Precise details about the plot of After the Gold Rush, an unmade and now lost screenplay by actor Dean Stockwell and actor and writer Herb Bermann, are difficult to come by. It seems to have centred on an artistic community in California’s Topanga Canyon and its destruction by a huge tidal wave. “It involved the Kabala, it involved a lot of arcane stuff,” Stockwell has said. It was not, as he puts it, “a linear, regular story-telling kind of film”. Hey, it was the 1960s.
What we do know is that Neil Young, a friend of Stockwell’s and a fellow Topanga Canyon resident, read After the Gold Rush and it informed his 1970 album of the same name, especially the title track. “After the Gold Rush” is a sad piano ballad of elusive meaning. The screenplay was obscure and this, an impressionistic reading of it, is even more so.
For the first two verses it’s just Young on his old upright and then a flugelhorn picks out the melody before the third and final verse. The song starts with imagery of the Middle Ages: “knights in armour”, a “queen”, an “archer”, “a fanfare blowing”. Then it moves to the now: “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s”. In the middle verse, the narrator recalls “lying in a burned out basement” saying he “felt like getting high”. He is “thinking about what a friend had said” and “hoping it was a lie”. The last verse offers a futuristic vision of “silver spaceships” which are “flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun”.
The album was savaged in Rolling Stone, with the reviewer dismissing the singing as “pre-adolescent whining” and claiming that the title song “reminds one of nothing so much as Mrs Miller [a briefly popular comedically bad singer] moaning and wheezing her way through ‘I’m a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch’.”
The record-buying public disagreed. The album would eventually become Young’s second best-selling and the song one of his most popular. It has been covered in a number of different styles by a wide variety of artists.
Prelude, a three-piece group from Gateshead, had a hit in 1974 with their a cappella interpretation after it was championed by Kenny Everett on the new-ish Capital Radio. It charted in both the UK and the US.
The Flaming Lips have a version on a 1989 Neil Young anthology album The Bridge. The eccentric experimental rockers dispensed with the medieval first verse altogether and embraced the apparently apocalyptic theme with distorted guitars and thunderous drums.
Dolly Parton liked it so much she recorded it twice: first with Alison Krauss on her 1996 album Treasures and then on 1999’s Trio II with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt (who has also recorded a solo version). Both Parton and Ronstadt rather primly change “I felt like getting high” — a line that always elicits cheers in Young’s live performances — to “I felt like I could cry”.
Patti Smith, kd lang and Thom Yorke of Radiohead are among the other artists to have covered it. Yorke was told at the age of 16 that he sounded like Neil Young. Having never heard of him, he bought “After the Gold Rush” and “immediately fell in love with his voice”.
It was one of his selections when he appeared on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs in September. The song still “blows my mind”, he said. He occasionally does a brief section of the song during Radiohead concerts and in 2002 he played it on the composer’s own piano at one of Young’s benefit gigs, a performance included on The Bridge School Concerts album.
Yet despite its popularity, its meaning remains enigmatic. Young himself has been inconsistent on the topic. He has said it’s about environmentalism, but when Parton was recording it, she asked Ronstadt and Harris to call him and ask what it was about. “He said he had no idea,” she has recalled. Her take? “I’d say it was about the second coming. Or an alien invasion. Or both.”
Irene Hume, of Prelude, has sung it thousands of times and still performs it. She says she doesn’t know what it’s about but points to a video made for the band’s 1982 re-recording of the song. It is not entirely enlightening. Shot in Battersea Power Station, it features Hume as some sort of white-clad space traveller hooked up to a lot of medical monitors.
Perhaps we should listen to Dean Stockwell on the topic. He told Jimmy McDonough, author of Neil Young biography Shakey: “Sit down and listen to the lyrics of that tune itself — tell me what it means. I mean, you can’t do it. And no one could tell what that screenplay meant either. But Neil got it.”
What are your memories of ‘After the Gold Rush’? And what do you think it means? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Reprise; Sanctuary Records; Mercury Nashville; Rhino/Elektra; Columbia/Legacy; Nonesuch
Picture credit: ANL/Shutterstock