Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "re-ac-tor" (Reprise, 1981)

Back in 1982, an entertaining comedy by Richard Benjamin called "My Favorite Year" hit the theaters. He just barely missed what I fondly recall as my own favorite year, 1981.

I was an 18-year-old college student, a combination of circumstances that can be a lot of fun. That summer, I had a decent-paying job (nearly $4 an hour!) working for the federal government. And most importantly, that was the year I met my future wife.

And it probably marked the last year that I really made a concerted effort to stock my music collection with the latest releases. Even though we were technically into the '80s, the music usually associated with that decade hadn't really arrived yet. So the mainstays of the '70s (and even the '60s) still were going strong with albums I enjoyed: Frank Zappa's "Tinseltown Rebellion," the Grateful Dead's "Reckoning," Jefferson Starship's "Modern Times," ZZ Top's "El Loco" and Blue Oyster Cult's "Fire of Unknown Origin" are a few off the top of my head.

My favorite album of my favorite year is right along those lines. Neil Young, of course, had been to Woodstock; a decade later, he hit what many consider his creative apex with the incredible "Rust Never Sleeps" album. (The movie of the same title and the subsequent "Live Rust" LP were quite enjoyable, as well.)

He disappointed many of his fans with the relaxed, somewhat reactionary "Hawks and Doves" (1980), which is a good listen in retrospect but hardly captured the "Rust" spirit, particularly the proto-metal side of the '79 classic.

Fans who like Neil & Crazy Horse to "turn it up to 11" (hey, I'll always toss in a Spinal Tap reference when I can), then, welcomed "re-ac-tor" like a long-lost friend. Rolling Stone magazine's reviewer gave the album high marks, complimenting the band's ability to - I'm paraphrasing here - play with the distortion of Blue Cheer, but with the tightness of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Uh ... you'd have to be fairly steeped in late-'60s rock to appreciate that. Nonetheless, the description accurately describes the material on "re-ac-tor," and we embraced it accordingly.

So I played the album almost daily while living in the Carriage House apartments at IUP, cranking it through a roommate's high-powered JVC receiver. Despite all the action, I managed to take good care of the record; it still plays fairly clearly on the turntable 25 years later.

The reputation of "re-ac-tor," though, has not fared nearly as well. Reviewers of Neil's long and erratic career usually lump the album in with several hit-or-miss projects of the early '80s, such as "Trans," his '82 debut for Geffen Records, which I'll even concede is barely listenable.

For a long time, "re-ac-tor" was among the "missing six" in Neil Young's catalogue, albums of his that had yet to make it to CD. That was rectified to some degree in 2003 with the release of four titles - including the exceptional "On the Beach" - which brings it down to the "missing two," which are "Time Fades Away" and "Journey Through the Past."

As for "re-ac-tor," I remember reading a magazine article about Mr. Young at the time of his early-'90s, grunge-associated renaissance. The writeup attempted to rate all of his albums, and "re-ac-tor" was a special case, meriting both a "10" (as good as you can get) and "0" (as bad as you can get). The explanation behind the curious designation was that fans either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it.

You know where I stand. And I always consider "re-ac-tor" as an essential part of the soundtrack to my favorite year.