Neil Young – Trans

My introduction to Neil Young was 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. I was a late bloomer to rock and pop and became “experienced” in the fall of 1977 when I entered college. By the time Trans came out in early 1983 I was a serious musichead.

Most of Neil’s fans were baffled by Trans given its electronica stylings. His fans were used to major stylistic shifts in Neil’s career, but going “Kraftwerk” was absolutely baffling to most of his fans. It was greeted with similar negativity as Bob Dylan’s Christian period. I was too Neil Young ignorant to be scandalized by Trans. I liked it from the get-go. It was more fun than Neil’s previous records: Re·ac·tor (1981) and Hawks & Doves (1980) – although with four additional decades of experience with Neil, both of those albums sound better than I remember.

Despite its reputation as an electronica album, it is really not. 3 of 9 songs are typical of Neil (“Like An Inca” is a classic). Even the songs dominated by synths and vocoder would not be mistaken as Kraftwerk songs – Neil’s musical personality shines through even though this is a major stylistic left turn for him. I see it as more of a brilliant experiment. For example, Neil does an imaginative cover of his Buffalo Springfield song “Mr. Soul” that is equal part electronica and Crazy Horse proto-grunge. The album also has my most quoted Neil lyric – due to the sheer silliness of it – “I need a unit to sample and hold.”

The album has a fascinating context. Per Wikipedia:

From late 1980 to mid-1982, Young spent much of his waking hours carrying out a therapy program for his young son, Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak. Neil disclosed to almost no one at the time that he was doing so, or that the repetitive nature of the songs on both the previous album, Re·ac·tor, and this one related to the exercises he was performing with Ben. Work on Trans began in late 1981 as a continuation of Re·ac·tor, with the usual Crazy Horse lineup. But then Young started playing with two new machines he had acquired, a Synclavier and a vocoder. Crazy Horse guitarist Poncho Sampedro recalled, “Next thing we knew, Neil stripped all our music off, overdubbed all this stuff, the vocoder, weird sequencing, and put the synth shit on it.”

I saw the tour that supported Trans, which was billed as a solo show. Neil played solo both acoustic and electric. He played a cross-section of his catalog and some of Trans. The real surprise was the encore – an unannounced appearance by the Shocking Pinks – a novelty rockabilly band complete with gaudy outfits. It was one of the most memorable concerts I have witnessed. The Shocking Pinks gimmick was captured on Everybody’s Rockin’ (also released in 1983).

Trans and Everybody’s Rockin’ resulted in Young’s new label (Geffen) suing him for not being commercial and being “musically uncharacteristic of [his] previous recordings.” The lawsuit backfired and David Geffen personally apologized to Young for the lawsuit and for interference with his work.

Overall I loved the album and it endeared me to Young. It is a gem if you open your mind to the experiment.

Neil Young is not on Spotify due to his outrage over the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, which Neil felt was responsible for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccination. Young’s recordings, including Trans, are available on other streaming platforms.