Neil Young's 'Harvest': Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history and little known facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. And we're two guys with too much free time on our hands. My name is Jordan run Tug and I'm Alex Hegel. And today we're gonna take a look at Neil Young's Harvest, which turned fifty years old in February. Now, it's a gorgeous record and probably the one that people think of most when they think of Neil Young, which is actually weird because it's quite possibly the least representative Neil Young record every Yeah, I think before Neil Young started getting like glommed onto by the like Hitchfork Industrial Complex as the elder you know, noisy rock hipster guy, I think I don't know, like when you were growing up, did you have the sense of like the godfather of grunge, because I pretty much only got like the Glowing autumnal Valadi Neil stuff Like. I don't even think I heard Crazy Horse until I was well into like high school. Oh yeah, I definitely got him in the like Laurel Canyon, folky hippie realm through Heart of Gold and Old Man and everything. I mean, I almost get the impression that he put this record out purely to screw with the mainstream record buying public for the next fifty years. Like every time he would put an album out, people didn't really know him, you know, holistically, would buy and they go, oh, is there gonna be another Herd of Gold on this? And then it's like, oh, it's a it's a techno record. That's weird. We gotta do trans at some point, we absolutely gotta do trans Oh my god, or everybody's rocking, Oh god. I love it when it almost seems like he's trying to intentionally wrong foot the people who bought and loved Harvest, and that was like the only thing that they loved from him. But despite its comparatively placid sound, Harvest was recorded during a tumultuous time in New Young's life, between tours, surgeries, and the blossoming of a new romance. So Jordan's why don't you talk us take us back to a golden period in American history that I like to think of, and I hope all of you think of as the ass end of C. S. N. Y. I think we need to do the Wayne's World like time travel sound offending the spinning newspaper somehow comes flying at people's phone that are listening to this. But I think that was the Batman. Yeah, that it was definitely the Batmobile sound. Anyway, prepare yourself because we're about to dive in. You're gonna find out how Neil Young's busted back impacted the sound of the record, which seventies icons had secret singing cameos, and how Neil crushed his father's spirit by divulging the true meaning of the track Old Man. We'll also talk about how some of the songs created a bit of tension with Bob Dylan, Leonard skinnerd and the London Symphony Orchestra. And of course we'll explore the true love story at the heart of this record, Neil Young and his barn. So here we go. This is everything you didn't know about Harvest. So not to use this hoary old critical cliche, but Neil Young was in a weird place at the top of the nineteen seventies. One might even say a crossroads, perhaps a literal one, perhaps a metaphorical one, perhaps a musical one. Certainly the roads were crossing for Neil. I'll stop now. Um So, Neil was in Buffalo Springfield throughout the late sixties, and he was also tacked onto Crosby Stills A Nash, and then he recorded one of the all time debut record under his own name, Flops to My Mind up under lou Reid's first solo debut with the nineteen sixty eight self titled that even for new young completists, they seemed to disregard this record. So I don't know you you differ. I love this record. I mean I love that kind of like art pop, you know. I mean for me, all those Jack nietzsch arrangements. So like if Phil Specter produced the Buffalo Speingfield record, I mean you could draw a line between the amazing Buffalo Springfield track Expecting to Fly in this record. I'm Expecting the Flies one of my favorite Buffalo Springfield songs. And maybe it's because I came to kneel through all the kind acoustic e folky stuff and then hearing it with this like huge lush the orchestrated backing, instrumental arrangements and everything, it just feels so incongruous to me. That I kind of like it for almost like perverse reasons. But I love that record, but I know that's a, you know, extremely in a minority opinion. Yeah, I don't think Neil even shares that opinion because he follows up that self title by going the complete opposite direction. He picks up Crazy Horse, one of the all time sophisticated primitive groups. I love Crazy Horse, but you know, if you want to talk about a band of people who are very good at doing very simple things, it's like them. It's like them in the Stooges anyway, one of the best backhanded compliments I've ever heard. I mean, it's great, They're like, it's just there a garage rock band who happened to sing like do wo harmonies. Anyway, we should also talk about you know, everybody knows this is nowhere because that record is great, but it is a total left turn from the self title one. And then the next year he sort of expands on that sound with After the gold Rush, which has only Love Can Break Your Heart, which is his sort of first big hit under his big name, and elements of this record I do think kind of prefigure Harvest. So I don't know how you feel about that. I kind of see what you're saying about that. I feel like there's more of a sentimental heart in it than in everybody knows this is nowhere? Is it true that only love can break your heart? Is about when Joni Mitchell broke up with Graham Nash. That's what I heard that was about, which seems like, again like kind of an uncharacteristically sentimental thing for Neil to do. I mean, Neil is you want to talk about a study in contrast, You know, Neil Young is one of the most sentimental, nakedly emotional guys who can also be just a real bag of dicks, just can be a real jerk to people. Yeah, according to Shaky, that Jimmy McDonough book, which is like canonical, like the error text of Neil Young that's been handed down from Laurel Canyon to two new Young scholars. That's what he says. It's shaky, So I believe McDonough anyway. Also, in nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy one, you have CSN Wise, A JA Vou and four Way Street, A lot of which is a live live album called from performances that took place in the middle of nineteen seventy, so those come out in nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy one. But it's actually Neil's inability to continue playing live in the way that in the manner to which he had become accustomed, that sort of provides the impetus for harvest. So basically, by late nineteen seventy, as hopefully you can glean from even this wildly digressive summary of his past few years, Neil is very fried, and not just mentally. He had bought this big ranch up near to San Francisco in August nineteen seventy and he is sort of bumbling around the ranch, tries to pick up a big old piece of heavy wood, and in the in the spirit of thousands, if not millions, of wealthy white people who tried to do working class since then, he just messed up his back. And um, you know, Neil also had polio when he was a kid, just like Joni Mitchell. Um his childhood friends or his teenage childhood Frannish say, yeah, Canadian buddies, and so that had already kind of impacted his kind of chunky the way he gets around on guitar, not a virtuoso by any stretch, but can do all kinds of wonderful, wonderful things, obviously, but this back injury couples with his polio, and well, I guess we should back up a little bit and talk about Broken Arrow Ranch before we get into the rest of New Young's the convalescence phase. Broken Our Ranch is one of my favorite elements of the Neil Young, you know, myth. It was named for the Buffalo Springfield song. And when he bought it, it was fifteen hundred acre property, which is just gargantulan. I think he sold some of it, some of the property in later years, but it's still is this huge compound, and it involves this insanely circuitous route of like Redwoodline private roads to get to the Mayn