The best acoustic guitarist of all time, according to Neil Young: “Like Jimi Hendrix on electric”
While he may not have stood as the West Coast’s leading figure in the late 1960s’ folk rock peak, Neil Young would ultimately endure as the era’s most vital artist. Departing his native Canada for California during the emerging countercultural bloom nearing its musical and political explosion, Young was an important but less visible character among his contemporaries of the Woodstock generation, David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Simon & Garfunkel all folk rock’s biggest names by the decade’s turbulent end.
It was in the 1970s that Yong’s artistic vitality began to truly shine. Starting strong with 1970’s double punch of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu and his seminal After the Gold Rush, the decade would be scored by a ceaseless pursuit of creative intuition, winding across country, orchestral arrangements, bleak lo-fi confessionals, and a full-throated embrace of punk on 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. Young already had amassed an essential body of work that surpassed anything from his former CSN members.
Yet, despite further genre-hopping into rockabilly and even synthpop, Young was always a creature of folk and the movement’s rich tradition of piercingly personal lyricism and solemn songcraft. Speaking to the crowd at a 2014 show in New York’s Carnegie Hall—the site of his 1970 lauded live album—Young candidly revealed the folk artist that inspired him most deeply.
“When I was tripping around and sleeping on people’s floors, this girl that I knew, her name was Vicky Taylor, she was a folk singer, she lived on Avenue Road in one of those Victorian [places],” Young reminisced. “I was sleeping on the floor in front of the fireplace. Then I was sleeping there one night and put on this LP by Bert Jansch”.
He added: “He was like one of the greatest acoustic guitar players that ever lived, probably like Jimi Hendrix on electric guitar. Everything that he played was perfect, notes were going here and there, everything just seamlessly easy, beautiful like you could just drift away listening to it. But his words were in another world, he opened up doors for everybody to sing about things”.
Inspiring everybody from Paul Simon, Johnny Marr and Jimmy Page—Led Zeppelin’s riff lifts of ‘Black Water Side’ and ‘The Wagoner’s Lad’ leading to legal suits years later—the Scottish folk revival giant left an indelible legacy with his string of acclaimed solo efforts and work with folk rock band Pentangle.
Introverted and guarded on stage, Jansch still wowed his peers with his natural gift for blues-based yet creatively dextrous playing style, his reputation for a period saw sales along Charing Cross Road’s many folk stores selling as much as Dylan in his solo peak. Reportedly, when asked what motivated his playing, he pithily would reply, “I’m writing songs for myself”.
Young would stand as a significant chapter toward the end of Jansch’s life, touring with each other a year before his death in October 2011 at the age of 67. Ever the fan, Young covered Jansch’s ‘Needle of Death’ on his 2014 covers album A Letter Home.
