Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "Psychedelic Pill"

Mitch gets himself a hip-hop haircut

Mitch Blum

CJ Kaplan

, and

Ken Warshaw

Aug 04, 2021

Mitch’s Pitch:

Everybody wants some.

Contentment, that is.

A feeling of peace and connection. A sense of purpose and meaning in life. A moment that transcends the petty thoughts and consumerist stuff that dominates our daily lives.

New agers call it living in the moment, where you’re not thinking about the past or planning for the future. Athletes call it flow state, when pure muscle memory takes the wheel. Yogis call it, well, yoga, and use meditation and postures to connect with the higher self. Religious people seek it through prayer and community. And good old hippies take music, throw in some psychedelic drugs and dancing, and attempt to achieve lift-off to that beautiful, perfect, peaceful state of bliss, where you're no longer controlled by your thoughts, and you’re connected to something bigger and better.

Good old hippies like Neil Young and his on-again-off-again backing band Crazy Horse, who use their 2012 album Psychedelic Pill to both restate the higher spiritual purpose of music and to help people achieve a state of bliss through the music itself, all conveniently delivered in a kick-ass, jam-heavy rock album.

The music of Crazy Horse has always been deceptively simple, patterns of major chords repeated over and over (and over!) again, creating a hypnotic, trance-like effect, with the seamless union between drummer Ralph Molina, bassist Billy Talbot, and guitarist Poncho Sampedro creating the perfect launch pad for Neil Young’s iconic guitar lines and ethereal vocals.

And as much as I love all iterations of Neil Young - he’s definitely in my pantheon of favorite artists ever - I always love him most when he’s with Crazy Horse, and I was lucky that my first real concert was Neil Young & Crazy Horse at Great Woods on September 20, 1986. (I had previously seen John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band at Great Adventure and they were awesome, too!)

The power of the Horse is best demonstrated by the three epics on the album: “Driftin’ Back”, “Ramada Inn”, and “Walk Like a Giant”, three incredibly powerful tunes that draw you in deeper and deeper as they go on longer and longer, with the Horse keeping us tethered to Earth while Neil explores the cosmos through expressive extended solos delivered in his signature guitar style.

At first “Driftin' Back” seems like an old man’s stream of consciousness rant against modernity, technology and the commercialization of art. And it is. But underneath is Neil’s determination to drift back to a time when music was a spiritual art, when it was a meditation, and sound could be used to help control the ego-driven thoughts that cause suffering.

“Ramada Inn” is a deeply moving tale of the dissolution of Neil’s longtime marriage, and the sadness, ambivalence and responsibility he feels. It’s among the most vulnerable songs he’s even written, which is a pretty impressive feat for your 32nd album.

“Walk Like a Giant” allows Neil to drift back and reminisce about the other higher purpose that hippies had for music - to change the world - and in this case Neil’s disappointment in his generation’s failures is palpable.

Those three songs themselves would make a great album, but as a wise shaman, Neil gently guides our psychedelic trip by surrounding the epics with shorter tunes, making sure that we don’t take too much too soon. The rest of the songs are solid and serve their purpose well, and, yes, that includes the trippy version of the song “Psychedelic Pill”.

Friends, fellow bliss seekers and music fans, it’s clear that Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s Psychedelic Pill absolutely deserves a place in the Newbury St. collection. It’s more than just an excellent album by musicians at the top of their game; It’s a transcendent musical experience that can actually inspire a meditative state and create a sense of contentment in the listener. If it were up to me this album would be placed in the night table of every hotel room across the globe (perhaps with a small edible) to help wage heavy peace across the land, creating bliss and spreading contentment.

Ken’s Response:

It was February of 1989, a year and a half after President Regean publicly threw down the gauntlet to Mikhail Gorbachev and demanded he tear down the Berlin Wall. Later in 1989, the wall would indeed begin deconstruction and the end of the Cold War would become a reality. But in the normally quiet ski town of Beaupre, Quebec, Canada tensions couldn’t have been higher. It was then that a young, vacationing, red-headed senior from Needham High School clad in white Reeboks, ski pants and a Neil Young & The Blue Notes t-shirt sparked an international incident historians now refer to as The Mont Sainte-Anne Massacre.

