Playing with a Synclavier and feeding his vocals through a Sennheiser Vocoder, the exercises led Young to the more synthesized album Trans, his first full release under Geffen.
“If you listen to ‘Trans,’ if you listen to the words to ‘Transformer Man’ and ‘Computer Age’ and ‘We R in Control,’ you’ll hear a lot of references to my son and to people trying to live a life by pressing buttons, trying to control the things around them and talking with people who can’t talk, using computer voices and things like that,” said Young. “It’s a subtle thing, but it’s right there. It has to do with a part of my life that practically no one can relate to.”
Inspired more by Kraftwerk than his typical Crazy Horse canvas, Trans failed to chart which prompted Geffen to approach Young. Prior to the release of Trans, Young also released the more tropical-inspired Island in the Sun with Geffen in 1982. “ David Geffen thought it was okay, but he didn’t think it was good enough,” said Young. Geffen flew out to Hawaii where Young was recording the “[He said], ‘Neil, you can do more with these songs. Keep going.’”
When the label asked him to make a classic rock and roll album as his next release, Young offered up a country album, which they rejected, then switched genres entirely with Everybody’s Rockin’, a throwback to 1950s rockabilly, which he recorded with a made-up band, the Shocking Pinks.
“They told me they wanted me to play rock and roll, and told me I didn’t sound like Neil Young,” said Young in 2011. “So I gave them ‘Everybody’s Rockin’ and said, ‘This is a rock and roll album by Neil Young after someone tells him what to do. This is exactly what you said you wanted.’”
Everybody’s Rockin’ was ultimately a flop for Young and failed to break the top 40. Following its release, Geffen filed a $3.3 million lawsuit against Young, claiming he had violated his contract, and that the albums he recorded were “musically uncharacteristic of his previous recordings.” Young responded by countersuing the label for $21 million and claimed that his contract allowed him complete artistic freedom.
“The truth is, I fought with him [Young] because I wanted him to do better work,” said Geffen in 2012. ”I was taking too much of a fatherly role in his life.”
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