Earth (2016)

Only Neil, right?

Neil and Promise of the Real embarked on a long tour called “Rebel Content” in 2015, which featured The Monsanto Years prominently in music and in the stage show. Farmers sowed seeds and then hazmat wearing workers came out and sprayed them (you can hear some of this on the three hour plus Ziggo Dome performance if you have a Neil Young Archives subscription). And Neil got into the act throwing packets of seeds to the crowd (technically breaking the law). Not only that, but the shows featured specialty tents on farming, ecology, GMOs, and social justice. To document this tour, we have Earth. Ostensibly a double live album, it nonetheless features overdubs of some light effects and choruses (something he’s been doing since Rust Never Sleeps), but also animal sounds. Yep, bees, birds, cows, wolves, it’s all here. Sometimes it feels natural, sometimes it feels like a joke. Let’s unravel this. No danger of Neil hanging up on us here.

In various interviews, Neil has described this mix of live music and wildlife as a movie for the ears, where the perspective is from the animals and insects. For myself, I get a sense of watching an outdoor concert with wildlife all around me. Which is neat, but also the reality of that can be quite annoying in practice. Thematically all of the included songs follow the theme of earth and ecology. That’s good and thoughtful, and some of these performances are even great. As a whole, though, I’m not sure this works as well as he wanted it to. I’ve heard music that incorporates field recordings like Jacaszek and Deaf Center have done that works a lot better because it’s more integrated, but I can’t deny the smile on my face hearing roosters punctuate “Country Home.”

Due to the amount of non-The Monsanto Years songs on this live album and tour, I’ve read snarky comments that Promise of the Real is akin to the greatest Neil Young cover band in existence. So great they have the actual artist in the band! There’s some truth to that when you hear their renditions of classic Neil songs (especially with the congas and bongos peppering songs that didn’t previously have them; I get college visions of quad drum circles from those bongos…shudder). They bring a different vibe to the songs, younger, but also with less edge. Neil’s cadre of bands have always had a magic imperfection. Whether it’s Stray Gators, Santa Monica Flyers, or Crazy Horse (“That’s why we don’t wanna be good”), there’s a general feel that everything could collapse at any moment. Promise of the Real feels like a curated machine in comparison. They play well, perhaps “better,” but also controlled.

Storms and frogs open up “Mother Earth” which is also overdubbed with studio backing vocals (Neil chose singers that primarily sing jingles and told them to sing optimistically, even when chanting corporation names). It’s not bad per se, but I miss Crazy Horse’s harmonies. As the song closes out, a frenzy of bees swarms into the new song “Seed Justice,” which really rips, to be honest. It’s blunt, but with a memorable chorus and the guitars are fantastic. During the breakdown, birds chirp up and it somehow fits right in (the cows mooing less so). The always welcome “Country Home” has a great showing here, complete with roosters responding to the guitars. Again, I miss Crazy Horse’s harmony on this, a favorite song. You can immediately tell it’s a different band and it feels weird. Having someone else join on lead guitar will always be strange with Neil, too. Lukas Nelson just has a different style and sound.

“The Monsanto Years” is appropriately present on this collection and I have to say it’s an inferior version, the overdubbed backing vocals and overbearing bursts of bees, crowds, and traffic lessening the tragedy and seriousness of the original. Showing Promise of the Real’s deftness with Neil’s catalog, the Sleeps with Angels song “Western Hero” shows up. That album doesn’t appear a lot in live shows. They do a good job with this anti-corporation song (although still not into the overdubbed backing vocals). Horses and crows fade us out into a truly wild “Vampire Blues” from On the Beach (with Neil’s vocal all over the place, and an overdubbed “Chevron, Chevron” as the refrain), followed by a gritty “Hippie Dream” from Landing on Water. That’s a brace of rarely featured albums. That alone makes Promise of the Real a cool era in Neil’s catalog. They can play dozens of his songs, giving them their own stamp, and letting Rusties relive some of these old favorites live. It’s also a trilogy of topical songs, anti-corporation, anti-oil, and a quietly vicious condemnation of people giving up on the progressive dreams of the 60s and 70s.

I haven’t been too sold on the overdubbing up until this point, but there’s one incredibly cool use on “After the Gold Rush.” Neil overdubs the flugelhorn by Bill Peterson from the original recording into his piano led live performance. When he gets to the line “Look at Mother Nature on the run…” he updates the second half to “in the twenty-first century” to a noticeable crowd response. He’s been updating that line for the past few decades, but it still gets people to notice (“I felt like getting high” always gets the louder response, of course). Of all songs, he should have left the backing vocals off of this one. It’s too special and they rob it of its elegiac atmosphere. “Human Highway” is one of the best moments on Earth, a place where all the elements work well. The band feels really at home with this song, and it sounds like the band is actually doing the backing vocals instead of the overdubbed group. I even like the added percussion on this. There’s something comforting about this song, one of Neil’s staples that I have found new appreciation for over the past year.

Next we get a triptych of The Monsanto Years songs, “Big Box,” “People Want to Talk About Love,” and “Wolf Moon.” Of these three, the last is the only one that is noticeably improved by the live rendition. The first two are pretty close matches, with perhaps some more wild abandon on the guitar solos, but let down by excessive overdubbing in places. Particularly, the overdubbed vocal by DRAM on “People Want to Talk About Love” is bizarre and ruins an otherwise great performance. I can only imagine this came about because DRAM and Neil were collaborating on a (not good) song for the movie Bright.

When you look at this collection and see it closes with a 28 minute “Love and Only Love,” it immediately intrigues you. This is a song Neil has been playing in nearly every concert since it debuted (there’s 321 performances of it noted on Sugar Mountain). It makes sense, it’s Neil’s purest message and gives him a lot of freedom to get loose. This is quite a version, too. Lukas and Neil trade solos all over the song, and it ends in a very long breakdown before fading off into earth and animal sounds. That said, I really dislike the constant conga/bongo percussion throughout. They are weirdly louder on this song than on any other song and it feels too much. While the overdubbed backing vocals are more subtle on this, they are clearly added in and I just can’t understand it, personally. The magic moments of this epic recording come 10-12 minutes in when Neil starts playing with feedback and distortion, creating a sonic mind field for the rest of the band. The (first) breakdown comes around the 15 minute mark and that’s when you start to wonder just what happens in the next 13 minutes. Well, it’s a long drawn out denouement complete with overdubbed backing vocals, strung out guitars, sporadic percussion, and the jungle slowly taking over. Neil bids goodbye with a final resounding crash and then there are two minutes of roosters and chickens melding with applause before we get crickets and the annoying resurgence of the studio backing singers. Seagulls caw into the fadeout.

This collection of live songs presented as Earth would have been just as effective without all the overdubs. If only he had released a “raw” version of this, too.

Top 3:

1. Human Highway
2. Country Home
3. Seed Justice

Cut song: the overdubs, of course

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