“We screwed up”: the CSNY song Neil Young called an accident
When discussing the greatest guitarists in history, it’s understandable why Neil Young is rarely mentioned. Young is—indisputably—an incredible musician in a holistic sense, his guitar playing included. However, that’s not the only thing he became celebrated for, with the instrument appearing merely as a means to an end to creating great, longstanding art.
From the beginning, those more intricately fixated on the details of Young’s approach and craft have been interested in the different facets of his artistry beyond the beauty of his sounds and lyrics. Guitar playing, to Young, seemed to flow as part of a mindset, similarly to acts like Eddie Van Halen. Of course, the two exist as distinct opposites in music, but both seemed to view the guitar as part of a whole.
While it’s unclear whether this was actually the case with Young, his modesty as a qualified guitar player points to a different creative mentality where everything works in tandem, with riffs, progressions, and licks servicing the composition in a broader sense, where necessary by any means possible. Young, for the most part, acts in the studio on feeling, and his instrumentation was no exception.
After all, many of Young’s best records see him letting emotions direct the way, with varying personal experiences, memories, and events infiltrating all corners of his work like an open diary. This is also why he regarded Tonight’s the Night as his best-ever record; it allowed him to be vulnerable in ways he never had before while working to enhance art to a new, refreshing level.
In CSNY, Young often toyed with different ideas with the other members before revelling in what stuck. Sometimes, this approach would work more seamlessly in certain scenarios, with Young coming up with ideas without any real intention, more as a means to explore based on spontaneity and instinct than having a preconceived plan about what he wanted to do with a particular song.
This was the case with ‘Woodstock’, where Young played the lead riff throughout. According to the musician, this instrumental addition was entirely accidental and only occurred because he “started before everybody else”. While discussing the track with Howard Stern, Young also admitted that the final version wasn’t what he had expected and that Stephen Stills’ original vocals were better than the recording that went out.
At the same time, he mentioned that their major pitfall was that they “tried”, which took away some of the magic of authentic art. “[The ‘Woodstock’ riff] was an accident,” he said, “Because I started before everybody else. […] Stills’ original vocal was amazing. We were just hung up on making everything perfect, so we all thought we had to do it again, but we didn’t. When I heard the original vocal again I thought, ‘We screwed up’. We tried. Big bummer. Never should have done that.”
This was always a major downfall in Young’s world. Trying too hard without doing enough almost always detrimentally affects the sound, which is where he felt ‘Woodstock’ was let down. His guitar part, however, came entirely organically, which ultimately ensured the song gained as much magical traction as it did, even if the vocals weren’t as good as their first performances.
