There was an article in the New York Times magazine a few weeks back that caught my attention. It was a special edition on the 25 most influential musicians today. Anyway I didn’t know many of them but on the last page was a article about Metallica and how they’d finally put out an album that sounded like Metallica. The point being that since their 1990’s self-titled mega-hit, know as the “The Black Album”, they had put out a series of records that were deemed by their fans as deviating too far from their signature sound. But now they were back and all was right in the world of Metallica fans. This made me think about an artist’s obligation to factor into their creative process the expectations of their fans.
Any change in artistic direction can risk the alienation of a band’s fans. Think Dylan going electric or Springsteen’s “Nebraska” album. It happens all the time. I was a huge REM fan until they left the IRS label for Warner Brothers in 1988. Their sound and material changed, to my ears, in a big way. What I first loved about the band had changed. I moved on and followed them only casually after that.
Perhaps the most telling example was my initial experience with Neil Young. I discovered Young through my sister’s copy of “After The Goldrush”. This was around 1972 and the follow-up album “Harvest” had been just released. I feverishly went about filling in the back catalogue of all things Neil. There were his other solo albums, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young output (“Déjà Vu and “Four Way Street”), a bootleg from his 1971 acoustic tour and even Buffalo Springfield’s Greatest Hits (to which I took an endless amount of ridicule from my friends when I purchased it at our local mall). I devoured these records and waited eagerly for his next album, the follow-up to Harvest. In the fall of 1973 it finally arrived in the form of “Time Fades Away” a live album of all new songs from the previous winter’s tour. To say this was a departure from what I had come to know as Neil Young music was an understatement. Not that there weren’t some Neil-like songs including the classic “Don’t Be Denied” and some nice solo piano songs. But most of it was a pretty rough, ramshackle affair.
The following year in the summer of 1974 came “On The Beach”, now viewed as one of his classic albums, with a set of songs reflecting the whole Watergate, Patty Hearst zeitgeist of the seventies. No “Southern Man” or “Down By The River” (the raging guitar solos of the early albums having all but disappeared) just a jangling, paranoid set of tunes on side one followed by the somber, mostly acoustic, trilogy on side two.
It would be another year until the third offering of the Ditch Trilogy[1] hit the racks in the form of “Tonight’s The Night”. By now I had all but given up hope of getting some of the Neil Young music I had been weaned on. TTN, with its black cover with Neil peering out from behind shades, was a frightening, drunken, out of tune affair, which was more or less an audio wake for two fellow musician friends who had fallen to heroin. Neil wailed like an alley cat as the band (the remnants of Crazy Horse, Stray Gator Ben Keith and Nils Lofgren) lurched and careened behind him. I remember my friend and I each buying this album the day it came out. Listening to TTN back in my bedroom we looked at each other, both thinking, “what is this?”
The sun finally peaked through a few months later with the release of “Zuma”, a raging electric guitar laden return to form with the re-formulated Crazy Horse. Ah, the Neil for which I’d been waiting for two plus years.
Looking back now we know it was just Neil being Neil, which is doing whatever the hell he felt like with no thought of the commercial consequences.[2] Which brings us back, admittedly I took the long way around, to the article about Metallica. Playing to type may be the way to sell a lot of records but art it is not. The artist creates according to his muse and the fans follow, or not. .
Emerson wrote, “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”[3] That certainly applies to Neil Young and his career. Here’s hoping that Metallica was following its muse when they made their latest album and not just them trying to be the old Metallica.
Arts Roundup
Watching – The Night Manager is an adaption of a John le Carre novel starring Hugh Lourie and Tom Hiddleston. Lourie plays Richard “Dickie” Roper, a notorious arms dealer. Hiddleston plays Jonathon Pine, an MI-6 operative embedded in Roper’s organization. Six spellbinding episodes. Lourie is an excellent villain. Hiddleston is icy cool as he burrows deeper into Roper’s world. It’s on Amazon Prime. Terrific stuff.
Listening – Real Estate is a band from Ridgewood, NJ (about five miles from me). Their fourth album, “In Mind” has just been released. I’ve been listening to it for a couple of weeks. A somewhat low-key affair. I hear parts Teenage Fan Club (vocally) and Death Cab For Cutie. Their bio lists The Feelies as a major influence. It grows on you.
[1] When asked why he didn’t follow up Harvest with a similarly commercial album Young replied that Harvest had put him in the middle of the road, which was boring. He decided to head for the ditch, which was a rougher ride but he met more interesting people. These three albums became know as the “ditch” trilogy.
[2] Young actually got sued in the nineteen eighties, during his genre experiment period, by his label, Geffen Records, for producing records that were “unrepresentative” of Neil Young music.
[3] From the essay “Self-Reliance”.