Weekly Neil: You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio

I'm a country station, I'm a little bit corny

A few months ago, I heard something revelatory. Joni Mitchell singing what I’m on record calling the greatest song I’ve ever heard in my entire life with Neil and the down-home band that backed him up during his Harvest days, The Stray Gators. Obviously Joni and Neil ran in the same circles and collaborated often but the sheer explosiveness of them teaming up for one of Joni’s best songs felt like a new chapter for me and my fandom of both artists.

Not to get into dumb stuff but I could hardly appreciate the moment because I was working the worst job I’ve ever had at the time which cast every aspect of my life through a lens of dark fog. I’m grateful to be on the other side of that now, listening to “You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio” and luxuriating in its barn-tastic splendor. Missing link stuff right here. Hidden history and all that.

I immediately recognized the loose, almost delayed drumming of Kenny Buttrey. It’s the same that heads off one of the greatest albums ever (Harvest) on a song about wanting to head down to L.A. in a pickup and start over. Tim Drummond’s lazy bass and Neil’s harmonica are all over the track, matching Joni’s skyward vocalizations at the end. Paired with Joni’s urgent lines about romance and self-deprecating earnestness, the experience is viscerally jarring to me, someone to whom both separate sounds mean a great deal. It’s like hearing ‘70s Laurel Canyon Girl Talk — new contexts for beloved existing sounds. Lovely and deliberate, with Joni as effusive as ever. It means something to me.

Neil doesn’t sing on the track. He doesn’t need to. His electric guitar is sludgy and a bit mischievous, adding some winks to a song largely devoid of irony. While Joni’s acoustic guitar playing on her original is urgent and springy, this new take — recorded in April 1972, two months after Harvest dropped and half a year before Joni’s original saw release on For The Roses — simmers on low. Relaxed and more melancholy but undeniably beautiful.

In 2014 I remember deciding R.E.M. was my favorite band. It was almost aspirational, like I almost felt that way, like I had enough information to believe this was an informed take but still incomplete and subject to much, much further listening. I feel the same with this song, and also doing this newsletter. It makes things that are otherwise merely special and sublimates them into the realm of the richly meaningful. What do Neil’s and Joni’s music do for me? That’s kinda why we’re here, to explain all that.

And yet I haven’t been here all that much lately. For a newsletter called Weekly Neil, I’ve only published a handful of these in the past few months. I’m trying to change that, starting with this week. Expect a double-header. The second edition, coming on Thursday, is a lively and great interview with a musician about what I can comfortably say is a Top 5 Neil song for most people on this planet.

Neil and Joni, meanwhile, will continue to turn me on. I’ll continue being a little bit corny, etc., and, real talk, an actual radio broadcaster (a job I started in November. It’s going great). And I’ll keep dreaming of that legendary but imaginary Harvest follow-up with The Stray Gators and Joni on backup vocals, or hell even as a duet partner. Neil’s career became immensely more interesting by pursuing the weirder, the darker, the drunker, and so forth. But when he wanted to go broad, easy to listen to, and send Joni’s mastery right into your heart, I’m glad he did. The lines are always open.

“You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio,” written by Joni Mitchell, originally from For The Roses (1972)

Joni Mitchell: vocals
Neil Young: electric guitar, harmonica
Tim Drummond: bass
Kenny Buttrey: drums