20 Years Later: Neil Young & Crazy Horse Explore Small Town American On Ten Song Rock Opera ‘Greendale’

Even with two decades’ perspective on Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Greendale (released 8/19/03), it’s difficult if not impossible to know what to make of this ninth collaboration between these two musical forces of nature. Glib categorizations of the record as a ‘rock opera’ serve only to overstate the Canadian rock icon’s intentions in the recording of and touring to support his deceptively elaborate work.

Taking the form of a single tour featuring multi-media and live actors/singers/dancers, it was no surprise to witness Young’s insistence on pursuing the public demonstration(s) of his concerns about the environment as well as an abiding skepticism about celebrity and the media’s voracious appetite for the same. 

In the case of the latter two topics, he was simply reiterating themes that have long pervaded his work dating back to Buffalo Springfield (see “Mr. Soul”). Yet the fact that, at these concerts, he presented the entirety of the Greendale fable before any well-known material from his past work with The Horse may not have rendered the parable a subject of much longstanding curiosity for the audiences who attended: the feverish intensity of the extended multi-song encores overshadowed the primary focus of the evening.

The various formats in which Young released Greendale only served to further cloud perceptions of the work. The CD was originally released with a DVD of a live solo acoustic performance of the material where, within the intimate setting from Vicar Street, Dublin, Ireland renders clear the nuances of music and words. By contrast, such subtleties actually become camouflaged in the accompanying studio recordings where the trio of guitar, bass and drums plays too carefully (and thereby becomes ponderous).

In what may simply be a reflection of Young’s own ambivalence (obsession?) about this project–not to mention his predilection for technical advances–various other configurations, including DVD-Audio and a box set of vinyl LPs, preceded a feature-length DVD with actors lip-synching the material. 

As if that wasn’t enough, in November 2020, a live album was released as Return to Greendale, the anticlimactic nature of which only further muddled rather than clarifying the issue(s) within and without the work. The same turned out to be true of Inside Greendale, a documentary featuring in-studio performances of the album being recorded; in this format, the former friend of Crosby, Stills & Nash effectively overstated how the message took precedence over the medium (as if he hadn’t prior to this point). 

Hindsight, however, suggests Greendale is a fairly deft expression of personal emotion on Young’s part. Such uncommonly candid divulgences appear in the dramatic context of various aspects of his own (occasionally prickly) personality, thereby leaving the topical themes to be addressed only indirectly, sans the polemics of other such efforts as The Monsanto Years of 2015 or did Neil’s collaborations with Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real, the live album Earth and the cinematic experiments of Paradox.

For all his chameleonic tendencies, Young is nothing if not insistent in his pursuits of those interests most dear to him. He oversaw the curation of the Buffalo Springfield box set in 2001 as well as that mythic group’s original albums in mono and stereo for What’s That Sound? Complete Albums Collection seventeen years later; both endeavors constitute practical demonstrations of his self-professed devotion to one of, if not the most valued musical conglomerate of his career. 

As a result, there’s a nagging sense that the creative restlessness that’s marked so much of Young’s career (and also manifest itself in films like Journey Through The Past and Human Highway) often distracts from the main impetus of many projects and/or muffles their long-term impact. The durability of such focused efforts like 1989’s Freedom and the resounding works of a reconfigured Crazy Horse in the forms of 1975’s Zuma and, fifteen years later, Ragged Glory, appear all the more remarkable in contrast.With two decades’ perspective now, Greendale certainly comes off as that proverbial pet project of little durability, the self-indulgence of an artist sometimes too eccentric, not to mention idiosyncratic, for his own good.