house. And David Crosby called that his human filtration system because it required a tremendous amount of know how just to get to the house. And you finally arrive at this homestead and there's this massive complex of buildings that includes one building just for his collection of toy trains. He loves model trains, loves trains, loves model trains. There is another building that just houses his extensive collection of vintage cars. There's another that houses his master recordings for like the twenty plus records he's recorded in the studio that he made in his barn. And there's a great profile by the late great David carr U about ten years ago that describes Broken A Ranch as an open air fortress of eccentricity. But yeah, hell right after he bought it in like late seventy yearly seventy one, and he was screwing around moving a hunk of walnut or something and he messed up his back. Yeah, I think it's funny because Neil Young sort of the rest of csn Y. You know, Stills wears like football jerseys, and David Crosby and you know new Young kind of look like wizards. But those guys made so much damn money. They made so much money. And uh, that's why you know that you can afford a acre ranch with buildings just for your toy train collection. All of which is to say, Neo messes up his back and he cannot carry around his Gibson. Less Paul, which is another part of the sacred Neal texts, is old Black, his favorite less Paul and less Paul's are heavy guitars. They are very heavy. Now you think of all these like stick thin dudes playing them, like Pete Townsend and Jimmy Page, and then you strap one of those things on and it feels like you shoulder to Bazuka. So he couldn't even stand up to play either. So basically he starts playing a bunch of shows seated, which is as God intended it. The best way to play music standing is for Rubes. And he's playing with a Martin d fort acoustic and this is, uh, you know, one of Martin's flagship models, one of the most famous acoustic guitar models ever made, and the same year one they would actually produce more of their Dwight model, which is their other flagship, than at any other point in their history. And this is basically because of folk and folk rock, you know, the fallout from that scene of the past five years, everybody went out and bought about a Martin. So Neil is tooling around Canada in the US doing shows, solo acoustic shows. In a late nineteen seventy and in January v one he plays two of the most iconic Neil solo acoustic shows. There's the set at Toronto's Massey Hall, which is perfect start to finish. It's its own record. It's beautiful. Everyone go check out Near Young Live at Massey Hall and a u c l A Show, which I believe has also been released. But that show, the u c l A Show, is the show from which the Needle and the Damage Done off Harvest is drawn from. And this is probably a good point to touch on the background of the Needle and the Damage Done, which, for those of you who might not know, it's a fairly famous story. Uh. And it's a haunting song because it's essentially a eulogy for a friend written while this person was still alive, which is really scary. Young roaded about Danny Witten, who was one of the founding members of Crazy Horse, and he was very influential on much of Young's work proceeding Harvest, and Danny by seventeen seventy one was struggling with a heroin addiction, and that's obviously what the song is about. And Neil apparently attempted daily one on one lessons to try to rehabilitate his friend, and that's what the song Needle and Damage Done is about. And uh. Later After Harvest was released in the fall of seventy two and they were doing the tour to promote Harvest, Neil went out on tour with Crazy Horse and he brought Whitten, and I think he had Neil's Lofgren as a backup guitarist because Danny Whitten really wasn't a hundred percent And during rehearsals for that tour, Whitten was so strung out on heroin that he couldn't even hold up his guitar. So Neil basically fired him. He gave him fifty bucks, you know, really just to get him back home to Los Angeles, and I guess the day he reached Los Angeles, Danny Whitten overdosed on the alcohol and valium. And you know, years later, Neil was talking to his biographer Jimmy McDonough and he said he really felt responsible for Whitten's death and it took him years to stop him and himself. I guess he made this this really sucinct statement about Needle and the damage done in the lighter notes to the compilation record Decade. I'm not a preacher, but drugs killed a lot of great man and one of them was his friend Danny Whitten interesting that he performed the song at Live AID, which, yeah, that was a strange choice, a lot more like anthemic songs. Really people chose for that performance. But Neil loves wrecking the room. That's his favorite thing to do. Comes in, assesses the vibe does the opposite in his discography in actual rooms in concerts. I love him for it. But you know in lighter news, uh, you know. The other big thing that goes into Harvest is an actress named Carrie Snodgrass and she sort of kneels mused for the record. Really he saw Diary of a Mad Housewife at the behest of his roadie Guillermo get germ uh Germachetti. I guess jet Eddie, I don't know. I'm Italian, I shouldn't have Sicilian relatives are rolling over. I know, I know, it's really embarrassing. Um. So this so very on tour in d C in December nineteen seventy and Garmo says, hey, Neil, let's go take in this movie. And this is actually about two months after Young's first wife, Susan Assavedo, files for divorce. But you know, I wanta talk about Carrie Snodgrass for a moment. Her career kind of gets glossed over in the Neil story. But I mean, she got an Oscar nomination for her role in the Die of a Madhousewife. She was a big deal at the time. I feel like that bears absolutely, particularly when you get to the idea that she doesn't know who he is. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Neil Young is, you know, he's smitten, and so he sends Garmo and another roadie, Bruce Berry, and they go to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where Snodgrass is performing in a play called Rose Bloom. And this is this period of history when you could get away with doing stuff like this. They just got to do her dressing room and left a note that says called Neil Young on her table. But she doesn't even know who he is, so her roommate clues are in, Oh, yeah, Neil Young. He was in this band Buffalo spring Field and Crosby Stills, Nash wrote a couple of songs. Anyway, their first date does not set things up for success, because they go to Young's room at the Chateau Marmont, which is a famously debauched hotel that all manner of horrible has happened at. It's where John Belushi, oh did, Yeah, it's I'm sure many others that I can't think of offhand, but yeah, it is certainly extremely haunted. We should do an episode on the Chateau Marman actually, oh big time. Yeah. It was a great book by I forget who wrote it was a great history about Chateau My Mom that came out a few years ago. I think his name is Nick Levy. Uh, incredible book anyway. Yeah, so their first date happens in Young's room at the Chateau mar Mom, and he is confined to bed and wearing a neck brace which sparks clearly flew um Nono. Grass would tell Jimmy McDonough that her big memory from their date is how stoned they got. They were smoking Panama Red Baby, and she got so high that she got lost driving home and had to pull over and go to sleep. But despite that in auspicious beginning to use an old cliche, things end up working out, and Snodgrass moves onto Broken Arrow in one bringing apparently quite the entourage with her, including her mother. And although Neil had started writing a lot of harvest getting the material together before they met. He wrote in ten that the bulk of this record was written for or about Carrie Snodgrass, a wonderful actress in person, and she would go on to give birth to their son Zeke in two Yeah, and for years Neil was kind of cag about her influence on a lot of these songs. I mean, it seems really obvious on a song like a Man Needs