#and crazy horse

[dollarbin]

Shakey Sundays #8:

Ragged Glory

Some things are worth waiting for.

At age 14 I dedicated way too many hours to MTV, hoping to catch Neil Young's Mansion on the Hill. I'd seen the song's video just once; the network had seemingly played it a single time just to tease me.

During my weeks of hapless watching and waiting I tried to remember all the crazy stuff in the video; it entered my dreams and morphed. Had there really been a funeral? Who was dead? Was Young a ghost for all of it? Did a choir really sing the silly lyrics? Was that Neil in the gas station too? Were there dinosaurs at one point? Or was I making that part up? And how did guys my dad's age play such killer guitar?

Well, I never got my answers; instead I saw nothing but Motley Crue's Dr Feelgood. Over and Over Again.

But just now, 34 years later, and thanks to this new technology I'm learning to use called google, I finally got to see the video for Mansion on the Hill a second time.

You can feel Young's burgeoning joy all over this silly video. He'd probably seen Monty Python and The Holy Grail only while stoned on tour and thought his opening gag was entirely original. He's not dead yet!

In midst of my hopeless adolescent search for the video I read in the LA Times that Young had made two additional videos for Ragged Glory, one of which involved high drama between a sexy couple on a balcony. But, reported the Times, neither video had any chance of ever getting a single second of airtime. The writer (it was probably Robert Hilburn, a total dad rock grump who routinely called Use Your Illusion 2 fantastic) mused in the piece on Young's possible motives: Was he delusional? Deceived? Nuts?

Well, making videos exactly how you wanted, which meant you knew would never be seen, sounded genius to me, and I quit watching MTV cold turkey in response. If they weren't going to play Neil Young they weren't going to have me.

I've been thinking about those mythical videos for 34 years straight now. Seriously, I've wondered about them once a month for 408 months in a row. I'm not proud to report this; I'm just a victim of the Dollar Bin (and Jerry Jeff Walker), living my life easy come, easy go...

And now, low and behold, here they are!

Sure enough, this first one, for the hook-heavy Over and Over, has the balcony stuff; witness the serious, VH1 level, drama: a sexy lingerie lady (women in this era of music videos only wore lingerie; none of them owned pants) squares off with an Anthony Bandaras type dude; passion ensues while the band unrelatedly rocks. There's nothing silly enough here for Shakey-level greatness, although it does look like Young did indeed summon his Budokan era wind machines from the Shocking Pinks desertscape. Hurricane force winds are needed for most of Neil's videos.

And then there's the video least likely to ever be seen by me / anyone else as a kid. Had I been a MTV VG at the time, even I wouldn't have played this for fear of a FCC shutdown: there's the swearing in it, sure, but there's also the guitar solos at the 2:30, 3:30 and 4 minute marks that are so gnarly they do not seem safe for public consumption.

Unlike the previous two videos from Ragged Glory, Fubbin' Up contains almost no plot; but half way through Neil does cavort with two different buxom ladies; someone has to stand in for Neil on stage and pretend to shred like him while he stumbles about with them. Neil Young's music videos: they make every Sunday Shakey.

As I've written previously, I do not own Ragged Glory on vinyl. (The lead photo above features my fired up cat and a record store promotion poster I got as a kid and have kept inside my copy of Live Rust ever since.) If you've got the record on vinyl and want to swap I'll gladly send you my copy of Old Ways in return (then I'll go buy another copy of that 80's masterpiece to mediocrity; I saw one yesterday for $8; where the hell were all the copies of Old Ways up until a year ago?).

Anyway, when I was 14 I bought Ragged Glory on tape and, truth be told, it was a little over my head. I loved it, sure, but like another perfect record of that era, The Cure's Disintegration, it was just too damn long for my adolescent attention level. I'd especially get lost during Love and Only Love and Love To Burn. The songs seemed interchangeable to me, and on some level they still do.

While we're at it, I'm gonna argue that those two songs heralded the often regrettable nature of Young's lyrics ever since; for every weird and spectral song like Without Rings or Music Arcade there are four or five that remind me not to forget love.

Memo to Neil: I am not in danger of forgetting about love. I'm happily married, and I am familiar with The Sermon on the Mount. But when I drop the needle, I want visitors from space in my Neil Young songs; I want to picture him walking down main street: not the sidewalk, but MAIN street.

