Neil 'Cylon' Young and his vocoder
In 1983, Neil Young‘s record label sued him for 3.3 million dollars for not sounding like Neil Young. So what was the deal? He got the MTV mullet just like Geddy Lee and Eric Clapton. They were probably happy about that. But he also got his hands on a Sennheiser VSM-201 vocoder and was fraternizing with those weirdos from Devo. Worse than that, he recorded an album full of unsellable, synthesized ROBO MUSIC! And even worse than that, he made it the soundtrack to an even more unsellable weirdo movie that nobody understands!! Then he had the gall to play his unsellable weirdo robomusic soundtrack for the better half of his HBO concert special!!!
Gotta love the guy. But Trans wasn’t just some quick sell new wave gimmick made to confuse the masses and slap David Geffen in the kisser. Nope. Trans was a creative work which mirrored what was going on in Young’s world at the time. Which was most likely, let’s see… gettin’ high…hangin’ out with Devo… and spendin’ a good part of the year with his son, Ben. In fact, Neil claimed one of the inspirations behind his using a vocoder, apart from it sounding way cool and Kraftwerky, was to reflect how Ben’s cerebral palsy impeded communication between the two.
To be fair, Trans isn’t all indistinguishable cybo-rock. As part of the album’s concept, the vocals and music shift back and forth between sounding like good ‘ol Neil (Little Thing Called Love/Like an Inca/Hold on to Your Love) to sounding like a chorus line from Battlestar Galactica (Sample and Hold/Computer Cowboy AKA Skycrusher/Transformer Man), climaxing in a fusion of both styles, with a cover version of The Buffalo Springfield‘s “Mr Soul“, which is given the Devo-Satisfaction-Treatment.
Now, for both Neil Young fans and Devotees, here’s ”Sample and Hold” live in Berlin, and a beautifully mutated version of ‘Out of the Blue Into the Black’, from the movie Human Highway, featuring the Spud Boys themselves, along with Neil Young totally shredding on guitar, and Boogie Boy on synthesizer and lead vocals:
Neil Young & Devo
Paul | Myspace Video
NEXT WEEK: BRING ON THE SPACE MAIDENS!
The song with Devo is wonderfully trippy and wild. Somehow I had missed it. Thanks
Golly! I’d been completely unaware of this. Wicked!
This brings back some memories. At the time, I was vaguely aware of Neil Young through his intermittent collaborations with Crosby, Stills & Nash, but “Sample and Hold” and “Wonderin’” (from Everybody’s Rockin’, Neil’s rockabilly follow up to Trans – and the other basis for Geffen’s lawsuit) were my rather strange introduction to his work as a solo artist. In retrospect, it makes a lot more sense – one of the things I most admire about Neil Young is that he was doing whatever the hell he wanted long before he’d earned that right. Thanks for the post!
On tour a couple of years ago we stayed with these kids in Oklahoma City who couldn’t have been older than 22 or 23. They were completely excited about “discovering” TRANS, Neil’s lost techno album, and insisted on playing it for us in its entirety. Even though I already owned a well-worn copy, I let them think we were being turned on for the first time.
Always good to see a new generation of music fans discover Mr. Young’s eccentric genius.
I’m glad the error (not you but people in general) of saying the vocoder was the Moog 16-Channel MBVO 327A Vocoder has been corrected. It was/is the Sennheiser Vocoder VSM201! I found this out in Dave Tompkins’ history of the vocoder book “How to Wreck a Nice Beach”.
The Cylon Centurions were the EMS Vocoder 2000 (this is also mentioned in the same book…but I already knew this).
Several years ago, when I was on MySpace, I found a video of Neil Young, presumably on his Trans tour, performing the techno version of Mr. Soul in his suit & dark glasses. It was awesome. It looked like it might have been somewhere in the PAC-RIM. Apparently, Neil or his record company had it removed. I suspect it may have been included in his Anthology.
If anyone has a bootleg or website that still has it, I’d love to see it again.
Rikki