"Down by the River", by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. The deeper I descend into this perilous Neil Young phase of mine, the more I get the feeling that Young, like Dylan, is not an artist who can, or even wants to, be defined in terms of individual albums. Rather, he puts out albums as occasional collections of Songs Wot I Wrote. In this respect, "Decade" works for Young as "Biograph" worked for Dylan (and as the new "Dylan" set doesn't), as a much better summary of (one part of) a career. Note the extensive inclusion, in both cases, of non-album and even unreleased tracks, not the usual fare for retrospectives of Big Name Artists.
Anyway, of Neil Young's "major" albums, "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" comes perhaps closest to embodying a unified aesthetic vision. It may well be a mess, but it is a mess that is all of one type. And it is frequently a glorious mess. Nowhere more so than "Down by the River", 11 minutes of twin-guitar grind. Back in the late 1970s, when I used to read Rolling Stone from cover to cover, someone once wrote, I think in relation to "Rust Never Sleeps", that Crazy Horse are a band that manage to sound fast by playing slow. Or something like that. (The particular reference may have been to "Welfare Mothers".) I think this song also gives an clue as to what that writer was getting at; and that he or she (most likely he) wasn't far from the mark, notwithstanding how ridiculous it seemed to me when I read it.
