Harvest

Neil Young was booked to appear on The Johnny Cash Show in Nashville in early 1971. While in town, he ran into an audio engineer named Elliot Mazer at a party and ended up talking about music all night. Mazer invited him to his home studio, Quadrafonic Sound, the next day. On short notice Mazer assembled a trio of session musicians Young had never worked with, and James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, also in Nashville for the Cash show, came by for a couple of songs. Young later wrote that Harvest never would have happened if not for that accidental meeting.

The album was recorded in three separate locations across 1971: Mazer's studio in Nashville, Young's own barn at his California ranch where producer Jack Nitzsche set up a mobile recording unit, and a town hall in Barking, London, where Young recorded "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There's a World" with the London Symphony Orchestra. The opening track "The Needle and the Damage Done" was not recorded in any of those places. It was a live performance captured at a concert at UCLA's Royce Hall in January 1971, audience applause and all, and Young chose to use it exactly as it happened.

Harvest went to number one and produced "Heart of Gold," Young's only US number one single. His response to the success was immediate discomfort. He later wrote that the record "put me in the middle of the road," and that traveling there quickly became boring, so he headed for the ditch. His next four albums were some of the most abrasive and uncommercial music he ever made. Most artists spend careers trying to reach the mainstream. Young reached it on Harvest and spent the next decade actively escaping it.