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Neil Young’s hard to see ‘Muddy Track’ movie: ‘I don’t know what the f*ck it is’
04.17.2014
02:05 pm
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In 1987, Neil Young told an interviewer that Time Fades Away was “the worst record I ever made—but as a documentary of what was happening to me, it was a great record.”

Young has never shied away from documenting, warts and all, the high points of his career and some pretty low points as well.  When he toured Europe in 1987 with Crazy Horse, disaster was looming. “It was fuckin’ terrible,” to hear Shakey himself describe it. Ticket sales were shitty, band members were often in an alcoholic stupor and played poorly, there were riots and Young even had to deal with the ignominy of a radio interviewer who expressed surprise that Young wasn’t dead yet. Good times! At the end of the tour, Young publicly vowed never to work with Crazy Horse again.

Young, being Young, saw the cinematic possibilities of the chaos of the tour and the result is Muddy Track, a patchwork, out-of-focus Shakey-cam walk in the band’s shoes as they stumbled across Europe. No distributor would touch something like this with a ten ft. pole and so the film remained fairly mysterious until parts of it were seen in the Jim Jarmusch directed Year of the Horse in 1997.

Speaking about his films, Young told MOJO in 1995:

Muddy Track is really my favourite of all of them, though. It’s dark as hell God, it’s a heavy one! (laughs) But it’s funky.

Funky it is! Muddy Track is incoherent, sure, but it’s quite real and immediate in the best sense of Young’s work. Some of the footage is probably a bit too personal (a band meeting that devolves into a tense swearing match is uncomfortable to watch three decades after the fact) but it’s never boring.

Muddy Track is not a documentary,” Young has said “I don’t know what the fuck it is.” 
 

 
Thank you Vinícius!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.17.2014
02:05 pm
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Attack of the giant guitars: Neil Young and Crazy Horse shred Central Park
09.30.2012
03:44 pm
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The windows in the buildings surrounding Central Park must have been rattling last night. Neil Young, Crazy Horse, Dave Grohl and Dan Auerbach perform an epic version of “Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World” at the Global Citizen Festival.

The guitar apocalypse was for a good cause:

This September, as the world’s leaders gather in New York for the UN General Assembly, the Global Citizen Festival will bring top artists and 60,000 change makers together on the Great Lawn of Central Park on September 29 to urge our leaders and fellow citizens to do more to help end extreme poverty.

This advocacy concert will celebrate the progress already made in fighting extreme poverty, secure financial commitments for tackling extreme poverty and disease, and mobilise thousands of ambassadors for change. We’ll unite around a simple yet powerful idea: that by giving every child a chance to thrive, our generation can end extreme poverty.

I’ll be seeing Neil at ACL in a couple of weeks. The dude seems ageless.
 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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09.30.2012
03:44 pm
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‘Oh Susannah’: Track from new Neil Young and Crazy Horse album
05.01.2012
01:53 pm
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Personally, I think this is punk as fuck. Neil Young and Crazy Horse (Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Frank “Poncho” Sampedro) rock the garage with “Oh Susannah”—the first video from the new album Americana —coming June 5th.

The vintage film footage in the video is quite striking and may cause a bit of a stir. There’s a kid smoking in it. YouTube busted one of my videos (“88 Lines About 44 Women”) that had a kid smoking in it…but I’m not Neil Young.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.01.2012
01:53 pm
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