At the time of their debut album's release in 1971, Crazy Horse had garnered notice as Neil Young's band on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush. The core members had previously been in the Rockets, a California sextet that released one promising album and were eulogized by Young on "Running Dry (Requiem for the Rockets)" on Everybody Knows. All too soon, Young would be literally eulogizing the band's guitarist and erstwhile singer, Danny Whitten. But first came Crazy Horse, the shining moment in Whitten's career.

The first lineup of Crazy Horse was something of an informal supergroup, with Whitten and the rhythm section of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina (who remain with Young to this day) joined by pianist Jack Nitzsche -- a masterful arranger who'd been producer Phil Spector's right-hand man -- and guitarist Nils Lofgren, another Young sideman who fronted his own excellent band, Grin. Ry Cooder provided tasteful slide guitar on three tracks, including the Whitten-penned "I Don't Want to Talk About It," one of the saddest songs ever written about a broken heart.

Whitten was a man out of time; his artful, uncluttered songs seem steeped more in the verities of early rock & roll than in the convolutions of the late Sixties. Listen to the unabashed balladic sentimentality of "I Don't Want to Talk About It" and the grinding R&R basics of "Dirty, Dirty" and "Downtown." The last of these, if you pay close attention, is a shocker -- an upbeat ode to cruising for drugs that sounds like a West Coast complement to the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man."

The Eagles get all the credit for exposing the dark side of the California dream, but you can peek at the lobby of the Hotel California on Crazy Horse, too. The opening track, Nitzsche's chugging, bluesy "Gone Dead Train," reveals itself as an elaborate metaphor for impotence; the troubled Whitten lays his cards on the tempestuous, self-revelatory "Look at All the Things"; and Lofgren's stormy "Beggars Day" can been interpreted as his fatalistic view of Whitten's drug problems ("All your mercy can't save me"). Danny Whitten died at twenty-nine of a heroin overdose on November 18th, 1972. It's all documented on Tonight's the Night, Neil Young's elegy for Whitten and fellow drug casualty, roadie Bruce Berry, but it was foreshadowed on Crazy Horse.

PARKE PUTERBAUGH
(RS 890 - February 28, 2002)

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(Posted: Feb 4, 2002)