#1: After The Goldrush by Prelude

City: Kelowna, BC
Radio Station: CKOV
Peak Month: December 1974
Peak Position in Kelowna ~ #2
Peak position in Vancouver ~ #10
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #22
YouTube: “After The Goldrush”
Lyrics: “After The Goldrush”

Prelude are an English-based vocal harmony group, who in their most famous line-up consisted of singer and guitarist Brian Hume, his wife Irene Hume – on vocals, and guitarist and singer Ian Vardy. Vardy and Brian Hume had covered Simon & Garfunkel’s song “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine” in 1967, billed as The Carnival. They formed Trilogy in their native Gateshead in northeast England in 1970, adding Irene Hume. They changed their name soon after to Prelude. They backed Ralph McTell on his recording of “Streets Of London”, which was released as a single in the UK in 1974. Prelude released a non-charting single titled “Edge of the Sea” in 1972. The following year Prelude signed with the Dawn Record label. They went to the recording studio to work on their debut album, How Long is Forever? One of the tracks was “After The Goldrush”.

They released “After The Goldrush” as a single in 1974.

In 1974, Hume said of the selection of “After the Gold Rush”, “We were standing at a bus stop in Stocksfield and we just started singing it. There was no particular reason, it was just a nice song. The way we do it now is really no different from the way we did it at the bus stop. We included it in our act and it went down really well – even the rowdier clubs listened to it. We certainly never thought of it as a possible single. In any case we always thought of ourselves as an album group rather than making singles and included the song on the album How Long Is Forever as an afterthought?”

“After The Goldrush” was written by Neil Young who was born in Toronto in 1945. His family moved to Omemee, Ontario, and he contracted polio in 1951, two years before the polio vaccine was introduced. He learned guitar and dropped out of high school. He played in the Winnipeg based band called The Squires, who toured parts of Manitoba and northern Ontario. They played instrumental covers of Cliff Richard’s backup band, The Shadows. Young moved to California in 1966 where he was a founding member of the Buffalo Springfield. In 1968 he released his self-titled debut studio album. And in 1969 he became the fourth member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Young wrote “Ohio” in response to the shooting in Kent State in May 1970. The song’s opening line “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming…” became an anti-war protest anthem. In April 1970, Neil Young released “Cinnamon Girl”. In 1972, Neil Young had his most successful hit, “Heart Of Gold”. It climbed to #1 in both Canada and the USA in 1972. A followup single, “Old Man” made the Top Ten across Canada. Young had been nominated for 27 Grammy Awards and won three. The last of these honors was in 2011 for Best Song: “Angry World”. He has received 29 Juno Award nominations, and won seven of these including for Album of the Year: Harvest Moon (1995).

“After The Goldrush” was the title track from Neil Young’s third solo album, After The Goldrush, from 1970. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014. Young comments to a concert audience at the Bayfront Center Arena, St. Petersburg. on February 3, 1973, that the lyrics came to him after he had a dream.

In his 2012 biography Young described the inspiration provided by a screenplay of the same name (never produced), which apocalyptically described the last days of California in a catastrophic flood. The screenplay and song’s title referred to what happened in California, a place that took shape due to the Gold Rush. Young eventually concluded that:

After The Goldrush is an environmental song… I recognize in it now this thread that goes through a lotta my songs that’s this time-travel thing… When I look out the window, the first thing that comes to my mind is the way this place looked a hundred years ago.

The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. The sudden influx of gold into the money supply reinvigorated the American economy; the sudden population increase allowed California to go rapidly to statehood in the Compromise of 1850. Between 1846 and 1873, it is estimated that non-Natives killed between 9,492 and 16,094 California Natives. In addition, between several hundred and several thousand California Natives were starved or worked to death. Acts of enslavement, kidnapping, rape, child separation and forced displacement were widespread. These acts were encouraged, tolerated, and carried out by state authorities and private militias. So, after the California goldrush there was a lot of dislocation, displacement and chaos, as well as stories of getting rich quick.

