Weekly Neil: See The Sky About To Rain

Who will tell your story?

I always picture a rural highway. Summertime, a humid day, a battle between blue and gray above. There’s a farm house in the foreground bracing for the shower. Before long, the rain begins. But Neil’s song doesn’t take place during the downpour.

“See The Sky About To Rain” lives in the gathering storm, with broken clouds and a train whistle blowing a warning. You always hear the locomotive before you see it. Same goes for the thunder.

Neil recorded perhaps the best-known version of “See The Sky About To Rain,” track two of On The Beach, in early 1974. But he’d played it live for years before. The earliest recording available on Neil Young Archives is a crisp performance from December 1, 1970, from a show at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. Listen with headphones and you can even hear Neil’s feet pressing the piano pedals — absolutely worth the $20 yearly NYA membership. He performed it the following night at the same club and several times throughout late 1970 and early 1971. A notable version appears on Live At Massey Hall, recorded in January, and on a California bootleg from the following month. “I had a wonderful time here at the Cellar Door,” he says warming up with the chords during one of these taped shows. “I hope to come back sometime ‘cause I just wanna play some small places. Maybe there will be more people playing small places.”

I’ve only seen Neil once, on the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park, with 60,000 other people. He was backed up by Crazy Horse and spent 18 minutes of their 70-minute set crunching on a single song, “Walk Like A Giant,” before eventually rendering it pure goo. Those conditions are about as far away from the early-’70s “See The Sky” performances as you can get. Contrast 25-year-old Neil in a small club hunched over a piano — around that time, he ended up in hospital for two slipped discs — with 67-year-old Neil making his Les Paul howl at the moon for nearly the length of a network sitcom. Some are bound for happiness. Some are bound to glory.

The stripped-down piano versions furnish the song with the road-dog, singer-songwriter, straw-packed barn energy typical of the time. On After The Gold Rush and Harvest, Neil is a quiet showman. He’s unafraid of lush arrangements but stays grounded in the songs themselves. “See The Sky” would’ve worked on either of those albums. But he held it for years until the overcast On The Beach.

If the song has a hook, it’s the gorgeous interplay between Neil’s watery Wurlitzer electric piano and Ben Keith’s pedal steel in the space where a chorus might be. This happens twice, and each time the major-key chords bring sunshine that threatens to render the title of the song a lie. Neil sings enough trouble here that we can understand any reprieve from the precipitation is brief. The man snaps the musician’s silver fiddle in half. Some are bound to live with less. Nothing can stop the rain.

Threading the contemporaneous hippie needle, Ian MacDonald noted in Uncut magazine the appearance of “the man” on the song here as aggressor. “This bitterness about ‘the man’ (and you can take it straight as Big Business or bend it towards the drug connection) is reiterated constantly through the record,” he wrote, as captured and preserved by Songfacts. Indeed, Neil sings about “singing songs for pimps with tailors/Who charge $10 at the door” on “For The Turnstiles” and lampoons oil barons on “Vampire Blues.” It’s what makes On The Beach feel so melancholy, even as it currently stands as my favorite Neil album. He felt isolated making it, enduring a relationship’s end and still feeling his way out of the proverbial ditch. “The man” — authority, establishment — made for an easy target. “So all you critics sit alone,” he sings on “Ambulance Blues.” “You’re no better than me for what you’ve shown.” And yet it’s Neil who goes to the radio interview and ends up alone at the microphone.

“See The Sky,” chronologically and in terms of a tracklist, comes before that gloom. But Neil apparently slated On The Beach’s moody and murky second side — “On The Beach,” “Motion Pictures (For Carrie),” and “Ambulance Blues” — to be its first. He was apparently talked into swapping them by his trusted producer, David Briggs.

Thus, “See The Sky” enters like a sun shower but finds its egress right before the first flash of lightning. The farm house is doomed to get soaked. But there’s time yet to make your way inside.

“Sky The Sky About To Rain,” written by Neil Young, from On The Beach (1974)

Neil Young: Wurlitzer, vocals
Ben Keith: steel guitar
Tim Drummond: bass
Levon Helm: drums
“Joe Yankee”: harmonica