Time Fades Away (1973)

This song [“Heart of Gold”] put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I met more interesting people there. (Neil Young, Decade)

The massive success of “Heart of Gold” resulted in Elliot Roberts booking Neil on a 63 show tour to support Harvest. Not only was Neil struggling with the success itself, but a life altering tragedy would strike as a direct result. He assembled the Stray Gators for rehearsals in late 1972, but also invited Danny Whitten (Harvest didn’t have a regular rhythm guitar player in the core group). Since parting ways with Neil and Crazy Horse, Whitten had steadily become more and more addicted to heroin. After trying to clean up, Neil was convinced Whitten could play on the tour and be great again. However, the rehearsals at Broken Arrow ranch were awful and Neil ended up firing Whitten, sending him back to Los Angeles with $50. The very same night, November 18, 1972, Whitten died of an overdose of alcohol and Valium. The police found no ID, just a note with Neil’s number on it. The next day, Neil wrote “Don’t Be Denied,” one of his most personal songs, an ode to hardship and perseverance.

While Neil was already penning new songs to play on the tour, Whitten’s death combined with the mounting pressure of fame to cast a decidedly un-Harvest pale over the tour. There was no longer a miner for a heart of gold going out on tour, there was an increasingly intoxicated, bitter and guilt-ridden artist exorcising his demons out on stage. The entire band followed suit and the tour become one long booze-filled fight against the crowds there to see a gentle country-folk troubadour pleasantly crooning about love. You can hear the slurring, the meandering, the aggression and frustration. So, of course, Neil decided to record the whole tour and make his album out of the recordings. Neil once said that Danny Whitten was the one guy he felt he could play guitar with perfectly (their intertwining on Everybody Knows This is Nowhere is proof of it) and the sloppy, anguished muck of Time Fades Away is like when a children breaks their favorite toys because they don’t know how to process their emotions. (To top it off, Old Black had lost a pickup and Neil, thinking he could sound like Lonnie Mack, toured with a Flying V that wouldn’t stay in tune.)

A big reference to Whitten’s death is in the opening title track, which goes from singing about “Fourteen junkies” to “Thirteen junkies” over the course of the song. This ramshackle honky tonk is one of the sides of Neil I like the most, with a crazy piano by Jack Nitzsche and Neil’s interplay with Ben Keith’s slide guitar giving the impression of a car going slowly out of control. “Time Fades Away” marks the beginning of what fans have called the “Ditch Trilogy,” directing referencing Neil’s quote about heading for the ditch. As the first song of the trilogy, it has all the hallmarks of everything that follows after: wild abandon, dark themes, and clear inebriation. Curveballs are also one of those hallmarks, and the reflective “Journey Through The Past” fits the bill. Sonically, it has a lot in common with “After The Gold Rush,” but features Neil wistful instead of prescient.

Towards the end of the Time Fades Away tour, Neil’s voice was becoming shredded from all the drinking screaming, and he brought out David Crosby to supplement his vocals. That’s who introduces “Yonder Stands the Sinner” as “kind of experimental.” His voice, however, does nothing to mask the absolutely unhinged and destroyed voice of Neil. A diatribe directed at the phoniness of preachers, he dubbed this “bible rock” and once said he wrote it for The Coasters. It’s a funky number that could be great, if not for the strained sound of all involved. Another funky song is “L.A.,” Neil’s apocalyptic fantasy about a destroyed Los Angeles. It’s scathing about the uptight people blissfully unaware of the phoniness being swallowed up by smog and earthquakes. The sneering chorus “don’t you wish you could be here, too” is memorable. “Love in Mind” is a somewhat a companion to “Journey Through The Past” in it’s gentle beauty with Neil on piano again. When he played this song at the BBC Harvest show, he suggested it was about a lady he used to call while on the road and talk to for hours. He fell in love with this person without ever meeting her, and the lyrics reflect that unrequited love from a distance.

The most enduring song from this album, the one Neil would come to play throughout his career with regularity, is that song he wrote the day after Danny Whitten’s overdose death. “Don’t Be Denied” is a song I didn’t know until recently, having never heard Time Fades Away growing up with my dad’s records (no surprise, this record was buried and out of print for decades). In many ways, “Don’t Be Denied” is Neil’s magnum opus, his statement piece, intensely personal and honest. In this song, Neil tries to understand the hardships that lead to Danny’s addiction by processing the divorce of his parents, being bullied in school for his fashion sense, struggling to make it in music, his mounting guilt over being “a millionaire through a businessman’s eyes.” He paraphrases Shakespeare: “All that glitters isn’t gold” to remind listeners that appearances are deceiving, and you may not know the private struggles others hide. All throughout, the chorus “Don’t be denied” rings out with increasing desperation. Despite the circumstances surrounding it’s composition and recording, it’s a remarkable song for its insightful and harsh look. The beat is relentless, the guitar riff inescapable, the piano foreboding, doom and determination mixed up together.

While “The Bridge” is a beautiful and quite song, I think the studio version on Neil Young Archives Vol. 2 is overall a better take. It’s also unfair for it to be sandwiched between “Don’t Be Denied” and the epic final song “Last Dance.” If it wasn’t for the undeniable lyrics of the former, “Last Dance” would be my top song from Time Fades Away. It’s played for the rafters, unhinged, drawn out, with Neil vamping wildly in the second half of a nearly nine-minutes. While it seems to laud the lackadaisical hippie lifestyle, there’s a bit of warning behind it. Get your act together and do something with your life or it will be wasted just lying around. The mournful “oh nos” that cap the chorus is all the proof you need he’s not extolling the virtues of a lazy life. One thing Neil is not is lazy, after all. By the time he starts repeating “no no no” and “negative negative” in the last minute, you almost wonder if he’s unraveling on stage. He was. And it wouldn’t stop once the tour was over.

Top 3:

1. Don’t Be Denied
2. Last Dance
3. Time Fades Away

Cut song: The Bridge

For years, Neil talked about Time Fades Away II that would be included in the second volume of his Archives. No one really know what this meant, since he had called the original album his worst record and couldn’t imagine him releasing more from the tour. What was released in the end is called Tuscaloosa, a recording of most of a stop in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In contrast to Time Fades Away, you get performances of many of his past songs from the first three albums, including half of the Harvest album. This stop was earlier in the tour so maybe he was more amiable and the band wasn’t at each other’s throats yet. The Harvest material fares decently well, but Neil is clearly drunk during a lot of it already. “Don’t Be Denied” is drawn out and wildly dramatic, but “Out On The Weekend” and “Harvest” show some light. That said, there’s an audible sense that Neil’s heart wasn’t in singing “the hits” required of him on this tour.

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