Neil Young’s Ditch Trilogy

[EricPandora]

I’m a huge fan of Neil Young. So much, that an old friend once half-joked that Neil Young is my John Lennon. Obviously, I was thrilled to learn that Young’s new documentary and soundtrack Coastal gets released today. Daryl Hannah directed the film and it’s about his post-Covid return to the stage as a solo performer. The soundtrack blends live takes of newer songs and older fan favorites. To my ears, the two main standouts include a haunting, threadbare reworking of “Expecting To Fly,” easily my favorite song of Young’s during his time with Buffalo Springfield. But it was a stripped-down version of “Vampire Blues” that stopped me in my tracks – this performance is peeled to the proto-grunge marrow of vocals and a heavily overdriven electric guitar. It’s a timely translation that features Young crooning over the heavy, tube-driven distortion of “Old Black,” his famously modified 1953 Les Paul, plugged into a 1959 Fender Tweed Deluxe amplifier that’s so hot-rodded, his techs usually train two fans on the back of it, to ensure the amp doesn’t ignite and catch fire. Of course, listening to this incredible rendition of the song just made me want to revisit its origins – and my favorite era of his music – the Ditch Trilogy.

After the overwhelming success of 1972’s Harvest, Young was poised for superstardom. And since the album topped the Billboard 200, everyone at Reprise Records expected the hits to keep coming. After all, “Heart of Gold” went to No.1 and Billboard ranked it as the No. 17 song for 1972. But Young isn’t the kind of artist who cares much about other people’s expectations. In the liner notes to the 1977 compilation Decade, he wrote, "’Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there." Subsequently, Young’s next three consecutive albums were dubbed “the Ditch Trilogy.”

Young seemed cursed with adversity in the wake of Harvest. His marriage was falling apart. His friend and bandmate Danny Whitten from Crazy Horse overdosed and died the night that Young sent him home from rehearsals for being too strung-out to play. Not long after Whitten’s death, Young’s close friend and roadie Bruce Berry also died from an overdose. Young’s next three consecutive albums reflected some of the artist’s darkest times.

Young recorded both Time Fades Away and Tonight’s The Night in 1973 before tracking On the Beach in 1974. He once told an interviewer, “[Time Fades Away] is the worst record I ever made.” But over the following years, the sonic patina has fermented beautifully – an intimate live album, it stands as a sonic documentary of an overwhelmed superstar’s amplified vulnerability. Young’s label wouldn’t even release the album on CD until 2017. Reprise also shelved Tonight’s The Night for nearly two years. None of these albums yielded anything resembling a radio hit. But all three of these beautifully desolate sounding recordings have aged amazingly well, especially Tonight’s The Night. In 2018 Reprise also released ROXY: Tonight's the Night Live, an awesome document of Young and the Santa Monica Flyers playing the album in various live settings at the Roxy Theatre on Sunset Strip in 1973. And this is especially interesting because they initially thought the album was too gloomy to release after it was recorded. But that’s exactly the vibe Young was trying to capture. He wanted the studio versions of these songs to cast a heavy spell on the listener. Void of any production magic, Young insisted on rolling tape without rehearsing the songs beforehand. He wouldn’t let anyone overdub their mistakes. He purportedly kept his band sleep-deprived and wasted on tequila and “honey slides,” an intense concoction of homemade marijuana edibles. If Young’s goal was to distill a reflection of emotional fatigue and spiritual desperation, he succeeded. Listen to worn and weary “Borrowed Tune” or the exhausted “Mellow My Mind” and it sounds like he’s at the end of a frayed rope. His voice haggard and falling apart on the high notes, this is the sound of a man slowly being crushed by the weight of the times.

And make no mistake, the early ‘70s were some heavy times. The nation’s morale was wounded from the Vietnam War and Los Angeles was still paranoid from the Manson murders. Young mused on the latter in “Revolution Blues” where he sings, “Well I heard that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars. But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.” Understandably, this upset a lot of people. The Eagles’ Glenn Frye reportedly asked Young, “Why are you doing this to yourself?” Although On the Beach was recorded in 1973, the title-track’s most timeless lyric still resonates with haunting relevance during these currently heavy times: “The world is turning. I hope it don’t turn away. All my pictures are falling from the wall where I placed them yesterday. The world is turning. I hope it don’t turn away.” Over four decades later, Young’s darkest and most emotional work is still connecting with people. Give this doomed triptych some spins and it becomes understandable why the palpable emotion and raw desperation running through these three albums has garnered a deep Ditch Trilogy cult. Listen and join.