Neil Young and Crazy Horse Kick Up a Fuss on F###in’ Up

These days, we can always count on Neil Young and Taylor Swift being slam-dunk, perennial guarantees for “new” music every year. The two songwriters have been on a similar trajectory recently, emptying their respective vaults and, somehow, keeping up with their career-long, breakneck pace of productivity without missing a step. Last year, Young gifted us Chrome Dreams—the greatest folk rock album that never was—and Swift re-recorded her smashing critical gemstone, 1989. So, it would only be right for the two generational musicians to align once again and, in the same month, both release albums for their die-hard fanbases. Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department (and Anthology) arrived and broke countless records, found polarizing takeaways from critics and has, to no one’s surprise, further solidified her as the biggest American musician working right now (and it’s not really even that close of a race). Young’s own new release, F###in’ Up, isn’t exactly a “new” record but a live recording of the songs from Ragged Glory. He and Crazy Horse (billed on the album’s cover as “Neil & The Horse”) have given almost all of the tracks new titles (except for the cover of Sugarcane Harris’s “Farmer John”) and, in proper Neil Young fashion, make good use of the 64-minute runtime with nine sprawling, brutal songs of unabashed, rollicking, hard-nosed musicianship.

Ragged Glory, upon its release way back in 1990, was a bit of a comeback album for Crazy Horse. While now, in 2024, it feels like they’ve been firmly planted behind Young’s every step—perhaps on account of the five albums they’ve made together in five years (Colorado, Barn, Toast, World Record and All Roads Lead Home)—Ragged Glory was just the sixth record they made together, and it completely resurrected their work together. Of course, they made Life together in 1987, but I actively refuse to acknowledge it more than I have to. In his solo career, Young had achieved a bit of a second life in 1989 with Freedom, due to the successful single “Rockin’ in the Free World.” But I’d argue that, while the track is bulletproof and quintessential Neil, Freedom was not the taste-making creative resurgence that Ragged Glory was. The latter is considered a landmark grunge album, another take I am not fully on-board with (from a stylistic place, not one of quality). What can be said, though, is that Ragged Glory was the album that solidified Crazy Horse—for many—as the greatest backing band in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

So, if you’re like me, the announcement of F###in’ Up arrived with the promise of a record destined to be good on the merits of its source material alone. Young and Crazy Horse have such wicked chemistry to begin with; there’s no shot they would, to put it aptly, fuck up their own highlights, right? Right. F###in’ Up is good—great, even. Is it a masterpiece? No, but few live albums can be touted as such. What it is is 64 minutes of blistering, heart-racing rock ‘n’ roll that, somehow, digs its claws deeper into the heaviness of Ragged Glory’s original piercing, head-splitting distortion. The recording itself sounds good enough, too, that a casual listener might mistake it for a studio job, anyways—another notch in the belt of Young’s archival team, who simply cannot miss when it comes to preserving tape, whether it was recorded in 1973 or 2023.

And F###kin’ Up came to be when Young, Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot, Nils Lofgren and Micah Nelson (yes, son of Willie and member of Promise of the Real) played a private birthday party for Canada Goose CEO Dani Reiss at the Rivoli in Toronto last November—and the Rivoli is something of a legendary place, once being home to many early Cowboy Junkies shows and the Kids in the Hall’s early troupe performances (before Lorne Michaels found them and hired members Bruce McCulloh and Mark McKinney to come write for him at Saturday Night Live shortly after). Hell, it’s even said that Mike Myers based his SNL character Dieter off of a Rivoli waiter. While Neil Young playing a private event for someone whose net worth stands at $1.2 billion feels incredibly off-brand for Canada’s favorite musical son, the absence of banter (and most of the crowd noise) removes any kind of pretense or strings from the reality of the night. What we hear is plain and simple: It’s Neil Young and Crazy Horse going absolutely mad for an hour, as the opening act for a band that may have heard of—the Arkells.

All of the songs from Ragged Glory were performed, except for “Mother Earth (National Anthem),” and done so in such a loose and chaotic manner that I wouldn’t blame you for mistaking these seventy-year-olds for still being in their thirties. Perhaps that is the unrelenting magic of Crazy Horse—that their work still feels just as fresh and engaging this many years into the whole shebang. Opening with “City Life (Country Home),” the guys rip into the “I’m thankful for my country home, it gives me peace of mind” chorus together before shredding across multiple guitar solos that echo the exact kind of rugged unpredictability that Crazy Horse helped foster on Everybody Knows This is Nowhere more than 50 years ago. Original Crazy Horse guitarist Poncho Sampedro is greatly missed here, but Lofgren fills in the gaps just like he has off and on since After the Gold Rush. Young letting Lofgren deliver on his own nuances, too, opens up the Ragged Glory songs in ways that contrast slightly with Sampedro’s performances. The changes are small, of course, but “City Life” offers the immediate sense that these nine tracks are so open-ended that any picker can jump in and make the patterns glow as if they’ve been orchestrating them from the jump.

