By Stuart Mitchner

A chapter near the end of Neil Young’s autobiography Waging Heavy Peace (Blue Rider 2012) begins with him behind the wheel of his car “rolling down a California two-lane highway” listening to a group called the Pistol Annies, with “visions of the future and past” brewing in his “coffee-soaked mind.” I can relate to a driving-listening-to-music chapter because that’s how I bonded with his new album, The Monsanto Years (Reprise), in which he teams up with Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah and Lukas’s group Promise of the Real to put the Fear of Neil into corporate giants, with special attention to the one targeted in the title.

If I were riding with Neil Young on that California two-lane highway, I’d be telling him my thoughts about the new record while he’s cranking up the volume on the Pistol Annies’ Hell on Heels, saying he’s finally hearing something that makes him feel good: “I love the vibe these girls have! The way they talk about real things.”

Rather than mention his future decision to make an album with a group called Promise of the Real, which might spoil the illusion that we’re actually sharing a ride in a continuum where past and present are one, I start asking him about William Blake. I’m wondering how much Blake he read when he was composing the score for Dead Man (1995), Jim Jarmusch’s self-described “psychedelic western,” which is full of quotes from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I figure that as a songwriter attracted to paradox (using Waging Heavy Peace as a title for the story of his life) and metaphors of flight, as in “Expecting to Fly” and “Birds,” he must have had his head turned by proverbs like “Energy is eternal delight, the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, and everything that lives is holy,” and especially the notion that a single bird could contain “a world of delight.”

Thinking about birds and Blake, he slows down as we drive through some morning mist, telling me how walking in the forest “is like going to church,” with the “God-rays streaming down through the trees” and how much of his heart went into “Helpless,” a song he wrote and recorded with Crosby, Stills and Nash when he was 25. Rather than sing it to me, he recites a verse, “Blue, blue windows behind the stars,/Yellow moon on the rise,/Big birds flying across the sky,/Throwing shadows on our eyes/Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless.”

After that we stay silent while he concentrates on following the odd turns of the road through the mist, which is heavy at times.

Love and Music

Don’t ask me how, but we’ve been listening to The Monsanto Years and he’s politely allowing me to talk about the way he incorporates the corporate by taking creative possession in music of not only Monsanto, but Citizens United and Walmart in “Big Box” (“They don’t want to fall, so when they fall, they fall on you/Too big to fail, too rich for jail”). Then there’s “People Want to Hear About Love,” which reviewers have read as a “rant” (“typical,” says Neil) about escapist audiences hiding from the dark truths like pipeline politicians, fish dying in the deep blue sea, corporate hijackings, pesticides and autistic children. He doesn’t correct me when I suggest that what he’s leaving out of the lyrics and letting the music say is that love and music are actually just what people need if they’re going to live with and acknowledge the destructive realities; it’s not that they want to hear about love; what they’re looking for is music powerful enough in itself to make them feel love even as they absorb the tough love of the message. Here I can’t help bringing Blake back into the conversation because the idea of a song saying that love and music draw force and energy from the pain of knowledge, making a heaven of hell, reminds me of another proverb, “Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps,” not to mention the “Wrong side of right, right side of wrong” refrain in his song “Rules of Change,” which prompts me to carry on about the headlong unfettered spirit of the new album. “Guitar heaven!” I tell him. He nods. Then shows me a sideways half-smile as he reprises a deadpan quote he gave Rolling Stone in “Behind the Scenes of Neil Young’s New Protest Album”: “It’s an upbeat view of the situation.”

