Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:But let's have a little respect for the dead, all right? For starters, "Sweet Home Alabama" is a much more complex, a much less stereotypical response than the song it's reacting against (Neil has admitted as much in interviews), which boils Southern history down to a few incendiary images.

And for my money, Mr. Young's "Alabama," from Harvest (released between After the Gold Rush and Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd) was a much more complex, passionate, and empathetic song than "Sweet Home Alabama."

Clearly he's very conflicted about the South, and who wouldnt have been at that time in history?

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:Methinks Montana has its share of rednecks/racists, no? What about Chicago? A black dude ever caught any shit up there?

Of course. It's not about whether anyone has ever suffered racism anywhere else but the South (obviously people can be shitty everywhere), as it is about where the laws of the states upheld that racism in plain language, and where all the forces that could be brought to bear by the states to keep it around were. You've seen the news footage -- fire hoses, police dogs, not to mention (presumably) private citizens setting bombs and burning churches to the ground.

That's a long way from "catching shit."

More to the point, "Alabama" is not one of Neil's worst, either.

Some Canadian with a legal pad who smoked too much marijuana wrote:"Alabama"

Oh Alabama
The devil fools
with the best laid plan.
Swing low Alabama
You got spare change
You got to feel strange
And now the moment
is all that it meant.

Alabama, you got
the weight on your shoulders
That's breaking your back.
Your Cadillac
has got a wheel in the ditch
And a wheel on the track

Oh Alabama
Banjos playing
through the broken glass
Windows down in Alabama.
See the old folks
tied in white ropes
Hear the banjo.
Don't it take you down home?

Alabama, you got
the weight on your shoulders
That's breaking your back.
Your Cadillac
has got a wheel in the ditch
And a wheel on the track

Oh Alabama.
Can I see you
and shake your hand.
Make friends down in Alabama.
I'm from a new land
I come to you
and see all this ruin
What are you doing Alabama?
You got the rest of the union
to help you along
What's going wrong?

Joseph wrote:
Tried to save the trees
Bought a plastic bag
The bottom fell out
It was a piece of crap

Saw it on the tube
Bought it on the phone
Now you're home alone
It's a piece of crap

I tried to plug in it
I tried to turn it on
When I got it home
It was a piece of crap

Got it from a friend
On him you can depend
I found out in the end
It was a piece of crap

I'm trying to save the trees
I saw it on TV
They cut the forest down
To build a piece of crap

I went back to the store
They gave me four more
The guy told me at the door
It's a piece of crap

Personally, I can't stand "Homegrown." It's a piece of crap.

That was very funny. I rarely laugh out loud when reading, but that was witty.

endofanera wrote:

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:But let's have a little respect for the dead, all right? For starters, "Sweet Home Alabama" is a much more complex, a much less stereotypical response than the song it's reacting against (Neil has admitted as much in interviews), which boils Southern history down to a few incendiary images.

And for my money, Mr. Young's "Alabama," from Harvest (released between After the Gold Rush and Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd) was a much more complex, passionate, and empathetic song than "Sweet Home Alabama."

Clearly he's very conflicted about the South, and who wouldnt have been at that time in history?

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:Methinks Montana has its share of rednecks/racists, no? What about Chicago? A black dude ever caught any shit up there?

Of course. It's not about whether anyone has ever suffered racism anywhere else but the South (obviously people can be shitty everywhere), as it is about where the laws of the states upheld that racism in plain language, and where all the forces that could be brought to bear by the states to keep it around were. You've seen the news footage -- fire hoses, police dogs, not to mention (presumably) private citizens setting bombs and burning churches to the ground.

That's a long way from "catching shit."

More to the point, "Alabama" is not one of Neil's worst, either.

Some Canadian with a legal pad who smoked too much marijuana wrote:"Alabama"

Oh Alabama
The devil fools
with the best laid plan.
Swing low Alabama
You got spare change
You got to feel strange
And now the moment
is all that it meant.

Alabama, you got
the weight on your shoulders
That's breaking your back.
Your Cadillac
has got a wheel in the ditch
And a wheel on the track

Oh Alabama
Banjos playing
through the broken glass
Windows down in Alabama.
See the old folks
tied in white ropes
Hear the banjo.
Don't it take you down home?

Alabama, you got
the weight on your shoulders
That's breaking your back.
Your Cadillac
has got a wheel in the ditch
And a wheel on the track

Oh Alabama.
Can I see you
and shake your hand.
Make friends down in Alabama.
I'm from a new land
I come to you
and see all this ruin
What are you doing Alabama?
You got the rest of the union
to help you along
What's going wrong?

All right, I surrender; those lyrics scan pretty well. Can somebody give me a light so I can burn my rebel flag?

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:
Methinks Montana has its share of rednecks/racists, no?

I lived in missoula for a year, and outside of the university, there are about none in terms of black folks there. So few, that they are an anomaly. Too few to hate.

The racist venom in Montana was aimed at the indians.

"why do american indians have such high cheekbones?"
"from waiting in the bar with their face propped up in their hands waiting for somebody to buy them a drink."

and every other racist joke with indians substituted for blacks.

Haa haa ha, great.

Missoula, great city.

Quite a haul to the M.

Good used record store there.

I remember jumping off the foot bridge into the river when i was high and not being strong enough to fight the spring current and really thinking i was going to drown until i finally pulled myself over and had to walk a quarter mile back to my friends who i guess were better swimmers than I.

And walking to the liquor store when it was like 10 below zero to get a fifth of yukon jack.

Or shrooming and getting lost arouind that paper/wood factory and twisting my ankle and having the mushrooms make all the pain i was feeling 10 times more intense and horrible than it should have.

