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or YOUR COUNTRY's FLAG. Thank you!!!)
An unofficial news blog for Neil Young fans from Thrasher's Wheat with concert and album updates, reviews, analysis, and other Rock & Roll ramblings. Separating the wheat from the chaff since 1996.
Here is the Post of the Moment from the TW Archives: "Neil Young's 'On The Beach' is the greatest album I've ever heard".
enjoy!
Labels: album, neil young, on the beach
by thrasher@PermaLink: 3/22/2022 10:18:00 AM
8 comments
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8 Comments:
We have been through something like this before! Lists and rankings and all the trouble caused. But OTB deserves recognition as one of Neil's greatest records. I was 14 when it came out and did not listen to it until I was 18 and had recovered from being a Grateful Dead fanatic (I never liked "dead-head"). I heard a voice that was going to last because he had seen through the wretched nonsense of hippy excess. I want to express this in the right way- I am not moving to some neo-conservative attack on the war protesters or something similar, but rather the notion that Neil comprehended the darkness behind and all around "free-love." The counter-culture was, to a large extent, the expression of middle-class white kids with money to burn. Free-love I am using as main concept that others orbit around and it is not specific enough. I would need more time, as usual. But it goes back to that great discussion we had about romanticism, except now I would prefer to eliminate this concept. Love, it seems to me, is quite at odds with "free" (as "anything goes"). No, this is wrong, all wrong. The theme coming out of Down By the River comes through on OTB, especially in "Revolution Blues." The whole thing is dark without being hopeless. Think of the commitments Neil has now? Think of what love takes? To truly love another person is intense discipline and that is what best expresses our freedom.
You raise a good discussion point here Abner.
As you mention, we get the "not playing" game on rankings etc. But --- here it comes -- it is what Big Media does to attract readers/ viewers etc. So just try and do our take on how it shakes out.
But back to your point on not going all neo-con. Hippie Dream really said it all about the wooden ships and Woodstock. Totally get peace, love and understanding.
But when you're up against the Big War Machine, peace, love and understanding only goes so far.
The longer this simmers to a boil, the more violent the pressure release will be. While everything has been coming to a head for awhile now as the Big Shift rolls along, it seems to be kicking up a notch or 2.
Neil has gone quiet for awhile now. Historically that indicated he was writing/recording.
And while we all hope for the best, it is these situations where neil has written and recorded some of his best works.
A modification of a popular quote. 1st the popular quote:
"Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.".
Or...
"Strong singers create good times. Good times create weak songs. And, hard times creates good songs".
In order to be creative (write good songs or create something worthwhile) one has to be able to distance one's self from the actual facts of the hard times. Of course that's just speculation, but I doubt Neil Young could have written Ohio had he been actually there, at Kent State University. Being touched by events or being stunned by them makes a difference...
With the ubiquitous hard rain coming down under all sorts of skies, I do not expect a lot of creative output as long as creative minds are harnessed by their (own) depression about this latest turn of events. "Where the flags are waving what is left of reasonable thought lies in the cannon barrel" (very free translation of a German proverb). Neil Young's introduction to the latest LTTE batch could also be pointing in that direction, and hence his silence.
In normal times the new ORS box set would have made for a plethora in comments about how unfair it is to just include the sought after "Eldorado" (with just two rare tracks) and mostly re-issue records that have been re-issued already in different incarnations. Ther were some of these comments. Reading them I just thought them to be lame and irrelevant. And that's not because those commenters did not have a point (they may have) but because talk like that seems too trivial, even if I try to remind myself that trivial chatter might help to make it through these days.
There's a Ukrainian car parked in front of my house, the number plates says it's from Charkiw, on my way to work I meet these forlorn women with two or three children in tow headed for yet another place to stay for a while and on the way back I pass a line of people waiting at the farmer's food bank because all of a sudden their money turned to ash. Wanna make a song out of that?
it is truly beyond cruelty. Hannah Arendt made your point Dionys. Victims of the holocaust had "trouble finding words for ordinary objects."
