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Sat 3 October 2026 15:30, UK
Neil Young isn’t the kind of person who tends to meticulously look over every single thing he makes.
What he plays needs to be able to document a particular moment in time, and if the songs don’t work in a particular instant, it’s not all that uncommon for him to start working on something different and move on to whatever next genre strikes his fancy. He was willing to do anything as long as he felt his heart was in it, but he could also be devious when working with the right people.
Although Young was already making a name for himself in Buffalo Springfield, the seeds were already being planted for him to go solo. It’s not that Young doesn’t play well with others, but he also has a good idea of what he doesn’t want to be a lot of the time, and it made a lot of sense for him to make music that had a lot fewer bells and whistles than what he was hearing on the radio half the time.
Which is why Crosby, Stills, and Nash was a great way of introducing him to the mainstream all over again. Stephen Stills was already one of his buddies from back in the day, and getting the chance to jam with him on a couple of tunes was already one of the best feelings in the world, even back working with Buffalo Springfield, so it should have been perfect, right? Well, it did for a while, but after Young heard what he could do with heavier music, he didn’t have time for that kind of sound anymore.
The rest of CSN did have a lot of hippie idealism about them, and while Young could certainly appreciate that, he was looking for something a little bit more when he stumbled across Crazy Horse for the first time. He hadn’t heard a band that sounded that heavy in a long time, and while he tried his best to be professional, he knew he wasn’t walking out of that first rehearsal without the rest of the band leaving behind him when he first came down to jam.
The electricity between everyone was undeniable, and even Crazy Horse’s manager acknowledged that his band was stolen right from under his nose, saying, “They had a residency somewhere and would play the Whisky once in a while. One night, Neil Young, who we all knew from the Buffalo Springfield days, walked in. Anyway, Neil saw one set and asked if he could come in and play on the second. He walked away that night with Danny, Ralph, and Billy as his rhythm section.”
At the same time, Young had found something more than a band there. It was a brotherhood that happened to be forged with guitars, and when you listen to the way that all of them interacted in the live footage from that time, they were among some of the finest bands in the world that could jam to their heart’s content every single time they worked on one of their elongated jams.
Further reading: From The Vault
‘Cinnamon Girl’ was already a great skeleton of a song when Young first wrote it, but getting the chance to put some more punch into it was everything that the band was made for. And while a lot of good friends got lost along the way like Danny Whitten, Young never wanted to take any of his time with the band for granted even after disassembling them and moving on to something new.
Because Crazy Horse is as integral to Young as The E Street Band is to Bruce Springsteen or The Heartbreakers were to Tom Petty. They were always going to be considered a backing band, but Young knew that he wouldn’t be half of what he was today if his bandmates didn’t teach him how to be a better bandleader and an even better musician by the time they went their separate ways.
