“Something Happened to Me Last Night When My Internet Went out and I listened to Live at Massey Hall on My Hard Drive”

I got the weird impetus lately to start making mix CD’s again, for a number of reasons. One is that I live in the middle of nowhere so my everyday life entails a lot of driving and I don’t have current Bluetooth capabilities in my car. Another is that it’s summer and it’s road trip season. Look out, brewery down in Culver. 

So within this line of thinking I took on the unwieldy ambition of ripping all my CD’s to my hard drive that have any chance of contributing to a good “road trip mix,” or whatever. And I got SO sick of importing CD’s by the end of my second day off this week but it’s a good thing I suffered through a lot of that tedium because my Internet went out at our place last night (I think we’re on the Daniel Boone grid) and so my only source of entertainment, other than drinking cans of PBR and staring out my window, was listening to music on my computer. Well, unless you count Minesweeper, I guess. 

Even though I’d ripped I think at least 50 CD’s it was a little hard to find something I was in the mood for, after a day at work and feeling so tired and crotchety. I scrolled up to Beach Boys – Classics Selected by Brian Wilson and thought He** yeah this will be perfect for relaxing to on a summer evening, to unthinkably find the songs not copied in their entireties. 

No sweat, I thought: I’ve scrolled from M up to A (I like to start at a weird part of the alphabet so I don’t wind up listening to Arab Strap every day) and so then I started down from “M,” to encounter Neil Young, after not too long within the “N”’s, per iTunes’ rather cro-magnon name sorting method. The Massey Hall album had always been kind of esoteric to me — I’ve long lunged for Rust Never Sleeps as my definitive Neil Young live album and then Live Rust as a sort of companion piece to that. Other than the Grateful Dead, I don’t know of any artists of whom I regularly listen to more than two different live albums. I’d remembered Pitchfork’s lukewarm 8 out of 10 score they’d assigned to Massey Hall and that always had stuck in my craw a little bit, like some little kid with a microwave trying to critique Martha Stewart’s cooking. 

So not really fully knowing what to expect, I let Massey Hall rip. I noticed the pristine, crystal-clear acoustic guitar sound (in my opinion Young’s acoustic units sound a lot better than his electric ones). This was an acoustic show, through and through, with Young performing solo at the Toronto venue, without a backing band, utilizing guitar, piano and vocals, in totality.

A lot of the songs like “Old Man”; “A Man Needs a Maid” and “Needle & Damage Done” (sic) were exorbitantly new and fresh, with their album, Harvest, not even having been released yet (in fact that album would take more than a year to materialize after this January ’71 gig). Young, within the stage banter, provides various illuminating tidbits regarding what went into the songwriting, which he mentions as having ballooned to a considerable level of quantity as of late, particularly the result of his having moved onto a “ranch.” One of the songs, “Old Man,” he denotes as being about the “old man” who lives on the ranch with him (“He came with the place” is one of his specific quips on the topic), and lots of the other tunes like “A Man Needs a Maid” are understood as having essentially gushed out of him like a waterfall within his new proliferating environs. 

On Live at Massey Hall, he takes this wave of songwriting and, beautifully, I think, celebrates and maximizes it by doing an all-acoustic concert, where the fabrics of the lyrics, choruses and chord changes are allowed to manifest in full, authentic form. Massey Hall is an album for sitting back to on a relaxing night and just indulging in how this man was able to craft these classic, continually gratifying songs — you hear them in their rawest form. 

As I sat there last night listening to all of Live at Massey Hall straight through, the stress, the worries and the attrition of my day at work completely vanished — like something not completely erased but rendered a background by way of an usurping force of positivity. And I know this sounds cliched but it was like I entered this world of aural music constructed with the utmost purity and genuineness, as if being transformed into this edifying realm that transcends the banal, everyday methods of Internet communication and streaming, and part of me can’t help but wonder if my feeling of spiritual elevation wasn’t partly due to my abstinence from being online. But I mean, I hate those preachy bastards who tell you to “Turn off your Internet” and “Get to know your soul” as much as you do. 

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Addenda: ‘See the Sky about to Rain’ and ‘Dance Dance Dance’

Believe it or not, even though Massey Hall was recorded in January ’71, there’s a pervasive waft of the mid-’70s material, in the form of Young’s’ stylistically exploratory and ultimately gratifying 1974 album. And indeed, overall, one of the cool things about Massey Hall in general as an album is how it showcases Neil Young’s songwriting as something piecemeal — lots of the Harvest tunes are still in a primitive state here, to be later subject to melodic or lyrical modifications, but it invites us inside the mind of the artist in an intriguing way to view these songs as gerontological entities capable of growth and maturity, rather than them just being emitted as immediately cut off from Young’s muse, thereafter. 

“See the Sky about to Rain” is a standout second track on On the Beach, delivered ultimately with this beautiful, aching and gentle electric guitar that’s treated within a sort of bath of psychedelia, more or less. On Massey Hall, it stands as a piano/vox number, not too unlike “After the Gold Rush” and certainly replete with that same sort of cathartic melancholy that makes Neil Young’s songs something awe-inspiring to sink into and internalize. 

Interestingly, “Dance Dance Dance” amounts to an ostensible kin to “Love is a Rose,” a song chronoligcally compatible with “See the Sky about to Rain,” but kept under wraps until Young’s best-of collection Decade of 1976. I make note of this multi-song relation as interesting partly because Green Day, for the closeur on their last album Father of All..., “Graffitia,” make what I’d denote as licentious reference to the main melody in “Love as a Rose,” to say the least. Just for the record, Green Day’s version works too and Father of All… is their best album since Nimrod. It’s more guests at the dinner table, speaking the language we all love.

Amazingly, “Dance Dance Dance” one-ups even the venerable “Love is a Rose,” which was copycatted by Green Day and popularized by another version in the form of Linda Ronstadt. Well, at this point, I hear this melody and think of “Love is a Rose,” which contains the lines “I wanna go to an old hoe-down / Long ago in a Western town”. Unlike the eventual decade version of “Love is a Rose” on Decade, however, the Massey Hall run-through of “Dance Dance Dance” actually has a sort of hoe-down beat, not at all unlike the general rhythmic interface of “Bron-y-Aur Stomp” Eh, Neil, ya still got some country in you? I think we already know the ansewr to that.