Ranking Neil Young in the 1980s

Received maligning, let’s call it. None of these albums are great, even the vaunted comeback released in the year of Peak Boomer Comeback, but many of these are albums are good. Who cares how lousy Landing on Water sounds? Half the songs are prime Neil Young.

This Note’s For You is the missing alum — I haven’t heard it.

1. Eldorado/Freedom (1989)

In an earlier ranking, I’d placed Eldorado high: four killer songs, two of which Young has written out of existence on American compilations. “Cocaine Eyes” extends the generational critique offered in 1986’s “Hippie Dreams” but drops the synths in favor of a furious guitar attack as if to say, “Let me speak in terms you might understand.” Rewriting “On Broadway” for the Poppy Bush Interzone, he uses a master class in R&B poise to comment on a new era of indifference to the plight of poor black Americans: whites get cocaine eyes, blacks get crack. Freedom, the least cohesive of Young’s acknowledged classics, swings every which way; he has said he needed the other eighties albums to sort out an identity crisis that, in a true Neil move, needed another miscellany to explain. I”m not sure he sang “No More” thinking he’d never have to again.

2. Life

This 1987 studio/live mishmash gets the edge over the better regarded Trans because the weird politics get appropriately garish settings (“Around the World”). By all accounts in terrible shape in every circumstance, Crazy Horse sound pumped, with “pumped with what?” the necessary question. Ballad “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks” beautifully brings Young into the Steve Winwood era. I can assume embarrassment has kept “Prisoners of Rock ‘N’ Roll” from becoming Neil and Crazy Horse’s regular set opener.

3. Trans (1982)

He chickened out — should’ve tossed the hippie sops like “Little Thing Called Love” and embraced “Sample N Hold” as template. Imagine the Santana salsa of “Like an Inca” with a programmed loop.

4.Re-a c-tor (1981)

Anticipating Mark Knopfler’s penchant for confusing his guitar for a vacuum leaner, Neil turns in his loudest album to date — only Ragged Glory and its accompanying live documents surpass it. It’s more loud than good, but his commitment to loudness must’ve been a salve for the few fans that bought in that grim, soft, narcoleptic climate of 1981. “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze,” “Rapid Transit,” and “Shots” must have pissed off Stephen Stills, I hope.

5. Landing on Water (1986)

LOW gets flak for the wrong reasons: it doesn’t suck because Young hired Danny Kortchmar to help him with the Synclaviers, it sucks because Young hired Danny Kortchmar and LOL sounds like what you and I would’ve constructed with an untuned guitar and a Casio and your brother’s buddy Tim in the garage in 1986. He had the technology — why not imitate a choir on the sampling keyboard instead of deploying it like Custer did his men? But it doesn’t suck. In the year of the “Stand By Me,” “Twist and Shout,” and Monkees revival, not to mention the return of the Moody Blues, “Hippie Dream” sprays kerosene over the refuse. A synth line as cold as stone gives “Drifter” its menace.

6. Hawks & Doves (1980)

A few writers have made claims for this too slight and muddled collection, but like many artists entering the Reagan decade the confusion was sincere.

7. Old Ways (1985)

Thanks to the live A Treasure released in 2011, no fan need own this travesty, in which Young and the International Harvesters treat country like Sid Vicious did “My Way.” If he’d stuck a hayseed between his teeth he wouldn’t have looked more ridiculous. Two bits worth salvaging: “Get Back to the Country” and “Misfits,” where the greatest boxer in the world watches himself on the telly from space. A Bowie-eque moment on Neil Young’s country album? What a country!

8. Everybody’s Rockin‘ (1983)

The only time Neil followed a trend was when he heard the Stray Cats and decided he was going to have a go at this rockabilly thing. The music of his youth, right? Nothing is grisly except for his hair on the album sleeve. I’m surprised he never farmed out “Kinda Fonda Wanda.”