Young began jamming with the L.A. garage band Crazy Horse which led him to the sloppy guitar splendor of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. The title song, "Cinnamon Girl," "Down by the River," and "Cowgirl in the Sand" make this his first classic album and still one of his best.  

 For his first solo move, he explored the style he’d begun toying with in Buffalo Springfield songs like “Expecting to Fly” and “Broken Arrow,” with ornate, heavily overdubbed pop productions. The results are mixed bag of good ("Loner," "I've Been Waiting For You," "Old Laughing La... 

 After the Gold Rush adds the mellow, folky vibe of CSNY to the the raw attack of Everybody Knows, best seen in the gorgeous melancholy of “Tell Me Why,” "Don't Let It Bring You Down," “Till the Morning Comes,” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.”  

 Young took the Gold Rush songwriting approach to the bank with the country-flavored soft-rock hit Harvest, which had the #1 single “Heart of Gold,” “Old Man,” and “The Needle and the Damage Done.”  

 Journey Through the Past was an eccentric soundtrack to Young’s unreleased film debut. Non-essential. 

 Time Fades Away, a live album of new songs recorded with so-so backup band called the Stray Gators, has a lot of cult cachet, partly because Young refused for years to issue it on CD. "Don't Be Denied" and "Last Dance" are the stand-out tracks in an otherwise dull album. 

 The second in Neil's ditch trilogy, On the Beach was also disavowed by Young and unreleased on CD until 2003. It is weirder but sharper than Time Fades Away, with harrowing lows and amazing highs, including the off-the-cuff, eight-minute folk jam “Ambulance Blues.” 

 Recorded in 1973 but not released until 1975, Tonight’s the Night was inspired by the heroin deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. It’s one of Young’s rawest, messiest albums, as well as one of the greatest rock albums of all time.  

 Zuma is more cowboys-and-Indians mythos with the Horse, showcasing Young’s wildest guitar since Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere in “Barstool Blues” and the somber “Cortez the Killer.”  

 American Stars ’n’ Bars has the home-recording oddity “Will to Love,” Young overdubbing himself while he sings about salmon swimming upstream–it’s better than it sounds–while “Like a Hurricane” remains Young’s most reliable live warhorses. 

 Decade is an excellent three-vinyl­disc, 35-song retrospective that invented a whole new genre, the deluxe box set. The only problem with Decade is that most of its good songs are already on albums worth owning, but it still serves as a map for new fans and a sampler for nonfans.  

 Comes a Time was an acoustic triumph, heavy on dobro, banjo, and fiddle, with a rugged country groove. It’s a clear-eyed adult version of Harvest; highlights include “Peace of Mind," “Look Out for My Love,” “Human Highway,” and a cover of the folkie standard “Four Strong Winds.”  

 With Live Rust, Young picked an ideal time for a definitive summary that kicks the dump in the rump; the folkie first half is pretty good, with Neil sounding surprisingly feisty in the killer version of “Sugar Mountain,” but it’s the Crazy Horsed second half that really rewards listeners. 

 Just in time for the end of the Seventies, Young brought it all back home with Rust Never Sleeps, one side of acoustic folk elegy and one side of unbelievably brutal Crazy Horse rampage. Some of his greatest songs are here, including “Powderfinger," "Thrasher," and “Hey Hey, My My.” 

 He started out the decade strong with Hawks and Doves, a brief folk set including the scary “Captain Kennedy,” and Re-Ac-Tor (1981), before going into one of rock history's most notorious creative implosions. 

 Sometimes in a bar, you will hear someone try to defend Neil Young’s Eighties albums. This is technically known as a “desperate cry for help.” The long, robotic guitar jams of Re-Ac-Tor are the last gasp of okay-ness before Neil's streak of memorable (in a bad way) albums.  

 Neil officially began to rust out with the campy synth-pop parody Trans: dismissed on its release, later burdened with retro charm, Trans is now his most overrated record.  

 Young spent the mid-Eighties floundering in search of a hit, trying a new marketing hook with every album, but he failed to sell out no matter how much he dumbed down. Everybody’s Rockin’ was cutesy rockabilly. 

 Old Ways is a more sincere and therefore more annoying country album, with guest shots from Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. 

 This album proves that Neil Young's Eighties albums were actually as bad as they seemed at the time. Landing on Water is an eager-to-please Aldo Nova imitation.  

