The advice Neil Young gave to Sonic Youth: “The same thing all the time”
It would seem foolish to deny the talent and enduring influence of Neil Young. From his roots in Buffalo Springfield to the stadium-filling heights of Crazy Horse, the Canadian rocker knew how to keep things fresh and compelling. Unfortunately, like anyone of his calibre, Young has endured scepticism from a small contingent of peers who deny his status as a rock innovator.
Among the detractors was George Harrison. The former Beatle revealed his thoughts on Young in footage taken from a 1992 studio session with Bob Geldof and Chucho Merchan. The Boomtown Rats frontman praised Young only to be met by Harrison’s cutting critique. “I’m not a Neil Young fan,” Harrison interrupted before commenting on his guitar playing specifically, “I hate it. Yeah, I can’t stand it.”
Continuing, Harrison remembered an occasion when he and Eric Clapton played a concert with Young. “We did this show with him; I saw it from the other side of the stage and looked around. I looked at Eric and said, ‘What’s going on?'” he recalled. “[Eric] did the solo in the middle then he kind of looked at me like – ‘Don’t look at me, it’s not me’.”
Comparing Young’s guitar abilities to those of Eric Clapton is perhaps ill-advised, considering the latter is regarded as one of the finest lead players of all time. However, where Young’s playing lacked proficiency and refinement, he made up for it with songwriting prowess. The balladry displayed throughout After the Gold Rush and Harvest may not be respected for its instrumental complexities, but Young’s talent as a wordsmith and composer is hard to deny.
On the topic of refinement and a lack thereof, Young’s work with Crazy Horse will endure in the history books for decades to come, thanks to its pioneering nature. With his electric backing band, Young brought a heavy rock sound to counterbalance his singer-songwriter oeuvre with standout releases like 1975’s Zuma, which contained the powerful epic ‘Cortez the Killer’.
Arguably, Crazy Horse’s most crucial contribution to Neil Young’s catalogue was Rust Never Sleeps. The 1979 album is a hybrid of live and studio-recorded material bookended by ‘My My (Hey Hey)’ and ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’. The latter is a live variant of the former with the backing of Crazy Horse, credited widely as the birthplace of grunge and noise rock.
Throughout the 1980s, synth-pop prospered under the sturdy wings of A Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran, but a post-punk thread endured under the surface. Bands like Sonic Youth and Pixies initiated a return of guitar-based rock that eventually threw out bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Of course, a whole tapestry of rock ‘n’ roll history inspired this wave of popular rock music, but Neil Young is known as ‘The Godfather of Grunge’ for a reason.
The grunge and noise rock subgenres are typified by fuzzy distortion and simplistic progressions, often accentuated by punchy lead riffs. Certain groups used pedals and production techniques to give an illusion of complexity, but as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth maintains, simplicity is key.
When discussing Sonic Youth’s 1988 masterpiece Daydream Nation, which Kurt Cobain listed among his favourite albums of all time, Moore told Exit Musik that, on an individual level, the songs were simple. “I was doing very simple things even though they seemed complicated. Lee and Kim too, it’s the sum of all that which resulted in complex music,” he explained, “I don’t need to play something technical or complicated, like progressive rock.”
Instrumental virtuosity is very handy, but as Moore points out, it isn’t necessary and can sometimes make compositions unattractive and inaccessible. “When I listen to Emerson, Lake and Palmer today, I find it awful, super complicated,” Moore exemplified. “It’s entertaining, but my brain doesn’t like it.”
On a closing note, Moore recalled some words of wisdom Young once imparted. “When we toured with him, Neil Young told me ‘I play the same thing all the time,'” Moore said. This leaf could also have been taken from Mark E. Smith’s “always different, always the same” book. It seems that raw power and repetition are all you need to get by in rock and roll.
