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Gleaning Gold: Neil Young’s Harvest Turns 40

I have always had dark heroes.

Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Brian Jones all captured my imagination. Their deep mysteries, their devotion to otherworldly muses, their wrecked cool and even their idiosyncratic clothing kept me enthralled as I pored over the exoticism of their guitar excursions like they were consecrated texts concealing some code that would reveal the profundity of a great unseen world.

And in some ways, they did. This unholy trinity opened up whole vistas of thought and sensations, allowing me to develop what Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to when describing transcendentalism: “an original relation to the universe.” It was both music and extra-musical—but at the heart of it, what they were imparting obscured more than it revealed.

I liked the idea that rock stars were not like the rest of us. That they existed in some alternative universe breathing in saffron-scented air, wearing tight velvet stovepipe pants, riding in chauffeur-driven Aston Martins—all while thinking great thoughts of profundity and consequence and consorting with woman who resembled The Beatles wives and girlfriends, or winsome fashion models.

But if I am entirely honest with myself, my greatest mystery has always been Neil Young. And unlike the aforementioned guitar gods, his mystery wasn’t as occult or obvious—but rather more homegrown and inexplicable because it occupied that unsettling juncture between the familiar and the unknown, like a human manifestation of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.”

Neil Young may look like the rest of us—may even appear to act like the rest of us—but at the core, you know he really isn’t. That’s even before we get to the Pontiac hearse that he drove from Toronto to Los Angeles in 1966, or how the Buffalo Springfield came into being because all the members just happened to be stuck in the same LA traffic jam—in a moment that seemed to momentarily subvert the law of physics and geography to make musical history.

At the center of my devotion to Young is his emotional austerity and loneliness that has always mirrored my own. I have a theory that the artists that you most revere are the ones that reflect something of yourself back to you, to show some wound or strength in a more exaggerated form, allowing you to understand yourself better. For me, that has always been Young and never so much as on his fourth album, 1972’s Harvest —with its trajectory of wanting love but not quite knowing how to give into it wholly; looking for a heart of gold, but finding a heart of darkness.

There are few places as uncomfortable as the full surrender of your affections—for me, anyway.

And for Young, I suspect.

At least back in 1972.

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Beyond Neil Young’s ability to manipulate events, traffic conditions, overcome health concerns or be my own personal mirror, I think his greatest gift is his unfathomable, often wary imagination.

Do words descend on him like Jeanne d’Arc’s visions, fueled by his (and her suspected) epilepsy? How can one explain where a song like Buffalo Springfield’s “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” comes from, with images that feel pulled from Greek tragedy with an economy of language that brings Ernest Hemmingway to mind?

Part poetry, part obfuscation, Young has always created a culture of unease, first witnessed here, oddly asking, “Who’s putting a sponge in the bells I once rung?” then demanding, “Whose seeing eyes through the crack in the floor?”—an early reveal of his incipient paranoia and ability to sense some threat that the rest of us are only dimly aware of.