Weekly Neil: Out Of My Mind

All I hear are screams from outside the limousines

The first two cities my father lived in were Buffalo (New York) and Springfield (Massachusetts). I was destined to love Neil from the very beginning.

It’s no surprise I haven’t yet written about anything from the Neil Young self-titled album from 1968. It’s overproduced and very much out of step with the rest of his catalog. I have a great interview coming up soon where my guest lays out what that record meant in terms of his pivot to hard, scuzzy guitar music with Crazy Horse and, eventually, druggy reverie throughout the rest of the ‘70s (and beyond).

But it’s a fascinating document. Rich, string-laden, psychedelic, and folky. It feels very much in step with what he did in the band Buffalo Springfield in the mid-’60s before that band split up due to Neil and Stephen Stills grappling for power (or whatever happened). There’s an alternate universe where Neil became famous not for his soul-hollowing folk songs and dark examinations of the emptiness of the 1970s but for writing pretty little pop ditties like “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” and “Flying On The Ground Is Wrong.”

And then there’s “Out Of My Mind.” It’s not a notable song by any metric. It appears late on Side Two of the first Buffalo Springfield album from 1966 as sung by Neil, who admittedly didn’t quite have his voice yet. (He had a voice, but if you heard it, you’d know it’s mostly certainly not the Neil voice he’d develop soon enough.) That’s why his more notable contributions to the Buffalo Springfield oeuvre of the time — “Flying,” “Clancy,” and later, “On The Way Home” — were sung by Richie Furay, whose soulful timbre had more personality.

Giving these songs to his bandmate Furay created an interesting distance for Young and his work. His voice is more traditionally pretty. Young’s can be brittle and lonely. But back then it was just kind of searching.

So, “Out Of My Mind” — not a necessarily pensive song lyrically, not precise either (as Neil’s stuff usually isn’t, or isn’t always). And there are rich vocal harmonies from both Furay and Stills that really counter how relatively flat Neil’s is in this era. But listen to Neil play it in Michigan three days before his self-titled album drops. He’s alone, he doesn’t have the great strength vocally he will have by ‘70 and ‘71. He had to grow into it.

It’s almost a trope that an acoustic performance lends a song more emotionality or authenticity. But man, that show at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor. Two years after Buffalo Springfield dropped, months after the band imploded, and alone at the microphone. “Out Of My Mind” finally achieves the lonesome affect that a line like “I don’t know what I’m smiling for” hints at in the studio version. Unadorned with studio sheen, the song barely lasts two minutes. The introduction tells the greater context of the tale, though.

What’s cool about that show is how “Out Of My Mind” is prefaced by “Birds,” one of the all-time ballads from the mind of Neil. And then, pure alchemy. He’s fiddling around on the fretboard and incidentally finds what will become the basis of “Winterlong.” “That’s a new melody,” he says before admitting, “I really don’t even know what to sing, you know?”

This moment causes someone in the club to mention “Out Of My Mind,” which is, remember, a late album cut from a record by a band that no longer exists. “That’s far out,” Neil says in response. “I don’t even know anybody here who bought that or heard that album. I could do that one.”

He’s almost pleasantly surprised. It’s not the one The Guess Who covered. It’s not the one The Carpenters would cover the following year. It’s just a little tune about getting famous, or trying to anyway.

“The strange thing is, about that song,” Neil admits in Michigan, “I wrote that song before anything ever happened, you know? We’d just gotten a manager and we really hadn’t any scenes or anything. We’d just done some tours, but we hadn’t had any success at all when I wrote that song.”

“But I had a premonition,” he concludes as he strums the opening chords. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the song, but the song was written before any of it happened. And later on, we all sat and listened to the record about two years later.”

Two years later, in 1966, when Buffalo Springfield were just about to blow up.

I think of my dad in his mid-twenties, about the age that Neil was when Buffalo Springfield had their moment, living in western Massachusetts and studying for the bar. He’d be married before long, and him and my mom would live in a small place as he finalized his studies. They were both far away from home, closer than I’m sure it felt. And a few years later, he had made it. They both had.

No limousines for my father, the public defender, or my mother, the Catholic school teacher. But plenty of memories.

“Out Of My Mind,” written by Neil Young, from the album Buffalo Springfield (1966)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar
Stephen Stills: guitar, vocals
Richie Furay: guitar, vocals
Bruce Palmer: bass
Dewey Martin: drums