Transformer Man: 1980-1988
Excerpt from Neil Young: Long May You Run – The Illustrated History (Voyageur Press, 2010, 2012)
Following the critical and commercial triumphs of Comes a Time, Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust, the 1980s are widely viewed as Neil Young’s lost decade. The period is marked by an acute artistic restlessness that found him flitting from one genre to another, resulting in inconsistent and sometimes slapdash records that, in turn, led to feelings of confusion, frustration, and downright anger in even his most ardent fans. Record sales plummeted.
Predictably, Young has a different perspective on the period.
“I feel really good about what I’ve done in the ‘80s,” he told the Village Voice as the decade came to a close. “Even though I’ve taken a lot of shit for it. Everything I did made sense to me, yet everywhere I went people were telling me, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Why are you doing this? You’re systematically dismantling your record sales.’ There was this huge abyss between me and everybody else.”
What the public didn’t know – because Young forbade his camp to divulge it – was that the music he made during the period was to some degree a response to various crises he was facing in his personal life.
His son Ben, born to Young and wife Pegi in 1978, was diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy. Young’s older son, Zeke, born to actress Carrie Snodgrass, also suffers from the disorder. But Ben’s condition was worse: he was spastic, quadriplegic and non-oral.
“I remember looking at the sky, looking for a sign, wondering, ‘What the fuck is going on?’” Young told the Voice. “‘Why are the kids in this situation? What the hell caused this? What did I do? There must be something wrong with me.’”
In 1980, there was another emergency on the horizon. Pegi required brain surgery to repair an arterial problem that, left unchecked, could have killed her. She recovered fully in a matter of months, but one can only imagine the strain the family’s health problems placed upon Young.
To be sure, both situations would impact his music in the ‘80s, most strikingly on re•ac•tor and Trans, which offered Young’s artistic response to Ben’s monotonous, repetitive therapy. But first came Hawks & Doves, which showed the artist already adrift creatively, casting about for new genres to work in and navigating the shifting political and cultural tides around him.
Hawks & Doves is a minor effort that Young himself called a “transitional” album, although he also defended it to Mojo as “a funky little record that represents where I was and what I was doing at the time.”
Funky? Not so much. But little it is, clocking in at barely half an hour.
The album is roughly split along the lines of opposing acoustic “dove” tunes and electric “hawk” songs. The two opening numbers are leftovers from Young’s abandoned Homegrown album. “Little Wing” is a short, sweet song about a nurturing woman that is given new relevance by Young’s nesting with Pegi. “The Old Homestead,” which takes up nearly a quarter of the album’s runtime, is a nearly impenetrable allegory that seems to describe Young’s warring creative impulses.
“Lost in Space” is another song yearning for domesticity, albeit in an unusual setting: the ocean floor. In one of his loopier moments on record, Young manipulates the tape to make his voice sound like he’s joined by an underwater chorus. In stark contrast, “Captain Kennedy” offers a blast of harsh reality, detailing a sailor’s last few minutes before going into battle.
The album’s electric tunes were newly minted for Hawks & Doves, but depart wildly from the take-no-prisoners rock that Young pursued on the Rust albums. Instead, they’re country songs, as pure an unfiltered as Young had ever offered, led by Ben Keith’s swooping steel guitar and Rufus Thibodeaux’ sawing fiddle. At the time, songs like “Stayin’ Power” and “Coastline” seemed slight and somewhat tossed off. But in retrospect, it’s possible to view them in the context of Young’s relationship with Pegi and the steadfastness with which they faced down their hardships. “We got stayin’ power/You and I/Stayin’ power, through thick and thin,” he sings in the former song, while in the latter, he boasts, “We don’t back down from no trouble.”
Of course, the Hawks & Doves songs that are most remarked upon are the last three, each of which hints at Young’s unexpected shift to the political right. “Union Man” lampoons the musician’s union (and by extension other bloated and ineffective unions that did little to make life better for the rank and file.) “Comin’ Apart at Every Nail” is a blue-collar anthem that exults in patriotism even as the nation unravels. This was the time, recall, of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise,” the Iranian hostage crisis, and the dawn of the age of Ronald Reagan. If Young’s brethren from Woodstock Nation were aghast at his sudden rightward tilt, they must have been floored by the album’s title track, which blatantly spoiled for war. Young even volunteered his life, or at least his checkbook, for service. It was a far cry from “Ohio.” But it was nothing compared to what would come further down the road.
