He’d also just lost Crazy Horse, the band with which he’d made his first great record, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. His first marriage had just broken up, and he was enjoying the warm glow of a new relationship with the actor Carrie Snodgress (chronicled in “A Man Needs a Maid,” a delicate gem of a song smothered in the schmaltz of the London Symphony Orchestra). Harvest came together at a particularly tumultuous time for Young.

As “Heart of Gold” celebrates its golden anniversary, then, how are we to understand the album’s enduring popularity? Harvest isn’t a great record it isn’t even a great Neil Young record. It ’s wildly uneven, containing at least one earnest but lousy song and a couple of embarrassing experiments in symphonic arrangement.

No one who knows Young’s catalog-40-plus studio albums, with his latest, World Record, released last month-would argue that Harvest is his best. Fifty years after Harvest’s arrival, Reprise has put out a deluxe reissue that includes previously unreleased documentary footage. Its first single, “Heart of Gold,” is his only bona fide hit and quickly became his signature song, a staple of rock and pop radio. Yet as the author Sam Inglis puts it, “ Harvest is the only Neil Young album that has found its way into the record collections of people who don’t have record collections.” It was the best-selling album of 1972-and of Young’s career-with four-time platinum sales in the U.S. The cover of Neil Young’s fourth album, Harvest, is the color of unbleached muslin, lending a mellow vibe to a pleasant, if not groundbreaking, work.

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