a Maid, with lines like a while ago somewhere, I don't know. When I was watching a movie with a friend, I fell in love with the actress. She was paying a part that I could understand. But when Jimmy McDonough, I guess was asking him about that song, uh, and just asked her about Carrie's influence on it, Neil just said, well, she's in there, which is a very very neal explanation. Um. But then it features a song like heart of Gold, which comes from such a restless and unsettled place, and I'm searching for a heart of gold and I'm getting old, and even just like a brief glance at the lyrics, it makes you wonder kind of if he was all that committed to that relationship or if, like he says in the song, he was still searching. I mean they that relationship ultimately didn't pan out. They broke up a few years later. But uh yeah, it's interesting to try to get into the well. Getting into the Neil Young psychology is a dangerous place to be. I mean, I feel like we could die if we tried. But um yeah, I mean, Neil is an unreliable narrator at best. Obviously, he has been extremely open about his lifelong marijuana use, and he also just kind of seems to get a kick out of scream with his own legacy. So take almost everything he says with some portion of salt. And having said all that, we'll be right back with more too much information right after this. So Harvest is not even planned to be Harvest. Harvest is planned by the label to be a double live album, and Reprise actually went so far as to release a track list for this proposed album. I guess yeah. Through the press um, sam Angus writes that in the Harvest thirty three and a third and basically his hypothesis is that the release of C S N Y S four Way Street preempts that they don't want to flood the zone with enormous, bloated live albums that feature overlap between members. So by February of seventy one, new Young is in Nashville. He's there to tape an appearance on the Johnny Cash Show along with fellow Folky rising stars James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. And this proposed live album has been sunk. It's dead in the water. So he doesn't know what he's doing next, but he's in Nashville, and you know, Neil Young does kind of live a charmed life because he basically stumbles into the core of this record. And a lot of that story begins with a guy named Elliott Maser who is a New York native who had relocated to Nashville and created his own studio called Quadrophonic Sound Studios in a little two story Victorian just off Nashville's Music Row. Yeah, I mean, this place really pushes the definition of Holmey to its limits. The control room was the old porch of the house, the living room in the dining room where the two live rooms where people played, and the kitchen became like the drum area. And it was called Quadrophonic as a joke because it was the quadrophonic was the most technologically advanced sound at the time of his stereo, which is to quadraphonic is four speakers, and this was like the most stripped down place you could make a record that you could imagine. It's like calling it electrically Land that's just always filled with dudes. So Maser is also he's a known quantity in the industry because he's cut two albums of instrumentals with I don't want to call him a ragtag group, but they're kind of a thrown together band of session musicians called Area Code, which is a self explanatory name. Let's explain it. I just google it. I don't have time to come on time as money people, It's the Nashville area Code. So these guys have played on Blonde on Blonde, They've played on Nashville Skyline, they have played all over on god knows how many records, and so Maser is running in this circle and he kind of has his eye on New Young because he knows he's in town Johnny Cash show taping that was a big thing. So all of these industry guys are floating around and Maser decides to throw a dinner party and he invites Neil with like fifty other people. I feel like it should be said, I mean, this is like a big group of like the who's who of Nashville insiders. I'm reasonably certain James Taylor and Lena Ronstad also came too. I mean, this was a big event. At some point, Neil Young says, hey, man, I'm into those Area Code six one five records? Is it six or six? They really are? Yeah, they are great records, and so that's all Neil needs. As it becomes the theme in his career, he goes, I'm gonna make a record, and people are like, cool, how do you want to, Like, like, let's talk about it, and he's like, no, I want to make a record now. So this is a Saturday night and uh, Maser just decides to get as many guys as he can together because it's a Saturday night and Nashville session players record all during the week, eight hours a day. So on the Saturday, what do they do? Jordan's uh, well, on the weekends they go fishing a lot. So we actually had a hard time finding people to play with Neil because a lot of them have gun fishing for the weekend. Apparently, but one guy, one guy who didn't go fishing, is bassist Tim Drummond, who Maser told b M I in two thousand seven they literally found walking down the street. I believe it's another music industry photographer who was just out on the street and saw Tim rolling down the stream was like, hey, you look like you can play some bass, Like, come on, come on down, And as luck would have it, they found the only white guy who ever played in James Brown's famous flames, the only guy. Wow, I didn't realize that is that is what I That is what I have heard. I have not cross referenced the entirety of James Brown's employee records, which I do have access to through a Freedom of Information after request. I have not cross reference that, but that is what I've heard. So imagine again, Neil Young leads a charmed life. Imagine you're going to make a record, you can't find a bass player. You find the one white guy who played bass for James Brown walking down the street. Incredible. There's other guys in there, We'll get to them. This band is christened the Stray Gators, Another and another. Neil Young really knocks it out of the park with band names. Um did he name Crazy Horse? I believe so. I assume because he's got that kind of a weird Native American fixation. I assume. I don't want to reach too much into that. So this band, the Stray Gators, records live in the house and they track harvest cuts like Old Man, Bad, Fog of Loneliness, and Dance Dance Dance, although those last two are not the versions that are included on the record, but the second session that they cut does wind up in the basic tracks for Heart of Gold, and Maser says that this song was recorded in one or two takes over the course of about two hours, with Neil just situated in the doorway between the houses old dining room and the living room. And I mean the speed that they did this is really not out of the ordinary for these Nashville session pros. I mean, they knew how to bash this stuff out. And it's kind of a throwback to the old analog days when tape was expensive and it was necessary to conserve and really just kind of get it down quickly. And also, this is not a typical for Neil Young. He kind of doesn't give a damn, like he capturing the moment is so much more crucial to him than capturing a slick track, especially since doing something like Ohio with cs n Y the previous spring in the spring of seventy, which he really was kind of his dispatch on the Kent State massacre and he really wanted to get out immediately and like it was, getting it out like within I think a matter of weeks after the event was was crucial. So that really started him deciding to just get in, get out, let's get these out there. He want one of the electricity and the immediacy of the room to be kind of the most important thing and getting all the notes right. Uh. So he quit bothering with overdubs and you know, reduced basic tracks and just like one or two takes. So he was on the same page with these Nashville players who basically thought that overdubbing was pretty ruinous to the recording process because it just spoiled the spontaneity. And this is a theme that this is Neil Young has done