Likewise, “Feels Like a Railroad (River of Pride)” (titled “White Line” on Ragged Glory) sounds extra special this time around, thanks to Nelson’s well-placed piano contributions. It’s the kind of addition that helps F###in’ Up avoid just being a frenetic guitar mirage, and you can hear it again on “Walkin’ in My Place (Road of Tears)” later on the setlist. “Walkin’ in My Place” has a certain meanness to it, too, and the lack of surroundings really allow the unbridled noise of Crazy Horse shine—especially during the “There’s a mansion on the hill / Psychedelic music fills the air / Peace and love live there still / In that mansion on the hill” chorus that still sounds as good now as it did three decades ago.

I have never considered Ragged Glory to be a landmark grunge album. I do think Neil Young’s implementation of distortion 15 years before the Pacific Northwest really emboldened it is a designation that makes sense, though. Him being the “Godfather of Grunge” is a fine thing to say. But Ragged Glory is as dangerous and unfiltered and raucous as “Like a Hurricane” was in the mid-1970s, or as melodically sludged-up as “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” was in 1979. However, F###in’ Up has done its absolute damnedest to make me eat my words—as Young completely disregards any telegraph of predictability. This album—and these nine performances—is an absolute freight train of no fucks given. Sure, Young’s voice sounds worn-out, but it adds a certain coat of rust to an already oxidized sound. This isn’t Zuma or Rust Never Sleeps, though. There aren’t any acoustic fills on an otherwise heavy album. No, this is pure noise that, in the title track (now titled “Heart of Steel”), erupts into a solo full of missed notes and skyscraping, nosebleed-inducing, razor blade chords.

The centerpiece of F###in’ Up is “Broken Circle (Over and Over),” the song that was the best part of Ragged Glory and is, again, the best part of this album. It’s hard to downplay any element of the nine-minute barn-burner, but what must be said is that, even when the world has gone to shit, we are still lucky enough to remember the utter brilliance of that Neil Young guitar tone. The lines are just as second-fiddle now as they were in 1990, as the real vibrancy lies in the pissing match Crazy Horse is having with each other. Who’s going to go that extra mile and plug just enough ferocity into their instrument to make the walls rattle? Beginning with a guitar solo that coils, turns and colors just as “Powderfinger” did in 1979, “Broken Circle” is Young and Lofgren sharing licks back and forth and neither missing a beat. That “Remember the nights of love and that moment on the beach?” couplet hits a little harder this time, especially with the On the Beach 50th anniversary hitting this summer, and Molina, Talbot, Lofgren and Nelson’s backing vocals chime in perfectly here.

Too, “Valley of Hearts (Love to Burn)” eclipses nine minutes—but it doesn’t explode. Instead, there’s a building upwards to the inevitable full-band climax of cascading six-strings, pounding snares and a bassline from Talbot that throbs mightily beneath the drenched pastoral of pedal-board tone progenies. Rather than try and strip down their work and package the songs on F###in’ Up into three- or four-minute packages and open the floodgates with more material, Young and Crazy Horse seem much more interested in stretching out their already-stretched out music. Take the closing track “A Chance on Love (Love and Only Love),” which gets upgraded from 10 minutes to 15 and sees the five-piece deliver a masterclass on jamming not as a mood stabilizer, but as a top-to-bottom art form.

It’s moments like these that exist only through talent. The magic here exists because Young, Molina, Talbot and Lofgren—despite their age and tenure in this business—possess an on-the-prowl, menacing rock ‘n’ roll bravado they had in 1969, when they were barely in their twenties. It’s quintessential bar band hunger, one that allows a band like Crazy Horse to burn down the house at a private party. They’ll never go anything but 100%, and we should all be grateful for that. Because, at the end of the day, F###in’ Up is Neil Young saying “What if we remade Ragged Glory but didn’t really worry about the verses and choruses?” And the answer that his band comes up with is a genius one—a “return to form,” if you will, that they teased greatly on “Chevrolet” just a few years ago that involves as much guitar as possible and little else to say. These guys cut their teeth on wailing and, 50 years later, keep true to their own singular genesis. It’s like Young sings during “A Chance on Love”: “Let me feel the magic in my heart, love and only love will endure.” Well, that and Crazy Horse, too.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.