“After The Goldrush” consists of three verses which move forward in time from the past. The first verse is in a medieval setting with knights in armour representing the queen appear. Peasants sing, drummers drum, and archers shoot arrows splitting a tree. There is a fanfare, which is a musical flourish typically featuring trumpets, french horns, other brass instruments and percussion. As the knights have come, “saying something about a queen,” the fanfare is appropriate as it is a musical announcement played on brass instruments before the arrival of an important person”, such as heralding the entrance of a monarch.

A second verse describes the present time, which was set in the nineteen-seventies. “Mother nature” is “on the run,” given the encroachment of industry and urban sprawl. The singer (narrator) is “lying in a burned out basement, with the full moon in my eyes.” The singer is connecting with the full moon, a part of the daily cycle of day and night, and of nature itself. Simultaneously, the singer is in a dwelling – a burned out basement – and the symbol of civilization in the song is a dwelling impacted by fire, an image of destruction. At the end of the verse, “there was a band playing in my head,” which harkens back to the fanfare in verse one. He is also “thinking about what a friend had said, I was hoping it was a lie.” What is it that the friend is saying? Why hope it was a lie? Was the friend predicting doom for humanity? If so, it is a good segue into verse three.

The third verse depicts the end of humanity’s time on Earth. Here, silver spaceships fly to earth “in the yellow haze of the sun.” Children cry, and banners fly. But this time, unlike the fanfare for the queen in verse one, the one who has arrived is “the chosen one.” In the Book of Revelation, in chapter 21, it is written:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. ² And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among the people, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His ^[a]people, and God Himself will be among them, ⁴ and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”⁵ And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” And He *said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.” ⁶ Then He said to me, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”

The apocryphal vision in the Book of Revelation imagines a new beginning, coinciding with the appearance of “He who sits on the throne” (“the Chosen One”).  But in “After The Goldrush” the new beginning is achieved by abandoning planet Earth in favor of a new start in a new astral setting: With the arrival of the chosen one, the spaceships are loaded presumably with human explorers (which is unstated). But significantly, with “mother nature’s silver seed” to “a new home in the sun.” Here, “After The Goldrush” envisions a time when humans will leave planet Earth to populate “a new home in the sun,” taking seeds of Mother Nature to begin again. And so, possibly a new Garden of Eden.

In the song, Mother Nature features prominently in verse two. Since the 13th Century BC, Mother Nature has been the personification of nature that focuses on the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature by embodying it, in the form of a mother, or mother goddess.

In a popular 1970s Chiffon margarine ad, Mother Nature is offered a taste of Chiffon margarine. She likes Chiffon and identifies it as “my delicious butter!” The narrator of the ad then tells her: “That’s Chiffon margarine, not butter … Chiffon’s so delicious it fooled even you, Mother Nature.” Vexed at the trickery, Mother Nature responds by uttering, in increasingly scornful tones, her signature line “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” The commercial ended with the tag line, “If you think it’s butter, but it’s not: it’s Chiffon.”

In the nineteen-seventies, Mother Nature was not only on the run because of Chiffon margarine. She was also vexed by what was happening to the ecology. In 1971, Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)” asked “Where did all the blue skies go?” He lamented, 1) “Poison is the wind that blows from the north, and south and east,” 2) “Oil wasted on the oceans,” 3) “fish full of mercury,” 4) “radiation under ground and in the sky” and more. With these sentiments expressed in pop culture, Neil Young’s “After The Goldrush” added to the sense that it might be too late to save the planet. Flying off in silver spaceships to start again from scratch seemed a promising solution. After all, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of the Apollo 11 NASA flight had walked on the moon and planted the stars and stripes on July 20, 1969. Neil Young and billions of people had watched it on TV! Could humanity use space travel to perpetuate our species in wake of environmental destruction? Some thought the song was escapist for this reason.