And there was a slot poker place right by that cool used record store that might have been one of most depressing places on earth.


Butte is one of the coolest looking towns i have seen. A run down masterpiece where everybody drank lucky lager out of 16oz cans.

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:
Methinks Montana has its share of rednecks/racists, no?

Red necks, snuss-can rings, elaborate belt buckles, facial hair that is never "groomed" in any meaning of the term, gun racks.. yes, Montana has its share of "western" regalia.

And assholes. And racists.

But Montana lacks black people, and so they have not suffered indignities there to the extent they do elsewhere. I cannot commend Montana for this, as the few black people there are treated not with disdain, but a kind of deference afforded to anything considered "exotic."

There are other Montanans more equipped to address the race issue than I, but I believe my anti-racist thinking has some of its roots in the lack of race conflict that is implied by a near-monoculture. I have witnessed virtually no anti-black racism in places like Japan (where they are soundly racist toward Koreans and even the Buraku Japanese) or Iceland. I think Montana is a kind of Japan or Iceland in this regard.

capnreverb wrote:I lived in missoula for a year, and outside of the university, there are about none in terms of black folks there. So few, that they are an anomaly. Too few to hate.

The racist venom in Montana was aimed at the indians.

"why do american indians have such high cheekbones?"
"from waiting in the bar with their face propped up in their hands waiting for somebody to buy them a drink."

and every other racist joke with indians substituted for blacks.

While Native Americans were treated horribly for a couple hundred years, and Montana has no bragging rights in its treatment of them, while I lived in Missoula (1973 - 1981), I saw no genuine prejudice against them in any of my peers.

And the jokes we made were about North Dakotans, not Indians.

Good used record store there.

If you mean Rockin' Rudy's, it's about perfect for a college town like Missoula.

I remember jumping off the foot bridge into the river when i was high and not being strong enough to fight the spring current and really thinking i was going to drown until i finally pulled myself over and had to walk a quarter mile back to my friends who i guess were better swimmers than I.

This is a Montana experience. Montana is made for stories like this, where you are with your friends in nature, you do something normal and human, and nature reminds you that she is much, much bigger than you. But in the end, you did not die! You were getting high with your friends! So cool!

Violent rivers, beautiful lakes, tall mountains, deep gorges, dense forests, vast praries... Montana has it all. If one wants to have a communion with the raw earth (to "fuck a mountain" in the words of a poet), Montana is the place to do it.

And walking to the liquor store when it was like 10 below zero to get a fifth of yukon jack.

Montana, land of leave-me-alone-and-I'll-do-likewise, our most nearly Libertarian state, has a state-run liquor store. Go figure.

Or shrooming and getting lost arouind that paper/wood factory and twisting my ankle and having the mushrooms make all the pain i was feeling 10 times more intense and horrible than it should have.

Shrooming and wandering around is also a Montana experience. One favorite shroomsite was the big rubber tarp covering the reservoir on Mount Jumbo (Tim, help me out. Was it Mount Jumbo?). It was like a stadium-sized waterbed.

And there was a slot poker place right by that cool used record store that might have been one of most depressing places on earth.

Montana has such a depressing place in every town, but many of them are not really depressing if you are there with friends. The Oxford, for example, was always great, despite it being a tragic all-night wino rest-stop, "strip club" and keno bar. If you describe it in such terms, it sounds like a drag, but sitting there after, say, getting high and floating down the river, it's a terrific little place to eat a bowl of soup.

Butte is one of the coolest looking towns i have seen. A run down masterpiece where everybody drank lucky lager out of 16oz cans.

Rank! Montana Beers (beers consumed in Montana):

Great Northern (not Black Star, currently-trendy microbrew)
Buckhorn
Oly

It has been so long...

Thinking back to 88/89 when i lived there, you jarred my memory about oly. people loved that stuff. didn't it come in stubbie bottles? the other beer that everyone drank was ranier. i only saw the lucky lager in butte
.
i had never hitched hiked before anywhere, but three friends and i decided to hitch to butte. we broke into pairs, my friend and i got picked up and drove half way there and were dropped off. we were lucky to get picked up again quickly, because we found out it was right by a prison where folks are generally not picked up. that ride took us to butte. the other two guys got stranded in some town and hot wired a car and stole it to drive the rest of the way. the guy who hot wired the car was all ready on parole and the other dude was obsessed with Gordon Lightfoot. quite a pair.

we went to a party there and they had the coolest drinking game. they had this old big ass heavy fridge door propped up against the wall. on the fridge was drawn circles of differant sizes with the amount of sips or drinks you had to take. they would stand or sit on the other side of the room and toss this big fricken' magnet onto the fridge, and whatever circle it landed on, you had to drink what it said. if you missed a circle you got a pass.

i loved butte.

you guys should check watford. its great!

My two cents:

"Greendale" is not entirely worthless, in that the song "Bandit" has a beautiful and sincere Neil Young chorus. The first time I heard this song was at the Greendale concert, where he played it alone on stage, and I dare admit to you folks that I wept like a god damn hippie at Jerry's funeral, man.

And to his credit, any of you who have read the excellent biography "Shakey" know that there was a very stressful and overwhelming period in Neil's life with his child and wife Peg, where he was in therapy 8 plus hours a day for years, and still had the record obligations, so his output was less than stellar.

And I can't stand "winterlong." even the damn pixies cover of it.

gcbv wrote:And I can't stand "winterlong." even the damn pixies cover of it.

Can I change my vote to "Winterlong"? Because any song covered by the Pixies is undoubtedly the worst song by that artist (their version, anyway). Unless the Pixies are covering REM; then deciding which is worse is like deciding between two wet teabags smacking together in an empty cup of piss.