(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 21 March 2026 8:53, UK
He’s one of the most prolific and respected songwriters of all time, but Neil Young does have the odd skeleton in his musical closet.
Having provided over one thousand songs over a six-decade-long career, Young’s discography is packed to the rafters and as diverse as any in modern music. While it contains some of the defining anthems of countless generations, it also has a series of missteps, too. He’s always striving for something new, pioneering folk harmonies in the 1960s before becoming the Godfather of Grunge in the very next decade.
This artistic focus on ‘the next thing’ has meant that he usually avoids covers, repeated ideas, or any truly tangible threads of inspiration from a notable source. At the outset of his career, this move set him apart.
For a while, in the 1960s especially, artists were often expected to cover the work of foundational musicians who had come before them. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones were all happy to add a host of cover songs to their albums in a bid to help boost the track numbers and help them to pump out full-length records.
It also gave them a chance to pay tribute to the heroes who had come before them. Rock ‘n’ roll, after all, was still in its infancy, so this swapshop of ideas and songs helped to inject it with a certain degree of community and engagement – vital to the formation of the ‘movement’ as a whole. But, for Young, he usually reserved covers for special occasions.
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Young has covered a whole host of artists, including Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and more. However, there was one artist whom he accidentally covered when composing one of his original songs, ‘Ambulance Blues’. On that track, Young admitted to ripping off folk guitar icon Bert Jansch by copying his opening melody.
Taken from Young’s legendary album On The Beach, ‘Ambulance Blues’ is said to have many inspirations, including an apparent bad review, a 1945 movie titled All Along the Navajo Trail and the overriding feeling of aligning the trauma of the past with the possibility of the future.
But did Neil Young copy his defining anthem?
For many, the nine-minute track that can sometimes feel like an internal diatribe put to music can be rightly considered one of Young’s greatest works. It exemplifies his anti-commercial approach and searing ability to capture emotion in amber. In short, it feels entirely ‘Young’. However, the delicate opening line was not only inspired by Jansch but stolen from him completely.
As part of Shakey, Young said of the usage of Jansch: “I always feel bad I stole that melody from Bert Jansch. F–k. You ever heard that song ‘The Needle of Death’? I loved that melody. I didn’t realise ‘Ambulance Blues’ starts exactly the same. I knew that it sounded like something that he did, but when I went back and heard that record again, I realised that I copped his thing… I felt really bad about that.”
‘Needle of Death’, written by the Scottish folk artist and released in 1965 on his self-titled debut LP,is often considered his finest work. A deeply personal look at the troubling amount of heroin addictions that were infiltrating the country at the time, Jansch attached the song’s creation to the death of his friend Buck Polly and the speed with which heroin could take over, he said of the loss.
“We [Jansch and Polly] went up to Goodge Street,” he said, “a pub there called Finch’s. Buck scored from a dealer. And the next day, I’d heard he’d died.” It was a shocking tragedy, but not an unfamiliar one for the period.
Young had taken on a similar storyline for his song ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’ in 1972, two years before writing ‘Ambulance Blues’. That track would be written about his former Crazy Horse collaborator Danny Whitten, who also succumbed to heroin use.
Jansch was a giant influence on Young, who claimed he was a pivotal guitarist in the industry. “Bert Jansch is on the same level as Jimi Hendrix,” shared Young in 1992. “That first record of his is epic. It came from England, and I was especially taken by ‘The Needle of Death,’ such a beautiful and angry song. That guy was so good.”
He added, “And years later, on On the Beach, I wrote the melody of ‘Ambulance Blues’ by styling the guitar part completely on ‘Needle of Death’. I wasn’t even aware of it, and someone else drew my attention to it.”
Perhaps in the ultimate tip of the hat from Young to Jansch, the former would cover ‘Needle of Death’ for his 2014 album A Letter Home, in the ultimate homage to both the song and the man behind it.
