As all-encompassing multimedia experiences go, Yellow Submarine takes some beating. Famously, a comic ditty by The Beatles - written in bed one 1966 night by Paul McCartney as a children's song -became a film, an album, a picture book, a video game and in, 2012, will once again resurface as a Robert Zemeckis 3D animation. But Neil Young is certainly giving The Beatles a run for their money. Last week's publication of graphic novel Neil Young's Greendale was the latest in a long line of interpretations of his self-styled "rock novel" set in a fictional Californian town.
Greendale has already been an album, a film, a performance piece, a website (with maps and family trees) and a companion book. Not bad for a project that began eight years ago with a song called Devil's Sidewalk, of which Young admitted: "I didn't even know what it was. I said, 'what the hell is this? What is that? What am I talking about?'" But he was in a groove. One song led thematically to another, and suddenly he had the tale of Grandpa Green, who finds his house swamped by reporters when his cousin Jed shoots a cop. He tries to fend off the media scrum, immortalised in the song Grandpa's Interview: "'Susan Carol from Early Magazine, I got some questions to ask." "Well you can stick 'em where the sun don't shine!"' Grandpa said with a gasp." But that gasp is his last and Grandpa has a heart attack, which, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, inspires his granddaughter, Sun, to become an eco-warrior.
Truth be told, it isn't the greatest piece of storytelling. The music isn't actually Young's finest hour, either. But Greendale began to take on a life of its own. The elaborate level of detail - their much-loved cat is kicked by an FBI agent, and appears curled up in the graphic novel representation - made it a satisfying repeat listen, but its many deeper meanings were crucial to the forming of a whole Greendale cottage industry.
Some suggest it is a post 9/11 tale, specifically in the line from Leave The Driving: "Meanwhile across the ocean/ Living in the internet/ Is the cause of an explosion/ No one has heard yet." Young also comments on the corruptive influence of power, the Bush government, old age, and, through Sun, the terrible havoc we wreak on the environment. And the continuing legend of Greendale is very much of Young's making.
Unlike The Beatles, who had very little to do with Yellow Submarine after recording it one happy summer's afternoon, the godfather of grunge was very much involved in what happened next, suggesting he was as intrigued by his first, rather sketchy concept as everyone else. Greendale the film, from 2003, was actually shot by Young himself under his directorial nom de plume Bernard Shakey, dialogue and actors gradually included to bolster the initial idea of simply recording the process of making the record. Granted, it looks like the home movie it essentially is, but there's something spectacularly primitive about Greendale that suits the organic, three-chord music.
Not all reviews were positive, but undeterred, Greendale the theatrical production followed in 2004. Two hours long and featuring a cast of 40, it was again slightly bizarre: the actors would lip-synch the music coming from Young and his band, and the set was not far removed from am-dram. But again, that was its low-key, all-American charm. All of which has made the graphic novel something of an oddity, in that it's taken four years to come to fruition and it looks beautiful, a world away from Greendale's rough-hewn beginnings.
And once again, Young has been involved in the story, written with Joshua Dysart and turned into "an American fable with strong supernatural elements". It also draws on all the former incarnations of Greendale - the 2004 companion book of lyrics, illustrations and backgrounds on the characters was vital here - to bring the story to, perhaps, its natural medium. Young has even said there could be more tales of Sun Green in this form in the future.
So why does Young keep going back to Greendale? He says it's because the story is empowering for young women, and its political and environmental relevance, as oil continues to spew into the Gulf of Mexico, is clearly undimmed. The graphic novel, too, expands on the mystical and magical themes that Young was interested in but never fully explored on the record. Most of all, he's finally had the opportunity to put flesh on the bones of that first idea set in small-town America eight years ago.
Young sang on Greendale in 2003, "I've got a new song to sing/ It's longer than all the others combined and it doesn't mean a thing." But it does now. Neil Young's Greendale (Vertigo) is out now. www.nygreendale.com