But who am I kidding: I can't complain about Love to Burn or Love and Only Love, or anything else on this vital and classic record. No other 45 year old ever rocked this hard. At 45 Stephen Stills stayed fat and laid an egg. Just get this: Young permanently blew out his hearing not on tour for the record but while mixing the live album that followed. How cool is that? At 45 years old, while the rest of us were acting like grown-ups, he sat in a studio and listened to himself shredding at 11, thereby damaging his ears. When I was 45 the loudest thing I did was shout at the Dodgers. And it worked: they won the World Series.

But Neil kept up his revived crazy brilliance from this era long term. Check him out using Love and Only Love to lay siege to Farm aid with Ralph, Billy and Poncho in tow ten years later:

But at age 14 I never really understood Ragged Glory. It's not an album for teenagers. Metaphors such as, "like a little girl, who couldn't wait" only made sense when I had a daughter of my own, finally asleep at 2am on Christmas eve. It was in moments like that when I wanted to chug a cold one and high step my way around the kitchen, listening to Ragged Glory on headphones. Over and over again...

But I started unlocking the record years before, late in high school. My buddy Matt, a MIT-bound, state champion wrestler in the 150 pound class when he should have weighed an easy 180, was the only person I knew on earth who was as gnarly as Young's soloing on Truckin' Up. And Matt spoke up at lunch one day, when we were probably late for Physics, and told us the story of his 10 mile run the day before after 3 hours of push-ups and brawling on a mat.

Matt had listened to Ragged Glory on his walkman during that run and wanted to report that Forking Up was the greatest song ever written. It was even better, he claimed, that his other favorite Neil song, Homegrown.

I was really into TS Eliot and The Pixies at that point; so he sounded full of crap. But as I listened to him recite Neil's nonsensical, bone-headed lyrics my future self reached out to me and ordered that I sit up and listen; Matt had a point.

Dogs that lick And dogs that bite Hounds that howl Through the night Broken leashes Are all over the floor Keys left hanging In a swinging door.

Amen, Matt. The world is nonsensical and bone-headed. As the great Bob Pollard once warbled, sometimes you need to slay the beast and win the cup. Sometimes you need to fook things up and then scream about it.

There's a lot more to say about Ragged Glory but I'll pause here: happily, Young put out a new extended version of the record, aptly titled Smell the Horse, recently. Writing about it will make some future Sunday Shakey all over again.

[shepscapades]

Little doodle I did a couple of weeks ago that I forgot to post :D I love that the frogger lobby has become the Chatters decked out lobby =w=

[dizzybizz]

i've been moshang-ing lately, like exclusively

[kaogens]

wolfwood please grow ur hair out…

[saturnvs]

it's nice to draw them again

[venompinks]

LISA ✴︎ CRAZY HORSE PARIS

[dykedvonte]

I think it says something that Jimmy absolutely destroyed the crew and ship in half the time Curly was captain. Like he couldn’t even get them past 2 full months before breaking down.

Like he really couldn’t be half the man he thought Curly was.

[arolegos]

please please pleasee do the other ninja as cowboys 🙏🙏🙏 /nf

have the whole team actually :3

the little blorb drafts

+ wgatever this Is

[carpathiians]

drew Arthur like I said I would 😊 im normal now and there is nothing under the read more!!!!!

JUST KIDDING JOVIER JUMPSCARE ‼️‼️

i drew this a while ago just didnt wanna post it on its own cause its kinda.. nothing

also johns arm looks weird but I couldnt fix it so. :/

[heejake-hoon]

THE SOUND THAT CAME OUT OF MY MOUTH WHEN I SAW THIS

HE LOOKS SO FUCKING FINE LIKE PLZ M ON MY KNEES ALREADY

[reality-detective]

In California, a horse runs back into a fire area to save other horses. 🤔

[dollarbin]

Shakey Sunday #12:

Life

Neil Young has offered up a lot of weird images over the years. He's sought to identify the miscreant who slipped sponge in the bells he once rung; he's sailed heart ships through broken harbors; he's kicked it in the Astrodome with Pocahontas.

But Mideast Vacation, the opening track to Life, Young's troubled snot nose of a younger brother to Rust Never Sleeps (both are Crazy Horse records that employ the "let's record my nutty new songs live in concert and then add overdubs so as to call it a studio album" approach), features what is either one of the silliest or most terrifying images in Shakey's entire career.

