(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Nationaal Archief)
Sun 19 October 2025 20:30, UK
For anyone making rock music, surely by now it’s impossible to escape the impact of The Rolling Stones. Their legacy looms large, almost too large to even begin to try and quantify. But even if a person isn’t directly inspired by Mick Jagger and Co, likely one of their other idols was.
Neil Young certainly was, as he’s routinely dedicated time throughout his own lengthy and powerful career to heap praise on the Stones. For fans, the band’s resilience and never-ending enthusiasm are a treat. It keeps them out and about, meaning even younger fans get a chance to see them live as Jagger is still swaggering about to stage. But for other musicians, that endurance is a triumph and a feat, it’s incredibly impressive and even Jagger’s slightly younger peers look at him and likely think ‘how does he have the energy for that?’
Young is only a few years younger than Jagger but he definitely thinks so. While he himself has also had a career that’s never stopped or slowed, especially in recent years as he’s been touring more and more, the Stones felt like a blueprint for that.
“The Rolling Stones, now there was something, because they kept going. They didn’t just last for five years,” Young said. While he bounced between different groups in his younger years, the fact that the Stones formed early and stuck together impresses him as he continued, “It took them longer to make a great contribution. The Beatles made their contribution in about five years, bang, gone—right? The Rolling Stones came out with ‘Miss You’ way after, years after the Beatles broke up.”
Impressed by their drive to keep at it and keep evolving, he added, “When you think of the Rolling Stones, that’s one of their best things, that Some Girls album— and that’s with Ron Wood, y’know. They’d gone through a lot of changes.”
The band’s endurance also means that they’ve been a consistent feature in the lives of Young and the wider musical sphere. They’ve always been present and providing inspiration that Young was keen to lap up, especially during the Buffalo Springfield days on ‘Mr Soul’ but there was another track where he calls it out by name.
“I’m singin’ this borrowed tune. I took from the Rolling Stones. Alone in this empty room. Too wasted to write my own,” he sings on ‘Borrowed Tune’ as he rips the whole melody from the Stones’ ‘Lady Jane’.
It came to him in a moment of panic on stage as later described the track as “a song I had written at the beginning of the Time Fades Away tour reflecting on whether a big stadium tour was right for me.” He’d included the Stones song as part of the setlist but slipped up, explaining, I played ‘Lady Jane’ and forgot the chords. I started playing my own chords, it started sounding better to me, so I kept playing that. It just turned into another song.”
“I liked the fact that the Stones lasted so long and kept making vital music,” he said about the band, counting himself amongst their huge mass of fans.
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