Neil Young

The last album of an early '70s triptych known as "The Doom Trilogy" finds Neil Young threatening the stars of L.A.'s Laurel Canyon, singing that he hated them worse than lepers and that he would kill them in their cars. This album of gritty, blues-tinged country rock comes off as savage and dark as Young's words.

Since his days with Buffalo Springfield, the shifts in Neil Young's preoccupations have
presented a barometer of a generation's attitudes toward itself, reflecting the dissolution of
political idealism and, beyond that, the end of the romance of youth itself. Even in such
early-ballads as "Sugar Mountain" and "I Am a Child," Young gently warned against living with
the illusion of perpetual youth, while his childlike vocals tantalized us with the p... More >

Something in his obsessive self-examination is easy to dislike and something in his whiny thinness hard to enjoy. But even "Ambulance Blues," an eight-minute throwaway, is studded with great lines, one of which is "It's hard to know the meaning of this song." And I can hum it for you if you'd like. (Grade - A-)