this for his holy career. I mean you there's interviews with the Crazy Horse guys where they're like, yeah, you know, we come in and he runs this song through like twice and then he's like, Yep, that's it. Said's how he rolls. And speaking of the Stray Gators were researching this episode, did you know that members of the Stray Gators, I think Tim Drummond and Kenny Butchery the drummer played on Jewels pieces of the album. I did not. Yeah, I think Spooner Oldham did too, like she had some great players on that. Spooner Spooner is the man. I love that dude. Um So, speaking of Kenny Butchery as we often do, As we often do in times like these, the mind goes to Kenny Butchery again, a guy who played on Nashville Skyline and Blonde and Blonde incredible Bob Dylan records for anyone not familiar, though if you've listened this far you probably are. Um And and Maser called him the kind of drummer that eight engineers alive if they did not get a good drum sound and a good earphone mix, which is so funny because on Harvest he's pretty much reduced to playing kick snare, kick kick snare on almost every song, but like a high coup, there's deceptive complexity in those drum parts, and apparently he was seated over to Neil's right so he could watch his strumming hand to get the timing. But they just kept telling him to play less and less, and Maser and he have both basically said that at one point he was doing so little that he either sat on one of his hands or used the hand that wasn't hitting the snare to keep an eighth note pulse on his thigh. I heard that Neil told him to sit on his hand just so that he did that he would only play with one stick so that it would force him to keep it. I mean, this is the guy who could do anything on the kit, and he's, like you said, he's just keeping time with one hand as per Neil's request. I mean, years later, Butttery was saying that Neil kept saying less is more, less is more. Just that was his mantra during these sessions. I just have to throw this in there. And there's the other instance that I can remember of this is when Joy Division was recording Unknown Pleasures. Martin Hannett, who's like their engineer and famous UK engineer, he uh wanted to get the drum parts as dry as possible, so he made their drummer Stephen Morris record each drum individually, so he it sounds like one tom at the time, like one sna Oh my god, I can't I can't imagine doing it. And so he would keep time on his like thighs while he was just recording like just the snare part or like one tom part. Yeah, I would go insane, but you know, I don't have a good segue for this. Linda Ronstad and James Tayler, we talked about them being in town to tape Johnny Cash Show and which have you seen? It's on YouTube and it's kind of amazing. Neil plays needle and the damage done, but it's preempted by this footage of Johnny Cash kind of like in amongst all these teenagers out in like a park somewhere, and they're throwing all these questions to him about like do you think that marijuana is a gateway drug to heroin? And he's given these really thoughtful, honest responses, like I think he says, like I learned the hard way about drugs like cord to death with it. For a long time, I took my chances, and for a long time I tried anything I was able to try and he's like really getting real with them. It's kind of an amazing bit of film. And then they go to knee all doing that you know, incredibly heavy song, which just is like, I don't know, I mean for nineteen s it's a heavy song to have on network TV. Well, Nashville is also pretty conservative. I can imagine like a bunch of Nashville people being like, this is our anti drug episode. The fact that they get Johnny Cash to be like Johnny Cash I land Speed for four years, which is I guess, you know, he comes from a place with authority. But so ron Staton Taylor are in town. They're all hanging out and Maser has also worked with Linda ron sat before he produced Silk Purse for her in nineteen seventy. So they get invited over to Quadraphonic after they do this show together. They both sing on Old Man and basically the way that they just did this was they were in the control room, which is on the porch, and um Mazer just drags a bunch of speakers into the control room and just sticks a mic in front of them and they just sang along from the couch and I love apparently Linda rons that years later was saying that she's so small, James Taylor is so tall that well, she had the Neil on the couch just to be as tall as James Taylor sitting upright, just so that they could reach the same mike, which I love. Linda runs that so much. Yeah, she's the best adorable story. So they both sing on a Heart of Gold and Old Man, and then Taylor also plays the six string banjo, which is the thing that pops up on Neil's record. It's a banjo that is just tuned like a guitar. It has six strings instead of the usual five. He plays it on four. The turnstiles on on the Beach later, and that's James Taylor's contribution to that record, But Steven Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash actually also all contribute vocals to this um. I had read somewhere that it was these were done in New York, but I'm also reading in the thirty three and a third book that these were tracked at Broken Arrow and that while Nash was there. This gets into the famous Barn story, so we'll have to pick up that later. But in the meantime, we're going to take a little detour. We're gonna take a trip across the pond to get back to the recording of Harvest and one of my least favorite new Young songs. The second part of that recording takes place in London. Young flies in in March to perform on the BBC. And you're a big fan of this this program, Oh yeah, it's called I think it's just called in Concert like BBC in Concert, and it's on YouTube. Definitely check it out. I mean some really like basically every Neil Young documentary you see whenever they're going through the Harvest era pulls clips from this performance. It's really amazing. I think the clips of him doing Old Man are on there. It's really incredible. But the flip side of these incredible performances of the BBC are two of probably the least popular tracks on Harvest, A Man Needs a Maid and There's a World, which saw Neil re team with uh this old producer Jack Nietzsch, who wrote the really elaborate arrangements that I love on his first solo record, and the arrangements that he did on Buffalo Springfield's Expecting the Fly. These arrangements don't really fit as well on Harvest. I don't think I'm alone in saying that. Uh. He wrote these really elaborate orchestral parts for the London Symphony Orchestra that they recorded with the Rolling Stones mobile unit at like a municipal town hall in this London suburb which is kind of like Barking, called Barking in the London suburb of Barking. Neil Young is in this like little town hall building. I can't think of a less Neil Young environment to work in, Like that's so strange to me. And they they laid down these, uh these tracks for a Man Needs a Maid and there's a world I think live with the orchestra, right he's playing with them, Yeah, and it's it's a nightmare. I mean we also have to note that this is recorded by Glenn John's baby, Glenn John's late of the Get Back Beatles documentary The Style Icon. Glenn John's I mean, you know, one of the most legendary producers of all time. I mean, who hasn't he worked with Led Zeppelin, to Who, the Stones, the Beatles, you know, so many But I didn't realize that he did that. I mean, yeah, some times a man has to go back to his roots in Barking. I don't actually know that he's from Barking. I just wanted to say Barking again. But the members of the London Symphony Orchestra, who are perhaps gang pressed into playing this um doesn't seem like anybody had a good time doing this. There's this clip of him telling Nietzsche. He's on the Nietzsche. He's telling Friedrich Knietzsche. Um, he's at the piano and he's kind of having a having a bad time. Neo God is dead and so is this track. But you can see him on the piano and he's saying that it's obvious that the orchestra musicians like they