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November 8th, 2026 · 9:00pm GMT
Being in a band hasn’t really been something that has really fit Neil Young at any point throughout his career.
Even though he has had some of the best musicians a guy could ask for playing on all of his records he seems to exist in the Bob Dylan camp of musicians where some of his greatest works happen when he’s by himself and getting to call his own shots. That being said, there’s never a point where he was going to turn his back on the kind of musicians that he knew he could trust.
Because when you look at Young’s track record, the kind of music that he made with Crazy Horse is the kind of thing that he couldn’t have done on his own. Some of the biggest bands of his career were the ones that pushed him whenever they had the chance, and on Rust Never Sleeps, you can hear him getting physically driven to give 110% while feeding off of the rest of the band all the time.
Each song was a chance to show the bandmates next to him what he was made of, but sometimes the biggest losses are the ones that come from within the group. Danny Whitten already had his fair share of problems with substance abuse, but when you look at the kind of music that Young was making after he passed on, you could tell that he had put a lot into making sure that his band would even be able to survive making music without one of their brothers.
But aside from his solo career, we can’t really tell the full story of ‘Uncle Neil’ without mentioning Crosby, Stills and Nash. As much as he had a touch-and-go relationship with the group most of the time, there’s no doubt that they turned him into a better musician, and songs like ‘Ohio’ wouldn’t have been half as good as they were without those soaring harmonies from David Crosby and Graham Nash.
The reason that Young existed in the band at all, though, was because of Stephen Stills. They had already been musical brothers thanks to working in Buffalo Springfield together, and since he was brought in to bring more of an edge to all of their songs, Young was always going to have a partner in crime whenever the band kicked off a tune and he could play with Stills on any of his tunes.
He didn’t want to stay long, and there were more than a few times where he left his band hanging for no good reason, but throughout every step of his career, Young felt that Stills was the one person that he could never replace, saying, “A great friendship rose up between Steve Stills and me that goes on to this day. Stephen is a genius. Like any genius, he is sometimes misunderstood, and I misunderstood him many times when we were young. When I left CSNY to do my own thing, I missed him. He is my brother. We went through so much and learned from each other along the way, discovering our music and life at the same time.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Which explains why even in the strange period where the band split up into two separate duos, Young was still the one that was linking up with Stills more often than not. There was an unspoken bond between them half the time, and it wouldn’t be out of the question for Young to call him up out of the blue if he thought that one of his songs needed a guitar line that Stills could absolutely destroy.
Young might not be the easiest person to get along with in a band half the time, and even he would probably admit that, but his relationship with Stills exists in a totally different space. So many people can be best friends for years at a time only to have everything blow up, but Young and Stills are the kind of friends that can be together for weeks on end only to disappear for years at a time and come back as if nothing happened.
