I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NEIL YOUNG AND CRAZY HORSE-Greendale (2003).

This is a lengthy song story (rock opera?) from Neil Young.  It’s a pretty meandering story, musically, although there’s a lot of electric guitars involved, and Crazy Horse keeps the pacing pretty brisk.

The songs are all pretty long (from about 5 to 12 minutes).  And they are all employed for telling the narrative of the town of Greendale and its first family: the Greens.  The town of Greendale was named after a patriarch of the Green family.  The story focuses on his great-granddaughter ( I believe) whose name is Sun.

Her parents own the Double E ranch, where her mom sings and her father paints.  The story is set during Bush’s war in Iraq.  And as more revelations come out, Sun has more and more reason to fight.  She ultimately winds up fighting PowerCo, chaining herself to their giant eagle statue, wielding only a megaphone and the truth.

Later, she plans to travel to Alaska to protect the environment.

But there’s also ancillary characters.  Sun’s cousin Jed is trying to do anything he can to avoid joining the army.  But when his drug running comes to the attention of the cops he acts impulsively against someone he actually knows and is punished for his crimes.  We also meet Sun’s grandfather, a tough old man who speaks his mind just a bit more often than he speaks with his guns.

And there’s also Earth Brown, the boy that convinces her to go to Alaska with him.

Musically, the songs fall into a similar vein: long, loping, kinda sloppy jams, acoustic guitar over the top of Crazy Horse, and of course Neil’s voice.  There’s nothing revolutionary about the music.  It’s just a solid collection of tunes.  If you don’t like songs that last 12 minutes, this may not be your cup of tea.  But I find that if I engage with the story I really enjoy the disc.  And yes, there’s a few catchy choruses too.

[READ: May 11, 2010] Neil Young’s Greendale

Adaptations from one media to another are quite common these days.  So, to see a comic book made from a record (and a film) isn’t that surprising.  What is surprising is how this story comes to life on the page.  I haven’t seen the film of this record, so I don’t know how it compares, but this graphic novel really fleshes out the story from the CD.

I was delighted to get this as a prepub, as I didn’t even know it was coming out.  This preview copy of the comic is one of the first advance copies I’ve received that is not anywhere near the final version.  The final product will be in color, while my version has about ten pages in (beautiful) color and the rest left uncolored.  I didn’t count the pages, but I suspect that a fairly large amount of the final product was left out as well.  And that’s fine.

The back of the book asks that the product should not be reviewed without comparison to the final.  Well, I can’t do that, but I’m not going to go into too much depth here.   I can safely say that this is an awesome project.  The story in the CD was a little vague (the liner notes help fill in the gaps), but the comic book really expands the story in wonderful ways.  It really paints a larger picture of the folks that Neil created.  Again, I don’t know if the film fleshed out the story like the comic does.

The basic outline is that Sun Green has been having crazy dreams about her ancestors (who have Native American blood).  She is also watching information about the war 24-7.  In fact, just about everything that’s going on in the news is pervading her brain.  And she needs a way out.

She meets a group of activists who are heading toward Alaska.  After a couple of crazy days (Jed in jail, the media harassing her grandfather), she decides to join them.  That’s where the prepub ends, and I’m fairly certain there’s a lot more in store.

The subplots that are covered in the CD are also here: Jed and his altercation with the police; Sun’s grandfather’s Alzheimer’s; even her father’s painting.  But it also adds a number of plots that I don’t recognize from the CD : Sun’s twin, all of the information about her ancestors, and the plot about Alaska (and Earth Brown) gets a lot more details filled in.

I’m looking forward to the final edition.  It’s going to be hardcover (therefore pricey), but the teaser color pages were really gorgeous.  I think it will be well worth it, whether you know the CD (or the film) or not.