Neil Young - After Berlin - Non-Album Tracks (1982)

A few weeks ago, I posted the album I call "Winter Winds," which compiles what I feel are the best songs Neil Young did in 1980 and 1981. I said then that would be the first of a reconfiguration of his musical works from 1980 to 1988. He was in the musical wilderness for those years, and it's hard to deny that his albums were spotty. So, for this series of albums, I'm making albums out of everything I can get my hands on, both songs on his officially released albums and non-album songs.

The one album Young officially released in 1982 was "Trans." Boy, was that a controversial album! For about half of the songs on it, he used a vocoder, which is a device that makes his voice sound robotic. The songs he did that for had a fitting computerized and "futuristic" sound that was totally unlike anything he'd done before.

Personally, I'm not a fan of his vocoder style. That said, I think it works well on two songs that I've included here, "Sample and Hold" and "Transformer Man." It helps that they're solid songs that probably would sound good with a variety of arrangements. (On a later Neil Young album, I'll post versions of them he did without the vocoder.) There's another songs with the vocoder effect, "Computer Age," that I considered including. Instead, I found one instance in the late 1980s when he played it without the vocoder, and I'll put that on a later album in this series.

By the way, to better appreciate the vocoder songs, it helps to understand what was happening to Young at the time. As I've mentioned previously, he had a son, Ben, born with cerebral palsy in the late 1970s, and taking care of this special needs child took up the vast majority of his time. Ben couldn't talk, but communicated simple things through pressing a button. The vocoder songs, and other songs he wrote around this time, speak to the communication difficulty Neil was feeling. For instance, Ben is the subject of "Transformer Man."

Young later said, "At that time, [Ben] was simply trying to find a way to talk, to communicate with other people. That's what Trans is all about. And that's why, on that record, you know I'm saying something but you can't understand what it is. Well, that's exactly the same feeling I was getting from my son." So the way the vocoder makes the song's lyrics nearly unintelligible was deliberate.

Also at this time, the music world was changing. Young's singer-songwriter folky style had gone out of fashion, and new wave music with synthesizers and drum machines were all the rage. Young was particularly influenced by the new wave band Devo, and worked with them a bit. So "Trans" was also his attempt to experiment with these current trends.

Anyway, "Trans" is known for the vocoder songs, but that actually only made up half of the album. The other half was more or less typical Neil. That half was dominated by one song, "Like an Inca." I like the song, but I felt it went on too long. I've edited it some, mostly by removing a repeat of the first verse plus chorus. That cut the song to seven minutes, when it had been almost ten minutes long. By the way, the ten-minute long version is for the CD release. The vinyl version is eight minutes long, so that edit isn't much different from mine.

Frankly, I suspect the song was so long because he was padding the album some. He was so busy taking care of Ben that he didn't have much time to work on music. He's said that at times in the early 1980s, simply taking care of Ben took 15 to 18 hours a day. (Apparently that eased up a lot by the end of 1982, allowing Young to go on tour.)

Yet, strangely, even though "Trans" feels like a padded album, with some obviously weak songs on it, it turns out Young had some better songs that he left unreleased. In mid-1982, he presented his record company with a finished album called "Island in the Sun," which didn't have any of the vocoder songs on it. The record company considered it too weak and rejected it. So he gave them "Trans" instead by the end of the year. I'll bet the company rued the day they rejected it, and the weirdness of "Trans" may also partly be a middle finger to them.

We don't have some of the songs intended for "Island in the Sun," and I don't think it's even known which songs exactly were meant for it. But a couple of the studio tracks have somehow leaked onto bootlegs - "Rainin' in Paradise" and "If You Got Love." I've included three more songs that were played live in concert for the first time in 1982, and may or may not have been meant for that album: "Soul of a Woman," "Love Hotel," and "After Berlin." "After Berlin" was only played once in concert, in Berlin, but it was recorded for a concert video called "Neil Young in Berlin," so at least it's been released in that format. He returned to "Soul of a Woman" later, but the other unreleased songs were forgotten by him.

Clearly, 1982 was not a good time for Neil Young, musically. He had personal struggles relating to his son and he was struggling to make sense of changing musical trends. "Trans" is one of his least liked albums. But had he put out an album like this one, which is only four songs from "Trans" plus five songs that went unreleased at the time, the album would have had a much better reception. This is a theme that I'll return to a lot for this series of 1980s albums: he actually wrote a lot of good songs in that time period, but what actually got on his albums didn't always show that.

By the way, there's another unreleased song from this time that has appeared on bootleg, called "Johnny." But the recording of it isn't that good, and I don't think it's much of a song, so I haven't included it.

01 Little Thing Called Love (Neil Young)
02 Sample and Hold (Neil Young)
03 Transformer Man (Neil Young)
04 Like an Inca [Edit] (Neil Young)
05 Rainin' in Paradise (Neil Young)
06 Soul of a Woman (Neil Young)
07 Love Hotel (Neil Young)
08 If You Got Love (Neil Young)
09 After Berlin (Neil Young)

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It's hard to find a good photo of Neil Young in 1982. He cut his hair short for maybe the only time in his adult life, and wore a tie in concert. In some photos, he looks like a nerdy office worker! But when he played the vocoder songs, he put on weird glasses meant to make him look alien. I tried to avoid both those looks by choosing a photo of him wailing on his guitar. This photo was taken in Wembley Arena in London in September 1982.