Sunday Music – Pocahontas

Posted on Sun 06/08/2014 by TonyfromOz

Today’s music video is Pocahontas from Canadian singer songwriter Neil Young.

This video was posted to You Tube by cyrille brand

Today’s featured song is taken from Neil Young’s eleventh studio album, Rust Never Sleeps, and it was released in mid 1979. In effect, the title is done in the form of a comment about trying to remain relevant in a music world where artists and bands come and go, and the difficulty of changing styles to suit the current direction music was always moving in. Neil always changed, and his music was seemingly always moving in different directions with the release of virtually every album. He wanted to avoid becoming complacent with his music, releasing music that he was noted for, and even though he had been doing this for so long now, most people thought of Neil Young as that guy who sang Heart Of Gold, probably his greatest hit, and his only Number One Single, and that was probably due to the fact that was virtually his only song that received regular airplay on radio. So, even though his musical directions had changed with each album, there was a perception that he was basically just a Country Folk style of singer, something so far from the truth as to be absurd in fact.

With this new album, he moved towards the general direction that music was moving in, towards Punk Music, and even Grunge Music.

This album was done mainly from Live recordings of the songs and they were overdubbed in the studio, with some backing added, and the crowd noise removed. Side One of the album was acoustic material, and on the second side, Neil played heavy and hard rock with his band Crazy Horse.

The main song on the album was Hey Hey My My (Into The Black), which was the last track on the album, done in an electric rock format while the bookend song, the reverse My My Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue), which was the acoustic song opening the album on Side One. It was the song released as a Single and was a minor hit. The song contained one line which later became almost infamous, “it’s better to burn out than to fade away,” when it was used by Nirvana singer Curt Cobain in his suicide note.

Also of note from this album is the song Powderfinger, the rock song opening side two. This song was the inspiration for an Australian band, who used the name Powderfinger, and who later became one of the biggest bands in Australia for a number of years.

The album was critically acclaimed as one of his best albums, and rated as the second best album of 1979, while another rated it as the ninth best album of the 70’s, and the album came in at Number 350 in Rolling Stone magazines list of the 500 Greatest Albums, one of nine albums from Neil Young on that list.

The song I have selected as today’s music video is the beautiful song, Pocahontas, one of the songs on the acoustic side of the album. It starts out describing a massacre of an Indian tribe by European settlers, and moves to modern times at the end of the song where the narrator wistfully thinks of an imaginary conversation with himself as the narrator, Pocahontas, and the noted Indian Rights campaigner Marlon Brando.

This clip of the song is of Neil performing it for an Unplugged MTV special, recorded in 1993.

It’s not often I include lyrics for a song, but these are the last two verses. Just beautiful.

I wish a was a trapper
I would give thousand pelts
To sleep with Pocahontas
And find out how she felt
In the mornin’
on the fields of green
In the homeland
we’ve never seen.

And maybe Marlon Brando
Will be there by the fire
We’ll sit and talk of Hollywood
And the good things there for hire
And the Astrodome
and the first tepee
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
Pocahontas.