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Gleaning Gold: Neil Young’s Harvest Turns 40

Whether paranoia is heightened awareness or just acute self-awareness, it’s something that Young has honed to high art, allowing him to pull things out of the ethers—seemingly ordinary images—and put a slight counter-clockwise twist on them, transforming the commonplace into something unruly and unexpected.

That and his dedication to never do the expected, even in small ways. From changing band members and configurations at will to making a rather straightforward record after four albums which showed him to be the inscrutable loner, often injured by love and loss. From the bewildered recriminations of “What Did You Do To My Life” to the wistful longing of “I’ve Loved Her So Long,” to asking for a woman to save his life in “I’ve Been Waiting for You,” all on his eponymous debut in 1968, to the elusive females of “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Cinnamon Girl”—dream girls from his second record, 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, the lyrics and images are intangible and anticipatory.

By the time that Young released his third record After The Gold Rush in 1970, he appears to have had a deep experience of love, loss and romantic redemption. But the best song from that disc, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” is about his Crosby Stills Nash &Young bandmate Graham Nash’s break-up with Joni Mitchell. Though Young had married Susan Acevedo in 1968 (and divorced her by 1970), the song’s lyrics suggest that Young had yet to allow himself to become totally lost in a relationship.

It’s not until he became smitten with actress Carrie Snodgress after seeing her in the film Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) that he let himself be more forthcoming, autobiographical and less oblique than he had been on record—chronicling the beginnings of his romance-cum-conquest of Snodgress in the third verse of “A Man Needs a Maid,” which was slated for the forthcoming Harvest.

A while ago somewhere I don’t know when
I was watching a movie with a friend.
I fell in love with the actress.
She was playing a part that I could understand

That is, of course, after expounding in the first lines that all he really needed was “someone to keep his house clean, fix my meals and go away” —lines much more indicative of the character of the relationship than anyone would have suspected in those early days of 1971 when the couple met.

It’s exhilarating for the listener to be able to crack open the backstage door into the personal life of this brooding, dashed romantic—even approaching rock soap opera. But if it was intoxicating for fans to find him documenting the history of his relationship, then it was more intoxicating for the actress who didn’t have any idea who Neil Young was at the time of Harvest’s release. “I wasn’t a rock and roll girl,” she told the New York Times in 1990. “I said, ‘Neil Young. Neil Young. Where do I know that name from?’”

Nevertheless, she said, she fell “madly and immediately” in love with Young and abandoned Hollywood, walking out on her contract in order to travel with the rocker and share his Northern California ranch. In 1972, she gave birth to their son Zeke. As for her career, “I decided that I was going to be in love, I was going to give it everything I had.”

Unfortunately, Young wouldn’t or couldn’t do the same. It was as if he had one eye fixed on the exit door—or as he so poetically put it in “Alabama,” as he was speaking about the intersection of the then-new South and the old South and the problems that it posed: “Your Cadillac has got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.” He could have just as easily been speaking about himself in this relationship, which ended in 1977.

What I find most unnerving is that after the ambiguity of “A Man Needs a Maid” and his rather offhanded declaration love for Snodgress, Young follows the song with “Heart of Gold,” signifying—like Bono a decade after him—that he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.

Neil Young scholar Thrasher, founder of the preeminent Neil Young fan site, thrasherswheat.org, contends that, “It is the search for love that drove his songwriting.” But I’m not certain that’s correct; the greater quest might be for something altogether different and more elemental.

There aren’t any accidents in an album’s sequencing and Young had to have thought hard about where he wanted to place “Heart of Gold” in respect to the rest of the songs. Was its placement a message to Snodgress or to himself? Perhaps the “heart of gold” that he’s searching for is his own, given the use of the personal pronoun: “I’ve been in my mind and it’s such a fine line that keeps me searching for a heart of gold.” This particular journey is the search for self.