You And Me: Harvest Moon Lingers Long

We watched the moment of defeat/played back on the video screen
Somewhere deep inside of my soul
-- “Natural Beauty,” Neil Young

On a random weeknight nearly a decade ago some friends and I drank scotch and looked out at the view from the thirty-ninth floor of a boardwalk hotel in Atlantic City. The static lights on the ground stretched far west into the dark New Jersey night, and our view faced that direction, out towards where the ghosts of our adolescent dreams rose and hovered, without shadow and without being seen, above the rooftops and porchlights and maddening crowd that shared our streets in those, our suburbs. Many new days dawned since those talkative nights, and each morning has seen the rise of the hotel's shadows as they draw across each other, and the ocean. Uncounted, unaccountable and long rough nights have passed, built of loss and sadness, some others built of hope and love. These nights and days, and the elements that filled them, and made life more complete at the time; it adds up maybe to the action of growing up, of living long enough to see young dreams rise and hover above, like city smog or birthday balloons. Whose defeat, and which video screen to watch it from, became the best question for some of us to answer, as a new century split open before us.

Neil Young's Harvest Moon is the only record in the world I am unwilling to hear: won't put it on. I own it—a nicked disc with a tattered sleeve in a broken case, all the wounds of a well-loved CD—but reel today in trying to describe how sadly true it all became, how Neil's mellow return to country ended up writing stories we would live out. I was thirteen years old in 1992, and had a copy within months of its release (I am eternally grateful to the now-defunct music-by-mail company BMG). Copying compact discs wasn’t something our computers could do yet; I bought my best friend Adam a copy at The Wall, a defunct music chain at the Granite Run Mall in Media, Pennsylvania. We consumed it separately and discussed it together, at fourteen, fifteen, across each formative year of high school. “The broom,” Adam told me once, “the broom in the song ‘Harvest Moon’—it’s a key part of the percussion. I mean, it’s there and is as important as all the rest of the instruments—some guy on a broom.” We reeled at the wild woman who, as if out of the pages of a Kerouac novel, was “somewhere on a desert highway/she rides a Harley Davidson/her long blond hair flying in the wind/she’s been running half her life…” (“Unknown Legend”). We dreamed of days in which we had friends ("scattered/like leaves from an old maple") to pen letters to. By the time we graduated high school together in 1997, Harvest Moon had gone double-platinum.

1992 was the year before grunge, the final year before pop became allowed to get grittier, if not self-destructive: we were still months away from chasing down any self-loathing pop Nirvana, and the hardest of rock was still only built of the metallic residue of Metallica, and those extensive big-hair volumes that instructed us almost-high-school boppers on how to Use Our Illusion. Neil Young ran himself death-metal-ragged being innovative through the last of the 1980s, producing works of stock guitar thrash that ranged from bemusing and quaint to the absurd. People like Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl and Soundgarden were listening to these, Neil’s inharmonic uses of the hardest of rock idioms, and would pick up and carry that torch to new heights through the 1990s and beyond. It took years, not months, to stop the ringing in Neil’s ears; his next project was to gather musician alums from 1973’s mellow epic, Harvest, to produce its thematic sequel, Harvest Moon.

There aren’t many rock albums one might consider deserving of a sequel. Neil’s strained ballads in 1973—“A Man Needs a Maid” and “Out On the Weekend” especially—spoke of romantic relationships with profound wide-eyed wonder, making his aged perspective an important return in his career (props on the bravery; geezers of rock don't always seek such introspection). The original Harvest featured Neil’s choosy top-of-the-range vocals supporting lyrics that set new bars for those residing in and defining the lucrative James-Taylor power pop ballad genre. Harvest was released just as designations of “easy listening” and ‘soft rock” were being born, but none of the songs on the 1973 original would be likely found on any such playlist: Neil’s acoustic guitar on “Old Man” is unspeakably legendary and influential, a defining moment for rock and roll on an acoustic guitar. You’ve heard it, and Neil’s wail “old man take a look at my life” at least one hundred times, in grocery stores alone.

So many of us weren’t around for the release of Harvest. And, many of us weren’t likely prepared, or had real time to devote to such a down-home country product, from a man who hauled around a battery of Marshall stacks through the last years of the 1980s, posing as the gritty front man for a band that made great, tighter, faster and more chaotic forms of Neil Young chords. Harvest Moon sang out beneath the waves of grunge and subsequent pop iterations, presenting complete and distinctly moving ballads—nearly hymns, with choruses of declaration and simple celebration. The band, built of alums from the 1973 Harvest sessions as well as background singers James Taylor and Linda Rhondstat, ends up sounding much more like the modern down-home stomps of the Avett Brothers or the Old Crow Medicine Show than anything else. Was it his return to acoustic strumming following a long bout with metal that drove Neil deeper toward his creative source?