have to hear me. He says they were playing a half beat behind me all the way through the thing. UM which new young angry. Is so funny because it's just like he still has that like detached Canadian this but he's just like swearing at the London Symphony Orchestra from a piano. So surreal. But you know, Neil and Jack's relationship doesn't just extend to a recording studio. Yeah, there's a weird fact about Jack. I always pronounced Jack Niche. I guess. I mean he obviously arranged A Man Needs a Maid, which was inspired, as we said, by Neil's relationship with the actor's Carrie Snodgrass, and she and Neil broke up in the mid seventies, and a few years later Jack Niche actually dated her and it didn't end well, to say the least. He was later sentenced to probation after he beat her with a handgun in nineteen seventy nine. She's probably worth noting that Jack nich got his big break in music working with Phil Specter. So uh, I mean Phil Specter also worked with Ike Turner to for River Deep, Mountain High with Tina, So scumbags attract scumbags. But uh anyway, Jack Nichoya, but gentlemen, Jack Niche, But on the topic of A Man Needs a Maid? Did you know I didn't realize this until researching this episode, that that was supposed to be paired with Heart of Gold as a medland. I am so damn glad it did not be, because can you imagine if the if Heart of Gold was grafted onto A Man Needs a Man? It's pretty strange. But I think there's clips of him in early seventy live performance clips of him playing those two songs together on piano and uh, I think it's on the live at Massey Hall recording and seventy one. But then halfway through these days he switches and he goes from piano to guitar, and he splits the songs into two. One line that he cut after the original song became two separate songs was afraid a man feels afraid. I actually that makes more like hearing that as the original eric like afraid. It's so much more harrowing. I don't know. I'm in the camp of not liking this song. You actually have some interesting things that you dredged up about it that maybe weow anything related to A Man Needs a Maid is dredging um, But please try and change my mind. I mean a lot of people hate the song, not only because of the overland orchestration, but the title and chorus, which you know, many people understandably view as sexist. Neo himself defended the title in later years by saying that it was written in the spirit of Robin Hood's maid Marian. It's a great quote that he said, Robin Hood loved the maid long before women's liberation judges ruling on that. How do you feel about that? It's just I mean, I love Neil and I think he writes so well on topics like loneliness and self loathing. Yeah, and he's he is a good at articulating like romantic love in a way that is, but he also tips into platitudes. And this is just a bad, lazy idea to hang a song on in my opinion, and dredging it and dredging and coding it with the London Symphony, like what a wow, my God, to be a fly on the wall in that conversation, like, oh yeah, Neil, what what else you got? Well, I've got this song about how I want to be waited on and and foot G eight. Let's get the London Symphony orchestra on that one. I don't know anyway. Rolling Stone has a great slam on you think it works? What do you think this? Are? You think this? And there and There's a World both work. I think the arrangements work better than There's a World, which is probably the most controversial song certainly on this album, if not in Neil's cannon. I think it's probably the one that people skip the most often. On Harvest and like I said, like, I like Neil Young's heavily orchestrated stuff, but this one I just think is too overblown. And Rolling Stone is a great uh line about this song. They put it on their Terrible Songs by Great Artists lists. They say for some reason, Young thought the London Symphony Orchestra would mesh with this song. The result is like a chocolate covered cheeseburger boom, which fair. But Neil himself, as is so often the case, doesn't care what the critics saying. He's fine with it. Uh. He later said, Bob Dylan told me it was one of his favorites of mine, so I listened closer to Bob, which I mean, I guess if Bob Dylan says that one of your songs is his favorite, then that's kind of a good mic drop. I don't believe him. I don't believe that. I mean, Bob Dylan is sure as hell. I'm not going to confirm or deny. So you're right. I guess if there's somebody that you can just say, you know, especially if you're like, he's not gonna come out, what's he gonna do? Come out of being a crazy old dude and like disconfirm that whatever. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. So now it's time for us to get into the other big love affair that really colors all of Harvest, which is Neil Young and his barn. Did you not see that one coming? Did you not see me set up? No? I didn't. It's it's really incredible, but it's perfect because amazed that it hasn't burned out. I mean it looks like a giant Lincoln log set. I mean there's like footage of him recording in the barn, and there's like sunlight streaming through the gaps in the logs. I mean, it's like obviously not insulated, like like what happens when it rains, there's apparently still a lot of bird all over it. When the straight gadder straight gadders, there was apparently still a lot of bird all over the barn. When the stray gators showed up at Broken Arrow to reconvene recording sessions, which happens after Neil has surgery in August and he gets his disks fixed, um and there's hey, every I mean it's a barn. It's a barn. It's not it's not like a bougie recording studio. We can you know, it's a barn. But to the hay works is like sound absorbtion on stuff and maybe like the bird droppings are like organic echo plates or something. I don't know, like is that how it works? Yes? Absolutely, And you know this gives way to probably really one of the other r texts of New Young Lore where graham Nash recalls this. It's in shaky, it's in the hearts and minds of New Young fans everywhere young and Maser rigged up the barn and the house with a bunch of speakers and amplifiers to act as separate channels of a monitor system. And incidentally, Maser also used the natural echo and reverb created by the way the barn nestled up against the hills. That's part of the sound on Harvest. He you know, dragged microphones out back and used the barn as a playback monitor, and then the cap showed captured the echoes out in the hills. It's wild. But this set up results in you know, graham Nash is there, He's layed on vocals. He's listening to rough mixes, and Neil Young rose him out into the middle of the lake and Graham's looking around, and all a sudden, the playback of Harvest comes blasting out across the lake from the house and from the barn, and those us technologically inclined the barn and the house have become two giant speakers, a barn size speaker and a house size speaker, just filled with monitors and stuff out front. The sound is absolutely deafening. I mean, the lake is pretty far from those structures being in the house. I mean, I'm sure that your drums were probably bleeding. Yeah, and so there and so Nash and Young are out in the middle of the lake and they're listening to playback and at one point Neil's note is more Barn. This is just one of the favorite one of the It's like a secret handshake for New Young fans. And it got to the point where there's this guy named Brad Brando who created a line of shirts that have this like sort of airbrush style cartoon rendering of New Young yelling more Barn out in a rowboat. It's a great shirt. You should look it up. I don't know if they're still making them. This it's the joke that keeps on giving. I mean, it seems like it was a mix. It seems like one of those things that you would just say about Neil Young. But Neil actually confirmed it in a two thousand six interview with the Huffington Post. But he confirmed it in the most Neil Young way imaginable. So yeah, I did say that I thought it was a little house heavy, but you know, I mean we're talking about all the different places he recorded this