When Neil Young became terrified by his own work: “I gotta get outta here”
Neil Young was never one to dwell on his material for too long. By the time he put out one classic record in the 1970s, he was already moving on to the next phase of his career and trying his best to keep up with where his muse was taking him half the time. When you’re playing for that long, things can stack up, and when working with Young, Eddie Vedder recalled the rock legend getting frightened at his own body of work.
If you were to look at anyone who wants to get into Neil Young for the first time, it’s already demanding looking at the man’s studio output. Ever since his solo debut in 1969, he has rarely looked back throughout his career. There was always a sweet spot in the 1970s when he was working with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but the era following Rust Never Sleeps showed him going in every direction under the sun.
While Young was known for singing what was on his mind, he did also find time to make songs that shouldn’t be listened to by anyone, like the 1970s equivalent of a shitpost to his record company on Everybody’s Rockin’. Even if he tried sonic outfits that he had no business making, like Trans and Landing on Waters, you still have to respect the hustle of a man willing to make something new rather than rehash the same songs over again.
Once acts like Pearl Jam started getting big, though, Young was heralded as the wise older uncle of the grunge movement. He always played by his own rules and didn’t give a damn about what the industry said, so he fit right in amongst the Seattle scene when he came out with songs like ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’.
When inducting Young into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Vedder remembered Young getting too scared to go back and listen to everything, saying, “I was talking with a friend of Neil’s, Joel Burnstein, and he was cataloguing Neil’s tapes…There were the 40 best versions of ‘Tonight’s the Night’ and 65 best versions of ‘Cortez the Killer’. Neil and I were standing in this room, and I thought he was going to take one out and play it. And he just looks and goes, ‘I gotta get outta here’. I saw a man overwhelmed by his body of work.”
Granted, when you’ve recorded that many classics, it can be a little bit intimidating to revisit all of those moments in your life. Considering how frail Young sounded when working on an album like Tonight’s the Night, chances are those tapes may open up some bad memories he might not want to deal with again.
Maybe that’s the whole reason Young has been so prolific throughout his career. Compared to other artists who see the studio as a stop-gap in between touring, Young’s catalogue seems to be like individual time capsules for where he was at that moment, whether that was working with Pearl Jam on Mirror Ball or all the way back to him getting the most out of Crazy Horse on Rust Never Sleeps.
When you have that kind of mindset, it’s almost necessary to keep moving. Because if you were to try to look back through everything you’ve done throughout your career, you would probably want to go a little insane after a while.