Neil Young
Everybody's Rocking

Noblesse oblige, and here comes the review of Neil Young's universally recognized artistic nadir: the mocking "Everybody's Rocking".
Released in 1983, just a few months after the somewhat unlistenable electronic tour de force of "Trans", this album presented Neil in a rockabilly version, increasingly happy to scientifically dismantle his myth. It was met with the belief that the Canadian bear had lost his mind, and even today critics unanimously consider it the most obscene milestone of Young's 80s ordeal.
Indeed, good Neil was carrying several crosses during that period, and clarity was apparently not at its best: the remnants of a decade lived at a blazing speed, several vanished utopias, family dramas (two seriously ill children), and the usual squabbles with the music business, in this case with his new employer David Geffen.
After releasing his "Metal Machine Music", what better follow-up to "Trans" than an album stylistically oriented towards 1954? Everyone wanted Neil to come back with a good rock album? Here comes "Everybody's Rocking", recorded in just one day.
Honestly, the album makes you smile: accompanied on this occasion by a brand new band, the Shocking Pints of old buddy Ben Keith (on sax!), Neil takes a grotesque journey to the roots. At least it lasts 25 minutes, and slips by in the blink of an eye, unlike "Saved" or "Knocked Out Loaded" by Dylan from the same period, or the fearsome conservative country of the subsequent "Old Ways". Neil serves both boisterous versions of classics like "Betty's Got a New Pair of Shoes" or "Bright City, Big Lights", as well as ironically old-fashioned originals like "Cry, Cry, Cry" or "Kinda Fonda Wonda", spiced with ironic doo wop choruses and Gretsch guitars, even going so far as to mention the Reagans in the nonsensical title track. Young's stubborn will is evidenced in the way he ruined a jewel like "Wanderin", presented here in a truly bland version: the one heard on the recent "Live at Fillmore East" shows that this track would have shone on any album with Crazy Horse.
But class is permanent, and at least one ace is pulled out in this match: we're talking about "Payola Blues". "This one's for you, Alan Freed... " Neil utters in the opening. Precisely that Alan Freed, the most famous DJ of the Fifties, who introduced black music to Americans, contributed to easing racial segregation, and who, in fact, coined the term "rock and roll", fell into disgrace over a sleazy payola scheme by the majors for radio airplay. A scapegoat of a well-oiled system, Freed died alone, sick, and alcoholic in the early 60s. The track is simply genius: a sparkling r'n'r synthesis, capable of creating a hilarious time break, shouting "because the things they do today would make you look like a saint" and sealing it with a symptomatic line like "I've got the payola blues/ even though I already paid my dues".

Alan Freed thus adds to the gallery of extraordinary historical characters depicted in Young's mythology. An epic often sui generis, subject to the whims of its author, idealized and even charmingly apocryphal (a bit like Stendhal’s "The Charterhouse of Parma"), as often demonstrated by his flights of fancy on the shores of pre-Columbian America.
A vision of History in which the protagonists are often the losers, or those who have lost everything, like Richard Nixon: massacred by Young when he was the symbol of the most reactionary America, but to whom the Loner granted the honor of arms once he fell from grace, in the famous "Campaigner", shouting "Even Richard Nixon has got soul". But definitely better the soul of Alan Freed: this tribute, the best possible, is definitely the only aspect to pass on to posterity a wicked work, a physiological piece in the intricate puzzle of its author, but certainly dispensable.