Neil Young
Journey Through the Past (Soundtrack)

The relationship between Neil Young and cinema has always been fruitful, as well as essential for understanding many facets of the Loner planet, primarily certain dynamics of his creative process. Who doesn't remember the touching "Philadelphia," which sublimely closed Demme's eponymous film, or the sinister accompaniment for Jarmusch's "Dead Man"? Or the masterpiece "After the Goldrush," inspired by a screenplay by Dean Stockwell, and the troubled relationship with actress Carrie Snoodgress, the protagonist of famous songs like "A Man Needs a Maid" or "Motion Pictures (for Carrie)." Despite being perversely industrious in his musical production, Neil has often found the time to personally engage behind the camera. His cinematic journey has, however, always run parallel to his musical one, constituting a deepening of complex works like "Rust Never Sleeps" or "Greendale." After all, he has always presented himself in these roles under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey, his celluloid alter ego (Shakey meaning "trembling," a reference to his epilepsy).

Released in 1972, "Journey through the Past" was Neil's first, timid "clap": a sort of documentary that retraced his life, from the beginnings in the Canadian prairie to the glory of CSNY, with related visions of the context and the American dream of the era: a rough and frank film, but with few truly brilliant moments in a purely artistic sense (consider the homage-parody of "Lawrence of Arabia," with masked riders materializing out of nowhere on a mysterious beach).

The related soundtrack was the immediate successor to "Harvest," and marked the first of many commercial suicides that have dotted Neil's career: not coincidentally, it was the first album released after Danny Whitten's death by overdose. Aside from orchestral fragments and a citation from the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds," one witnesses a jarring and surreal revisitation of Young's repertoire, beginning to foreshadow that tiring and hallucinatory sound of the subsequent "Doom Trilogy." There are live versions of classics from the Buffalo Springfield and CSNY period, deliberately in a lo-fi and scrappy version, and there's room for some alternate takes of "Harvest" classics: symptomatic is the tail of "Alabama," with Neil turning to David Crosby: "I fucked up the words. But that's okay, the words I fucked up can be fixed" and the famous attack of "Words (Between the Lines of Age)" begins. The only unreleased track is "Soldier": a desolate and sparse piano ballad that fits perfectly, highlighting Neil's unmistakable and fragile falsetto.

Ultimately, "Journey through the Past" is the classic trinket for completists: unsurprisingly, its author has never authorized its reissue on CD, as with the subsequent "Time Fades Away." But while for that shining rough gem it's a terrible injustice, being one of the darkest and most moving pages in Young's catalog, in this case, the Moon King was probably right.