The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Neil Young with Crazy Horse · seven tracks · produced by David Briggs and Neil Young · Reprise · about 40 minutes
Mode
Electric rock by a band of four recorded nearly live, two of its songs opened into long passages for two guitars
Mythos
The murder ballad, the lover killed beside the water; the pastoral flight from the city; the west and its women; a requiem
Phase
Seven tracks on two sides, each side opening short and bright and closing on a long guitar passage
Presentation
Album; seven sung tracks, about forty minutes, nearly half of it in the two long pieces, which are mostly guitar
Register
A thin, high voice and high harmonies over two electric guitars, bass and drums, a little rough and out of true; acoustic guitars once, a violin once
Scale
Four men in a room, a few loves, one killing and a wish to be somewhere else
Governing Proposition
A songwriter sets aside a layered studio debut for a garage band of four, records it nearly live, and lets two songs open into long passages in which a lead guitar circles a single note against a rhythm guitar holding the floor: a killing sung as levelly as a love song, and a man’s inability to say what he feels, made the music’s subject and worked at for ten minutes at a time. The plan is plain, each side moving from short song to long search, and the search is the record.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a riff. Cinnamon Girl runs under three minutes: a heavy guitar figure on a low bottom string, a high harmony over it, and a guitar break that is a single note played again and again. In three minutes it states the law the record will keep: four men in a room, a thin high voice over guitars a little rough, tone and repetition preferred to speed. The song lifts at once, on the riff and the harmony above it, and the lift is of the kind the record will spend its two long pieces earning: not display but insistence. The break is the first sign of what the record values, the one note chosen and held rather than the run.
Reprise released the album in May 1969, produced by David Briggs and Neil Young. It was Young’s second solo album and his first with Crazy Horse: Danny Whitten on guitar and voice, Billy Talbot on bass, Ralph Molina on drums and voice. Bobby Notkoff plays violin on one song. Young’s first solo album, issued months before, had been a layered studio record with orchestral arrangements, and it had sold poorly. He had come out of a successful band, and he staked his second record on roughness: a garage band of limited players, recorded nearly live, and songs allowed to run ten minutes on solos that refuse virtuosity.
The unit is the album as first released on LP, seven tracks on two sides, about forty minutes. Side one runs Cinnamon Girl, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Round & Round (It Won’t Be Long) and Down by the River; side two runs The Losing End (When You’re On), Running Dry (Requiem for the Rockets) and Cowgirl in the Sand. Each side begins short and bright and ends in a long passage, and the two long pieces take nearly half the running time. Every track is sung; the long pieces are mostly guitar. The record twice moves from song to search, and that plan, plain as it is, is its form.
Movement II
The title song is the one plain statement of place and wish. A man in the city wants to get away, and the place he wants is somewhere that is nowhere: the oldest wish of the pastoral, the city fled for the country, sung in under three minutes and bright rather than high. It names nothing beyond the wish. The decade outside, its war and the city where the record was made, are absent from the record except as this nowhere, and the song is content to leave them so. The world the record holds is chosen narrow, and the title says as much.
Round & Round (It Won’t Be Long) closes in. Nearly six minutes of three voices and acoustic guitars, hushed, it holds its idea well past its length, and the harmonies sag. Its slackness is not the slackness of the long electric pieces, which is their point; it is the slackness of a song that has said what it has to say and goes on. This is where the test of necessity bites first, and with The Losing End on side two it is the reason the record’s sequence is compelled in its frame and permitted in two of its seven parts.
Set Round & Round beside Cowgirl in the Sand and the record’s law appears. One is acoustic and hushed, the other loud and ten minutes long, and they obey the same law of plainness and duration: four people in a room, high and unsteady voices, and the song allowed to run as long as the feeling lasts. The voices bind them. The law is held across a moderate range, and the narrowness of the range does some of the work. Where the record holds together, it does so by being always the same band, thinking aloud in the same way.
