The good folks at City Lights (if you live in State College and don't shop there you're courting some serious karmic bitchslappage) recently ordered cheap copies of Neil Young's Zuma and After The Gold Rush so I snapped them up. Despite being a Neil freak since middle school (I first learned guitar chords from his On The Beach-Rust Never Sleeps song book), I've intentionally put off purchasing all of his "classic" albums. The idea was to leave some great numbers fresh and unheard for the 30-year-old and beyond versions of me. Now the only canonical work I've yet to own is, ironically, Harvest. Hopefully that massive archival box set they've been promising for over a decade will come out during my lifetime (if there's a Young-sung version of "Flying On The Ground Is Wrong" on there I will pay any price they demand - thanks for the Rainy Day version, Evan).

I haven't put on After The Gold Rush, but Zuma has already done a few rotations in my CD changer. It's a perfect album for where my head's at these days. No reason to go into detail, but Robert Christgau's passing reference to "relative neatness and control" in his review covers a good part of it. Out of the storm but no land in sight yet. Post-Snodgress, pre-Pegi.