The International Harvesters may not hold the same exalted status in the Neil Young story as Crazy Horse or the Stray Gators, but they were an integral part of a less celebrated stretch of his career during the mid-80's. Among all of Young's 80's genre exercises, the Harvesters country detour was the most musically in tune with his turn-of-the-70's work, but Young shot that music through with a persona every bit as calculated as the skinny-tied humanoid heard on 'Trans', or the ersatz Elvis seen on the cover of 'Everybody's Rockin''. For the Harvesters tour of 1984/85, Young wasn't so much playing country music as playing the role of a country-music singer, taking the stage in a Harley-Davidson ballcap, spouting over-the-top pro-America rhetoric in the press, and booking the band to play state fairs, rodeos, and variety TV shows instead of the usual big-market concert halls. Only Young knows how genuine his new image really was, but the music captured a very real desire to leave behind Geffen and the increasingly corporatized rock world, by taking refuge in the heartland, and if Young's label and old fans were frustrated by his Music City makeover, the middle American audience ate it up. Featuring long-time Young collaborators Ben Keith, Spooner Oldham, and Tim Drummond, and helped by the frenzied fiddling of Rufus Thibodeaux, the Harvesters transformed 'Harvest' warhorse 'Are You Ready For The Country' from FM-radio road-trip anthem into an advertising jingle for their own Nashville-bound sound, and a standout of their concerts was a show-stopping charge through 'Southern Pacific', that upgrades the 'Re-ac-tor' version's sluggish boogie into a banjo-powered barn-burner. Added to that were a number of new songs, heard here for the first time, such as 'Soul Of A Woman', 'Nothing Is Perfect', and the raging 'Grey Riders', which anticipates his 1989 return-to-form album 'Freedom'.
Some of their concerts were recorded, with a live album titled 'A Treasure' being officially released, and some of the songs from it were supposed to be issued in 1985 as an EP in support of Farm Aid, with 'Grey Riders', 'Nothing Is Perfect' and 'Southern Pacific' being joined by 'Depression Blues' and 'Interstate', but it was blocked by Geffen Records who, at the time, were still involved in litigation with Young due to charges of him delivering "unrepresentative" product. After the tour finished in 1985, Young went back into the studio and recorded his country album, 'Old Ways', with some, but not all, of the musicians from the International Harvesters, and so we never got to hear a studio album featuring this backing band. To put that right I've taken the new songs that were heard on that tour, along with their interpretations of a couple of Young classics, and made them sound like studio recordings. Alongside those, I've added two songs that were only ever played once in 1982 on the 'Trans' tour, and which could well have been resurrected for an International Harvesters studio album a couple of years later. I've removed some annoying electronic percussion from 'Love Hotel' to make it fit in with the other tracks, and then added an out-take from a proposed second country album which was recorded with the International Harvesters, plus a solo rendition of 'Razor Love' from 1984, before it was radically reworked for 2000's 'Silver And Gold' album. This gives us a "studio" album that could have been recorded and released by Young and the band some time in 1984, comprising new songs and radical reworkings of some old classics, and preparing his fans for the full-on country album that was 'Old Ways'.
Track listing
01 Soul Of A Woman
02 It Might Have Been
03 Berlin
04 Beautiful Bluebird
05 Love Hotel
06 Grey Riders
07 Nothing Is Perfect
08 Are You Ready For The Country
09 Razor Love
10 Southern Pacific
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