Country Girl

Every Neil Young song reviewed! #20: Country Girl. Album: Déjà Vu

Country Girl is the other side of the coin for what CSN can do to Neil Young. Whereas Helpless is greatly aided by the big production, the layers of harmonies and all the instrumentation, Country Girl ends up sounding like a track off his first album that’s been smothered to death. Just because something is dense doesn’t mean that it’ll be good.

The song consists of three sections, Whisky Boot Hill, which showed up in different form on his debut. He had been working on that in 1967. The middle section, ‘Down, Down, Down’, had been a song that Neil had recorded with Buffalo Springfield, but would only be released in 2001 (I might review it one day? I’m not sure how to go ahead with all the archival stuff, I’ll go chronologically and just through the albums first for now). The last section is Country Girl, the ornate and orchestral finale.

From the start of the song, it really sounds like a track that didn’t make the cut for his debut album. Only this time, his voice is a bit stronger, and Jack Nitzche’s orchestration is a bit more obnoxious. It’s not all bad, I like the synth note running through, it creates a bit of an eerie and spooky atmosphere.

It’s another Neil Young song that’s vaguely about a woman, the lyrics are more about sounding good than actually meaning anything. The ‘Down, Down, Down’ section has some classic early Neil era clunker lyrics:

“No pass out sign on the,
Door set me thinking,
Are waitresses paying the,
Price of their winking,
While stars sit at bars and,
Decide what they're drinking,
They drop by to die 'cause,
It's faster than sinking.”

That’s not too far from Sugar Mountain’s:

“Now you're underneath the stairs,
And you're giving' back some glares,
To the people that you met,
And it's your first cigarette”.

I find CSNY’s harmonies to be a bit much, four voices all shouting at you, I just find it offputting, it’s a bit too perfect. The chorus of the first section is pretty good though, they haven’t quite jumped the shark, and while it sounds big it still has its feet on the ground. It’s slightly over the top, but you get a good sense of space.

Another issue is that supposedly being a three section suite, the three sections aren’t all that distinctive, until in the third they just explode and it becomes a catastrophe of interweaving harmonies. When a song bigs itself up to be this epic thing, it’d be nice if it did a bit more with all of its scale, allow for some more drastic changes. Despite all its pomposity I end up feeling underwhelemd.

Now, Neil is not a fan of Country Girl, he described it as ‘overblown’ hence the reason it would not end up on his then career defining compilation Decade in 1977. Therefore, he hasn’t played it much over the years outside of a Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young context. According to setlist.fm he only played it 6 times with CSN and he’s only played it four times solo. Here’s a version from a CSNY concert from 1969 (allegedly in Houston on the 18th of December, 1969):

And here’s a really cool (but low quality) cover by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings from the Bridge School Benefit in 2006, Neil joins in for backup vocals and has a harmonica solo:

Tomorrow we’re onto the final song off Déjà Vu, ‘Everybody I Love You’, Neil doesn’t sing on it, but he did co-write it, so I’ll cover it.