Neil Young has never been especially interested in the way the music industry expects artists to operate, preferring to trust his gut rather than fretting about career expectations. It's not hard to imagine
Young saying to hell with it and joining a bar band rather than dealing with the annoyances of rock stardom, and he did just that for a while in 1977. That year, he impulsively joined a fledgling band called
the Ducks, featuring
Bob Mosley of
Moby Grape on bass, noted songwriter
Jeff Blackburn on guitar, and
Johnny Craviotto, who worked with
Ry Cooder and
Arlo Guthrie, on drums. While
Young was the most famous person on board, he was not the leader; all four
Ducks took turns singing lead,
Mosley and
Blackburn wrote most of the songs, and they were content to play bars and clubs in their native Santa Cruz, California, doing two sets a night and charging a three-dollar cover at the door. With someone as famous as
Young in the lineup, this could only stay a secret for so long, especially since
the Ducks were playing two or three nights a week, and the grand experiment was over in three months, with only a few bootleg tapes to confirm it ever happened. Thankfully,
Young obsessively documents his activities, and he had a mobile recording truck tape some
Ducks gigs in August 1977. Forty-five years later, he pulled the reels out of his vault and compiled a
Ducks album, 2023's
High Flyin'.
The Ducks were a bar band in the same way
NRBQ were a bar band -- their mix of country rock, blues, and tough, straight-ahead rock & roll was rooted in the classics without getting mired in cliches. While they had good, unpretentious fun on-stage, they also had impressive chops and a catalog of fine material, and the energy of seeing a group this good in a funky, intimate setting was not lost on their audiences.
Young seems to be having a ball not having to be the star of the show, and his guitar work is excellent, ripping out solos in his unmistakable style but also buzzing along beside
Blackburn. He also takes the opportunity to rework some of his classic tunes, with a gutsy tear through "Mr. Soul" a highlight of this set.
Mosley and
Blackburn's originals are good enough to stand up to comparison to
Young's, and
Mosley seemingly taught some of the tricks of
Moby Grape's glorious harmonies to his fellow
Ducks, feeling rougher but no less satisfying.
Mosley and
Craviotto are a superb rhythm section, too, knowing when to groove and when to push the music into fifth gear. It's a shame
the Ducks didn't have the chance to mature and cut a studio album, because they clearly had talent and potential to spare, but there's no shame in being a truly great bar band, and
High Flyin' shows
the Ducks were something special for just three bucks. ~ Mark Deming
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