"I was Rambo in the disco," he snarls, describing his reaction to hearing Death to America chants while on hollibobs with the wife and kids. "I was shooting to a beat."

We'll take it as a given that Neil is not self-reporting actual events: I've checked with Interpol and there are no international warrants out for his arrest.

So what's the tone here? Irony? Despondency? Fury? Inebriation? Take a listen, and let me know if you have any ideas. I'm forever lost when it comes to this entire record.

The track sounds equal parts silly, sincere and feverish, the keyboards shape shifting and oozing into oddball corners like alien play dough in the hands of a brooding demon. There's nothing boring here; that's for sure.

The record's second song, Long Walk Home, contains no comparable depth or intrigue. Neil and the boys sound lovely on the chorus but everything else in the song, from the rockets red glare cannons to the 80's piano, sounds like it's ready to serve as the theme song for Farm Aid At Sea, a 10 day cruise starting and ending in Fort Lauderdale that Donald Trump probably already has in his ass shaped pipeline.

But fear not, Dollar Binners, there is music worth hearing on this record. The third track, Around the World, is a wonderful and fairly psychotic collage of just about every tone Young had experimented with during his wacky 80's. Buckle up and consider a helmet:

We've got Landing on Water's churning synths and drum fury, riff work and bass stomps carried over from Re-ac-tor, Everybody's Rockin's silliness when it comes to discussing some lady's fashion choices and Trans-level anxiety, not to mention some terrific screaming and a brutal, pounding fade out that anticipates Eldorado. There's nothing from Old Ways to be found in this song, I guess, but that's just fine by me.

Sadly, the record fails to build on Around the World's vast and bizarre palette. Side 1 wraps up with the far too long and ultimately dull Inca Queen that makes us wish we were hearing Cortez the Killer or Interstate instead, and Side 2 features five songs that are all too boneheaded and boring to write about (okay, I admit that there's some pretty sweet guitar work in Crying Eyes but that song is about 65 seconds long and Side B may as well have been written by a bunch of bozos attending a songwriting workshop led by Stephen Stills, Richard Marx and John Cougar Melonhead).

Neil famously put himself behind bars on the cover of this record, a not-subtle-in-any-way reference to the unhappy five years he'd just spent as a Geffen Records recording artist. I was 11 when he put this record out, too young for Neil Young. Thank god I was born when I was and first encountered Young two years later. By that point he was fresh out of the pen, ignoring his parole officer and busy committing crimes against mediocrity.

Hope you'll get the chance to do the same on your Shakey Sunday.

Cheers Everyone.

[hallowshumour]

Doodle of my edgy ass rainbow dash kinsona, Storm Chase. 🌈🌩💥🎠

[demilypyro]

just found out there's a jojo spinoff manga starring hol horse, josuke and kakyoin's cousin

this rules

[anniflamma]

My next animatic will probably be Ruthlessness. So I have been sketching out some ideas, I guess, for Poseidon, and I ended up making him a horse. So I like to depict the gods as animals or change sizes when they are expressing big emotions. And Poseidon has this calm anger throughout all of his songs, but his anger is simmering beneath. So my first ideas, I started out having him as a dark horse chasing Odysseus' boat. And when he becomes angry, he becomes more horrifying. But then I realized that meant that I had to draw a freaking horse throughout the whole animatic, and I didn't want that, so I gave him a human form....

His human form isn't really 100% decided yet. I don't really know if he fit of the delivery the song.

If I remember right, in the snippet of Get In The Water, Jay said that there will be a "twist" in the song. Probably Athena will appear or something. I don't know what it can be. But I do have some theories.

I have a headcanon about Poseidon in the musical. I see him more like a personification of vengeance itself. It's based on the parallelism between Odysseus, Poseidon, and even Hector.

Hector was the man who died and couldn't protect his son from the perpetrator. Poseidon is the man whose son became mutilated and is trying to take revenge on his perpetrator. Odysseus is the man who does everything he can to make sure he won't end up in the same spot like Hector/Poseidon.

So this design of Poseidon is more based on what if Poseidon was the representation of Hector's ghost trying to take revenge for the murder of his son.

It's a stretch, but I kind of like it!

[weaselmcdiesel]

nepeta told me her sona looks like this real and true