The rock bands Neil Young never truly belonged in: “It’s just not right”
Neil Young didn’t see the point in him trying to make the same kind of song every single time he made a new record.
He wanted the chance to stretch out every single time that he went into the studio, and the last thing he wanted to do was spend his time trying to make the most cliched version of what his music was supposed to be. The audience thrived on hearing something that they had never heard before, and while Young liked the idea of toying with his audience, he also knew when some songs weren’t really meant to be played by his hands whenever he put on a concert.
Because when looking at his relationship with his band, Crazy Horse was like a living, breathing entity when they played together. There were so many chances for him to take his music in a different direction whenever they were behind him, and it wasn’t out of the question for him to start working on something completely new and seeing what happened with it whenever he fed off of his bandmates.
But a lot of his jamming was a different animal than the other jam bands out at the time. He didn’t aim to be a member of the Grateful Dead or anything like that, so the most that he could hope for was to make the kinds of tunes that felt like vehicles for him to do whatever he wanted. No one knew what he would get up to when he stretched out his songs, and that was half the fun of it whenever he performed.
Then again, that wasn’t what was going on in rock and roll at the time. There were still people that were trying their hand at making more expansive music, but there were a lot more bands that were used to writing everything out. Prog rock had turned music into high art, and Young could see the same thing happening with some of the massive stadium-rock bands that he loved.
Bands like Led Zeppelin were making beautiful music at the time, but when looking at the way that they approached their shows by the late 1970s, the whole thing almost seemed choreographed down to the gesture. Page would always have his moments where he would look like a wizard, and while it never stopped being exciting for the crowd, Young vowed never to make that kind of mistake when performing.
He wanted the chance to make music that had a much more vicious assault to it, and he wasn’t going to go down the route that Zeppelin and The Allman Brothers Band found themselves in, saying, “My music is basically subtle … that’s why I’ve gone back to just playin’ clubs like the Roxy. It makes me feel like I’m still a musician and not in a circus. The Allmans, Led Zeppelin, all those groups, they’re great for those big events, y’know. But you take a guy like me and put me in those circumstances, it’s just not right. I just don’t belong there.”
And it’s not like Young doesn’t have a small point. There needs to be some structure for people to understand what those stadium shows are all about, and a lot of the biggest songs that he wrote deserved to be played in a tight-knit room as opposed to the kind of venue that should have held one of his favourite hockey matches from around that same time.
The whole point was to get as little separation between him and the audience as possible, and while Young wanted to have the chance to put the rock legend part of himself on the shelf for a little while when playing intimate gigs. Zeppelin sounds like a pretty good gig to have, but it was also more than the massive paychecks that kept Young interested in going back to his guitar every night.
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