“Harvest”, Neil Young’s flagship album, turns 50

Most people who listen to Neil Young’s music have approached it through this record. It is the most common gateway to discover his abundant work. Released on February 1, 1972, it remained the best-selling album of the year, and although some critics were less than enthusiastic when it was released, it has been recognized over the years as a major, and most iconic album. by Neil Young.

Yet the Canadian songwriter never considered it different from the rest of his discography. For him it’s just “a disc like the others”. But the public quickly acclaimed it, especially through its two hits heart of gold and Oldman.

After his debut in the sixties in Buffalo Springfield, then as a soloist or as the fourth musketeer of the trio that became a quartet Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Loner arrived in 1972 at a key moment in his career.

Harvest indeed marks a turning point between his previous albums with the group Crazy Horse and the dark years that followed, marked by the death of his guitarist Danny Whitten and the disability of his son. Before sinking into depression and recording three very dark albums, Neil Young signs this luminous and timeless record.

He temporarily freed himself from Crazy Horse by recruiting the Stray Gators, musicians oriented rather country. The disc smacks of the bucolic atmosphere from its opening Out on the weekend or the title track, and most of the songs are bathed in an acoustic and country atmosphere. Besides the song Are you ready for the country? plays on words: “are you ready for the campaign? / are you ready for country music?”.

Neil Young thus becomes one of the heralds of folk-rock, but does not lock himself in by opening his album to other musical genres. Two titles stand out where the singer is accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra: the judged sexist A man needs a maid (“a man needs a maid”) and the existentialist There’s a worldconsidered too “exaggerated” by Young himself.

Folk that is eyeing country, songs with symphonic arrangements, but also rock. Because a Neil Young album wouldn’t be complete without a few snarling riffs. The one who would later become the godfather of grunge slips into the soft Harvest two angry songs, one of which will remain famous for an alleged quarrel with another group.

If the record ends with Neil Young’s scratchy guitar playing in Words (Between the Lines of Age)it is especially Alabama which holds the attention of the public, and in particular that of the group Lynyrd Skynyrd.

On his previous album After the goldrushthe songwriter had already expressed his aversion to the “dungeons” populating the southern states of the United States in southern man and its acid text. He drives the point home with Alabama where he mentions “the remnants of the Union”in reference to the Confederates of the Civil War, and castigates the segregationist hints still very present a century later.

Spearhead of southern rock, Lynyrd Skynyrd felt stung and responded two years later with Sweet home Alabamaquoting the Canadian singer directly in the lyrics: “I heard Mr. Young talking about it” [au sujet de l’Alabama], “Neil Young must know that a Southerner doesn’t need him around here”.

Little wink from the group, the verse “Southern Man” is slipped right after “I heard Mr. Young talk about her”. It’s very low in the mix, but that was revealed by guitarist Ed King, who wrote the track. Listen carefully to 0:55 on the left channel.

The opportunity is too good for some to catalog the group as racist, and place it as a sworn enemy of Neil Young. But this easy shortcut forgets that the phrase that seemed to praise the then white power governor of Alabama “in Birmingham they love the governor” is immediately followed by “boo boo boo!”. And in concert, these choirs will even sing “down down down!”confirming the song’s irony and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s desire not to be co-opted by any political movement.

But above all, the supposed animosity between the two artists will only be artificially exaggerated by the press. Indeed Neil Young has always claimed to love Lynyrd Skynyrd and Ronnie Van Zant, the author of the lyrics of Sweet Home Alabama, has never hidden his admiration for the songwriter. Everyone wore T-shirts bearing the image of their so-called enemy, and before the death of Ronnie Van Zant, the southern group was to record Powderfinger du Canadien, a not-so-glorious text on the colonization of America.

A disc that marked the spirits, but ultimately much more by its musical significance than this futile controversy. Twenty years later, in 1992, Neil Young published harvest moon whose title track instantly evokes the musical color of his most famous album. And even if since then, Neil Young has become a old manhis 1972 album still arouses as much enthusiasm, 50 years after its release.