Young was unable to tour to support either Hawks & Doves or its follow-up, re•ac•tor, which he recorded with Crazy Horse in the fall and winter of 1980 and the summer of 1981. By that time, he and Pegi had enrolled Ben in a radical therapy program designed by the Institute for the Awareness of Human Potential. The demanding program required the couple’s total commitment, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It also altered Young’s work schedule, forcing him to record only during breaks in the afternoon, when it had been his natural inclination to howl at the moon.
You can feel Young’s desire to break free and rock out on re•ac•tor tracks such as “Opera Star”; the stuttering, slobbering “Rapid Transit”; and the character-driven “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze.” “Get Back On It” expresses a desire to head back out on the road but nebulously hints that he’s otherwise engaged. Still, the album contains enough social commentary to suggest that Young’s attention could be at least temporarily drawn outside the demands of Ben’s program. “Southern Pacific” is a chugging rocker about a railroad worker who gave his life and good health to his profession, only to be cast aside when he reaches the age of mandatory retirement. “Motor City” is a seriocomic rant about the American automobile industry, which even then was being savaged by imports. The album-closing “Shots,” meanwhile, is dominated by intense sound effects of automatic weapons fire, and pairs two topics seldom discussed simultaneously: suburban lust and international ultraviolence.
For both good and ill, re•ac•tor’s standout track is “T-Bone,” a thudding nine-and-a-quarter-minute composition whose repetitiveness is thought to have been inspired by Ben’s therapy. Its sole lyrical content is a koan that most found a bit too Zen for the room. “Got mashed potatoes,” Young declares. “Ain’t got no t-bone.”
With no public acknowledgement of his personal situation, Young’s fans weren’t sure just what to make of “T-Bone,” or the rest of re•ac•tor, though at least the album found him kicking out some Rust-style jams. But those who paid attention to album art must have known something was up. The back cover was inscribed with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, which has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step recovery programs: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” it reads; “Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.”
Maintaining the requisite level of mystery, however, Young had the prayer printed in Latin.
He must have taken the prayer’s wisdom to heart, however, because in short order, he drastically changed a number of aspects of his life to help him regain control of it:
• On the personal front, he and Pegi quit Ben’s demanding program and opted for another, less pressurized form of therapy designed by the National Academy for Child Development.
• Professionally, Young, who was frustrated by the lack of promotional oomph behind re•ac•tor, left Warner/Reprise his record label for nearly a decade and a half. He turned down a more lucrative deal with RCA in order to sign with David Geffen’s eponymous label, which offered him a huge advance for each album and complete artistic freedom.
• Musically, Young purchased two devices that would change the course of his work for the foreseeable future: a synthesizer/sampling unit called the synclavier, and the vocorder, a device that radically altered the sound of the human voice.
“I was looking for ways to change my voice,” Young told the Voice. “To sing through a voice that no one could recognize and it wouldn’t be judged as being me.”
Young began recording a handful of songs that would eventually wind up on Trans. One of them was a robotic take on his Buffalo Springfield hit, “Mr. Soul,” made to blow the minds of his fellow Springfield bandmates, who were considering a reunion. But when the Geffen deal was signed, Young set the tracks aside and, Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer in tow, headed for Hawaii to make an album called Island in the Sun.
That album, which also featured Ben Keith, Ralph Molina, Nils Lofgren and CSNY percussionist Joe Lala, was intended as a commercial album that Young thought would please his new label. “It was a tropical thing all about sailing, ancient civilizations, islands and water,” Young told Mojo. But Geffen rejected it. So much for artistic freedom.
In his usual taciturn fashion, Young returned to the mainland and revived Trans, which deals even more explicitly than re•ac•tor with the demands of Ben’s original program. To handle the pressure, Young said, he completely shut himself down emotionally.
“I closed myself down so much that I was makin’ it, doin’ great with surviving,” he told the Voice. “But my soul was completely encased. I didn’t even consider that I would need a soul to play my music, that when I shut the door on pain, I shut the door on my music.”
Young attempted to lay bare his crippled emotional state, but do it anonymously, hiding himself in a cast of characters created by the vocorder’s many voices. It was only later that he let his fans in on the album’s subtext.
