By following the hi-tech
Trans
after only seven months with a
rockabilly
album,
Neil Young
baffled his audience. Just as he had followed the sales peak of
Harvest
in 1972 with a series of challenging, uncommercial albums,
Young
had now dissipated the commercial and critical acceptance he had enjoyed with 1979's
Rust Never Sleeps
with a series of mediocre albums and inexplicable genre exercises.
Everybody's Rockin'
, credited to "Neil & the Shocking Pinks," represented the nadir of this attempted career suicide. Running less than 25 minutes, it found
covering early
rock
evergreens like
"Betty Lou's Got a New Pair of Shoes"
and writing a few songs in the same vein (
"Kinda Fonda Wanda"
). If he had presented this as a mini-album at a discount price, it would have been easier to enjoy the joke
seemed to intend. As it was, fans who already had their doubts about
dropped off the radar screen;
was his lowest-charting album since his 1969 solo debut, and he didn't release another album for two years (his longest break ever between records). ~ William Ruhlmann