record. It's kind of amazing that the record sounds as coherent as it does. I mean, these are very distinct sessions here. I mean, going from you know, the London sit of the orchestra in a small London suburb town hall to a bunch of Nashville dudes in a restored nineteenth century country barn. It's that's kind of a jump, and I think it's a testament to Neil and Maser, I guess, to making a record that sounds so you know, of a piece. Yeah. Absolutely. And the other thing that this record does is um continue Neil's not feud with Lenard Skinner, which is like another giant thing that's it was like part of both of those artists legacies. Um So Alabama is part two in things Neil Young has to say about the American South. Yeah, this is kind of his sequel to Southern Man from after the gold Rush, and famously both tracks really piste off Leonard SKINNERD who wrote Sweet Home Alabama in part as a response to those songs, And of course it has the lie you know, Neil Young will remember Southern Man don't want them around anyhow, which started there non feud. It was more of a respectful dialogue between two artists who I guess they're probably more alike than they are different, despite their difference of opinion. But in any event, Neo himself doesn't really care much for that song these days. In his um autobiography Waging Heavy Piece, which might be the most boomer biotitle I've ever heard, Neil said this of the song, I don't like my words when I listened to it today. Their accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue, which is all fairly true, that's fair, But still he did inspire a Southern rock classic out of those songs, So something good did come of it. There's another tune on here that sort of a deep cut is words between the lines of Age. It's interesting because, befitting its ponderous title, uh words, is Neil's only real stab at mixed meter stuff. I mean, he has Waltz's and he has kick snare kick kick snare, but this tune you can either count it as having a bar of eleven eight or two bars one of five eight and one of six eight. And it is so bizarre because I don't think he does this anywhere else in his discography. I'm sure someone on Steve Hoffman forums or Jimmy McDonald's somebody can tell me I'm wrong here, But like, he does not do mixed meter stuff. And it's my personal theory about this is that it was either a mistake that he was like I like that, we're keeping it and it's so difficult that they never did it again, because to be honest, he sounds outclassed on his own song here when he's trying to play lead over it and he cannot figure out where the bars. So my theory is that it was a mistake that he liked and wrote a song around it, which fine or the Grateful Dead around this time had a song in their Lives set called the eleven that is actually a great song in eleven eight, and it just it sounds really cool. So my other theory is that he saw the dead at some point it was like, I can write a song in eleven which, no, you can't. I've been keeping my New Young impressions admirably in check. I think, um, but this seems like a good time to throw to Jordan's bit about Dana Carvey song. Yeah, I mean, you know, speaking of the name of the song's words between the lines of age. On the topic of Neil Young's words, Dana Carvey is a bit in a stand up special call every Neil Young song You've ever heard, and it's this great parody song. It is a pretty dead on Neil Young impression and he's singing lyrics like dead Dog line in the ditch, Cigarette Smoker has an itch? Can you can you do it? You can do a great New Young impression. Can you sing that dead dog lying in the ditch like Adam Sandler sigre? I can't do his vibrato. Smoker has an age. I don't know this song. I gotta look it up. It's pretty good, but uh at the time when Harvest was released, And we'll talk more about the contemporary reviews later, but early reviews are really turned off by its kind of impenetrable lyrics, and Rolling Stone in their review thought the words for are you ready for the Country? Seemed like an in joke throwaway. This is a quote intended for the amusement of certain of Neil's superstar palells. I just thought it was already ready for some football. That's all I can think of New Young being like all my rowdy friends are coming over tonight. No, I don't know, there's a very like there's a book in me that I don't have or someone else has probably already written about, like the way that Canadians see the American South, because like Candians and yeah, like Canadian boonies are kind of similar to like American boonies. I mean, like Rick Danko grew up on like a tobacco farm, but Canadians seem to have this like maybe because it's more cold, old rural versus hot rural, but they have this weird fixation on like American country music in the South and like the ante Bellum South and everything I don't know, it's weird. Do we know any Canadians? Do you know any Canadians? Maybe we can get a Canadian on the show to talk about that. Wait at us, We're not going to do that. But now let's get to some of the real Let's shut up and play the hits. Let's get to an Old Man, which what a what a devastating track, which will become even more devastating when you hear the story about it. New Young murders people. He stabs people in their heart and their mind, and that extends to people he's worked with and members of his own family. So Old Man, as many people know, was not written about his Dad's written about the guy who kind of came with the Ranch, the guy who like came with Broken Arrow. His name man Ranch had named Louis of Villa, and I guess you know met him and wrote a song about him. And Neil Young's dad was just Scott Young, blithely going through life talking about how much he loved this hit that was presumably written about him. And he he has an autobiography called Neil and Me that he wrote, and he talks about the moment that he tells Neil he says, like, you know, I really love that song that you uh that that old man that you wrote about me? And Neil tells him to his face, Nope, not about you. It's about the guy who looks after my ranch, my handyman. Sorry, dad, Like what why do you do that to your father? Don't you just lie to him? Yeah? And so Scott Young caps this recollection in the autobiography by just writing the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. So Neil met Lewis when he was he was getting a tour of the ranch, and um, Louis quite rightly asks him, you know you are twenty five years old, although new Young never looked twenty five. Neil Young was born at forty and has only gotten older since. But Louis, this guy says, you know, like I said, quite rightly, how can you afford a three hundred and fifty thousand acre ranch? And Neil says, just lucky, Louis, just real lucky. Just just admit you made more money than God and you blew it all on trying to launch Pno, that's right. He did have to sell some of the ranch in recent years, and he I guess daving car piece he was talking about like, yeah, I need some money. I wonder if it was Pono. I mean, his passions bankrupt him constantly. It's what kills me so much about him. I think it is so funny. He spends all of his money on trains and trying to get Old Lincoln's to like run on corn fuel and audio file qualities streaming, and then he's just like, wow, now I don't have any money and I have to go out to tour, and like, well, Jesus, you guys made more money than God invests. You should have invested some of it. Anyway. Anyway, um, I mean back to old man man. As much as you sound like an old man right now, back to old man. I mean, when you think about it, it's really kind of an astonishing topic for a song, because you know, Neil's coming out of this long period of deep suspicion towards adults. You know, this is nineteen seventy one, at the time of the famous Generation gap, and you know they're pippies wearing pins that say don't trust anyone over thirty and all that. And you know, when Neil Young was in Buffalo Springfield, he had you know, his fellow l A clubmates the doors singing the end, which as you know, father, I want to kill you, etcetera, etcetera. And that sense