Movement III
Side one ends on a killing. Down by the River is a love song in its verses, about holding hands, and in its chorus the singer says “I shot my baby” in the same level voice. Nothing explains it. The words do not say why the man killed or what he feels about it; the guitar carries that. The song takes the old murder ballad, the lover killed beside the water, an inheritance from Anglo-American balladry, and builds it again, and the archetype bears load: the frame of the song is the ballad’s frame, and the long passage that follows makes the killing a thing endlessly circled and never confessed.
The passage rises out of a two-chord vamp by insistence. Whitten’s rhythm guitar holds the floor, and over it Young’s lead plays a single bent note, sustains it, returns to it, until it becomes a cry. This is the record’s first summit, and its means are the record’s making at its most exact: Briggs records the band as a room, guitars, bass and drums placed so that lead and rhythm can be heard answering each other for as long as the passage runs. The lead is exact in what it chooses, tone governed by touch, and what it does not play is as much a part of it as what it does.
Here the record discloses what it knows, and it knows it through sound. A man’s inability to say what he feels becomes the music’s subject, worked at on one string for minutes. Cut the song to four minutes and the brooding becomes a hook. The question it leaves, why he killed and why he says it so evenly, stays open, and the song has been returned to for more than fifty years, by guitar players above all. Each return finds a different moment where the line nearly breaks. What the record discloses is felt more than articulated: a mood, without a meaning stated.
Movement IV
Side two begins on the ground. The Losing End (When You’re On) is a country shuffle with the feel of a pedal steel, a genre exercise inside a record that otherwise makes its own genre, and the sequence would survive losing it. It stays level, and it is the record’s nearest approach to the edge of its own law, held in only by the band’s plainness. Like Round & Round on side one, it is a form the record contains rather than one through which it knows anything, and the two of them are why the parallel plan of the sides reads as set rather than developed.
Running Dry (Requiem for the Rockets) is named a requiem and plays one. Bobby Notkoff’s violin scrapes over a slow beat, and the record reaches its dreadful kind of height: not the lift of Cinnamon Girl or the long climb of the solos, but a dirge. It is the furthest element from the band’s sound and still keeps the band’s slow drag. Its place in the sequence is earned: it is the low point before the last ascent, and Cowgirl in the Sand rises out of it.
The making is narrow, and loose by design and also by limit. Tuning and time drift, the harmonies sag, and the playing never reaches past what its players could do; the drift is also formal, the sound of men thinking together. The production is plain and roomy, and it has dated less than the studio fashions of its year, though the shuffle and the three-voice folk of Round & Round belong to their time. The recording survives whole after fifty-seven years, reissued in remastered form, and the album is a fixture of the canon of rock records, present continuously though not as widely as the most present records of its decade.
Movement V
The record ends on its highest passage. Cowgirl in the Sand runs about ten minutes, and most of them are a long, ragged ascent in which the lead keeps finding and losing the line over Whitten’s rhythm, while the band swells under it. The reaching itself is the height. Four of the seven tracks rise, two of them for ten minutes each, and the height is real but of one kind, transport by grinding; it does not have the range of Low, whose Sublime stands at 8.8. Within its kind the record has nothing higher than this.
The words address a woman grown old in the game of being looked at, a sharper glimpse than the rest of the record gives, and the cowgirl and the sand call up the west and its women without building them into a pattern. That is the measure of what the record holds: love and its failure, a killing, a wish to leave the city, a woman worn by being looked at, and a band as a small society that thinks aloud in sound. Work, the family, the state, history and the sacred barely appear. What is held is held in one structure, the band’s way of playing, and the world is narrow by choice.
The sound it made had not been there before in that form, and it went far, though much of its going ran through Young’s own career and came late. The Crazy Horse sound became his template, carried through Zuma, Rust Never Sleeps and Ragged Glory. Later bands, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth among them, took it up openly, and Pearl Jam made a record with Young in 1995. The next year he turned away from it: After the Gold Rush (1970), at 8.3, kept its roughness for two songs and turned to piano. What remained was the record of a band, and the sound it found there.
