Fork in the Road is an album by Neil Young and it sold a paltry 28,000 copies during it's debut on Billboard, peaking at number 19. This is simply not good enough for an artist of Neil's standing. Then again, the album was inspired by a Neil Young alternative energy kick, trying to get electric power systems working. Indeed, Young's own 1959 Lincoln Continental is serving as a prototype for Young's experiments in this area. This concept for the album isn't really even the reason for the huge amounts of controversy surrounding the release. Young fans have been up in arms expecting the long awaited Young archive series, only to be met with this rather lukewarm new original album instead. Young has history of not doing what people expect him to though, of course. 'Trans' in the early eighties nearly sunk him and earnt him a lawsuit ultimately, from his own record label. No Crazy Horse here by the way, although you wouldn't really notice on the likes of 'Just Singing A Song', itself proof of Neil's utter lack of creativity of purpose here, and this is a highlight! On this album, Neil tries to convince us of electric and alternate power sources for cars whilst singing of speeding down the road and a heavy metal 'continental'. The often presumed crazy man Frank Zappa meanwhile predicted in NINETEEN EIGHTY THREE (?!?!!!!) "We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company's difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rentable D-A converter in the phone itself . . . the main chip is about $12). All accounting for royalty payments" He also said "Music consumers like to consume music ?not pieces of vinyl wrapped in pieces of cardboard and people today enjoy music more than ever before, and, they like to take it with them wherever they go. Wowsers! Tell that to the record company lawyers who 'defeated' the Pirate Bay!
'Cough Up The Bucks' is so lame it takes me back to 'T-Bone' from his 'Reactor' album. That was bad, but this is worse. Tired recycled melodies abound and I don't want to sound like George Starostin but he'd have a field day reviewing this. Mark Prindle will probably like it because it's so incredibly dumb but I don't like it not for any analytical scientific reason and I won't try to be funny, either. This album just sucks bad and is one of the worst ever Neil Young albums. I'm kind of glad it's sunk saleswise without a trace.
When Worlds Collide / Fuel Line / Just Singing A Song / Johnny Magic / Cough Up The Bucks / Get Behind The Wheel / Off The Road / Hit The Road / Light A Candle / Fork In The Road
'Cough Up The Bucks' is so lame it takes me back to 'T-Bone' from his 'Reactor' album. That was bad, but this is worse. Tired recycled melodies abound and I don't want to sound like George Starostin but he'd have a field day reviewing this. Mark Prindle will probably like it because it's so incredibly dumb but I don't like it not for any analytical scientific reason and I won't try to be funny, either. This album just sucks bad and is one of the worst ever Neil Young albums. I'm kind of glad it's sunk saleswise without a trace.
When Worlds Collide / Fuel Line / Just Singing A Song / Johnny Magic / Cough Up The Bucks / Get Behind The Wheel / Off The Road / Hit The Road / Light A Candle / Fork In The Road