruce Berry, Young spent the bulk of 1973 in a Jose Cuervoinduced haze. “Danny was a singer, songwriter and played guitar,” Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot told Uncut. “So did Neil. And both had deep feelings and intelligence. They were both very passionate people.” When he wasn’t careening wildly through tours in America and the UK, Young was in the studio recording the introspective Tonight’s The Night and On The Beach. “I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow,” he promised on “Motion Pictures”, from On The Beach, a song subtitled with a dedication to Snodgress. In early, 1974, however, Snodgress left Young. He was shattered – but inspired. On “Star Of Bethlehem”, the feelings of betrayal and bitterness are writ large, in spite of the easygoing nature of the music. “All your dreams and lovers won’t protect you/They’re only passing through you in the end/They’ll leave you stripped of all that they can get to/And wait for you to come back again.” The dirge-like “Separate Ways” is still unreleased but was performed live occasionally in the 1990s and 2000s with both Booker T & The MG’s and Crazy Horse. “That one is him and Carrie splitting up, no question,” confirms Mazer. Certainly, the lyrics are unashamedly autobiographical. “Though we go our separate ways/Lookin’ for better days/Sharin’ our little boy/Who grew from joy back then.” A rendition of the lullaby “Barefoot Floors” by Young has never surfaced, but a cover by Nicolette Larson gives us a glimpse into its author’s haunted, sleepless state: “Love, baby, love/Has got me walking on these barefoot floors.” The piano-led “Try”, meanwhile, has a rollicking feel that’s belied by the nature of its subject matter: Carrie Snodgress’ mother, who had recently committed suicide. There was room for a vein of dark, self-loathing humour as well. “Love/Art Blues” paints a sardonic portrait of Young’s inability to reconcile the two main draws of his life, while the narrator of “Homefires” finds his mind drifting from one lover to another: “I’m free to give my love/But you’re not the one I’m thinking of.”

IN May 1974, Young showed up at New York City’s Bottom Line for an unannounced solo set. It has become an all-time favourite among aficionados, thanks to an audience tape that’s been bootlegged endlessly over the years. Though the bulk of the songs came from the just-released On The Beach, Young also debuted “Pardon My Heart”, an ambiguous, meditative ballad that showed up on 1975’s Zuma. “It’s a fallen situation, when all eyes are turned in,” he sang in a fragile voice over delicate fingerpicked guitar. “And a love isn’t flowing, the way it could have been.” More pointed was Young’s version of “Greensleeves”, with rewritten lyrics that seems aimed directly at Snodgress: “Alas, my love, you do me wrong/By treating me so curiously.” Another brand-new song, “Pushed It Over The End”, fell further into darkness. Ostensibly based on the Patty Hearst saga, then grabbing headlines across the country, the words still seemed

“Toast is ready to go. It’s not a perfect record, but it’s an essential one” NEil yoUNg