he did with Crazy Horse<\/a>.
\nAnd still I grit my teeth and expect the worst every time I hear he’s got something new coming out.<\/p>\nNeil Young is like that crazy neighbor who happens to be a fantastic baker.\u00a0 You know that nine times out of ten when you hear anything from that neighbor it’ll be because he’s plinking at cats with a BB gun, or because the cops are hauling her back into treatment.\u00a0 But there’s that odd visit where he\/she brings over the lemon meringue pie that proves the existence of a divine loving God that makes you forget the other nine times – for the moment.
\nThat’s Neil Young. He bounces from the sublime to the…well, not really “ridiculous”.\u00a0 “Tiresome”?\u00a0 “Not really quite right?” “Waste of time?”\u00a0 Anyway, he bounces around like a hyperactive four-year-old who’s broken into the Coca-Cola.<\/p>\n
And I don’t mind that, even. Oh, it’d be cool of so many of Neil Young’s reinventions weren’t squibs (Trans<\/em>, Re-Ac-Tor, <\/em>and on and on), but it would <\/em>be boring, for Young and for the audience, if he never,ever changed.<\/p>\nSo part of the problem is that I get worn out keeping up with Neil Young.<\/p>\n
But the big problem I have?<\/p>\n
Let’s go back to college.\u00a0 I took a piano tuning class.\u00a0 In learning how to tune pianos, my ears became incredibly <\/em>sensitive to pitch, and especially to harmonic dissonance between strings; when two strings that are supposed to have the same pitch are just ever-so-slightly out of tune, phase cancellation creations a subtle “beat” in the sound; the more out of tune the strings are, the faster the beat.\u00a0<\/p>\nSo by the time I got done with that class, my ears were as sensitive as a dog’s.<\/p>\n
And then Re Ac Tor <\/em>came out. \u00a0 And its first single, “Southern Pacific”, came on the radio.<\/p>\nAnd I listened.\u00a0 And held my head in pain.\u00a0 Neil Young’s guitar was out of tune.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nAnd as I listened to more and more Young, the throbbing phase beats told me Neil Young never ever ever ever tunes is &^%^$#$@ guitar<\/em>!\u00a0 My ears are still very sensitive to pitch, by the way, which is why Karaoke night can be so utterly painful to me.<\/p>\nSo stylistic schizophrenia aside, even when I like <\/em>Neil Young, he makes my teeth hurt from clenching at the out-of-tuneness of it all.<\/p>\nIn 20-odd years, I haven’t been able to ignore it.<\/p>\n
So yeah.\u00a0 I’m supposed to love Neil Young.\u00a0But he bugs me.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While we’re on the subject of Canadian folk singers gone awry – I just can’t stand Neil Young. Let’s make sure I’m clear here.\u00a0 I love tons of Neil Young music; “Down By The River” is one of the sixties’ better moments; that it can survive the presence of Stephen Stills is testimony to its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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