Neil Young’s Chrome Dreams: The Greatest Folk Rock Album That Never Was
Released nearly 50 years after being shelved, the beloved singer/songwriter’s should’ve-been eighth album is a piercing, emotional and scattered portrait of a genius grappling with a transitional period in his career
For decades, an acetate copy of Neil Young’s lost 1977 album—Chrome Dreams—was heavily circulated in fan circles, but it never went any further than that. Initially, the project was meant to be a proper follow-up to his 1975 Crazy Horse record Zuma. He had concluded his Ditch Trilogy that same year with Tonight’s the Night (though that album had been made and shelved two years prior) and was firmly squared away as North America’s best living storyteller. Dylan had put out Blood on the Tracks and Desire in back-to-back years around the same time, but the bite that made the Greenwich Village folk practitioner a legend was starting to peter out, as many all-time greats tend to experience at some point or another. It was Young, who’d put out Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Harvest, On the Beach, Tonight’s the Night and Zuma all in a six-year period, that was still on fresh legs and at the pinnacle of his game. In retrospect, he might be responsible for one of the single greatest half-decade runs in all of rock ‘n’ roll history.
1977 was meant to be a banner year for Young. He’d just released Long May You Run with former CSNY bandmate Stephen Stills the previous fall, but he’d also compiled numerous songs between 1974 and 1976 and had nowhere to put them under his own name. From what we know now, because of Young’s vault of bootlegs and “lost” projects, he also recorded Homegrown and Hitchhiker around that time, too—but both albums went unreleased for decades. Chrome Dreams, despite being banished to a similar fate, feels like the most fully-formed of the trio—as if it was a true career benchmark that never became fully realized. The fact that, in 2007, Young released a record titled Chrome Dreams II damn near solidifies that truth.
Recorded everywhere from Indigo Ranch Studio in Malibu, California to Quadrafonic Sound Studios in Nashville, Tennessee to Hammersmith Apollo in London, Chrome Dreams is not just a living, breathing full moon; it’s a document of a prolific, all-time era in Young’s career that never truly was. In 1977, he released the middle-of-the-road American Stars ‘n Bars—which was heavily shouldered by “Like a Hurricane”—and then, in 1978, he put out his country-focused Comes a Time—which was headlined by “Four Strong Winds,” a song Young didn’t even write.
It’s perplexing, as a Neil Young evangelist, to make full sense of this recent run of unvaulted “lost” album releases. We got Hitchhiker in 2017 and then Homegrown in 2020, two projects that feature much of the same content as Chrome Dreams and have also been deemed as “lost records.” Young rarely does interviews these days, so it’s hard to say whether he had this batch of songs near completion and just couldn’t find a full-bodied, complete space for all of them or not. What we do know, however, is that Chrome Dreams is a great assemblage of 12 of the best tracks Young ever wrote. How likely it was to be a bonafide studio album 46 years ago is beside the point because, man, what a triumph it is—even in 2023.
Chrome Dreams begins in a familiar place, with the solo ballad “Pocahontas.” The song is, most notably, featured on Rust Never Sleeps—albeit with more overdubs to match the bigger, prettier production glaze of 1979 pseudo-live record. However, the version we get this time around is the track in its most original form. Initially made for Hitchhiker, “Pocahontas” was inspired by Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge,” which characterized Matoaka, and Marlon Brando’s boycott of the 1973 Academy Awards—where Sacheen Littlefeather spoke on his behalf, alerting the world that Brando was protesting the treatment of Native Americans in Hollywood.
Young tackles the cyclical nature of violence against Indigenous People, singing especially about women being killed in tepees by white men who, later, massacre roaming buffalo. “In the mornin,’ on the fields of green, in the homeland we’ve never seen,” Young sings. “And maybe Marlon Brando will be there by the fire. We’ll sit and talk of Hollywood and the good things there for hire. And the Astrodome and the first tepee. Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me.” Whether or not you believe that Young is perpetuating the American white-washing of Matoaka’s identity (she has long been reduced to “Pocahontas” in historical context) or that he is cheekily throwing a jab at Brando’s political statement, what is undeniable is that “Pocahontas” is one of the greatest stories he’s ever sung.
There are five tracks on Chrome Dreams that were later reconfigured for American Stars ‘n Bars—all of which are, to no one’s surprise, the best cuts from the uneven 1977 album that Young did end up releasing. “Will to Love” features Young performing all of the instruments himself, including guitars, an organ, vibraphone and drums. It’s a rawer song that evokes a demo quality, though he layers haunting, complex harmonies around his own mangled, gritty lead vocal—as he sings of an Icarus-like approach to love and grief and loss. “I can be like a fire in the night, always warm and giving off light,” Young sings. “But there comes a time when I shine too bright. Oh, I’m just a fire in the night.” “Will to Love” is a titanic story of determination amid self-doubt, displayed on Chrome Dreams in a vessel that juxtaposes the muted, subdued rendition put on American Stars ‘n Bars. Similarly, Young performs all of “Hold Back the Tears” by himself, and articulates how hope can lead to true love and survival: “Hello, my old friend, it’s good to see you smiling,” he sings. “You’ve been around so long, you must be strong.”
American Stars ‘n Bars is mostly beloved because of its centerpiece, “Like a Hurricane,” which appears here in its original glory. There’s not much to say about the track that hasn’t been said over and over and over again. It rules and it shreds as one of four Crazy Horse entries on Chrome Dreams, as Young, Poncho Sampedro, Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina take their chemistry and make solid gold out of it. The best part of “Like a Hurricane,” beyond its eight-minute massacre of a listener’s eardrums, is that the song begins midway through a guitar riff—it’s one of the ultimate fade-in intros ever. “Like a Hurricane” loosely mimics the melody of Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” but the comparisons are greatly overpowered by Young’s explosive, relentless lead guitar—which he barrel rolls into multiple face-melting solos.