A Nashville search that got too easy
The harmonica states the whole argument before a word arrives, a simple figure, almost shy, and then a pedal steel leans in as if the room had a horizon.
Neil Young recorded Heart of Gold in February 1971 at Quadrafonic Sound Studios in Nashville, with Elliot Mazer producing and the Stray Gators behind him: Ben Keith on pedal steel, Tim Drummond on bass, Kenny Buttrey on drums. James Taylor played banjo and sang, Linda Ronstadt sang with him, and the two voices sit just behind Young’s, close enough to feel like friends in the control room rather than a choir. The song opened Harvest, released in February 1972, and became his only American No. 1. The lyric is a man looking, still, for a heart of gold, old enough to have crossed the ocean and young enough to keep the wish. The track does not strain. It walks.
On stage the harmonica returns like a signature he cannot resign. He has played it with a band, alone, in ragged voice and in the clear tenor of 1971, and the song always sounds as if it were found rather than built. That ease is what frightened him. In the notes to Decade, in 1977, he said the hit had put him in the middle of the road, and that the middle soon bored him, so he headed for the ditch, a rougher ride with more interesting people. Tonight’s the Night and the records around it are the ditch. Heart of Gold is the road he left on purpose.
This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.
(Neil Young, liner notes to Decade, 1977)
The public did not follow him into the ditch at the same speed. Radio kept the Nashville song, and it still does, a three-minute proof that Young could write a melody as plain as a field. The steel guitar is the landscape. The banjo is the footsteps. Nothing in the arrangement shows off, which is why it survived the decade that made it. People who dislike the later noise still know the chorus, and people who live for the noise still sing it, a little embarrassed, a little glad.
What remains is the honesty of a simple want. He is not asking for fame in the lyric, though fame is what the record delivered. He is asking for someone unspoiled, and the music, recorded among friends in a Nashville room, briefly sounds as if such a person might answer. Then the harmonica restates the question, and you hear why he had to leave. A song this welcoming can become a cage. He walked out of it, and left the door open.
