Neil Young's "Harvest" - 50 Years On
Released February 1, 1972, this post first appeared on the album's fiftieth anniversary on All Things Music Plus
When I first dropped the needle on Harvest in 1972, Neil Young’s 4th solo album that followed his massive success with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, nothing quite prepared me for the spare sound coming from my turntable. The first track sets the mood. “Out on the Weekend” spills out a dirge-like lament: Think I’ll pack it in and buy a pickup, take it down to LA. And then something about a woman who loved me all up. Where’s this going?
The genesis of Harvest began when Neil was invited to Nashville to perform on The Johnny Cash TV Show in the first week of February 1971. He ended up in a Nashville studio, joined by a new band of musicians he dubbed the Stray Gators. Neil was accompanied by a pedal steel guitar for the first time. And he chose one of the best in Nashville to play it – Ben Keith. His playing is so subdued, you might not even realize he’s on a track. Keith’s spare, perfectly blended tones were not the norm of the day for pedal steel players who often dominated country music tracks.
The session would yield Young’s only number-one hit, “Heart of Gold.” In the excellent biography Shakey by long-time fan Jimmy McDonough, he quotes Young’s manager Elliot Mazer about the Stray Gators: “They were the other side of Nashville. They were not part of the establishment.” And that was just fine for Young, who would later comment, “Harvest was just easy. I liked it because it happened fast, kind of an accidental thing—I wasn’t looking for the Nashville Sound, they were the musicians that were there. They got my stuff down and we did it. Just come in, go out—that’s the way they do it in Nashville.”
Young’s new album furthered the genre of country-rock, invented by 60’s rock bands using country themes or vocal styles, like Buffalo Springfield (where Stills and Young worked together prior to CSNY); and The Byrds, particularly their Sweetheart of the Rodeo album with brief member, Gram Parsons (he would later dub his sound “Cosmic American Music”). But Young wasn’t the first to record in Nashville. His idol Bob Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde with studio musicians in Nashville as early as 1966.
It took the original country music outlaw Johnny Cash to invite these new singer-songwriters to appear on his popular TV show. Neil writes in his autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace: “Everyone loved Johnny Cash; he was the real thing. The show was all about music, and it was cool, very real.” In fact, both James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt were in town for the same show and joined Neil in the studio for a few songs: “We wound up on our knees around this microphone,” Ronstadt recalls. “I was just shrieking this high harmony, singing a part that was just higher than God.” Their contributions ended up on the 2 certified hit songs from the album. “Heart of Gold” hit number one on the Cashbox charts on March 18, 1972, and “Old Man,” on which Taylor played banjo, reached number thirty-one on the Billboard charts in June. The album claimed the number one spot on Billboard and would stay in the top forty for twenty-five weeks.
Neil was beset with back problems during this time, and it took a toll on completing the album. As McDonough writes, “in March 1971, Young went to London with producer/arranger Jack Nitzsche to record a pair of songs live with the London Symphony – ‘A Man Needs a Maid’ and ‘There’s a World’ (Neil thought the arrangement was ‘a bit overblown’). In April, Young returned to Nashville to cut the title song ‘Harvest.’ September would bring the first recordings done on his northern California ranch, with ‘Words,’ ‘Are You Ready for the Country?,’ and ‘Alabama’ cut with the Stray Gators by backing up a remote-recording truck to a dilapidated old barn on the property.”
Mostly, though, Neil was in love. He met actress Carrie Snodgress who had just been nominated for an Academy Award in 1970 for her portrayal of the lead character in “Diary of a Mad Housewife.” As Neil sings in “A Man Needs a Maid”: I fell in love with the actress / she was playing a part that I could understand. Carrie quit acting and lived for a few years with Neil on his ranch. In 2019, a note on Neil’s official website states that much of Harvest was “written about or for Carrie Snodgress, a wonderful actress and person and Zeke Young’s mother.” Clearly, she’s the woman who loved me all up from “Out on the Weekend.”
Although the music critics of the day were generally dismissive of Neil’s latest LP, it would go on to become universally loved. Even Rolling Stone, who were quite critical upon its release, ranked it 72nd greatest album of all time in 2020.
Neil summed up his philosophy in his autobiography, “I just like to make all kinds of music and do what is coming natural to me. Nobody told me to make Harvest. No record company told me what to do until a lot later – and that didn’t work.”