Neil’s New Perspective

In a bit of a role reversal, Neil Young and the members of Crazy Horse have been working on an album that will allow each party to see what the other’s life is like.

Guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro said 23 songs have been finished for a Crazy Horse-with-Neil Young album in which Crazy Horse members Sampedro, Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot will be the singer-songwriters and Young will just be a guitar player. Plans call for a 1997 release of what would be the sixth album by Crazy Horse as a self-contained band.

Young is also the producer, and Crazy Horse has given him an affectionate producer’s alias for the project, Phil Perspective.

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“When he starts giving advice, we go, ‘Is this our guitar player talking, or are we talking with Phil?’ ” Sampedro joked. “ ‘If it’s the guitar player, shut up.’ If it’s the producer, we have to listen to him.”

As Young and Crazy Horse worked on their current album, “Broken Arrow,” early this year, they were missing a producer’s voice they were accustomed to heeding. David Briggs, co-producer of most of Young’s albums since 1969, died of cancer in November at age 51.

“He was like the fifth member, one of the very few guys whose opinion I would ever respect,” Molina said. “He had a great ear for music. He was very ornery, and if he heard something he didn’t like, he would tell you. He was up front; he didn’t hide anything.

“He was a very emotional guy too. We’re not chops players [who rely on technique], we’re feel players [who rely on emotional intensity], and that’s how he was.”

While Young’s records often have been made quickly, with an unrehearsed and rough-hewn feeling, “Broken Arrow” sounds especially offhanded.

Sampedro said that, in an unusual working method for him, Young hadn’t finished writing most of the songs when the sessions began. He would start a day’s recording by fleshing out music and lyrics on his acoustic guitar while the band watched and waited for him to finish.

“We’d play it two or three times, and usually that would be one of the takes [used on the album]. We never went back and redid any songs; we never worked on a song more than one day.”

Molina lobbied against using the album’s final track, a live version of Jimmy Reed’s blues chestnut, “Baby What You Want Me to Do?,” which was recorded--with bootleg-quality sound fidelity--during a string of dates Young and Crazy Horse played at Old Princeton Landing, a tiny Bay Area bar.

“I said, ‘Come on, Neil, let’s not have that song on there,’ ” recalled Molina, who would have preferred an album of all-original material. “We took it out and put on this other song we had recorded when Briggs was alive. But the next day [the blues number] was back in there. We listened again, and it worked. I personally wish it wasn’t on there, but it’s not my say.”