Ranking favorite Neil Young albums

I stopped at ten but could’ve added a couple. Mr. Soul, aka Shakey, has a vast catalog and getting vaster by the year. I stopped keeping up a decade ago.

1. Zuma (1975)

His meanest album, Zuma stars a long-haired star child whose penchant for mellow drugs doesn’t restrain him from poking malicious, undeserved fun at stupid girls who cry (Young spent the previous two albums crying over dead druggie friends and mourning the depths of his solipsism to a degree that might’ve made Phoebe Snow, Linda Ronstadt, and, of course, Joni Mitchell roll their eyes at the dumbfuck male saddos they endured in studios). Zuma is Neil Young’s tomcat album. Single, out on the town, singing barstool blues and hallucinating lurid fantasies about Cortez and swoopin’ birds before crawling home to the shaky arms of David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Stephen Stills. His loudest and best guitar album until Ragged Glory…

2. Rust Never Sleeps (1979)

….or is it this one? The cracked mirror version of Zuma. Cortez turns into Pocahontas, CSN into abandoned combine harvesters, and Neil into one of the desperate cold-eyed explosive guys in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear makin’ a sedan delivery. The Rust Never Sleeps material has a meticulousness missing from Young’s previous work — it’s as if he sat down at a typewriter and with his index fingers tapped out these lyrics — but even if the songs were in Portuguese he and Crazy Horse create a momentum that stops short of hurtling off a cliff. To do so would be Sid Vicious’ fate. Neil Young doesn’t celebrate Sid Vicious. This is the story of Johnny Rotten.

3. On the Beach (1974)

A dozen years ago after a couple beers two friends and I, at my prompting, threw marijuana, honey, and a half teaspoon of butter in a frying pan. When the bolus had congealed we took a bit. “What a crock,” we said. Twenty minutes later we were immobile. Recorded under the influence of honey sliders, On the Beach boasts one of the slowest album sides in rock. “Ambulance Blues,” on which Young forces himself to stay conscious by leaning into an electric piano, is the peak. The faster numbers on the first side have a gnomic intensity; he doesn’t know what they mean, we sure don’t, but they signify anyway (“Revolution Blues,” “For the Turnstiles”).

4. Tonight’s the Night (1974)

What I want my wake to sound like.

5. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1970

Known for two long tracks for which I have mixed affection and the far from euphoric “Cinnamon Girl” — Young and co-harmonist Danny Whitten sings it as if the Girl is homework — Everybody Knows This is Nowhere also as a number of eerie tunes that belie Crazy Horse’s reputation as ravers. Bobby Notkopf’s violin guarantees that “Round & Round (It Won’t Be Long)” will be a bad time; it could’ve fit on On the Beach.

6. Time Fades Away (1973)

Thanks to Live at Massey Hall, the grubby production, or, rather, the non-production gets mitigated by the intensity of Neil Young’s commitment to “L.A.,” “Journey Through the Past,” and “Love in Mind.” Mixing introspection and defiance like a man who’s figured out how the latter strengthens the former and the former deepens the latter, Time Fades Away is the best sixties album released in 1973, this time the cracked mirror in which the millions who bought Harvest saw the calcification of their tastes and perhaps values, thanks to a sociopolitical climate that encouraged lethargy. Don’t be denied, Young countered, his raggedy band the Stray Gators collapsing behind him.

7. Comes a Time (1978)

I once sang to a trick, “In the field of opportunity it’s plowin’ time again.” The country/folk-rock fusion that Harvest should’ve been, Comes a Time was a hit too, his first since 1972. Odd album too, no doubt; in places like “Goin’ Back,” mixing Mellotron and Nicolette Larson, Young could’ve been toying with the musical tropes on Big Star’s Third (if he’d heard it). To remind listeners who bought enough copies of CAT to send it into the top ten that the sleeve said “Neil Young,” the artist includes “Look Out for My Love,” where he plays electric guitar as if it were a hacksaw, and goop like “Four Strong Winds.”

8. Ragged Glory (1990)

“Fuckin’ Up” is an anthem, “Over and Over” a valentine. This followup to an unexpected triumph does go on a bit, but it’s marvelous as a mopping soundtrack, an activity that has list possibilities too.

9. Eldorado (1989)

A Japanese and Australian EP previewing two of Freedom‘s most coruscating tracks, one of its okay tracks, and two never-seen-agains, including “Cocaine Eyes”, told from the POV of the user in the opening verse before broadening to an attack on any thirty- or fortysomething former hippie. When in doubt, attack David Crosby or better yet Stephen Stills. Reminds me of anecdote from the same era: when Keith Richards, recording his solo album, said he’d run out of material to write about, drummer Steve Jordan reminded him, “Think of Mick. Write about Mick.”

10. Trans (1982)

Perhaps overrated now, too short, and he should’ve gone further (“Little Thing Called Love” is the nervous commercial accommodation to which Neil didn’t often succumb). But “Sample and Hold,” “Transformer Man,” and, damn, “We R in Control” meld vocoder, unexpected interjections of ugly guitar, and a vocal insistent on connecting thanks to and through the technology. He can’t abjure an addiction to thirdhand ideas about natives and what he thinks they need and what they can do for him; “Like an Inca,” an epic canonizing monumental bad taste, flippety-flops its bongos and flaunts Young’s most intricate guitar work of the next five years in an attempt to transcend itself.