Owners of Porsche 911s do not own Porsche 911s and people from Glasgow are not from Glasgow. If you talk to people from the Empire's second city, they'll never say they're from 'Glasgae' but one of it's many, many districts- Bishopbriggs, Partick, Anderson, Queen's Park, Govan, Pollok, Maryhill and so on and so on- which is confusing if you can only understand one word in three of their thick Scottish brogue to begin with. You start by asking a native for directions to Hampden from Queen Street Station by using the seemingly innocuous "Are you from Glasgow?" and have to spend the next half hour being told how to get to the bit of the city they grew up in, irrespective of whether the stadium is anywhere near it. If you want to find the way to Hampden Park you are, trust me, better off wandering round saying "I'm lost, are you from round here?" and if they say "yes" running away and finding a Norwegian tourist. The level of gerographical pickiness prevelant in this otherwise magnificent city however is nothing compared to owners of a certain German sports car.
I recently got chatting to a chap who has a 911 but insisted that what he actually drives is a Porsche 911 Carrera 4 RS, NOT the standard Carrera RS mind- the Carrera 4 RS. If you're wondering whether it's an original Carrera 4 or from the re-introduction of the Carrera, I'll make everything clear by telling you that the 911 in question was, of course, a Type 993, not a Type 964. And it's got the 3.8l engine but you probably knew that. By the time he'd gone on to point out that his Carrera wasn't a trubo model but had the turbo model's body shell and some other components from that version I'd glazed over like a frozen pond and started to think about Neil Young.
I do this a lot. Canada's finest export occupies quite a lot of my thinking for any man with a reedy voice and massive sideburns and it was strangely fitting that he was now interjecting himself into my mind during a (one-sided) talk about the most complicated model history in motoring. Put simply, like the timeline of the 911, Neil Young's discography is one of life's great unfathomables- currently featuring 33 solo studio albums (19 by himself, 14 with any one of 6 different backing bands), 8 live albums, 3 albums with Buffalo Springfield, 4 with Crosby, Still, Nash and Young, one with The Stills-Young Band and a film score. He also directed a mental comedy film in 1982 in which he performed with post-punk outfit Devo.
As a general rule, he veers between country-tinged mellow work, often with a social/political bent; and feedback-drenched rock-outs that sound like God putting the apocalypse through a knackered amplifier. He demonstrated this most eloquently in just this past year when he released two classic live shows as part of his 'Archive' series- a solo show from Toronto's Massey Hall that's delicate as gossamer and one from the Filmore East with Crazy Horse that's delicate as Lawrence Dallaglio in mating season. They're both from an 18 month period between '69 and '71 when he was essentially pissing genius and churning out an album approximately every 30 minutes.
Every now and again, like any truly great artist worth their salt, Young goes a bit skew-whiff and turns out the sort of bizarre work which polite critics call 'challenging' and honest fans call 'crap'. A few years ago he came over a bit Pete Townshend and made a rock opera called Greendale (tragically, it's not about Postman Pat) while in 1982 he embraced the fledgling technology of synthesisers and vocoders to make 'Trans', an album so bad his record company sued him.
Naturally, I decided it was ripe for reappraisal. First of all, it's important to explain the genesis of this record. Neil Young has a son born with cerebal palsy and, at the time of 'Trans', had realised that he could communicate much better with his child is he spoke to him using a vocoder. Now if I was in this situation I'd get Steven Hawking to do the babysitting but instead Shakey (that's Young's nickname, based on his film directing alter-ego Bernard Shakey) decided that he'd make an album with all this electronic wizardry instead.
Things start going badly wrong on the cover which is a painfully 1980's graphical rendition of a bizarrely retro-futuristic car streaming towards the foreground away from a pinky-orange sunset. It's somehow appears to be made entirely of right angles. Things don't improve much on the inside either as one of the world's great troubadors is reduced to peddling songs with names like 'We R In Control' and 'Computer Cowboy (AKA Syscrusher)' which sound even worse than their titles suggest. There's even a techno remix of an old Buffalo Springfield number- a band about as ripe for an electronic makeover as George Formby or Robert Johnson.
Matters around this album were so shoddy that one song 'If You Got Love' was taken off at the last minute but no-one could be bothered to change the track listing on the original sleeve- leading to one of the few examples of music fans being glad to be short-changed. Young then took such brevity of material to new heights with his next record which took another left turn stylistically by being an album of rockabilly tunes, recorded with a hastily assembled band called 'The Shocking Pinks' and clocking in at less than 25 minutes. The cover features Young in a pink room, dressed in a pink suit, sturmming away on a guitar like Bill Halley gone metrosexual. The album was called 'Everybody's Rockin'.
And it's brilliant.
But that's Neil Young- wilfully changeable, always evolving, constantly looking to try something new, something wierd, something over-the-top or completely unexpected and all the while always making an interesting, and when he's on his game- brutally beautifully, noise. It's made his music endlessly fascinating and makes Young himself a captivating personality. If he was a car designer he'd probably be just as willing to do something silly which hardly anyone else would try. Like making the headlights shine into the car, or reversing the indicator-stalk action. Or, at a pinch, putting the engine in the back.
Just like a Porsche 911.
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