“Trans was about all these robot-humanoid people working in this hospital and the one thing they were trying to do was teach this little baby to push a button,” he said, referring to Ben’s program. “That’s what the record’s about. Read the lyrics, listen to all the mechanical voices, disregard everything but that computerized thing, and it’s clear Trans is the beginning of my search for communication with a severely handicapped non-oral person. ‘Transformer Man’ is a song for my kid. If you read the words to that song – and look at my child with his little button and his train set and his transformer – the whole thing is for Ben.”
In its released form, however, Trans is a mix of Young’s inscrutable computer music and three songs from the Island in the Sun sessions: “Little Thing Called Love,” “Hold On to Your Love,” and “Like an Inca.” True, songs like “Computer Age,” “Sample and Hold,” and “Transformer Man” – the latter of which, in its new context, seems more sweet than foreboding – didn’t go anywhere that Kraftwerk didn’t go first. But the album represented an incredibly bold, risky move for an artist of Young’s stature.
Far riskier, though, was Young’s decision to take the Transband (as it was dubbed) on the road before the album’s release. Unlike the Rust tour, whose backdrop was comically outsized for effect, everything about Young’s European trek was too big. It was over budget, used too much equipment, was booked into halls he couldn’t fill, and was too technically complex. Some of the dates were canceled. Several ended in riots. The shows left audiences puzzled and Young awash in red ink.
On Live Berlin, a video compiled from the tour’s last two shows, you can see the band, especially Molina (a basher at heart) and Palmer (who’d been suspended from the tour earlier for boozing too much), fail in their attempts to gel with a tangle of backing tapes, synched-up synclaviers and Young and Lofgren’s vocorders. It was all too much, especially given that the audience was completely unfamiliar with the new material.
Even had that not been the case, it’s hard to say how much difference it would have made. Young admitted that, bottom line, the songs he was singing were about a communication breakdown that can’t be repaired.
“It was very obscure,” Young said. “[The audience] didn’t have a fuckin’ chance in the world. The whole thing is, Trans is about communication, but it’s not getting through. And that’s what my son is. You gotta realize – you can’t understand the words on Trans, and I can’t understand my son’s words. So feel that.”
Read more of the chapter in Neil Young: Long May You Run - The Illustrated History.
Excerpt from Neil Young: Long May You Run – The Illustrated History (Voyageur Press, 2010, 2012)
Following the critical and commercial triumphs of Comes a Time, Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust, the 1980s are widely viewed as Neil Young’s lost decade. The period is marked by an acute artistic restlessness that found him flitting from one genre to another, resulting in inconsistent and sometimes slapdash records that, in turn, led to feelings of confusion, frustration, and downright anger in even his most ardent fans. Record sales plummeted.
Predictably, Young has a different perspective on the period.
“I feel really good about what I’ve done in the ‘80s,” he told the Village Voice as the decade came to a close. “Even though I’ve taken a lot of shit for it. Everything I did made sense to me, yet everywhere I went people were telling me, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Why are you doing this? You’re systematically dismantling your record sales.’ There was this huge abyss between me and everybody else.”
What the public didn’t know – because Young forbade his camp to divulge it – was that the music he made during the period was to some degree a response to various crises he was facing in his personal life.
His son Ben, born to Young and wife Pegi in 1978, was diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy. Young’s older son, Zeke, born to actress Carrie Snodgrass, also suffers from the disorder. But Ben’s condition was worse: he was spastic, quadriplegic and non-oral.
“I remember looking at the sky, looking for a sign, wondering, ‘What the fuck is going on?’” Young told the Voice. “‘Why are the kids in this situation? What the hell caused this? What did I do? There must be something wrong with me.’”
In 1980, there was another emergency on the horizon. Pegi required brain surgery to repair an arterial problem that, left unchecked, could have killed her. She recovered fully in a matter of months, but one can only imagine the strain the family’s health problems placed upon Young.
To be sure, both situations would impact his music in the ‘80s, most strikingly on re•ac•tor and Trans, which offered Young’s artistic response to Ben’s monotonous, repetitive therapy. But first came Hawks & Doves, which showed the artist already adrift creatively, casting about for new genres to work in and navigating the shifting political and cultural tides around him.
Hawks & Doves is a minor effort that Young himself called a “transitional” album, although he also defended it to Mojo as “a funky little record that represents where I was and what I was doing at the time.”
