The Damage Done: The death of Danny Whitten 50 years later
Half a decade after it happened, Neil Young was still thinking about the death of Danny Whitten. While writing the liner notes for his first compilation, 1977’s Decade, Young alluded to his former friend and guitar player, plus the untold number of friends and collaborators who came and went over the years. “I am not a preacher, but drugs killed a lot of great men.”
Just a few years before, Young and Whitten were as close as two collaborators could be. Along with his childhood friends and fellow Crazy Horse bandmates Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, Whitten was a struggling San Francisco musician before the trio hooked up with Young. After departing from Buffalo Springfield and recording one folk-focused album, Young needed the solid edge that Whitten provided.
“Danny Whitten was the focal point of Crazy Horse, but he was also the fault line that ran through it,” Young claimed. “Like many a troubled genius, the greatness of his art was partly a product of his own tragic life.”
Whitten’s contributions to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere were extensive: shared lead guitar with Young, along with co-lead vocals on songs like ‘Cinnamon Girl’ and ‘Everbody Knows This Is Nowhere’. Around that time, however, Whitten’s personal health problems lead him to seek solace in drugs, quickly turning to the depths of heroin.
As his addiction worsened, his connection with Young became frayed. Whitten and the rest of Crazy Horse were dismissed by Young during the sessions for After the Gold Rush, leading Young to write ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’ with direct reference to Whitten’s decline. Still, Young attempted to get Whitten back on track, even after his Talbot and Molina decided that they wanted to work with other guitarists in Crazy Horse.
Young called Whitten to perform as a rhythm guitarist with his new touring group, The Stray Gators. However, Whitten’s inability to follow the new material, coupled with his ongoing struggles with heroin, caused Young to dismiss him from the band. Young gave Whitten a plane ticket to Los Angeles and just enough money to get him there, but the next day, Young received a devastating message.
“We were rehearsing with him and he just couldn’t cut it,” Young observed. “He couldn’t remember anything. He was too out of it. Too far gone. I had to tell him to go back to LA ‘It’s not happening, man. You’re not together enough.’ He just said, ‘I’ve got nowhere else to go, man. How am I gonna tell my friends?’ And he split. That night the coroner called me and told me he’d died. That blew my mind. Fucking blew my mind. I loved Danny. I felt responsible. And from there, I had to go right out on this huge tour of huge arenas. I was very nervous and … insecure.”
As Young and the Stray Gators attempted to reckon with Whitten’s death, the performances that came from the tour were erratic and emotionally fraught. The subsequent live album, Time Fades Away, was a critical and commercial failure. Still, Young seemed bound and determined to embrace the darkness around him. Largely inspired by Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, who also died of a drug overdose around the same time, Young crafted his most uncompromising album to date, Tonight’s the Night.
“Tonight’s The Night is like an OD letter. The whole thing is about life, dope and death,” Young explained. “When we [Nils Lofgren, guitars and piano, Talbot, Molina and Young] played that music we were all thinking of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, two close members of our unit lost to junk overdoses. The Tonight’s The Night sessions were the first time what was left of Crazy Horse had gotten together since Danny died. It was up to us to get the strength together among us to fill the hole he left.”
Observant fans could feel Whitten’s presence in nearly all of Young’s work, although the allusions were usually coded in song. Occasionally, there were direct mentions of Whitten, like in the liner notes to Tonight’s the Night. Written in Dutch, the translated notes reveal the fragile state of mind that Whitten’s death put Young in.
“The death of Neil’s discovery and friend, Danny Whitten seems to have affected him deeply,” the note reads. “Since ‘The Needle & the Damage Done’ most of Neil’s songs about Danny’s death reflect his guilt complex. Neil seemed to fall back into an even deeper depression. Then he began drinking, became sentimental and generally intolerable for anyone who had anything to do with him. It’s said that those around him treated him with great caution for fear of provoking him, causing him to retreat and become a recluse. During this evening at the Rainbow, Neil makes particular reference to Miami Beach where he was safe from external influences and where a highly emotional and introverted process went its course.”
Whitten’s final contribution appeared on Tonight’s the Night: ‘Come On Baby Lets Go Downtown’. Replicating the co-lead vocal and co-lead guitar style that he and Young could have perfected had they stuck together, the song constitutes one final declaration of the breadth of Whitten’s creative talents. “He left us with a slice of magic in this album,” Young wrote, “But also with the thought that he could have given us so much more had he given himself a chance to.”