Act III · The Twelve
Seven tracks in about forty minutes, and the record’s argument lives in three of them. Cinnamon Girl must open: its riff, its heavy bottom string and the single repeated note of its guitar break state the band’s law in three minutes. Down by the River and Cowgirl in the Sand are the record, each a song opened into a long two-guitar passage that closes its side, and neither could be cut without the album ceasing to be itself. The title song is needed as the one plain statement of place and wish, and Running Dry earns its place as the dirge before the last ascent. The test bites twice: Round & Round holds its idea well past its length, and the sequence would survive losing The Losing End.
Score: 7.9 / 10
What can be stated is real and narrow. Under plain love songs runs a violence nobody explains: in Down by the River the singer says “I shot my baby” in a voice as level as the verses about holding hands, and the guitar, not the words, carries what that means. The record discloses through sound. The long solos brood rather than display, and a man’s inability to say what he feels becomes the music’s subject, worked at on one string for minutes. The title song adds a city man’s wish to get away to somewhere that is nowhere, and Cowgirl in the Sand glimpses a woman grown old in the game of being looked at. What holds it: the condition is felt more than articulated, and the words are fragments.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Elevation is rough, warm and dreadful at once, and it comes often. Cinnamon Girl lifts at once on the riff and the high harmony over it. Down by the River is the first summit: the solos rise out of a two-chord vamp by insistence, a single bent note held against Whitten’s rhythm until it becomes a cry. Cowgirl in the Sand is the higher, a long, ragged ascent in which the lead keeps finding and losing the line while the band swells under it, so that the reaching is itself the height. Running Dry reaches the dreadful kind. The title song is bright rather than high, and Round & Round and The Losing End stay level. Four of seven rise, and the height is of one kind, transport by grinding.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth is evoked often and built once. Down by the River takes the old murder ballad, the lover killed beside the water, an inheritance from Anglo-American balladry, and builds it again: the song’s frame is the archetype, and the long solo makes the killing a thing endlessly circled and never confessed. That figure bears load. The rest evokes. The cowgirl and the sand call up the west and its women; the title song is the oldest wish of the pastoral, the city fled for the country; the cinnamon girl is a dream of the plain beloved; Running Dry is named a requiem and plays one. None of these is built into structure as the river is, and the record does not join them into one pattern.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The turn is plain and it cost something. Young’s first solo album, months before, was a layered studio record with orchestral arrangements; here he drops it for a garage band of limited players, records them nearly live, and lets songs run ten minutes on solos that refuse virtuosity. A songwriter out of a successful band, with a debut that sold poorly, staked his second record on roughness. The swerve from the field is smaller than the swerve from himself: long improvised guitar passages were everywhere in 1969, and the murder ballad and the country shuffle are inherited whole. What departs is the kind of solo, tone and repetition over speed, the single note over the run, inside a conventional frame.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and the record loses what it knows. Down by the River and Cowgirl in the Sand state a feeling the words cannot reach, and only the long two-guitar passage, the lead circling while the rhythm guitar holds the floor, can say it: cut them to four minutes and the brooding becomes a hook. Each side begins short and bright and ends in a long passage, so the record twice moves from song to search. The ragged recording is formal, not careless, the drift of tuning and timing the sound of men thinking together. What holds it: Round & Round and The Losing End are forms the record merely contains, and the parallel plan of the sides is set rather than developed.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The two long pieces keep yielding. Their solos have been heard and argued over for more than fifty years, by guitar players above all, and their interest lies in what is not played, which does not wear out: each return finds a different moment where the line nearly breaks. The question Down by the River leaves, why the man killed and why he says it so evenly, stays open, and the song lends itself to return. What holds the figure: the words give on first hearing most of what they hold; the title song and Cinnamon Girl are spent as statements at once and live on as sound; Round & Round and The Losing End are not returned to for depth; and much of the return is affection for a sound.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is the rock record of 1969, a year in which Abbey Road, Led Zeppelin and Trout Mask Replica moved more. The intrinsic force is a sound that was not there before in that form: the heavy, slightly out of true two-guitar band, a lead that values tone and repetition over speed, and the song that opens into a long, grinding search. It reorganises what a rock band could sound like, in manner more than in possibility, and much of its reach runs through Young’s whole career and came decades late. