As with Dylan, I don't have time these days to listen to Neil Young's canonical works -- especially the early seventies albums, on which his melodic gifts compete with remnants of hippy poesy (he'd begin to purge them on Harvest and be done with them completely on Time Fades Away). As familiarity has worn the pleasures of Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, I find large chunks of After the Gold Rush simply indigestible. Young found his voice on near-classics like On the Beach and Zuma; by the time of Rust Never Sleeps he'd transformed into a sinister demi-urge, coldly noting the decay of fellow hippies, signaling that he'd caught The Wages of Fear in a repertory theatre, expressing ambivalence over the relation between Elvis and Johnny Rotten (in the still-too-little understood "Hey, Hey, My, My [Into the Black]").

Live At Massey Hall 1971 is a dandy compendium of Young's contradictions. He's gosh-darn polite and grateful in his between-song banter one minute and singing "What am I doing here?" in a wavery, unsettling falsetto the next. I'd rather here "Helpless" and "Tell Me Why" in this context than in any other. The warhorses (and crazy horses) aren't covered with dust yet. The deeply weird "A Man Needs a Maid" gets weirder (on acoustic guitar!) when performed as a medley with "Heart of Gold"; domesticity has rarely seemed creepier, although Young tips his hand when he lingers momentarily on "part" in "She was playing a part/that I could understand." This hippie weirdo understood: it takes an actor to recognize an actress. Not long after the success of Harvest he'd show chameleonic instincts on American Stars 'n' Bars, Comes a Time, and Rust Never Sleeps to rival the role-playing games of the creator of Station to Station, Low, Heroes, and Lodger, but trumping him by keeping the confused hippy straights who probably bought CSN too.