of suspicion towards your parents. It had dissipated a bit by the dawn to the seventies, but it's still kind of hard to grasp how not cool it was for you to look up to, you know, in quote, grown ups at this time, and it really kind of seemed to fly in the face of this really rapidly fading kind of hippie ideal. And it's not even it's not even the only Neil young parents, I mean, not his parent, but it's not even the only parent track on Harvest. Yes, that that's true. Speaking of crushing parents. The title track of Harvest has a really interesting and just emotionally devastating backstory. It's weird to me how overshadowed Harvest the song is by other songs on this record, because I mean, Neil apparently considers it one of his best songs that he ever wrote, and he's quoted as saying it's the best thing on Harvest. But the inspiration is really brutal, and it maybe reveals some of Neil's sadistic tendencies um According to account given by Carrie Snodgrass in Jimmy McDonough's Shaky Book, she and Neil were tripping on LSD and he kept repeatedly asking her to describe her mother, Caroline, who is a severe alcoholic, who would I guess regularly feigned suicide in order to test the love of her children. Which let's pause and reflect on that for a moment, and also just side note how terrifying must an LSD field Neil Young b That must be somebody that I do not want to cross paths with. Have you ever done LSD Jordan's I have not, No, I have, And I'll tell you one thing you don't want to do is think about your parents and your past trauma. You have to do that in therapy now, like when you do like m D m A assisted therapy, like people very gently guide you into like talking about your past pain and stuff. And Neil Young is just like they're doing like Owlsley Stanley acid like the purest acid that's ever been invented, and he's probing her about her parents, like her mom. That is dark, good god, I mean, also it's worth noting that her mom, I think lived with them on this. Yes, she was living with him at the time, so she she doesn't even really need to describe her. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess when you put it that way, there's really I was gonna try to give him the benefit of doubt and be like, tell me about you know what your mom was like. But I guess he knows exactly what her mom was like because here and uh so. Yeah, so it's kind of a troubling backstory. Apparently Neil played the song for her when he was working on the album, and when she heard it, she broke down in tears. Uh so, I guess on some level. I don't know if he told her explicitly, but it definitely resonated with the inspiration behind the song. But grim, grim, Neil, come on, man, that's unnecessary roughness. Onto a lighter topic, record record company finances. Yeah, I mean, with the possible exception of the London Symphony Orchestra John Harvest is like a bone cheap affair. They paid to those Nashville guys session rates. They recorded in a house and a barn. And with the exception, like I said, of the London Symphony, Orchestra stuff. That's a pretty cheap set of dates, and Maser estimated that thanks to all of these aspects of its recording, it only cost Warner Brothers fifty grand and it blew everybody's sales predictions out of the water. I mean, two of Neil's three career top forty hits Heart of Gold, Old Man are from this record. And what other famous records did Harvest Murder? Oh yeah, I mean this outsold led Zeppelin, This outsold Rolling Stones, Excelent on Main Street, Simon and Garfuncle's Greatest Hits Record, which is a huge record, Ziggy Stardust, Elton John, even Cheech and Chong, which I mean, I know it sounds like a joke now, but that was a huge seller then too. The second place that year was Tapestry, Carol King's Tapestry, and that was in the second place for the second year in a row. But it was the biggest seller of nineteen seventy two, and Part of Gold, as you said, went to number one. It was Neil's I imagine, only number one. Pretty insane, you know, you don't really think of it as being a tapestry size smash, or at least I don't. I knew a guy who used to tell you he was a record store clerk, and I was talking to him about prices, and he was like, you know what I used to tell if a record store is ripping me off is Harvest. There are so many damn copies of that record floating around out there. And then if I go into a record store and somebody's asking, like above ten dollars for a used record of Harvest, they're full and they're gouging you. Which it's to continue to be my barometer of record store price fairness. Well, there was very nearly a lot fewer copies of Harvest because apparently Neil originally wanted the cover of the record to disintegrate, which is a very Neil thing. He wanted to cover to basically biodegrade after the shrink rap was broken, but was understandably overruled by the record company based on not only the expense of coming up with a biodegradable record sleeve, which is insane, but also just you know, possible product loss due to shipping accidents. The record company also said, you know, Neil, we'd love to have a picture of you for this, because you're you're not on the cover. No, I don't. I don't want to do that. Yeah, I don't want to do that. So in response to their us for a picture, he sent a blurry photo of his own reflection in a door knob. In some ways, Neil Young is like that guy from your college dorm who's just like, has the worst ideas about everything and is like a major pill to deal with. But then we'll like sit down and break your heart with a little acoustic ballot. I mean, god, dealing with him must be such a unique hell, you know, Like it's someone like David Crosby, Like he's motivated by like drugs and sex, like Stephen Steeles is motivated by like ego. Graham Nash is motivated by being English, and what the for Neil Young's motivations. He wants to cause psychic pain, turn people off of hard drugs, and and what I'd say, go green, I don't, Oh my god, what a what? I'm fascinating. Two of those three are not, are you know, very legitimate? Yea, Waters, Yeah, that's fair, that's fair. So we talked a little bit about Bob Dylan earlier, and Bob Dylan has thoughts about a heart of Gold. You have to remember at the time that Bob Dylan has basically been midwifing his career transition from speed adult garage rocker to autumnal long haired you know, country rock, Troubadour. I mean, he's he's even singing differently, like on Nashville Skyline. He quit smoking and his voice is completely changes, and which is weird because he sounds like he's smoking more. Yeah, yeah, is so much lower. But by the time that Harvest comes out, he had just done self portrait, he had done New Morning, and apparently many people were asking him what he thought of Harvest and specifically what he thought of Old Man around this time period, because you know, we mentioned that Young says that Dylan liked a man needs a maid. But Dylan is talking to spin In. He's talking about people who sounded like him. He said, the only time it bothered me that someone sound like me was when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about seventy two, which I have questions about that, and the big song at the time was Heard of Gold. Dylan says, it seemed to me somebody else had taken my thing and had run away with it. You know, and I never got over it, which is weird a because what was Bob Dylan doing in Phoenix And I don't I don't even know if I want to know that story. But he also covers it. He covered it in two thousand two. So Jordan's let's contextualize all of this for me, right. I mean, not that Bob Dylan needs any more credit for anything, but he really signaled the beginning of these you know, rock stars and rock with the Capitol are who had gotten their start in the folk world and had grown tired with the kind of amped up psych rock and which is not super far removed from what you mentioned about, you know, the kind of garage rocky stuff he was doing with the group will become the band and in sixty six with the Blonde Blonde era stuff kind of reverting back to their Americana roots, and many would