Neil Young

:For the former Canadian politician see Neil Young (politician)

Experimental years

Like many rock stars of the '60s and '70s, the 1980s were a lean time for Young both critically and commercially as he struggled to remain relevant. After providing the incidental music to the film "Where The Buffalo Roam", a biopic of Hunter S. Thompson, he recorded Hawks and Doves (1980), a folk/country record in step with his public—and surprising—support for Ronald Reagan. Re-ac-tor (1981) was another set with Crazy Horse, with a mask of distortion and feedback obscuring a relatively weak selection of songs, but his strangest record of the decade came with 1982's Trans. Recorded almost entirely electronically with the instruments and vocals modified by effects such as vocoder and a reliance on synthesizers, it is often considered Young's attempt to experiment with technology that might give his son Ben, who has severe cerebral palsy and cannot speak, a way to communicate. (In 1986 Young and wife Pegi would help found The Bridge School http://www.bridgeschool.org/, and they continue to support it with an annual benefit concert). Fans, however, were baffled and the album, along with 1983's rockabilly-styled Everybody's Rockin' would lead record company head David Geffen to sue Young for making "unrepresentative" music (i.e. suing Young for not sounding like Neil Young!).

Related Topics:
1980s - Biopic - Hunter S. Thompson - Ronald Reagan - Vocoder - Cerebral palsy - The Bridge School - Rockabilly - David Geffen

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Old Ways (1985) saw a return to country music, recorded with a group of friends and session musicians, but the songs were largely tepid, whereas Landing on Water (1986) was an equally unsatisfying amalgam of his older styles, '80s synthesiser pop and Trans-era experimentation. Young would later claim that he had grown so angry with Geffen that he was now producing music purely to watch it anger the bosses at Geffen Records. Even the resumption of his partnership with Crazy Horse on 1987's Life failed to raise him from the artistic doldrums. It was, however, enough to fulfill his contract with Geffen and enable him to switch labels.

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Signing for Warner Brothers and returning to Reprise Records, he produced This Note's for You (1988) with a new band, The Bluenotes (unrelated to Harold Melvin's old group). The addition of a brass section provided a new jazzier sound and the title track became his first hit single of the decade. Accompanied by a witty video which parodied corporate rock, the pretensions of advertising and Michael Jackson in particular, the song was initially banned by MTV (although the Canadian music channel, MuchMusic ran it immediately) before being put into heavy rotation and finally given the MTV Video Music Award for Best Video of the Year for 1989. Strangely, there were sound problems during Young's acceptance speech. Incidentally, Harold Melvin himself sued Young for use of the Bluenotes name (since Melvin held the rights to it). As a result, Young renamed his back-up group "Ten Men Workin'" for the balance of the accompanying concert tour that followed. Now in something of a renaissance, Young also provided a few highlights on that year's CSNY reunion American Dream, though tensions with the band were always high.

Related Topics:
Warner Brothers - Harold Melvin - Jazz - Michael Jackson - MTV - MuchMusic - MTV Video Music Award for Best Video of the Year - 1989

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