It feels apt that the tapes began rolling on Homegrown after the music had started, so that the first you hear of it is the middle of a fat bass note in the opening bars of Separate Ways and the wobble of an analogue tape machine getting up to speed. It’s as if Neil Young were simply dipping a bucket into the ceaseless river of music that seemed to flow through him in the 70s. The flow was so strong he simply couldn’t keep up: Homegrown is the second previously unreleased studio album from the decade from Young’s Archives series, following Hitchhiker, the 1976 album released in 2017. Last year he mooted another 29 archival releases, including a further three studio albums from the 70s, as well as Lincvolt Chronicles 1-5, which is, per Rolling Stone, “an in-depth look at Young’s attempt to turn his 1959 Lincoln Continental into a hybrid electric vehicle”, and which may be only for those who felt 2003’s rock opera Greendale was too cravenly commercial.
Homegrown was recorded almost entirely in December 1974 and January 1975 after Young split up with his partner Carrie Snodgress, then cancelled in 1975 because he felt it was too personal. Instead, he released Tonight’s the Night, a desolate album concerned with two deaths. While Homegrown might have seemed personal to Young, it sounds breezy compared with Tonight’s the Night or the album that preceded it, On the Beach.
There’s a temptation with Young to concentrate on the big statement songs, but the joy of Homegrown is its lightness of touch. Love Is a Rose (one of five songs that would later appear on subsequent Young albums, in this case Decade) is as elegant as a children’s song, just Young’s voice, guitar and harmonica, accompanied by upright bass from Tim Drummond: “Love is a rose but you better not pick it / It only grows when it’s on the vine.” It’s so timeless, you understand why Linda Ronstadt thought it was too good to sit on the shelf, and put out her own version in 1975.
Not far behind are the two unfamiliar songs that open the record, Separate Ways and Try. The former is the desperate cry of the heartbroken; when Young sings, “I’m feeling better now / A bit more alive, somehow”, he sounds as though he’s trying to convince himself it’s true. The song tails away, as though he has lost the desire to speak. Try, similarly mournful in pace, is fractionally cheerier, though Emmylou Harris, who sings backing, could make Who Let the Dogs Out sound like a profound expression of emotion. Kansas is lovely, simple and heartfelt; We Don’t Smoke It No More is, sadly, no more exciting than its desperately unpromising title. Vacancy is a far more appealing version of Young the rocker, a taut, wiry thorn bush of a song.
The great curiosity here is Florida, whose lyrics had previously appeared – of course – on the liner notes of Tonight’s the Night. It’s not a song – the instrumentation is Young and Ben Keith running wine glasses along piano strings to create a ghastly howl – but a spoken-word piece in which Young recounts seeing people flying gliders in the heart of a city, before one crashes into a building and lands on a couple with a baby, killing them, and leaving Young to argue about the child with a bystander. It’s odd and disquieting – Neil Young as the JG Ballard of Laurel Canyon – and unlike anything else on Homegrown, not so much the grain of sand in the oyster as a brick thrown through the greenhouse window.
Of the familiar songs, these versions of Little Wing and Star of Bethlehem were later released on Hawks and Doves and American Stars’n’Bars respectively. This rendition of the title track is significantly less stoned-sounding and ragged than the later rerecording with Crazy Horse, though no rhythm has ever sounded quite so pinned to the sofa by weed as Young’s patented boom-boom bash, which is present and correct. White Line, filler on 1990’s Ragged Glory, becomes much more affecting stripped of the full-band stomp, with Robbie Robertson adding shade on acoustic guitar.
There’s no point trying to pin a counterfactual around Homegrown. It’s not like Smile, which would have altered the course of the Beach Boys’ career had it been released in 1967. Had this come out in 1975, it would have been another in a largely stellar run of albums, but it wouldn’t have changed anyone’s perceptions of Young. It might, if anything, have reinforced them, something he has always steered away from. He has located this album within the family of albums that began with Harvest, which made him the wistful troubadour of choice, and subjected him to expectations he wasn’t prepared to shoulder. On the Beach had been a deliberate step away from that. Perhaps it wasn’t just that Homegrown was too personal for him 45 years ago – maybe it was simply too likable.