Funky? Not so much. But little it is, clocking in at barely half an hour.
The album is roughly split along the lines of opposing acoustic “dove” tunes and electric “hawk” songs. The two opening numbers are leftovers from Young’s abandoned Homegrown album. “Little Wing” is a short, sweet song about a nurturing woman that is given new relevance by Young’s nesting with Pegi. “The Old Homestead,” which takes up nearly a quarter of the album’s runtime, is a nearly impenetrable allegory that seems to describe Young’s warring creative impulses.
“Lost in Space” is another song yearning for domesticity, albeit in an unusual setting: the ocean floor. In one of his loopier moments on record, Young manipulates the tape to make his voice sound like he’s joined by an underwater chorus. In stark contrast, “Captain Kennedy” offers a blast of harsh reality, detailing a sailor’s last few minutes before going into battle.
The album’s electric tunes were newly minted for Hawks & Doves, but depart wildly from the take-no-prisoners rock that Young pursued on the Rust albums. Instead, they’re country songs, as pure an unfiltered as Young had ever offered, led by Ben Keith’s swooping steel guitar and Rufus Thibodeaux’ sawing fiddle. At the time, songs like “Stayin’ Power” and “Coastline” seemed slight and somewhat tossed off. But in retrospect, it’s possible to view them in the context of Young’s relationship with Pegi and the steadfastness with which they faced down their hardships. “We got stayin’ power/You and I/Stayin’ power, through thick and thin,” he sings in the former song, while in the latter, he boasts, “We don’t back down from no trouble.”
Of course, the Hawks & Doves songs that are most remarked upon are the last three, each of which hints at Young’s unexpected shift to the political right. “Union Man” lampoons the musician’s union (and by extension other bloated and ineffective unions that did little to make life better for the rank and file.) “Comin’ Apart at Every Nail” is a blue-collar anthem that exults in patriotism even as the nation unravels. This was the time, recall, of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise,” the Iranian hostage crisis, and the dawn of the age of Ronald Reagan. If Young’s brethren from Woodstock Nation were aghast at his sudden rightward tilt, they must have been floored by the album’s title track, which blatantly spoiled for war. Young even volunteered his life, or at least his checkbook, for service. It was a far cry from “Ohio.” But it was nothing compared to what would come further down the road.
Young was unable to tour to support either Hawks & Doves or its follow-up, re•ac•tor, which he recorded with Crazy Horse in the fall and winter of 1980 and the summer of 1981. By that time, he and Pegi had enrolled Ben in a radical therapy program designed by the Institute for the Awareness of Human Potential. The demanding program required the couple’s total commitment, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It also altered Young’s work schedule, forcing him to record only during breaks in the afternoon, when it had been his natural inclination to howl at the moon.
You can feel Young’s desire to break free and rock out on re•ac•tor tracks such as “Opera Star”; the stuttering, slobbering “Rapid Transit”; and the character-driven “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze.” “Get Back On It” expresses a desire to head back out on the road but nebulously hints that he’s otherwise engaged. Still, the album contains enough social commentary to suggest that Young’s attention could be at least temporarily drawn outside the demands of Ben’s program. “Southern Pacific” is a chugging rocker about a railroad worker who gave his life and good health to his profession, only to be cast aside when he reaches the age of mandatory retirement. “Motor City” is a seriocomic rant about the American automobile industry, which even then was being savaged by imports. The album-closing “Shots,” meanwhile, is dominated by intense sound effects of automatic weapons fire, and pairs two topics seldom discussed simultaneously: suburban lust and international ultraviolence.
For both good and ill, re•ac•tor’s standout track is “T-Bone,” a thudding nine-and-a-quarter-minute composition whose repetitiveness is thought to have been inspired by Ben’s therapy. Its sole lyrical content is a koan that most found a bit too Zen for the room. “Got mashed potatoes,” Young declares. “Ain’t got no t-bone.”
With no public acknowledgement of his personal situation, Young’s fans weren’t sure just what to make of “T-Bone,” or the rest of re•ac•tor, though at least the album found him kicking out some Rust-style jams. But those who paid attention to album art must have known something was up. The back cover was inscribed with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, which has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step recovery programs: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” it reads; “Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.”
Maintaining the requisite level of mystery, however, Young had the prayer printed in Latin.
