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Neil Young is the kind of artist who was never going to do what a label told him to.
The fact that he made entire albums that were meant to sabotage his label to a certain degree is one of the most hilarious moves that any artist has ever made, but it wasn’t his intention to give everyone the worst impression of himself, either. He liked the idea of following his muse until the end of time, but sometimes he needed the right inspiration from his fellow musicians every single time he played.
And when he joined Crosby, Stills, and Nash, it felt like he had finally found a bunch of musicians that seemed to understand him perfectly. Every member of the supergroup saw the band as their refuge away from their old projects, but when you’ve been working with a band for this long, there comes a point where even Young felt that total creative freedom wasn’t enough, even when working with people like Stephen Stills.
Stills was a friend, and he was more than capable of jamming with him at every opportunity, but there was another piece of the puzzle that was missing until Crazy Horse came in. Young’s band was everything that he wanted out of a rock and roll outfit, and given what he had been through with Buffalo Springfield, he knew that he didn’t want to make the same mistakes over again when he finally got a band that worked.
Not all of them were complete virtuosos or anything, but Young felt that the band was the closest that he had come to sounding like some of his favourite acts, saying, “After the Springfield, I wanted to get out to the sticks and think everything over. The problem was, I needed a band again. I met these guys that were, to me, the American Rolling Stones. There has never been a bad night with them, to this day. Crazy Horse.”
But a lot of the best Young albums are where he’s usually Crazy Horse in a different way than the usual band construction. On many records, it wasn’t out of the question for Young to start working on something completely different or ask everyone to change instruments around when he thought that the song needed an extra push, and while that can be exciting, you have to be ready for anything if that’s the mentality you’re going in with.
And Young was prepared for the apocalypse as long as he had a guitar in his hand. Even when he was doing acoustic and electric music on the same disc on Rust Never Sleeps, there isn’t a moment that goes by where he doesn’t seem totally in control of the entire band, almost playing them like an instrument when he goes through ‘Hey Hey My My’ for the first time. Which probably made it all the more depressing when people like Danny Whitten became casualties along the way.
Further reading: From The Vault
Rock and roll has always had a reputation for claiming some victims over time, but Young felt that he had lost more than a bandmate when he passed away. To him, Crazy Horse were like a band of brothers, and even if he retired the band’s name a few times, he was always going to put some respect on their name for every single step of the way that they’ve walked with him since the late 1960s.
Because as much as Young liked to make great music on his own, Crazy Horse is as integral to his music as the Heartbreakers are to Tom Petty or The E Street Band is to Bruce Springsteen. Every bandleader might be the key member of the band, but if they wanted to tell a story with a huge size and scope, they were going to need a kickass rock and roll band to get them the rest of the way there.
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