Sometime after completing Chrome Dreams in early 1977, Neil Young invited his Malibu neighbor Carole King over to hear his latest album. Years later he recalled, “About halfway through she went, ‘Neil, this isn’t an album. It’s not a real album. I mean, there’s nobody playing, and half the songs you’re just doing by yourself.’ She was just laughing at me. Because she crafts albums.”
There’s no way of knowing whether King’s withering assessment of Chrome Dreams played a part in Young’s decision to shelve the album in favor of the charmingly misshapen American Stars ’N Bars in the summer of 1977. Chrome Dreams may have been gone but it wasn't forgotten. Young lifted four of its tracks wholesale for American Stars ’N Bars, then re-recorded another song for that same album. “Pocahontas” and “Powderfinger” wound up on Rust Never Sleeps, “Captain Kennedy” popped up on Hawks & Doves, and Neil resurrected “Too Far Gone” for his 1989 comeback Freedom. Long before he started excavating lost albums and official bootlegs as part of the Neil Young Archive, Chrome Dreams survived as an acetate that worked its way into the bootleg marketplace, becoming relatively easy to find during the compact disc explosion of the 1990s.
All this subsequent recycling—a practice that ran all the way through 2017, when the late-night session that produced “Pocahontas” and “Captain Kennedy” was released in its entirety as the wistful album Hitchhiker—means that the long-overdue official release of Chrome Dreams carries a vague air of anti-climax. Forget unheard songs: Unlike Homegrown and Toast, two other “lost” albums released under the NYA’s Special Release Series banner, Chrome Dreams barely contains unreleased recordings. The hype sticker attached to the physical edition touts “2 previously unreleased versions,” which amounts to an alternate take of “Hold Back the Tears” and a slow, stumbling early “Sedan Delivery,” which would later take a punishing pace on Rust Never Sleeps.
Disappointing as that may be, Chrome Dreams offers a distinctly different experience than any other Young album from the late 1970s. It serves as an example of how albums manage to be more than the sum of their individual parts. Young is keenly aware how individual songs can harmonize and rhyme. When promoting Chrome Dreams II—a 2007 sequel that bears no overt relation to the album he essayed 30 years earlier—Neil explained, “Quite often I’ll record things that don’t fit with what I’m doing, so I just hold onto them for a while. Some of them are so strong that they destroy what I’m doing. It’s like if you have a bunch of kids and one of them weighs 200 pounds and the other ones are 75 pounds, you’ve got to keep things in order so they don’t hurt each other. So that’s why I held certain things back.”