I don't remember how and when, but at some point in time I heard Hey, Hey, My, My (or the other one) and started to be obsessed with it. This is basically what made me discover Young. So I have a special love for this record. Apart from that, it's actually pretty standard Young: the folk songs are a bit too low-key and I generally fail to keep interested in this part... and then there are the electric ones, that are really good. As far as I'm concern, we could chop off 50% of Young production and it would be near perfect. But well, life is like a Young album: you have to swallow some shit at some point, everything is not unicorns & rainbows.
Ever wondered what grizzled old hippy Neil Young was getting up to at the height of punk in 1978? Turns out he was recording this mostly live album with a mix of acoustic and electric tracks, reuniting with Crazy Horse for a series of gigs. Musically it’s pretty much by the numbers folk-rock with no real surprises.
However, the lyrics read like something that someone who’d taken bad acid in 1970 might write. He starts by name checking Johnny Rotten, then on the next track he asks what happened to his old friends (presumably referring to Crosby, Stills and Nash) then remembers that he got bored of them and abandoned them because they were just dead weight to him. Ouch.
There are then couple of tracks that give the impression that he got stoned and fell asleep watching westerns on TV and somehow started dreaming about a man from Mars too. Very weird.
Cowboy-tastic!