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After The Gold Rush
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Don’t Let It Bring You Down Album: After The Gold Rush (1970) |
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After The Gold Rush was mostly recorded in my beloved Topanga. After a couple of years of living here, I can appreciate how this creative, idyllic Los Angeles enclave shaped Neil’s music.
Neil was going through a patch of writer’s block in early 1970 when he read a screenplay from his neighbor, the actor Dean Stockwell. Dean is most famous for the TV show Quantum Leap but earlier in his career, he was one of Hollywood’s ambassadors to 60s-era counterculture.
The still-unproduced, whereabouts-unknown screenplay for After The Gold Rush concerned a tidal wave that floods Topanga Canyon. As Dean described it, After The Gold Rush was “a Jungian self-discovery of the gnosis. It involved the Kabbalah, it involved a lot of arcane stuff.” (Hard to believe Hollywood didn’t pounce on this pitch.)
Dean Stockwell’s After The Gold Rush may have been lost to time, but his script was the creative spark Neil needed to create the After The Gold Rush LP. Those were some hazy days, and it’s unclear which specific tracks were written specifically for the film. Some of the tracks were recorded with Crazy Horse, Neil’s loud rock-n-roll collaborators, at a studio in Hollywood; the mellower songs (including those selected for this post) were recorded with local musicians who gathered in Neil’s makeshift studio.
After a couple of mildly successful solo albums, Neil reunited with his Buffalo Springfield bandmate Stephen Stills and joined his new vocal group, Crosby, Stills and Nash. Now known as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, they went on tour (including an appearance at the Woodstock Festival) and released the hugely successful LP, Déjà Vu. It was in the aftermath of CSNY’s explosion that Neil retreated to his Topanga basement to record After The Gold Rush.
