Seen from the retrospect of 57 years, though, the main point here is that the anticipated "destruction" never ended up taking place. The song namechecks Vietnam, the moon landing, the eastern world, floating bodies, civil rights marches, the process of coagulation and much else besides.ĭepending on your point of view, Eve of Destruction either stands as the most exciting thing since the invention of the electric toothpick or an utterly puerile tumble of non-sequiturs, the likes of which a listening world would thankfully never bear witness to again until Billy Joel put pen to paper and scratched out We Didn't Start the Fire. Nearly a half-century ago, for instance, the raspy-voiced Barry McGuire scored a massive (and solitary) worldwide hit for himself with Eve of Destruction - actually written in 1964 by the teenaged PF Sloan - prophesying the imminent end of life as we knew it. Even the best stuff becomes horribly dated in fairly short order. It's probably his best work.īut who wants to listen to protest anyway? There are all kinds of perils in putting politics to music, not least the passage of time. What most of the songs are about is anybody's guess.Īnother of his celebrated albums, Tonight's the Night, was cut from the same crazy cloth: a bunch of toxically out-of-key dirges brutally cranked out in the wake of afternoons spent "getting high, drinking tequila and playing pool", as Young put it to Rolling Stone at the time. Harvest, After the Goldrush and the bucolic Comes A Time are exquisitely oddball works. After an impressively solid apprenticeship with the group Buffalo Springfield, he turned in a bunch of insanely gorgeous solo albums whose appeal was precisely that you didn't know what on earth he was singing about in that shaky voice of his. Mind you, Young has always been a little back-to-front in his public positioning and bumpy turns of phrase. In a world in which we are always hearing about this or that artist getting cancelled, the lanky superstar has gone one better and cancelled himself. But issuing clarion calls to political arms has never been his strong suit.įor now at least, the last of the great protesters has only shuffled the deck in one intriguing respect.
#Neil young spotify full#
On a good night, with his band playing as commandingly as it did on the night I once saw them many years ago in Wellington, he can make you feel like you're lying in a burned out basement with the full moon in your eyes.
Then again - and I mean this in the nicest possible way - Neil Young has always been a bit useless when it comes to rousing the troops. You could be forgiven for thinking nobody in the world of contemporary music actually is on board with Young's protest against Joe Rogan, the star podcaster Young says "disseminates harmful information" about the coronavirus and vaccines.
Where are the others? Where's Bruce when you need him? Where's Bob? Where, for heaven's sake, is Neil Finn?
#Neil young spotify plus#
Plus the guitarist Nils Lofgren! But all of these people are already part of the Young circle in one way or another. Not forgetting the slew of elderly gents with familiar-sounding last names - that would be Mr Crosby, Mr Stills and Mr Nash. Okay, so Joni Mitchell has lent her name to the cause.
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