You won’t read about this debacle in the history books, but I was there and witnessed the aftermath. Mitch and I along with another friend of ours flew up to Quebec for a week of skiing (we went to Canada so we could drink, duh!) and general merriment. At the end of our last day of skiing, our friend (we’ll call him Andre, because that’s the name his parents gave him) and I decided to get one more run down the increasingly icy slopes, but Mitch had already stripped off hat, gloves, jacket, etc. and was enjoying a couple of cold Labatt’s with some new friends we had made from Toronto. They had approached us after seeing Mitch’s awesome t-shirt; a blue and purple tie-dye with the cover of Neil’s 1988 concept album This Note’s For You on the front and SPONSORED BY NOBODY proudly emblazoned on the back.

Little did a buzzed Andre or I realize that while we were out schussing down the slopes, Mitch and the Toronto guys were getting into it with some Quebecois over the rightful claim to the official language of Canada. By the time we made it back to the lodge, the police were there, the lodge had been emptied, broken bits of Labatt’s bottles were everywhere, dozens of contrite Canadians were apologizing to each other in both French and English, and the Neil Young t-shirt was gone, leaving Mitch wearing some ill-fitting white shirt.

Unlike the English vs. French debate, there is no argument about Neil Young north of the border. They love some Tim Horton’s, some poutine, and a whole lotta Neil! And I agree with them completely. With a body of work that can be categorized using a musical taxonomy, at the top of the list would be two kingdoms, “solo” and “with Crazy Horse”. Psychedelic Pill is the latter and it is one of his best efforts, and that’s saying a lot considering it’s his 32nd studio album.

Neil writes some of his most honest work and Crazy Horse drives the sound. Whether it’s talking about modern music delivery systems on “Driftin Back”, a relationship gone sour on “Ramada Inn” or the ultimate failure of the hippie generation on “Walk Like a Giant”, he paints beautifully tragic pieces that are driven at full-speed by his incredible backing band.

Let’s put Psychedelic Pill in the Newbury St. collection, and pour out a Labatt’s for our fallen comrades who bravely (sorry, I meant drunkenly) fought and caused me to have to wait almost 30 minutes (or whatever 30 minutes is in the metric system) to get into the lodge to get my backpack.

Pitch definitely successful (no one wins, it’s a war of men)

CJ’s Response:

Neil Young is mad.

He’s mad at Big Oil, Big Tech, Big Pharma and maybe even Big Bird for all I know. But, that’s almost always a good thing. Because when Neil is mad, we get songs like “Southern Man”, “Ohio” and “Rockin’ in the Free World”. (Although sometimes we get albums like Greendale, which is basically a lecture from your least favorite professor about how much your generation sucks.)

Psychedelic Pill is the good kind of mad Neil. “Driftin’ Back”, the Rush-like opus that kicks off the album, really caught me by surprise. Sure, it’s a get-off-my-lawn diatribe, but the lyrics are sharp and incisive. As someone who fancies himself a creative person, this particular stanza cut close to the bone:

Dreaming about the way things sound now

Write them in my book

Worry that you can’t hear me now

And feel the time I took

When you agonize over words and phrases and even punctuation as often as I do, the idea that your work is just more grist for the content mill is absolutely devastating. So, Neil had me right from the jump. Even when he threatened to get a “hip-hop haircut”.

Now, did “Driftin’ Back” need to be nearly half an hour long? Well, I’ve sat through 20+ minute versions of “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Down by the River” without even once checking my e-mail, so I’m gonna let it slide.

Mitch hit the highlights of Psychedelic Pill pretty solidly. “Ramada Inn” was heartbreaking. Initially, I feared that we were going to add another budget hotel to the list of places rock stars hate to stay. But, when Neil used it as a setting for his dissolving marriage, I could only hold my breath and listen.

The other song that deserves a mention is “She’s Always Dancing”. I think this is Neil forgiving his wife and himself as he lets her go.

She wants to live without ties to bind her down

She wants to dance with her body left at ground

She wants to spin, and she lives in her own world

She wants to dream like she was a little girl

Dang.

Does Psychedelic Pill belong in the Newbury St. collection? I’d be a fraud if I said it didn’t.

Although I would like to see Neil with a hip-hop haircut.

Pitch Successful (…and the Crazy Horse you rode in on)

Mitch’s pitch was successful and Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s Psychedelic Pill has been added to the Newbury St. collection!

Comes a time when you gotta walk on to the comments section and let us know whether Psychedelic Pill takes you to sugar mountain or is on the losing end.

Exile on Newbury St.

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