Since Prisoners is my highest-ranking song from the 5 albums Neil released for Geffen in the '80s -- it should surprise none of you that nothing from Landing on Water or Everybody's Rockin' made the cut, though they will show up on the 102-204 list -- I figure this is a good time to go into Neil's battles with/trolling of Geffen for those of you who aren't familiar. This is what I remember from the books cited in the first post, as well as "The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce" by Fred Goodman.
Neil left Reprise in 1981 to sign a 6-album deal with David Geffen's new label. Geffen got his start as a talent agent/manager of the SoCal stars of the late '60s and early '70s; Joni Mitchell's "Free Man in Paris" is about him and his partner Elliot Roberts managed Neil (a relationship that continued until Roberts' death last year). Geffen and Roberts co-founded Asylum Records in 1971 and Geffen spun off to form his own label in 1980. He had a strong personal relationship with Neil, so it was probably a pretty easy decision for Neil to go with him, given that Reprise had barely promoted his last two records, Hawks & Doves and Re*ac*tor.
However, each brought something to the table that the other was unaware of when the deal was signed. Even by his standards, Neil at the time was not interested in making commercially appealing music. He was under extreme stress due to his toddler son Ben's severe cerebral palsy; the training process Neil and his wife had to do with him was very labor-intensive and kept him off the road in 1979, 1980 and 1981. (A new, less labor-intensive program begun in 1982 allowed Neil to tour again; Neil and his wife Pegi co-founded The Bridge School to promote this program, and Neil organized benefit concerts for it each year until his divorce from Pegi.) Rather than address his frustrations head-on in his music, Neil made coded references to them and hid behind personas and genre dalliances during this era. Unlike the execs at Reprise, who after the Tonight's the Night fiasco let Neil put out whatever he wanted, Geffen was not interested in merely providing a platform for artists to express themselves. His label was new and needed hits. Big hits. And in the '80s, if you wanted hits, you needed to sound a certain way. This was a recipe for disaster.
In late 1981, Neil recorded an album called Island in the Sun. It was a guitar-based folk-rock product with some modern sheen. Deciding it was passe, Geffen execs rejected it and asked Neil to come up with a more modern product, citing Peter Gabriel's Security as the kind of thing they were looking for. Neil said, sure, I'll give you a modern product, wrote some songs about his difficulties with communicating with Ben, and recorded them with synths and vocoders. He submitted Trans, which included these songs plus three leftovers from Island in the Sun. Since Neil did indeed give them a modern product, Geffen released it in 1982, but did not promote it much despite Neil hitting the road for the first time since 1978. As I said earlier, Trans is a fascinating record if you know its backstory. If you don't, it's confusing as hell.
Neil next went to work on an acoustic album that he envisioned as a callback to Harvest, probably figuring that the label would be happy with a record that recalled his most popular one. He submitted the first version of Old Ways, which has indeed been described as sounding much more like Harvest than the final version of Old Ways, in 1983, but the label rejected it, saying this was no longer a commercially viable approach and asking him to make a rock and roll record.
And here is where Neil started trolling his own record label.
OK, Neil, thought, they want rock and roll, I'll give them rock and roll. So he dashed off a quick (less than 30 minutes in length) rock and roll album -- except it was rockabilly, a style that wasn't particularly commercially viable either, The Stray Cats notwithstanding. Because their orders had been followed in letter if not in spirit, Geffen released the album in 1983. Everybody's Rockin', except for one song that will appear on the 102-204 list, is donkey poo and was deservedly a flop. (Perversely, in one interview, Neil cited it as one of his two favorite of his albums, along with Tonight's the Night.)
At this point, the label had had enough and sued Neil for submitting records that were not like himself. That sounds Orwellian as hell, but it's true. Neil spent much of 1984 on the road while the legal case played out, but during breaks would record more material for Old Ways. He submitted several more versions of it to the label, all of which were rejected for the same reasons the first one was. Digging in his heels, Neil would make each new version more stereotypically country, ie, less marketable to a mainstream audience.
Also in 1984, Neil briefly reunited with Crazy Horse, but sessions for a reunion album did not go well, and Neil abandoned them.
During this conflict, Neil was always given orders from other Geffen execs but never Geffen himself. I suspect this was so Geffen could have plausible deniability and maintain his personal friendship with Neil. The lawsuit doesn't happen if Geffen himself doesn't want it to.
In 1985, the lawsuit was settled; terms have never been revealed. But the immediate fallout was that the final version of Old Ways was released. It sounded much more like a mainstream country record than a Neil Young record, and its songs shone much better on the road than in the studio. As I said earlier, it's just too corny for me to really enjoy.
Neil and the label had an uneasy truce after that until his contract expired. For Landing on Water, Neil recorded some of the abandoned 1984 Crazy Horse songs and other material with session players Danny Kortchmar and Steve Jordan. Consisting mostly of uptempo songs drenched with synths, it is exactly the kind of "modern rock and roll" project Geffen was asking for in 1982 and 1983, so they released it in 1986, but Neil phoned it in and the result is crushing boredom. Neil has made other records that are more misguided and stupefying, but at least they sounded like he cared; here, he clearly didn't.
For his last original album for Geffen in 1987, Neil brought back Crazy Horse again. Unfortunately, despite the basic tracks being taken from live performances (as had been done for Rust Never Sleeps), most of the record sounds more like Landing on Water than RNS or Zuma (or, 3 years later, Ragged Glory). Two of the three hard rockers are ruined by the '80s version of "layered b******t," the single was a dull ballad that sounds like a Springsteen reject, and most of the others plod along predictably.
And after that, Neil was free (the last album on his deal was a compilation Geffen released in 1993, Lucky Thirteen; it has some outtakes and alternate versions that are worth hearing). He returned to Reprise, where he was once again allowed to put out whatever he wanted. After one more genre album (This Note's for You), Neil became comfortable with being himself again and revitalized his career with Freedom, Ragged Glory and Harvest Moon.
Thank you for all the different versions!!