Adam and I went on separately to live lives full of fun and adventure, relative to the excitement of our youth: I fled for the hills of Vermont, while Adam pursued community college and a host of unfulfilling jobs. We both fell in love with women beneath harvest moons; both reeled and sung high like Neil in recounting our affairs of the heart; both pushed brooms for pay, working ways through higher education. “Such a Woman,” from Harvest Moon, takes four minutes and only four piano chords to state “you are such a woman/to me” and “no one else can kill me like you do/and no one else can feel our peace,” and it still resonates as one of the most tender and passionate statements I’ve ever heard made in music: and has made sense more consistently than most music that's persisted this long in my life. Like Neil Young, and so many other artists, Adam and I both commiserated and relished in the ability to fall wildly, madly and deeply in love. It seemed almost a super power, love to be something so large as to sway one’s heart and devotion, something to dismiss the rational and force any individual into true impassioned action, something worth being swept away by. If our high school interpretations of Harvest Moon had focused on Neil’s glowing ability to sum and lyrically shine light upon his own career, carefully mentioning successes as well as failures (“From Hank to Hendrix”), we were able to make much less sense of Harvest Moon in our early twenties (Sublime's self-titled debut diverted our attentions, too). Adult life gets complicated, a lawyer once told me: few things are as complicating as the sense of passion presented by the songs on Harvest Moon. Affairs of the heart and complications and bad and destructive decisions: “can we get it together/can we still stand side by side/can we make it last/like a musical ride?” (“From Hank to Hendrix”). Adam’s decision to take his own life in August 2005 stands as the letter unwritten, but the letter Neil wrote a song about: “one of these days/I’m gonna sit down and write a long letter/to all the good friends I’ve known…” (“One of These Days”). And now, with a trail of virtual email from the first half of the past decade being the best and worst representation of this gone guy, my memories of Adam persist now with more solidarity than all of the twinkling of the lights in Atlantic City. He was never any less fickle, but like us all, subject to the sudden bursts of greed, ignorance, and whimsical egoism that might drive us down here or elsewhere: a police cruiser's blue light flashes as it rolls south, shining briefly on all it passes, and the night is nearly over and the scotch is almost gone. Adult life, complicated though it may become, still remains a luminescent and boldly bright force, as we all continue to move about and interact with each other as best we can at the moment.

I’m a dreamin’ man/yes that’s my problem
I can’t tell when I’m not being real
in the meadowdust I park my Aerostar…
-- “Dreamin’ Man”

Harvest Moon was so good, so timed, so complete, so inviting to tears and joy and memory: these may have been reasons why Neil chose to release a compilation of a few nights’ performances from 1992, performances made around the time of the release of Harvest Moon (officially, this is disc 12 in Neil’s concert archive releases). I am not alone in my shying away from Harvest Moon as dinner music, or even concentrated listening sessions. This 2009 album, “Dreamin’ Man,” is a rearrangement of all the Harvest Moon tracks, performed by Neil alone, and I am becoming ever grateful for these tonight. One of these days, God willing, I will write Neil the letter he still clearly asked for—what if the whole of us, humans, sat to write out our thanks to those we’ve known, cherished, loved? “My friends are scattered/like leaves from an old maple/some are weak/some are strong” (“One of These Days”). The wide stretch of twinkling from the lights above the beachfront streets rings out and into my middle-age, through the cold late March early dawn wind, coming from the direction of the ocean, that gray blur beyond even the night’s shadows. I have been drinking Glenmorangie, and, with a bumper sticker in the window frame foreground that reads “Be Spontaneous But Think About It First,” I have been hearing new versions of songs I previously feared to confront. And, there is a different, revisited form of peace that comes in hearing that sage and songwriter perform his work by lonesome: from humble thumps on the guitar body to his harmonica wails, the “Dreamin’ Man” live album is even more calming and grounding than Harvest Moon itself. The words, like the twinkling sum of Atlantic City, still carries the same, if not a heavier weight: with each shadow and reflection, the outline of those dreams still hovering and pensive above our hometown comes more clear with each day, week, month, year further away from those visions. We find ourselves in places far different, unanticipated, from those in which we floated in high school, where the outlines of our dreams loomed, and we grew up as we faced our own throbs of the heart. Thanks, Neil.