American Stars 'n Bars

Background

In the summer of 1976, Young rekindled his partnership with Stephen Stills, resulting in a tour that ended abruptly and an album. He then embarked on his second tour of the year with Crazy Horse, but spent the first half of 1977 off the road. His previous album had been issued in November 1975; after recording enough tracks to fill up one side of an album at sessions in April, he assembled additional tracks from earlier recording dates to make up the balance of the new album.

Content

"Homegrown" and "Star of Bethlehem" had initially been slated for his unreleased LP Homegrown. Both of those songs, along with "Like a Hurricane," "Hold Back the Tears" and "Will to Love," had also been slated for yet another unreleased Young album project, Chrome Dreams. Seven of the nine tracks feature his regular backing band Crazy Horse, and another features country music star Emmylou Harris in a vocal duet with Young. Songs from the April 1977 sessions are all in a country-styled vein.

The album cover was designed by actor Dean Stockwell, who had also written the screenplay that inspired After the Gold Rush. It features Connie Moskos, girlfriend of producer David Briggs, drooping with a bottle of Canadian whisky in her hand and an intoxicated Young with his face pressed against the glass floor.

Reception

Initially receiving favorable reviews, the album was described as a "sampler...of Young's various styles", even a "hodgepodge." Paul Nelson, reviewing the album for Rolling Stone commented on the mixed selection of songs and styles, and praising the "gale-force guitar playing" on "Like a Hurricane":

The album can almost be taken as a sampler, but not a summation, of Young's various styles from After the Gold Rush and Harvest (much of the country rock) through On the Beach (the incredible "Will to Love") to Zuma ("Like a Hurricane" is a worthy successor to "Cortez the Killer" as a guitar showcase) with a lot of overlap within the songs.

According to William Ruhlmann, in a review for Allmusic,

Neil Young made a point of listing the recording dates of the songs on American Stars 'n Bars; the dates even appeared on the LP labels. They revealed that the songs had been cut at four different sessions dating back to 1974. But even without such documentation, it would have been easy to tell that the album was a stylistic hodgepodge, its first side consisting of country-tinged material featuring steel guitar and fiddle, plus backup vocals from Linda Ronstadt and then-unknown Nicolette Larson, while the four songs on the second side varied from acoustic solo numbers like "Will to Love" to raging rockers such as "Like a Hurricane." "Will to Love" is a particularly spooky and ambitious piece, extending the romantic metaphor of a salmon swimming upstream across seven minutes. The album's centerpiece however, is "Like a Hurricane," one of Young's classic hard rock songs and guitar workouts, and a perpetual concert favorite.

It was finally released for compact disc using the HDCD-encoding process on August 19, 2003, as part of the Neil Young Digital Masterpiece Series along with On the Beach, Hawks & Doves, and Re-ac-tor.

Track listing

All songs written by Neil Young, except where noted.

Personnel