Harvest Time

Harvest is, I believe still Neil Young's biggest selling album having been first released in early 1972. I got into Neil Young a few years later, with 1979's Rust Never Sleeps and while I then bought everything I generally prefer the rockier albums, particularly those with Crazy Horse, to the more country ones (Old Ways is an exception because it had Misfits on it) so Harvest has never made my best-of list.

Of course a not the vest best Neil Young album is still a pretty good thing, it does have Words on it after all, so I was obviously going to see a film made during the recording of the album, a mere fifty years after the event.

The film had a limited release so I went to a showing a Kingston Odeon and willingly paid £15 for.

The film was delightfully casual with nothing (overtly) staged for the camera and it was like being alongside the musicians as they rehearsed and relaxed.

And because these were proper recording sessions the quality of the music was excellent even if the video was commensurate with the handheld cameras of the time.

The music carried the film and there were long sessions with Alabama, Words (hooray! and A Man Needs a Maid, the later being recorded with LSO in, of all places, Barking Town Hall.

I especially enjoyed the many close-ups of the musicians playing and seeing they ease with which they did so as a group.

It was a nice bonus to see Crosby, Stills and Nash recording backing vocals and a bit of a shame that we did not also get to see James Taylor or Linda Ronstadt who were mentioned in the contemporary introduction to the film that Neil recorded. 

There were some lovely little snippets in the non-music sessions too, such as Neil confessing to being a "rich hippie", saying that he had never heard of Pink Floyd (this was just before Dark Side) and comparing the approach to the final Beatles and Buffalo Springfield albums.

As with the Sparks documentary, The Sparks Brothers (now on Netflix), there was so much more that I wanted to see, things like the composition process and the reasons for working with LSO, but there is a limit to what you can include in a film running to just over two hours and in choosing to focus on the music Harvest Time got the balance right.