Harvest Time is Upon Us

Tomorrow January 5^th may be the last chance for a while to get to see the Neil Young documentary Harvest Time, at 3pm at the Greenwich Picturehouse.

I went to see the film when it was first screened in London at the beginning of December, to coincide with a new archival release celebrating 50 since the album Harvest was released.

Harvest was Young’s fourth studio album and his first after a brief collaboration with the supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash. Songs such as ‘Heart of Gold’ and ‘Old Man’ helped establish Young as a mainstream solo artist.

One thing that should be noted about this film is that it isn’t a formal breakdown of the album and what makes it great, but rather a home movie style documentation of what it was like making it,  with peeks behind the curtain to see the heart into of it all.

A majority of the two-hour documentary is assembled out of footage shot during the album’s recording, with the only exception being the introduction featuring a present-day Young reminiscing about the experience.

The footage itself lives up to the style of Neil’s music: raw, gritty and generally unpolished. For me, this both helped and hindered the experience. The immediacy of the unpolished footage allows the viewer to feel as if they are actually in the room when the songs are being developed. However, the downside is that at several points in the film the image quality is so raw that it becomes distorted and at times cuts out completely.

Additionally, there are other moments where the audio distorts badly due to the lack of any proper recording equipment. One example is a section dedicated to the recording of ‘A Man Needs A Maid’, and ‘There’s A World’, both with the London Symphony Orchestra. The wall of sound produced by the LSO overpowers the microphone and so the scene is hard to hear.

These glitches disturb the viewing experience in the same way that listening to a song skipping would take a listener out of the musical experience.

A highlight of the film is watching Young and his then backing band, The Stray Gators, recording songs in a barn at the Broken Arrow Ranch in Woodside, California. These scenes show how tight-knit Young and ‘Gators’ were, despite them having only been together for a few months at that time.

These scenes include the songs ‘Alabama’, ‘Words (Between The Lines Of Hate)’, and ‘Are You Ready For The Country?’, and show how the ‘Gators’ were able to play in a similar style to Young’s previous backing band Crazy Horse, whilst also bringing their own distinctive country rock sound to the project.

Then the film switched to the the odd inclusion of a live rendition of ‘Old Man’. When this ends,  so does the documentary. For me this shift did not work. It appeared to come out of nowhere,  as if thrown in as an extra, and jarred with the rest of the film.

For fans of Young’s work, this film is an interesting dive into one of his most highly-regarded works. For people unfamiliar, it’s not the best way to indoctrinate yourself to the musical world of Neil Young. Whilst Harvest is both Neil’s best-selling album and one of his most accessible, the documentary itself does little to express why people should go and listen to it if they haven’t done so already.

Additionally, the price of admission was roughly £15, when the documentary is also available as part of the Harvest 50th Anniversary box set that costs roughly £50. So it would make more sense financially to buy the box-set rather than a ticket to see the documentary once.