Cowboy in the Sand

To the Editors of The Crimson

Eric Fried, your music critic, must have gotten lost on the Arborway line on the way to see Neil Young at the Boston Garden.

Was he really at the same Neil Young concert everyone else was? Mr. Fried says that when Crazy Horse came on stage, "the level of the audience enthusiasm dropped off a sheer cliff." At the concert I saw, everyone was out of theig seats, jumping up and down with frantic energy.

But thanks for printing Mr. Fried's column. When an introspective, intelligent and talented musician sings from his heart about experiences with love, herion addiction, and with the death of a close friend, it's nice to know that there's enough variety in the world that a critic could call the music "silly." When a musician can sing honestly about depression (alone onstage with only a piano or guitar), and then bounce into a state of frenzied optimism (with a powerful hard rock band), it's interesting that a critic could feel "embarrassed for him."

Less interesting is Mr. Fried's abundant knowledge of Neil Young's music which does not encompass early songs with Buffalo Springfield like "Mr. Soul." (Yes, Mr. Fried, they did have electric guitars back in '66.)

And even in this Disco Decade, it's still hard to understand how when a singer says, "It's gonna take a lot of love/To make things work out right," a critic can label the thought expressed as "insignificant."

Bizarre commentaries, like Mr. Fried's, make for interesting reading, but then again, didn't I see him getting on the Arborway line when I took the train to North Station? John Jacobs '77