The 1968 song Neil Young will always regret: “It sounds overdone”
Although Neil Young now boasts a vast and influential discography, there was a time when he was still finding his footing. After the dissolution of Buffalo Springfield, a band that brought him significant success and helped define the countercultural era, Young ventured into a solo career. Like many artists navigating a major transition, this period was marked by its fair share of growing pains.
That sense of uncertainty is often a crucial part of any artist’s evolution. For Young, those early missteps weren’t failures so much as necessary experiments, helping him strip back what didn’t work and double down on the elements that would later define his sound.
In hindsight, these formative recordings offer a rare glimpse into an artist in transition. They may lack the cohesion and confidence of his later work, but they carry the rawness and curiosity that ultimately laid the foundation for the distinctive voice he would soon refine with Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
It wasn’t until Neil Young’s second solo album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, his first with Crazy Horse, that he truly found his signature sound. While his 1968 self-titled debut includes fan favourites such as ‘The Loner and ‘Sugar Mountain’, Young himself considers the album a mixed effort. In fact, he once described a verse from ‘Sugar Mountain’ as “one of the lamest verses I ever wrote“.
To be fair to Young, this frank sense of realism about what worked and what didn’t on the album led to the musician refining aspects and producing his widely influential second album, the first-ever alternative rock moment. Yet, given that he moved on so quickly from his debut and then became one of the most prolific artists of all time, fast-following up masterpieces with another just a handful of years later, he would look back on another moment on his debut with more disdain than ‘Sugar Mountain’.
The track Young referred to is ‘The Last Trip to Tulsa’, the often overlooked closer to his debut album. Stretching over nine minutes and featuring only Young with his acoustic guitar, it remains an oddity in his catalogue. Written as a weed-fueled stream-of-consciousness narrative, Young intended the song to showcase his humorous side. However, as he later admitted, the humour largely went unnoticed—both by listeners at the time and in retrospect.
Ultimately, ‘The Last Trip to Tulsa’ fell short of its comedic aspirations, highlighting that Young’s true strength has always been in addressing more serious, poignant themes.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1970, Young revealed why he hated ‘The Last Trip to Tulsa’ and questioned why fans did, providing a prime example of how the composer and listener often see songs in very different lights.
The Canadian legend expressed: “After the album came out, that’s the one I really didn’t like, you know, and I still don’t, but a lot of people really dug that better than anything else on that whole album. See, it’s strange. Just because it doesn’t happen to be my favourite part, and I know a lot of people really didn’t like it, you know, and I can dig why. Because it sounds overdone.”
While ‘The Last Trip to Tulsa’ may have felt overwrought and failed to land its intended humour, it’s far from Neil Young’s worst effort. Like much of his early work, it possesses redeeming qualities, including its evocative musicality and the vivid imagery of the titular location. Interestingly, Young seemed to revisit the song with a renewed perspective, reimagining it with a full electric band in 1973 and releasing it as the B-side to ‘Time Fades Away.’
However, considering the personal and creative struggles he faced during that tumultuous period, including the loss of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and the frustrations of a challenging tour, it’s hard not to view this reinterpretation as a possible act of creative grasping amidst the chaos.
