20 albums in 20 days After the Gold Rush by Neil Young

I was nominated to post 20 album covers in 20 days to FaceBook. I've been a little distracted. The album covers should be posted without explanation or comment. The album covers should have had a significant impact on my life. Although the FaceBook challenge excluded explanations or comments, that's actually not the case for my blog. This seems a really suitable place to make a comment or two.

I have already posted on this blog how I first heard about this album. Click here to read about that experience. But here's a memory I have about listening to Neil Young.

In 2004 I was in hospital for about 9 months. It was a really traumatic and difficult time. Healing and recovery was slow. After 4 months of treatment that eventually ended with life-changing surgery, I was moved into a large empty 8 bed bay on another ward. The acute phase of my stay had ended. I was now on that long, slow road to recovery and healing. 
I enjoyed being alone in that bay, but missed terribly my working life at college, my church fellowship and my home life with my wife, Katy, and my two 10-year-old children,  Iona and Arran. Family and friends from various strands of my life came to visit often. This was an incredibly positive, stimulating and comforting time.
One time my sister Debra came to visit. She bought with her a CD of music she thought I'd like. This was old music I hadn't heard in decades. One CD was Harvest by Neil Young. Click here for a link to YouTube to hear the full album.
I remember sitting up in the hospital bed. I was engaged and animated. I was really pleased to see her and happy to play the CD she'd bought with her. She didn't tell me what it was. She knew I'd know it.
Then she pressed the play button and I heard the first heartbeat drum strikes and guitar plucks. 
I felt I'd been punched. Those first notes of 'Out on the Weekend' hit me like pain that melted into a feeling of loss. It spread out through me. I hadn't played that album in 25 years. It was such a familiar sound pattern. Maybe I'd been dreaming that record in my sleep. The music was in me. It was part of me. It hit me like a punch. It passed through my head. The waves of sound overwhelmed me. I fell back against the pillow, my eyes blinded with tears. I covered them. I wanted to be alone at this moment. To savour the closed graves of memory suddenly springing open wide. 

My bedroom in Walton Drive. The box room at the front of the house looking out at the road and straight down to the two Kodak chimneys at the bottom of Harrow View. A narrow single bed that fitted half the width of the room and filled the whole length of the room to the window.
Opposite the bed, a wardrobe, its doors open up into the space between wardrobe and bed. Next to the wardrobe, when we first moved in in 1969, there was a short chest of draws. 

I have an early memory of bonfire nights. I think mum and dad bought a box of fireworks every year. They weren't particularly great boxes. There was at least one rocket, a Catherine wheel and a Roman Candle. A few sparklers. Lighting the fireworks never lasted very long. So I'd retreat to my room and look out the window. From there I watched the neighbourhood fireworks. Sometimes just rockets and other times more spectacular displays. Because our house was on the slope of a hill, we were a little raised up. We really did have a view of Harrow, especially from my bedroom. 
But after a few years, I got rid of the chest of draws and we replaced it with a wooden table. Maybe three feet long. I put all my records under that table. On the tabletop, I eventually moved the family record player. It became mine.
When I came back from school, after dinner in the evenings, for long stretches of the weekends and long summer holidays, this room was mine and music dominated a lot of the time I spent in that room.

I remember going to a Rick Wakeman concert probably in 1975. Click here for a post about how I first heard the album, 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth.'

The concert launched Wakeman's new album, 'The Myths and Legends of King Arther and the Knights of the Round Table.' That was not a good album in my opinion. But I think he also played, 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth,' - now that was a good album. I took a close friend. She stayed the night. We lay awkwardly on that single bed for hours listening to The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Wakeman for most of the night. 

Or did I buy tickets for us to see Mike Oldfield play, Tubular Bells? I did see both at Wembley Arena. 

I remember a bunch of people - friends? - all cramming into that box room. There were two or three couples sprawled out on that bed. I climbed onto the wardrobe and played 'The Dark Side of the Moon and Echoes from the album Meddle. They stayed till really late. That happened a few times. We drank beer,- or was it just coke - smoked Players Number 6 and ate crisps. 
Those people seemed older than me. I don't know why they came. I lived miles away from where they lived. Perhaps they wanted to be out of the rain. Perhaps it was only a box room but it was mine, it was private. We welcomed people into our house. Or maybe it was the dope they'd bought. Or was it mine?

I remember bringing my close friend - the one I'd gone to see Rick Wakeman with - into that bedroom. She bought a friend of hers. They were disco queens. I think their school, Salvatorian College used to run weekly or termly discos. And I imagined they reigned over those nights. They were beautiful, sexy, heavily made up and full of glitter. They were totally out of my league. They sat on the bed. I played them Echoes. The friend kicked the table. The album scratched.

I remember....