{"id":249367,"date":"2025-10-24T20:50:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T20:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/249367\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T20:50:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T20:50:12","slug":"the-embarrassing-show-neil-young-resented-playing-for-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/249367\/","title":{"rendered":"The “embarrassing” show Neil Young resented playing for years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Neil<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Alamy)<\/p>\n

Fri 24 October 2025 19:45, UK <\/p>\n

No one in the history of rock and roll has known Neil Young<\/a> as being the kind of person to go with the flow. <\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019s not like he had to be smiling through everything he did, either.<\/p>\n

Because if you look through Young\u2019s 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\u2019s Rockin\u2019 did at least leave the fans with a few cheap laughs after sticking it to his label, it\u2019s not like everyone should have been expecting him to make After the Gold Rush 2: Rush Hour or anything like that.<\/p>\n

That said, it\u2019s not like Young\u2019s intuition made for the best song selections on every album, either. \u2018This Note\u2019s For You<\/a>\u2019 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\u2019t equipped for MTV, but anyone who had been following him for a while probably already knew that.<\/p>\n

Young\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Even in retrospect, Young\u2019s manager said that Young never forgot that secondhand embarrassment for years, saying<\/a>, \u201cIt was very highly rated, sold a lotta records, but in retrospect it was embarrassing, just a bad call. Neil went, \u2018The Tom Jones Show! What possessed you?\u2019 Neil never forgave me for that. He ripped me about it for a very, very long time. Years.\u201d Then again, it\u2019s not even about disrespecting Jones in any way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It takes a lot of time and chops to get that kind of massive voice, but while Young didn\u2019t think it would work, he was going to give the audience a performance they wouldn\u2019t soon forget. It\u2019s clear that he\u2019s not having the best time, but when listening to his guitar parts, you can tell that he\u2019s trying as hard as he can to put anything that feels like an edge into the guitar part to offset what Jones is doing.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Alamy) Fri 24 October 2025 19:45, UK No one in the history of rock…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[73139,88,216,41987],"class_list":{"0":"post-249367","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-crosby-stills-nash","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-neil-young"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}