The Wisdom of Excess

We’re back in his book again, which is subtitled A Hippie Dream. In the same chapter that begins with him driving he talks about how all through his life he’s been on “two separate paths, acoustic and electric.” He finds acoustic “liberating if confining” because it means “jamming was more or less out of the question.” Some people like one and “some like the other.” Jamming means playing with his soulmates in Crazy Horse. As he puts it, “The physical feeling of playing with the Horse is like nothing else. It leaves your brain wide open, like you can feel the wind blowing right through it.” The subject came up after my reference to guitar heaven and the joyous jamming on The Monsanto Years. “It’s my version of the road to excess,” he says, with a wink. His head-to-head jousting with Promise of the Real and the 20-something Nelson brothers can be seen on the DVD that comes in the same package with the CD. Hoping to rouse another smile, I mention the Rolling Stone piece, where Micah Nelson describes how Neil sets the forces of “dreamy, surreal” excess in motion: “My favorite thing is when he hits what I call the ‘cosmic hurricane black hole tornado button.’ He hits this button on the Whizzer and it’s like suddenly just a bajillion tons of cosmic sludge are hurled into a wormhole and they’re blasting out of his amp into my back.”

The cosmic hurricane blows most magnificently through “Working Man,” “Rules of Change,” “Big Box,” and the album’s first track, “A New Day for Love,” where people get something like the song denied them in “The People Want to Hear About Love,” except here it’s love, rage, and glory, a combination that makes you understand the gift that electric guitars were created to deliver to a desperate world (at times you seem to be hearing an echo of Eric Clapton and Dwayne Allman’s delirious jams on the Layla album). What I want to tell him but can’t put into words is how much raw courage it must have taken for him to pound home the truth, time and again, song after song, that the “new day” for planet, sun, and love will not happen until we’re willing to do battle with “the greedy who only plunder for themselves.”

Songs Haunted and Haunting

Now that the Blakean road has leveled out and the visibility has improved, we share some coffee from his thermos. “Definitely not Starbucks,” he says. I’m anxious to talk about two songs on The Monsanto Years that have more to do with depths of feeling than the topical urgency of fact, though both make moving reference to the album’s overriding message. “Wolf Moon” is a prayer of thanks and an obvious descendant of “Helpless,” where the moon was yellow and the birds threw shadows on our eyes. The other new song, “If I Don’t Know,” which closes the album, is a symphonic lament suggestive of his conflicted where-am-I-heading state of mind toward the end of the chapter in the car. It’s also the first time he looks the listener in the eye, so to speak, as he’s looking at me from the driver’s seat, speaking the words again: “If the melodies stay pretty/And the songs are not too long/I’ll try to find a way/To get them back to you.” But there’s more. Of course. There’s always more. There’s the death of rivers, the finding of oil and “shooting poison in the ground, the veins, Earth’s blood.” Those are the last words he has for us. “The Earth’s blood.” That sounds somber, but the music lifts everything to another level. It’s a deliverance, it’s the sound of love, passionate and inspiring, with Lukas Nelson playing to the angels, casting one searching, yearning line after another.

Again, silence in the car. I’m thinking of the other older song that this one seems to have grown out of, the song written in a shack in Laurel Canyon when Neil was with Buffalo Springfield. There are thousands of songs about love. “Expecting to Fly” is love,  the real thing, as the music rises from anticipation to a slow, sad waltz danced by lovers finding and losing one another. “By the summer it was healing,/We had said goodbye,/All the years we’d spent with feeling,/Ended with a cry ….”

Helpless, helpless, helpless. He knows.  When you fall in love, you fall ….

You can hear “Expecting to Fly” on YouTube with the original video, which is of a highway seen from the point of view of a driver. You know who’s driving. It’s a misty road with lots of curves and sudden changes. The road rolls on like a dream, finding and losing itself, following curves and descents, rising and falling, in and out of mist, morning or evening. The emotional pulse and surge, the rise and fall of the music, coheres with the movement of the road. As the driver writes in his memoir, “Where is this headed? some highway at the bottom of some hill? Tell me about it. I’ve been there.”

Three months away from his 70th birthday, Neil Young is still going strong.

Thanks to our neighbors Chris and Doreen, serious Neil fans, for bringing the CD back from the Camden concert, and thanks as always to the Princeton Public Library for having on its shelves the book that gave me this ride with Neil Young.