(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 24 October 2025 19:45, UK
No one in the history of rock and roll has known Neil Young as being the kind of person to go with the flow.
He has always followed his own set of rules, and while that made him a bit of a maverick and a joy to watch during his solo career, that didn’t exactly make him the best collaborator when it came time to work on a record with a group behind him. He knew that whatever he was doing could be dropped at any moment, but it’s not like he had to be smiling through everything he did, either.
Because if you look through Young’s discography, there are more than a few times where you can feel him spinning his wheels. He has never been one to put out records because he had to, and while Everybody’s Rockin’ did at least leave the fans with a few cheap laughs after sticking it to his label, it’s not like everyone should have been expecting him to make After the Gold Rush 2: Rush Hour or anything like that.
That said, it’s not like Young’s intuition made for the best song selections on every album, either. ‘This Note’s For You’ did at least show the funny side of him in the 1980s, but when listening to tunes from Landing on Water, it was becoming abundantly clear that the decade had swallowed him. He wasn’t equipped for MTV, but anyone who had been following him for a while probably already knew that.
Young’s track record has always been rustic in many ways, so making him play up the flashiness was only ever going to look silly. He could still grin and bear it through the greatest heights of his career, but if Graham Nash already had reservations about him joining Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Young may have been wondering what he signed up for when he saw their lineup of gigs.
He was already resentful of them playing Woodstock with all of the cameras shoved in their faces, but it was a much different story watching them tear through their setlist on the set of The Tonight Show. There was already a level of bullshit that Young could put up with, making TV appearances, but the decision to pair the group up with Tom Jones was never going to be an easy fit.
Even in retrospect, Young’s manager said that Young never forgot that secondhand embarrassment for years, saying, “It was very highly rated, sold a lotta records, but in retrospect it was embarrassing, just a bad call. Neil went, ‘The Tom Jones Show! What possessed you?’ Neil never forgave me for that. He ripped me about it for a very, very long time. Years.” Then again, it’s not even about disrespecting Jones in any way.
It takes a lot of time and chops to get that kind of massive voice, but while Young didn’t think it would work, he was going to give the audience a performance they wouldn’t soon forget. It’s clear that he’s not having the best time, but when listening to his guitar parts, you can tell that he’s trying as hard as he can to put anything that feels like an edge into the guitar part to offset what Jones is doing.
Nothing about this kind of performance was going to damage their careers by any stretch, but if there was one thing that Young had to deal with, it was a bit of a bruised ego. He had spent years trying to be on the fringes of rock and roll, and yet here he was with one of the biggest artists in the world and suddenly being expected to play the teenybopper role.
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