@ Dionys - again, your Euro perspective is invaluable to so many of us inside the Empire's mis-info/dis-info/mal-info bubble.
With the War Machine propaganda going into hyper drive, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the anti-war and peace factions to unite and stave off the growing escalation.
Let's be blunt. As always, *someone* will benefit tremendously if US & Russia go full scale war. The profits are too rich to simply say let's negotiate our way around these troubles.
The Greedy Hands have no limits or rules.
The plan has always been to resolve the WW 1 & 2 stalemate with winner take all in WW3.
Let's not play TPTB's game. It's a war of man and everyone loses.
Resist -- for the sake of all of our children of destiny...
peace
Can anyone on this thread recall a worse time in the world? The center is not holding.
If you are not interested in the present European perspective on the on-going war, please skip this comment.
One should not twist around cause and effect. While the Ukrainian war is a God sent/d? or rather a devil sent/d? - a windfall at any rate – for the armament and fossil fuel industries world-wide, the original cause for this war stems from the circumstances of the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Putin’s role as a minor KGB officer in what then was still East Germany in 1989 when the Wall came down illustrates this storyline. Putin at his regional KGB headquarters back then was surrounded by East Germans protesting the presence of their “Russian friends” (Russian occupational forces). Putin called Moscow about what to do, but Moscow remained dead silent. Little Wladimir suddenly was left on his own. With his back to the wall he declared that the occupants of the KGB regional office would start shooting, if the protesters were to enter the premises. Fortunately that did not happen – or maybe unfortunately. No matter how costly a different outcome would have been, Little Wladimir probably would not have survived it, at least not career wise.
So Putin’s politics in the years since he came to power basically try to restore the Soviet empire in order to overcome this trauma of helplessness, that’s one layer of this complicated historical process.
Of course there is an armament industry in Russia and they are selling world wide. But that is not the driving force behind the Ukraine war.
The driving force apparently is a sense of disinheritance, humiliation or outclassing. One cannot over-estimate the role of the "Great Patriotic War” (the Second World War in Russian diction) as the base of modern Russian identity. While the West tends to over-emphasize the role of the US' entry on the European continental theatre (“Saving Private Ryan” style) in Russian eyes it were the many millions of Soviet soldiers that died to overcome Hitler’s terror in Europe who made the difference.
Now imagine the descendants of these soldiers to be confronted with the fact that their influence in most of the territories once conquered at tremendous cost and held under tight control for decades has dwindled to practically nil (in most of the Warsaw Pact states but also the former Soviet republics in the Baltic who became EU members and NATO member states). The behaviour of wealthy Russian tourists in European holiday destinations in the last decades was very telling. If they had the money they behaved as if they had to compensate a major inferiority complex, just look at all that obscene oligarch wealth displayed in yacht harbours around the Mediterranean Sea.
That sense of humilaition and inferiority doesn’t justify the Ukranian war in any respect, but it gives some explanation why this is happening and why so many Russians seem to follow their leader like sheep.
So Putin and who ever is supporting him and all these misled and ill-informed Russians of the older generation who keep their feet still more or less are on a historical mission. And that’s what makes the whole situation so dangerous for the rest of Europe (and maybe the world): Somebody who considers himself to be chosen to fulfill a historical mission cannot easily be stopped by economic sanctions. I doubt very much that Putin has any understanding of economic systems at all, they are just a means to achieve his ultimate goal. And so far he believes that he can do without a prospering economy, if need be.
That there are the usual suspects sitting on the sidelines like vultures to exploit this conflict for their own gain and profit is also true of course. But at the core this is about something else.
End of history lesson, please except my apologies for the loss of bandwidth (That’s what we wrote back in the day of the rust list, remember?)
Sing a song for freedom
Sing a song for love
Sing a song for depressed angels,
falling from above.
Really interesting and helpful perspective. Thanks Dionys
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