from the LP Chrome Dreams, bootleg, 1976Gathering around a fire always awakens those old memories--- you know, the ones we don’t really have but remain there all the same, shreds of specks of quarks of experience which linger inside our DNA, recalling the fathomless number of times that we hominids have congregated around the flames, encounters which have left us all permanently imprinted by both the boundless importance and startling destructive force that lies within that ginger & indigo glow. We’ve all had nights around a campfire, cans of PBR and loosely rolled nature joints, faces red with the warmth of 30,000 years; shit, sometimes a whole hour can pass without words, and yet you feel closer to those individuals at that moment than during any heated debate or lively dishing. Sometimes if I get too drunk & high (why is there no common slang term in our slacker wastoid culture for this synergistic buzz?) my mind wanders a bit, and I imagine that, at some point in the future, civilizations may very well be reduced to huddling around fires again, not as a pleasurable adult field trip but out of necessity... that’s just when I’m mad bent though, and anyway, I’ve been socialized with films like Terminator and Red Dawn, and, perhaps most of all, Logan’s Run, which has left me soft on post-apocalyptic themes, rendering my mind prone to such stoned dalliances (most recently it was Children of Men, which is fucking amazing by the way). In his standard dualistic way, Neil Young lays out a metaphorical tale of love and distance, using the mighty salmon as our animal allegory (real original Neil); however, rather than merely usurping the salmon’s lust-laden marathon upstream, he harkens back to our own distant past as fish, “…my fins were aching from the strain, I'm swimming in my sleep, I know I can't go back again…I remember the ocean, from where I came…” What makes this a truly astonishing song, lyrically speaking, is the lines he begins & ends with: “It has often been my dream, to live with one who wasn’t there.” FUCK man, how does he do that?! Musically speaking, it’s the standard Neil Young modus operandi, with some acoustic guitar gently strumming those dreamy melancholic minor chords; this version is, in my humble opinion, far superior to the one which got released on American Stars ‘N Bars, having a lot less overdubbing after the fact, and it might just be my imagination, but it seems like the you can hear the campfire crackling even clearer on this version, taken from Young’s most infamous and loved bootleg.