 The Crazy Horse reunion Life coincided with the CSNY reunion American Dream, both albums reeking of flop sweat.  

 This Note’s for You was a big-band parody, complete with inept horn section, apparent evidence that Neil was ready to close his tired eyes for good. 

 Fans started to revive hope with the El Dorado EP, which featured Young’s first real guitar playing in years. Freedom offered proof with the Bush-bashing hit “Rockin’ in the Free World.” It was at least one-third overproduced Eighties dreck, but it was also a sign of life. 

 With noise-loving Neil Young acolytes such as Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Dinosaur Jr. on the rise, the old man completed the most well-timed comeback in rock history with Ragged Glory, stealing back some of his own thunder in an album of wild Crazy Horse guitar jams. 

 Weld was a live revamp of Live Rust (with many of the same songs); Arc was a static feedback piece a la Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.  

 Weld was a live revamp of Live Rust (with many of the same songs); Arc was a static feedback piece a la Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.  

 Harvest Moon was his long-promised country sequel to Harvest, with a title track celebrating a marriage that lasted and “From Hank to Hendrix” mourning one that didn’t. 

 Unplugged obviously doesn’t push very hard, but it’s surprisingly potent and listenable. Particularly welcome is the official debut of one of his greatest ballads, the longtime bootleg fave “Stringman,” which he recorded in 1974 but never got around to releasing. 

 Lucky Thirteen attempted a one­disc salvage job on the Eighties Geffen years, but there’s less to the picture than meets the eye.  

 Sleeps With Angels, partly inspired by Kurt Cobain’s burnout, has beautifully elegiac rockers such as “Change Your Mind,” “Trans Am,” and “Piece of Crap.”  

 Mirror Ball was a one-off collaboration with Pearl Jam. The highlight is "I’m the Ocean,” a surging nightmare about love and death that ends with Young stranded in his Cutlass in the middle of an intersection, trying to turn against the flow, as Kurt Cobain and other rock stars battle it out ... 

 Broken Arrow had three lazy gems, “Big Time,” “Slip Away,” and “Scattered.”  

 Year of the Horse was live slop with no track listings, which made it even harder than usual to tell the jams apart. At one point, a fan yells, “They all sound the same,” and Young cheerfully replies, “It’s all one song!”  

 The much-maligned Silver and Gold was very lightweight country rock, but with a few ace tunes, especially the poignant “The Great Divide,” the oft-bootlegged “Razor Love,” and the shameless Sixties nostalgia of “Buffalo Springfield Again.”  

 Road Rock was definitely one live album too many, with an 18-minute “Cowgirl in the Sand”; the backup all-stars get pitifully lost trying to follow Young until he abandons them around the 13-minute mark to take off on two minutes of shriek guitar 

 Are You Passionate? was a muddled attempt at R&B; giving this guy a subtle rhythm section is like giving a gorilla a Palm Pilot. But Passionate was noteworthy as the first genuinely bad album he’d made since the Eighties. 

 Greendale was an improvement over Passionate, an extended narrative filled with righteous political anger, but he hadn’t been writing any good songs lately, and his skills were too soft to handle such an ambitious project.  

 Prairie Wind was laid-back harvest twang, with some nice family-man tunes, stretching the wafer-thin Elvis tribute “He Was The King” to six minutes just for a hoot; the title song was a touching elegy for his father.  

 Living With War was a protest quickie, featuring “Let’s Impeach The President.”  

 Technically a part of Young's long-awaited Archives project, Fillmore 1970 came out three years before the box. It's a seven-song showcase for Young’s guitar duels with Danny Whitten at the height of their jammy powers. 

 Chrome Dreams II is a sequel to a legendary Seventies bootleg. It holds up as his finest album of the 2000s, unleashing his guitar for some inspired flights of hippie delirium.  

 Like Fillmore 1970, Massey Hall came out in advance of the Archives box set to which it technically belonged. This beautiful acoustic set sounds like a best-of compilation, including a number of then-unreleased songs from Harvest. 

 The first volume of the long-promised Archives was something of a letdown, featuring mostly songs fans already had. 

 For some reason, he revisited his Landing On Water production style for Fork in the Road–the acoustic ditty “Just Singing A Song” could have passed for a Flight of the Conchords skit.