Neil Young: Harvest Time - How a Signature Album was Born in a Barn

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

One of the most mind-blowing days of my barely-teenage life was in July, 1972, when my older brother took me to a for-the-ages edition of the Mariposa Folk Festival. Surprise drop-ins included Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young.

Dave Bidini of the band Rheostatics wrote an entire book about that event, keying mostly on Lightfoot.

Onstage, Young spoke those often dreaded words, “I’d like to play some songs from my new album.”

The album was Harvest. I recall Heart of Gold was already on the radio. But the most surreal and pleasing thing was hearing songs I’d never heard before that sounded like I had.

Is Harvest a perfect album? Not everyone agrees that it’s even Young’s best (a case could be made for his previous album, After the Gold Rush).

But Harvest certainly helped define the artist, who already was acclaimed enough, courtesy of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, to have attained the status of “rich hippie.” This, at least, is how he describes himself in the rough-edged documentary Neil Young: Harvest Time.

Young is putatively the director of this assembly of home movie level footage (some references identify the director as “Bernard Shakey”). He opens the film in the present day, holding the album and telling the story of playing a Johnny Cash event in Nashville and producer Elliot Mazer being impressed by many of the songs Young had written that were as-yet unrecorded. At the end of the story of how Harvest came together, Young says, “Now you don’t need to see the movie.”

Don’t believe him.

Unlike most movies about the sheer hell of making of an album – from The Beatles’ Let It Be to Wilco’s I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - there is virtually no drama in Harvest Time. Even when Young sort of butts heads with the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra over the time signature of A Man Needs a Maid, he remains smiling.

In many ways, the star of the movie is Young’s farm in Woodside, California, the barn in which became a de facto studio for some of the guitar-heavier songs, including Are You Ready for the Country, Alabama, and Words. The Nashville session players – whom Young dubbed The Stray Gators – are laconic and likeable. (At one point, drummer Kenny Buttrey is asked what he thinks of California, and answers simply, “Well, I tell ya,” and bassist Tim Drummond agrees.)

The rawness of the barn recordings is helped by ingenious tweaks, like putting microphones outside the barn, creating “the world’s largest echo chamber.” But the jump between raw and polished can be jarring. After watching the birth of Alabama in the barn, Harvest Time cuts to a proper studio in New York, where David Crosby and Stephen Stills join Neil for some sweet harmonies to place on top. In the same location, Stills and Graham Nash join him on Words.

Harvest Time meanders. There are seemingly random conversations that leave one wondering how they made it through the editing process. People close to him at the time, including the actress Carrie Snodgress, are in the background, but identified. Time is devoted to a chat with a loud and ebullient deejay, and to a surprisingly savvy impromptu interview by a charismatic young boy/budding-operator in the Nashville studio.

But the film’s sense of being in no hurry seems of a piece with its director - who, nonetheless, accomplished everything he set out to do.

Neil Young: Harvest Time. Directed by Neil Young. Starring Neil Young, Elliot Mazer and Jack Nitzsche. In theatres, Thursday, December 1.