Weekly Neil: Out On The Weekend
Tryin' to make it pay
Look at the calendar. Feel the chill in the air. It’s Harvest season.
Years ago I met an old friend at a bar called The Magician on New York’s Lower East Side. It might be the best bar in the world because you can bring in pizza and Genny Cream Ale pours are cheap and I’ve made a lot of nice memories there with people I care about. I am mostly a homebody and always have been but I associate The Magician with the kind of communal friend experiences you typically only see on sitcoms. One dude is always late, one is always talking about the latest imported Blu-rays he picked up, we can start there and end up at a karaoke place singing “Mr. Jones” until 2 a.m., etc.
These are all real but atypical occurrences that I nevertheless cherish because of how rare they seem to me in retrospect. The Magician facilitates this with its impeccably glowing neon interior sign and vintage CD jukebox that was replaced by a digital one in the past few years. It’s the kind of place where an old friend comes in wearing a white t-shirt after having taken off his sweaty Oxford and pulls up a chair across from you and, when you ask him how he’s doing, he says, “Well, I’m thinking about packing it in, buying a pickup, and taking it down to L.A.”
You know this friend but not well because he’s really the older brother of a friend you know better who is your age. But you’ve hung out with this friend. He’d come to visit in college and you’d mostly talk about music, which makes sense because he’s a musician but not professionally, so he’s able to be candid but also freewheeling. The last time he was at your place you put on In Rainbows and both tried your hand at hitting Thom Yorke’s falsetto vocal run that ends “Nude.” Then you all had a nice spaghetti dinner.
The friend has just moved to New York from years in Atlanta, which I guess is his version of finding a place to call his own and starting a brand new day. And when he quotes Neil Young he smiles wide and waits for you to comment on it because he’s excited to say that specific line to you because he knows you know it and maybe guys at work don’t and so they wouldn’t get it. So you say, “Nice! Neil!” because it is nice and because you love Neil. Then you look for the song on the jukebox but they don’t have it I actually didn’t do this part though I should’ve. I’m going to switch to first person now.
The same friend recently texted me, no bullshit, the following photo. We hadn’t talked since May, and then, boom.
Harvest is in the air. (Thanks, Jon.)
I told him about this entry and he sent back the following message, which I may have to print on a hypothetical Weekly Neil t-shirt somewhere down the road: “At one point in my life I used to say, ‘I don’t listen to music, I listen to Neil Young.’”
Who among us hasn’t thought about packing it the hell in and starting over somewhere new? What can even be said about “Out On The Weekend” that hasn’t already been dissected at length in the 50+ years since its release? All I know is it’s a great song with so much air in it. I want to live in that air. I’ll never forget Mark Richardson’s words about the Harvest album:
It's probably his best sounding album, and the ear tends to gravitate to the rhythm section in particular, as bassist Tim Drummond and drummer Kenny Buttrey are almost absurdly in the pocket throughout.
Listening to it once with another friend when we were way younger, we blasted the chorus (a funny thing to do because it’s a gentle twangy folk song) and he remarked on “that bell or whatever the hell it is” that radiates a steady calm as Neil delivers his lyrics. It’s a pedal steel but we didn’t know what that was back then. It does arrive like a ringing bell, a note of a single pitch that one might refer to as an announcement siren. The notification that Neil has, in fact, heard the call of woman he’s thinking of who has made him so down today.
“Out On The Weekend” is a quiet song but I’d argue it’s full of swagger. It evokes the image of the paradoxical cowboy, the truck-driving man ready for a new adventure who is also a lonely boy with a broken heart. “He can’t relate to joy,” Neil sings about himself. “He tries to speak and he can’t begin to say.”
As I’ve written before, I don’t like calling Neil a genius — even as he’s restless, boundlessly creative, and steadfast in his principles, he’s still just a guy, and in fact his everyman appeal is his among his best qualities but not for the dumb reasons people tend to use that descriptor, which are usually political. But I think that line is genius. The musical openness of the song echoes its lonesome sentiments. Guy’s got a broken heart, so he’s looking to start over. He was also laid up in a back brace during this time recovering from surgery. That’s undoubtedly a lonely experience. And he knows about being lonely. About the “Bad Fog” it brings and about channeling that wallowing feeling.
You have to create space in order to really sell the loneliness. Tell your rhythm section to slow it down. Let that pedal steel ring out. Unplug your guitar. Pack it in.
It’s funny to write about living out sitcom scenes with friends in a bar in relation to a song about loneliness. But I’d be lying if I said “Out On The Weekend” doesn’t also fill me with possibility — the wide-open expanse of two days off. What are you gonna do with ‘em? You could do nothing and be lonely or try to have some fun and be lonely doing that, too. Your call. I’ve done both. The latter typically works out better.
I get the same feeling hearing Kacey Musgraves’ “Slow Burn,” a song explicitly indebted to Neil’s influence. Her own lonely weekend has shades of it, too.
I recently hosted two hours of a talk show our local NPR station broadcasts daily called Connections. The topic was Brat Summer, but as the conversation wound down, the focus turned to autumn. Arielle Gordon, a writer I admire, came on to talk about Charli XCX and the great piece she wrote about the Brat phenomenon (“kamala IS brat” and the like), and I had to ask her how she was musically preparing for fall. She mentioned Nilüfer Yanya, whose terrific new album My Method Actor is out today. And then she asked a question so perfect I have to reproduce it here.
“Is MJ Lenderman Brat?”
That query — along with the fact that “Rip Torn” sounds remarkably like “Ambulance Blues” — is a topic for another newsletter. But to end this one, it’s worth noting that a September release date for MJ Lenderman’s new album Manning Fireworks feels predestined. A generational talent who references Bob Dylan a lot and who is stylistically and musically much closer to Uncle Neil dropping his breakthrough record into the amber haze of harvest season?
Brat Summer is dead. Welcome to Harvest Fall.
“Out On The Weekend,” written by Neil Young, from Harvest (1972)
Neil Young: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Kenny Buttrey: drums
Tim Drummond: bass
Ben Keith: pedal steel guitar