Album 66 - Neil Young - Harvest - 5/5
“Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup / With the promise of a man” But only the promise.
In my first semester in college, my dad told me he wanted to meet up with his old roommate in Chicago and see Bob Dylan. He had four tickets and wanted to know if I could come and bring a friend. Of course, I said, but my own roommate was busy and I didn’t know anybody else yet. So I e-mailed the dorm listserv and asked if anyone wanted to go see Robert Zimmerman. A couple of guys caught the reference and I ended up having them draw straws for it.
Afterwards we sat around drinking and talked about Dylan — his many eras, his epic genius. Somehow Neil Young became a point of comparison… someone said that as much as he loved Neil Young, he could fit all his favorite Neil songs onto a single CD, but he could never do that with Dylan. It all seems a pretty blinkered way of viewing art, but we were also just kids sizing each other up.
With a more mature mindset, though, I can say: Dylan never made anything like Harvest.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s my idol. It ended up being a great show. He had a killer band that went on extended jams. He covered Warren Zevon and the Stones. But I also remember seeing my dad’s awkward interactions with his old roommate that night and finally realizing that he had no friends. From then on his life would be increasingly characterized by confusion and decline. There are days I would hate him and there were days when he was too disconnected from reality to hate.
Even though it sounds smooth as a pristine pond, Harvest speaks to that kind of desperation, which i think Neil Young must have carried with him his whole life. Each song is almost a life story but not quite. Needles, words, a maid, a heart of gold — what does any of it mean? Even “Alabama” is not quite a protest song in comparison to “Ohio.” Harvest doesn’t quite make sense and doesn’t ask you to make sense of it, just listen.
In counterpoint to that room full of Dylanologists in college was a late-night ride with a spindly girl. She lived in our dorm but nobody really knew her or would say anything about her. My friend said she looked like a lost yearling. But somehow I ended up in her pickup truck in a drive to perform some errand in the suburbs. We sang along to “Harvest” the whole way. After “Old Man” she said “that song is everything.” I wondered if she would become a significant person in my life after that but I think I only saw her a few times ever again.
“Old Man” is everything but is by the same token incomplete. The patriarch yields to no particular interpretation or thesis. But I would say this — a writer I like noted that some song lyrics lie through their very composition. “I Walk the Line” is a lie. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” is a lie. If you’re so certain, fellas, then why put so much effort into the song? And “doesn’t mean that much to me to mean that much to you” is most certainly a lie.
Many years later my dad ended up in my care. And also in my car, a lot. After a certain age I realized he didn’t care that much about anything I had to say. Plus he was in the middle stages of dementia by then anyway — he regularly insisted we all said he was “demented.” When we would drive around the city for his fairly pointless medical appointments he would repeat phrases off of billboards and say things like “Didn’t we go there with your mother once?” Hell if I know.
So it made more sense to play music, typically albums I’d gotten to know from his own collection. When I put on “Harvest” one day, I knew “Old Man” would be waiting and decided consequences be damned. But when we got there I saw him off in his own world, mouthing the words, telling his own story. Dad exposed me to so much good music but I’m not sure we ever had an honest conversation about any of it, much less what it might mean for him and me.
He died not long after, passing a few minutes after visiting hours ended one night. I’ve made my peace about it all. I was lucky enough to have a father-in-law with whom I could discuss every steel guitar note if we pleased; he also grew up without much of a dad and knew not to make too big a deal of it.
And now I have my sons and I get to make up my own story. I pushed the baby around today in the stroller, talking in a stream of consciousness as I always do. Exposure to language is good. I told him about this album and what a harvest is. Completion and finality. A bounty and a scythe. A promise fulfilled but only through a degree of destruction. He’s young enough that I don’t have to fill in the gaps and I’m old enough that I have no desire to. “Old man take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you.” It’s any old man and young man, any father and son. It invites YOU to finish it. And by the time he’s 24 I’ll probably still be trying.
