David Briggs and Neil Young: "How Survivals, Grief and Legacies Unfold in American Music" by Caryn Rose

"How Survivals, Grief and Legacies Unfold in American Music"
by Caryn Rose @ 2019 Pop Conference at MoPop - Seattle

The late David Briggs was Neil Young's producer on several key albums including Tonight's The Night, Zuma and Ragged Glory. Briggs' influence on the recording process has been lauded as a major contributing factor to Neil Young's recording success bringing a unique "discipline" to the process.

David Briggs and Neil Young make for an interesting intersection at this year's 2019 Pop Conference at MoPop for the conference theme "How Survivals, Grief and Legacies Unfold in American Music" by Caryn Rose.

Only You and Your Ghost Will Know: Music, Death and Afterlife
2019 Pop Conference at MoPop

Caryn Rose is a music writer, crabby old punk rock lady writing for P4K, Pollstar, Vulture, NPR and Salon. Caryn's session on David Briggs and Neil Young addresses “Growing Up In Public: Musicians Processing Loss in Modern Times.”

The David Briggs and Neil Young section begins at ~4:00.


‏
Caryn Rose's thesis centers on the 1996 "The Year of the Horse" concept which came from longtime Neil Young and Crazy Horse producer David Briggs:

"Probably more the fifth member of Crazy Horse than anybody could ever be," says Frank "Poncho" Sampedro. Shortly before his death in November of 1995, Briggs was looking ahead to the coming year and told Young, "This is the Year of the Horse ." According to Young, Briggs also told him: "All you have to do now is get closer to the source. Keep getting purer and purer."

(source: official Crazy Horse Reprise Records Biography, May, 1997. PR for Year of The Horse, directed by Jim Jarmusch.)

Year of the Horse
Neil Young & Crazy Horse

On the meaning of tribute, the collective experience of death, and how musicians mourn their own. Brilliance at #popcon2019 with @carynrose and @anniezaleski pic.twitter.com/GoDUs9QltU

— Michelle Villegas Threadgould (@Mthreadgould) April 13, 2019

From symposium agenda Only You and Your Ghost Will Know: Music, Death and Afterlife
2019 Pop Conference at MoPop:

Popular music has long been centrally concerned with death and the afterlife.

Songs, recordings, and musical traditions have expressed both mourning and celebration and have—in some cases—helped envision the possibilities of a continued existence where “death is not the end.” From gospel to metal and beyond, music pays tribute to the departed, offers opportunities for ceremony and commemoration, and helps to process tragedies both personal and public. It even blurs the boundaries between states of life and death, offering sonic and symbolic evidence for hauntings, purgatories, and the continued presence of ancestors in the lives of the earthbound. Genres, formats, and media exist in a continual process of transformation, decay, and re-emergence—and boost both active artists and defunct (or deceased) ones. Songs and performances are reborn through new versions, different contexts, and changing relationships with audiences.

Beyond this, pop music cycles through its own series of “deaths” and “afterlives.” The work of the deceased is remixed, reclaimed, and reconstituted by new generations of musicians, scholars, compilers, and fan communities, while record companies, museums, tourist sites, and others preserve, profit from, and sometimes fetishize their memory. (These commemorations have taken on a distinctively digital character in the era of social media, YouTube, holograms, and the continued use of sampling.) And pop music—in its many forms—offers a cultural afterlife for sounds and populations that have been dispersed and displaced, helping to form new communities and maintain connections to those that have been lost.

While a constant concern, recent years have only amplified these dynamics. A wave of prominent musician deaths, from David Bowie to Aretha Franklin, has amplified conversations over music’s relationship to mortality and the nature of fan mourning in the digital age. (Some of these attempts, like the proposed use of a Prince hologram at the 2017 Super Bowl, have been greeted with controversy.) Public tragedies from killings marked by #BlackLivesMatter memorials to ongoing refugee crises have been suffused with music as both sustenance and response, while the rise of mass shootings at music venues from Paris to the Pulse nightclub provoked specific responses from affected artists and audiences as well as a broader championing of music as a means of memorial and healing. And, across genre and language, music continues to contend with the questions of life, death, and potential resurrection as a central subject matter and metaphor for conversations ranging from the economics of streaming to the health of genres like country and hip-hop.

Neil Young and Producer David Briggs, 1995
Photo by Pegi Young
(Click photo to enlarge)
Also, see:

• Friends of Neil: David Briggs
• Comment of the Moment: Producer David Briggs and Neil Young
• David Briggs in Memorium
• David Briggs Obituary - NY Times, 12/3/95
• Interview with Elliot Roberts on working with David Briggs

---

---