A few months before Jimi Hendrix unfurled the guitar fireworks of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, Neil Young played a hypnotic one-note guitar break inside “Cinnamon Girl,” the opening track on 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Even if Young’s style never approached minimalism in the classical sense, the very idea—an anti-solo solo—conjured a textural universe that Young has been exploring ever since, most often in live jams with Crazy Horse.
But it took more than two decades for Young himself to make an album of solo electric guitar music, his 1996 soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. In a catalog that has ranged from the 1982 vocoder-touched Trans to the 2003 eco-rock opera Greendale, Dead Man remains the only release of its kind. A new reissue returns the spotlight to arguably the most satisfying oddity of Young’s half-century career, too committed to be dismissed as a novelty.
Young creates a vocabulary of sound as if he’d been improvising movie scores for decades—a landscape of stark, expressive solo guitar to match Jarmusch’s psychedelic black-and-white Western. With the tracks unnamed on their original release, the high fidelity Neil Young Archives site now titles the half-dozen instrumentals as “Dead Man, No. 1” through “Dead Man, No. 6,” plus “Organ Solo.” They alternate with another half-dozen dialogue-based tracks, Young’s guitar pushed to the background while bits of the movie come up, largely featuring Johnny Depp, who reads the poetry of William Blake. Though they provide an emotional structure for the music and are unquestionably atmospheric sound-art, they’d be buzzkills even without Johnny Depp, interrupting perhaps the purest guitar playing of Young’s discography. (These buzzkills, of course, can be bypassed on mediums other than vinyl.)
Young’s closest companion to Dead Man, perhaps even a prequel of sorts, is 1991’s Arc, a 35-minute extended edit of Crazy Horse’s live feedback jams. While Arc might be louder, Dead Man is perhaps even further out, pushing beyond songs and rhythms and noise, and building from the new logic of the world beyond. On “Dead Man, No. 1,” Young’s guitar scratches a fluttering, almost-steady pulse while muted chords flicker, disappearing before they can resonate and reveal themselves. It ends with a 30-second melodic coda that sounds like what the narrator of Young’s 1975 “Albuquerque” might be hearing in their head driving through the New Mexican desert.
Each of Dead Man’s tracks offers subtly different strategies, from the dream swirl of “Organ Solo” to the sustained ghost tones and scandalously indulgent two-note solo of “Dead Man, No. 6.” The centerpiece is the 14-and-a-half minute “Dead Man, No. 5,” filled indelibly with Young’s favorite gestures as a guitarist: aching chord voicings, fuzztones, and spiky colors that open into broader fields of sound as ideas return and change shape.
The form of these compositions remains ambiguous, give or take moments when notes begin to connect into melodic fragments that sound viscerally like Young, accidental shards of musical personality on display. For an artist so famously committed to spontaneity and chasing idiosyncratic muses, including making films of his own, it’s authentically shocking that the now 73-year-old Young has never gone further down this path. The seven fully instrumental tracks of Dead Man are Neil Young at his purest, like a rare electronic voice phenomenon recording of Young’s musical spirit as it rumbles and bends and intersects with the material plane.
