Is Neil Young’s ‘Coup de Ville’ really about a car?
Neil Young had a bad time during the 1980s.
Now, to be clear, most artists of Young’s generation had a bad 1980s. Just look at infamous low points from the likes of The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton for more proof. At the very least, those acts still had commercial success.
The Baby Boomers were turning 40, you see, thus they now had disposable income, which led to a force nine gale of boomer nostalgia hitting the pop charts along with the likes of Madonna, Prince and Bruce Springsteen. How else do you explain George Harrison’s thoroughly mid Cloud Nine becoming as big a deal as it did?
In true Neil Young fashion, he skipped all this by his complete inability to play ball. Whereas everyone else was making throwbacks to their glory days, but worse, Neil Young was, as always, going his own way. Making baffling records like 1983’s one-two punch of commercial and critical suicide, Trans and Everybody’s Rockin’. He managed to steady the ship with some better received records, but he never stopped wanting to push the boat out, and possibly the best combination of this came in 1988 with his record This Note’s For You.
Up until this point, Young’s records had either been tethered to the folk rock he made his name with or wild, unabashed genre experiments. This Note’s For You was somewhere in the middle, cutting his trademark country songwriting with a raucous, blues rock soul. On track three of this record was a song called ‘Coupe De Ville’, a song which begged the question, was this Neil Young living out a hitherto unknown Bruce Springsteen fantasy and actually writing a song about a car?
Did Neil Young really write a song about a car?
The answer is, as always, kind of? But not really.
Cars have always been a fascination of Young’s, having written both a memoir and an album centred around them in the form of 2014’s Special Deluxe and 2009’s Fork In The Road. Young even wrote an early number of his, ‘Long May You Run’, about his first car, a hearse that he quite charmingly named Mort Hearseberg. ‘Coupe De Ville’ must be more of the same, right? Well, not quite.
It’s true, the Coupe De Ville was the name of one of Cadillac’s flagship cars. Introduced in 1949 as one of their luxury models 1961, it was one of the most popular cars on the market. A gearhead like Neil Young would be well aware of just what an important machine the De Ville would be. Yet more than anything else, Neil Young is a songwriter. A storyteller who can take a concept and use it as the starting point for something a lot deeper.
In true blues fashion, Young uses the Coupe De Ville as an example of all the frivolous things that he owns, that don’t make up for the woman he lost. “I got a Coupe De Ville / I got a bed in the house / Where you once lived.”
This is shown in the chorus when he wails, “If I can’t have you / I don’t want nothin’ else.” A sign, if one is needed, of just what a natural storyteller Neil Young is.
A songwriter of spectacular economy of language, who with a few sentences can wring genuine pathos out of a literal car.