Was Neil Young just caught up in the euphoria of news reports of “man” landing on the moon on July 20, 1969? On that day astronaut Neil Armstrong said of the Apollo 11 spacecraft landing on the moon: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil Young began writing music and lyrics and recording songs for After The Goldrush in August 1969. So, the news stories about the Apollo 11 moon landing would have been only weeks prior to Neil Young heading to the recording studio to record “After The Goldrush” and other tracks on the album, including “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and “When You Dance I Can Really Love“.

“After The Goldrush” peaked at #2 in Kelowna (BC) and Charlottesville (WV), #4 in Cedar Rapids (IA), Fort Worth (TX), and San Angelo (TX), #5 in Hamilton (ON), Denver, Akron (OH), and Cleveland, #6 in Fort Wayne (IN), #7 in Nashville, Houston, Milwaukee, and Chicago, #8 in Roanoke (VA), Stockton (CA), Reading (PA), La Crosse (WI), and Pittsburgh, #9 in Winnipeg (MB) and Wichita (KS), #10 in Vancouver (BC) and Ottawa.

Internationally, “After The Goldrush” peaked at #5 on the RPM Canadians Singles chart, #21 in Australia, and #22 on the Billboard Hot 100.

In 1974, a second album titled Dutch Courage was released in Europe. In North America, the album added the track, “After The Goldrush” and was titled After The Goldrush to cash in on the popularity of the single. As a result, Prelude had an album that peaked at #94 on the Billboard 200 Album chart. A third album, Owlcreek Incident, also appeared on the 200 Album chart climbing to #111. A single from the album, “For A Dancer”, reached #63 on the Billboard Hot 100.

In 1976, Prelude switched to Pye Records and released the studio album Back into the Light. In 1980, now with EMI Records, Prelude had a Top 50 hit in the UK titled “Platinum Blonde”. To support the single, they appeared on the UK TV show Top of the Pops. The follow-up “Trick of the Light” failed to chart. Further success was achieved in 1982 when a re-recorded version of “After the Gold Rush” reached #28 on the UK Singles chart. The group released three further singles in the same year, a cover of the 1960 Roy Orbison tune “Only The Lonely”, “City Tonight” and “Silent Night”. Their fifth album, self-titled Prelude, was also released.

Vardy left the band in 1985, and Irene and Brian Hume continued as a duo. In 1987 they were joined by guitarist and dobro player Jim Hornsby, bass guitarist Tony Hornsby, and on drums and percussion with Ian Tait. By 1993, Prelude consisted again of only the Humes.

In 1998, Brian and Irene Hume collaborated with Jim Hornsby to form More Tequila. The trio released a folk-country album titled The Country Line Dance Collection. In 1999, Brian and Irene Hume were joined by Chris Ringer to release a sixth Prelude album titled Good For You. In 2001, Brian and Irene Hume formed a trio named Making Tracks with Chris Ringer. The trio released an album that year titled American Roots.

In 2008, original member Ian Vardy performed with Brian and Irene Hume, and Chris Ringer, making Prelude a four-piece group for the next few years. The original three member of Prelude released one more studio album of new material in 2012 titled The Belle Sue Sessions. Their official website went offline in 2018.

November 27, 2024
Ray McGinnis

References:
“Prelude – Biography,” Billboard.
The Carnival, “Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine“, Columbia Records, 1967.
Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, (Yale University Press, 2016).
“Gold Nugget,” National Museum of American History.
Robert Deis, “It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature!,” thisdayinquotes.com, June 28, 2015.
“July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind,” NASA.com.
Neil Young bio, Rolling Stone, New York.
70 Facts You Might Not Know About Neil Young, TIDAL, June 17, 2016.
McDonough, James. Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography. Vintage, New York, 2003.

CKOV 630-AM Kelowna (BC) Top Ten | December 9, 1974