ABSTRACT
In 1982, Neil Young’s techno album Trans (1982) initiated a curious and conflicting post-Rust musical course for the prolific singer-songwriter. The seemingly erratic recording route persisted through several of his subsequent albums, provoking a lawsuit filed by Young’s longtime canyon-turned-corporate colleague David Geffen and his record label for being “uncharacteristic Neil Young.” Trans was clearly conspicuous, if not striking, in its divergence from Young’s more commonly electric Crazy Horse and folk strumming recordings. Young employs a Sennheiser vocoder and other electronics prominently as vocal devices across the album’s nine tracks and 40-minute running time. Even Young’s Buffalo Springfield standby “Mr. Soul” receives a mechanized makeover on the album. Though not initially widely acknowledged, the technological experimentation on Trans, particularly the track “Transformer Man,” was in large part a reflective response to Young’s coping and communicating with his cerebral palsy–stricken sons, Ben and Zeke. As side one’s fourth track, “Transformer Man” is sequenced between three of the album’s most emphatic electronic compositions, “Computer Age,” “We R in Control,” and “Computer Cowboy (AKA Sky Crusher).” A fourth, “Sample and Hold,” inspired by a digital system for controlling toy trains (a Young hobby), follows as side two’s second track. While “Sample and Hold” (at number 49) and “Computer Age” (number 93) placed among the list of Young’s “100 Greatest Songs” in a Rolling Stone Special Collector’s Edition in 2014 (Trans topped the list of “Weirdest Albums”), the unassuming, unsung—literally and figuratively—“Transformer Man” is highly emblematic of the era on multiple levels.