He must have taken the prayer’s wisdom to heart, however, because in short order, he drastically changed a number of aspects of his life to help him regain control of it:
• On the personal front, he and Pegi quit Ben’s demanding program and opted for another, less pressurized form of therapy designed by the National Academy for Child Development.
• Professionally, Young, who was frustrated by the lack of promotional oomph behind re•ac•tor, left Warner/Reprise his record label for nearly a decade and a half. He turned down a more lucrative deal with RCA in order to sign with David Geffen’s eponymous label, which offered him a huge advance for each album and complete artistic freedom.
• Musically, Young purchased two devices that would change the course of his work for the foreseeable future: a synthesizer/sampling unit called the synclavier, and the vocorder, a device that radically altered the sound of the human voice.
“I was looking for ways to change my voice,” Young told the Voice. “To sing through a voice that no one could recognize and it wouldn’t be judged as being me.”
Young began recording a handful of songs that would eventually wind up on Trans. One of them was a robotic take on his Buffalo Springfield hit, “Mr. Soul,” made to blow the minds of his fellow Springfield bandmates, who were considering a reunion. But when the Geffen deal was signed, Young set the tracks aside and, Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer in tow, headed for Hawaii to make an album called Island in the Sun.
That album, which also featured Ben Keith, Ralph Molina, Nils Lofgren and CSNY percussionist Joe Lala, was intended as a commercial album that Young thought would please his new label. “It was a tropical thing all about sailing, ancient civilizations, islands and water,” Young told Mojo. But Geffen rejected it. So much for artistic freedom.
In his usual taciturn fashion, Young returned to the mainland and revived Trans, which deals even more explicitly than re•ac•tor with the demands of Ben’s original program. To handle the pressure, Young said, he completely shut himself down emotionally.
“I closed myself down so much that I was makin’ it, doin’ great with surviving,” he told the Voice. “But my soul was completely encased. I didn’t even consider that I would need a soul to play my music, that when I shut the door on pain, I shut the door on my music.”
Young attempted to lay bare his crippled emotional state, but do it anonymously, hiding himself in a cast of characters created by the vocorder’s many voices. It was only later that he let his fans in on the album’s subtext.
“Trans was about all these robot-humanoid people working in this hospital and the one thing they were trying to do was teach this little baby to push a button,” he said, referring to Ben’s program. “That’s what the record’s about. Read the lyrics, listen to all the mechanical voices, disregard everything but that computerized thing, and it’s clear Trans is the beginning of my search for communication with a severely handicapped non-oral person. ‘Transformer Man’ is a song for my kid. If you read the words to that song – and look at my child with his little button and his train set and his transformer – the whole thing is for Ben.”
In its released form, however, Trans is a mix of Young’s inscrutable computer music and three songs from the Island in the Sun sessions: “Little Thing Called Love,” “Hold On to Your Love,” and “Like an Inca.” True, songs like “Computer Age,” “Sample and Hold,” and “Transformer Man” – the latter of which, in its new context, seems more sweet than foreboding – didn’t go anywhere that Kraftwerk didn’t go first. But the album represented an incredibly bold, risky move for an artist of Young’s stature.
Far riskier, though, was Young’s decision to take the Transband (as it was dubbed) on the road before the album’s release. Unlike the Rust tour, whose backdrop was comically outsized for effect, everything about Young’s European trek was too big. It was over budget, used too much equipment, was booked into halls he couldn’t fill, and was too technically complex. Some of the dates were canceled. Several ended in riots. The shows left audiences puzzled and Young awash in red ink.
On Live Berlin, a video compiled from the tour’s last two shows, you can see the band, especially Molina (a basher at heart) and Palmer (who’d been suspended from the tour earlier for boozing too much), fail in their attempts to gel with a tangle of backing tapes, synched-up synclaviers and Young and Lofgren’s vocorders. It was all too much, especially given that the audience was completely unfamiliar with the new material.
Even had that not been the case, it’s hard to say how much difference it would have made. Young admitted that, bottom line, the songs he was singing were about a communication breakdown that can’t be repaired.
“It was very obscure,” Young said. “[The audience] didn’t have a fuckin’ chance in the world. The whole thing is, Trans is about communication, but it’s not getting through. And that’s what my son is. You gotta realize – you can’t understand the words on Trans, and I can’t understand my son’s words. So feel that.”
Read more of the chapter in Neil Young: Long May You Run - The Illustrated History.