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Crazy Horse sound became Young’s template through Zuma, Rust Never Sleeps and Ragged Glory; Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth took it up openly, and Pearl Jam made a record with Young in 1995; and the riff and dropped tuning of Cinnamon Girl are a known model for heavy rhythm guitar.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years. The recording as released survives whole, nothing of its form or fabric lost. Presence is continuous and wide: Cinnamon Girl and Down by the River have stayed in radio and in covers, Young has played the long songs with Crazy Horse in every decade since, and the album is a fixture of the canon of rock records, reissued in remastered form. The surface is less fixed to its moment than most records of its year: the plain, roomy production has dated less than the studio fashions of 1969, though the country shuffle and the three-voice folk of Round & Round are of their time. What holds the figure: its presence, continuous as it is, falls short of the widest records of the decade.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing and limited. Briggs records the band as a room: guitars, bass and drums placed so that lead and rhythm guitars can be heard answering each other over ten minutes, the craft the long pieces depend on. Young’s lead playing is exact in what it chooses: the one-note break of Cinnamon Girl, the bent, sustained tones of Down by the River, tone governed by touch. Whitten’s rhythm guitar and harmony voice are the band’s hidden skill. Against this the command is narrow, and loose by design and also by limit: tuning and time drift, the harmonies on Round & Round sag, and the playing never reaches past what its players could do.
Score: 8.1 / 10
One law governs most of the record: songs played by four people in a room, a thin, high voice over guitars a little rough, and each song allowed to run as long as the feeling lasts. The most distant elements, Round & Round, acoustic and hushed, and Cowgirl in the Sand, loud and long, obey the same law of plainness and duration, and the high, unsteady voices bind them. Running Dry, with its violin, is the furthest out and still keeps the band’s slow drag. The Losing End, a country shuffle with the feel of a pedal steel, sits nearest the edge, a genre exercise inside a record that otherwise makes its own genre. The range is moderate, and narrowness does some of the work of holding it.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Seven songs in forty minutes hold few orders: love and its failure, a killing, a wish to leave the city for the country, a woman worn by being looked at, and a band as a small society that thinks aloud in sound. These are held in one structure rather than listed, for the band’s way of playing is the medium in which each is felt. What holds the figure lowest: work, the family, the state, history and the sacred barely appear, and the Vietnam years and the city the record was made in are absent except as the nowhere its title names. The world is narrow, and chosen.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Sublime and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 and The Swerve and The Living Form at 8.2. A recording that survives whole after fifty-seven years with a plain sound that has dated less than its year; two long passages that rise by insistence, the second the higher; a band sound that became a template for its maker and for later bands; a turn from a layered studio debut to a garage band and a new kind of solo; and a form in which only the long passage can say what the songs know.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: love and its failure, a killing, a wish to leave the city and a band thinking aloud, with work, the family, the state, history and the sacred barely present. Below the rest, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6: a condition felt through sound more than stated, and one archetype built, the murder ballad by the river, with the others evoked. Then The Inevitable and The Bottomless Well at 7.9, where two tracks of seven are permitted and much of the return is affection for a sound.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.3, The Swerve at 8.2 and The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate, and by the aggregate, which stands at 8.0, below the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · the LP as first released by Reprise in May 1969, produced by David Briggs and Neil Young: seven tracks on two sides in their original order, about forty minutes. Judged from knowledge of the record, its sound, its sequence, the shape of its two long pieces and its chief words; no recording, sleeve or lyric sheet was in hand, and running times are approximate. Later remasters, the archive reissue and the live and session material released since are evidence, not the object. Songs are cited by title, and nothing is quoted but four words of Down by the River. Facts that could not be verified are not given: among them the day of release, the studio, place and dates of recording, the players and singers beyond the four of the band and the violinist, the exact running times of the tracks, and the account of how three of the songs came to be written.