Credit: Far Out / Alamy
After the Gold Rush, as a title in itself, was a highly beguiling idea about being entranced by an elixir and being confused by the memory it left behind. Would you agree, Neil Young?
It’s frankly impossible to say, as it’s an album that the famously elusive man has always failed to be swayed very much on, hence always giving it somewhat of a beguiling quality. The genesis of the record started out somewhere in the wild expanse of Peru, ended up back in the Topanga Canyon of California, and naturally involved a lot of pot along the way.
In this sense, part of the reason why the process for After the Gold Rush has remained so mysterious is because the memories of it are pretty hazy anyway, but it has always been Young’s prime skill to weave an air of unknowability into his own being, and so he was likely quite satisfied to keep up the ruse.
Of course, the story goes that film director Dennis Hopper was in the heart of Peru shooting The Last Movie, a follow-up to Easy Rider, when he encouraged his friend Dean Stockwell, who was with him on the journey, to write a screenplay. Stockwell immediately thought of apocalypse, then of the Topanga Canyon. What if he could combine the two?
It was certainly a unique idea, and one that quickly reached Young since he was living in said canyon, full of hippies, at that time. The film was to be titled After the Gold Rush, and so the musician set about creating an album of the very same name. One of those things became iconic and everlasting, the other never came to fruition – you know which one is which.
The whole point is that After the Gold Rush became so interesting because it was based on such a specific and niche concept. What if the life Young had built for himself was completely obliterated, taking the very people who stood for a mantra of peace and love with it in the most destructive way imaginable?
On one hand, it may have been too dark to truly get into the gnarly details of the visions that passed through his mind during the whirlwind three-week period in which he wrote the record. But on the other hand, it has left a legacy of an album where no one really knows, to this day, what the heart of some of the songs is actually about. For certain people, it makes them love it even more.
Even Nils Lofgren, the guitarist who played as a session musician throughout the album, remained unsure of certain tracks’ true meaning, such as its eponymous title song. “Neil never told me what the song was about,” he said. “I’d love to bend his ear about it. It’s like it’s all our own fantasies, as we hear the words.”
Indeed, all Young ever offered up in terms of an explanation was that “The song was written to go along with the story [of the film],” depicting the central character as he was meant to carry the Topanga Canyon’s Tree of Life towards the ocean. Other than that, the interpretation is open to anyone’s guessing.
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