follow suit. I mean, you've got, as I said, you know, his old backing group, the band or a great example, and they would release uh songs from Big Pink soon after Dylan's John Wesley Harding album in sixty seven. And you know, in California, many ex Folkeys were congregating at places like the Troubadour and the Ash Grove and they would integrate country music into their folk influences and rock roots. And this was kind of a radical move in the mid to late sixties because country music at that time was kind of seen as having kind of a dirty name, kind of a conservative you know. Musical at that point was sort of seen as being this very forward thinking of people like Brian Wilson and the Beatles, all about pioneering, all about the future. Like people didn't really look backwards that much until you have John Leslie Harding the band Big Pink and their self titled album and some of like Graham Parsons encouraging the Birds to go to Nashville and make Sweetheart of the Rodeo. You know, they're covering like the old Luven Brothers songs and Luke McDaniel and stuff like that. And you know, because I was saying, that kind of show that after years of looking forward as studio pioneers, there was a lot to be learned from looking backward too. And Neil Young had grown up in Canada, whereas you were saying earlier, the relationship between folk and country was really strong and um being really intimately involved in the southern California scene with you know his time Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills. Nash you get Poco, you get Flying Burrito Brothers, you get all these kind of country influence groups at the dawn of the seventies. So you know Neil's shift from these kind of like wall of sound expecting to fly stuff that he was doing with Jack Nietsche and the Buffalo Springfield to even his first solo record that everybody hates that I love, so then moving into this kind of Nashville based country tinge stuff. It wasn't that extreme of a shift as a lot of people might think. A lot of people were doing it at that time in the early seventies. It's also funny that he went to Nashville for this because the other big sound from country music in this era is the baker Field sound, and um, when you think about Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, like those guys were basically the diametric opposite of Nashville, I mean Nashville. At this point, he's like your Patsy Kleines with like orchestra and pop music. It's country pop. And then you get guys like Buck Owens and Merl Haggard. The Bakersfield sound. He's like got a backbeat, electric guitars, and that's an influence on guys like um, John Fogerty is like a huge Merle Haggard fan. And and so it's funny to me that Neil picked Nashville because the stuff that he had done on everybody knows and like the Crazy Horse stuff seems so much more akin to Bakersfield Country than it does Nashville. That's just my two cents. It was probably a mix of him not only just actually being there to do the Johnny Cash, but also I mean Dylan recorded Blond blon there. I mean it was good enough for him, and you know, he clearly admired Dylan a great deal. So I'm sure just you know, ease of just happy to be here at this moment and have a great opportunity. Plus you know, fact that somebody who was a really influence on him probably explains how he wound up there. But you know, regardless of how this record has come to be thought of in the cannon of like mid century American rock and folk, and regardless of how well it's sold, it was not a big critical slam dunk. John Mendelsohn wrote in Rolling Stone, which has become one of the most famous pans, he ripped it and he used, I mean, it's like the spinal tap reviews bit he uses the phrase half asked, bologny and flatulent and portentous nonsense. I think he used the word flaccid in there too, and he said it was a disappointing retread of earlier, better Young releases. That seems unfair. It's not inaccurate, but it's like two, it's virile, I mean, that's new Young. Yeah, he plays the same six chords in different and beautiful ways like it's whatever, it's fine, but yeah. Rolling Stone would be verse their course later and joined the throng of supporters for Harvest, including Chart magazine, which pulled readers to determine the fifty greatest Canadian albums of all time. Harvest took number two in polls that were conducted in two thousand, two thousand five. It was stuck at number two all three of those times. Yes, what was number one? Was this something by like Rush or like Gordon Lightfoot's greatest hits? Like what the hell? Tragically was it? Really? No? What was number one Bare Naked Ladies. See No. Number one was Blue. Oh okay, alright, and see Harvest taken a backseat to Blue. Yeah, I stand corrected. Yeah. And so one of the defining statements on the record comes from Neil himself. You know, he wrote the liner notes to his career Retrospective Decade, and he wrote, of Heart of Gold, this song put me in the middle of the ode. Traveling here soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch, a rougher ride, but I met more interesting people there. So he writes this, and then he goes on to make three perversely trashy and like heavier records. Um he does on the Beach, he does Tonight's the Night, and he does what's the third one? Well. He follows up Harvest with Time Fades Away, which is a live album of new material, and it obviously doesn't do anywhere nearly as well as Harvest. And he would later say it was a quote people thought that I had failed with that record, but I knew I'd succeeded because I had succeeded in moving on. I wasn't dragged down by success, which I think you know you're getting on like what motivates Neil. I mean, I think that's a pretty good indicator. It kind of encapsulates a lot of his m right there. Uh. Later, he was later asked if he enjoyed the Harvest sessions, and he said, I don't know if I enjoyed it. I was just experiencing it. I mean, it was very intense. People saw something in me that I didn't see in classic Neil. You know, as you said, he always talked about how this record put him in a box, but he immediately wanted to get out of and hence his famous move into the ditch. But you know, as you also said, he looked back at it with affection in a very Neil kind of way. And you know, I mean, he would also admit that he would never really be able to return to that emotional place again. And there's a great BBC documentary on Neil. I think it's from like two thousand seven. It's on YouTube. And he'd say, you know, about Harvest, how many sensitive songs can you write before you're just writing a sensitive song and then it's not sensitive because it's not real. You can't live up to expectations. I was very open and expressive I still try to be that way, but I'm not twenty two or whatever I was at the time. It's like Bob Dylan says he doesn't know who it was that wrote Blowing in the Wind. He's not sure where that person is. That was a long time ago. That's how I feel about Harvest. That was us, it was proven it was me, but I'm not sure I could recreate that feeling. It asked to do with how old I was, what was happening in the war, old, what I'd just done, and what I wanted to do next. And I thought that was I don't know, one of the more honest and clear eyed descriptions of an artistic peak from the vantage point of many decades later. I mean, regardless of whether or not he feels that he can't access the emotions that let him create Harvest, or whether it's become a kind of albatross around his neck. He's also called it probably the finest record I've ever made, So that's a good defining statement. And whatever his thoughts are, it's still better than trans. Well, we'll get into trans on a future episode, but there are definitely too well. Uh, I think that's about all we got for harvest. What do you think I'm ready to head to the ditch. Well, it's been great talk to you. I hope you all enjoyed listening. My name is Jordan's and I'm Alex. Thank you so much for listening. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalk and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.