Harvest

Harvest sits at the foundation of Neil Young's legacy, a blockbuster that turned the singer/songwriter into a superstar in his own right. He had already received a boost from being recruited into Crosby, Stills & Nash, with After the Gold Rush climbing into the Top Ten months after CSN&Y's Deja Vu went to number one, but Harvest was something different, simultaneously slicker and more eccentric than its predecessor. Its overwhelming success -- thanks to the number one hit "Heart of Gold," a sun-bleached country-rocker that opened up the highway for the likes of America, and becoming the biggest-selling record of 1972 -- camouflages its slightly misshapen structure. Much of the music does indeed fulfill the rural promise of its title, either by relying upon the studio polish of Nashville cats or the ragged ramble of Young's jerry-rigged California barn. These are complementary approaches, with the raw immediacy of "Are You Ready for the Country," "Alabama," and "Words" contrasting nicely with the burnished, mellow simmer of "Out on the Weekend," "Harvest," and "Old Man." Where Harvest gets a bit odd is on "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There's a World," where the London Symphony Orchestra plays bombastic arrangements by Jack Nitzsche -- arrangements so overwhelming they threaten to knock the entire album off of its axis. "The Needle and the Damage Done," a lament for the late Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten that was recorded in concert, helps bring Harvest back to earth, offering open-hearted empathy that loses none of its poignancy over the years. At first, "The Needle and the Damage Done" doesn't quite seem to jibe with the rest of Harvest -- it's a solo acoustic number recorded live in concert, an aesthetic that's far away from either the slick studio craft or downhome country-rock of the rest of the record -- but its inclusion underscores how Harvest touches upon everything Neil Young had done to that point. Here, he's heard as a folk troubadour and a shaggy rocker, a protest singer and an old soul, a hippie who wants to get back to the country -- all personas he'd continue to explore and expand over the course of his career, and all presented here in a way that's welcoming, not alienating. Young notoriously bristled at this accessibility, writing in the liner notes of Decade that "'Heart of Gold' put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch," but that doesn't erase the fact that Harvest is a remarkable accomplishment, turning Young's idiosyncrasies into something commercial without sacrificing their substance. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine