The guitarist who taught Neil Young how to play: “Every record he ever made”
Having the right feel for a song can’t be studied in a book. Anyone can spend their entire lives running scales up and down their instrument in an attempt to get their chops going, but it’s no use trying to put in that much work if you’re not able to breathe some life into it when it comes to writing songs. Although Neil Young never played a note that he wasn’t 100% from the heart, he admitted getting a lot of his greatest guitar moments watching Jimmy Reed perform.
If you were to break down Young’s style of guitar playing, though, there’s no real rulebook to where a song is supposed to go. Just listen to the solo in ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ as an example. There are pieces of notes that sound good, but no one would blame the listener if they thought a drunk suddenly found his way behind the glass and started playing what he thought a ripping guitar solo was supposed to sound like.
That kind of reckless abandon in all across Young’s work, though. Even when he’s not the main lead guitarist in the group, the way he pushes every member of Crazy Horse on Rust Never Sleeps is about making better music because of the energy you create between each other rather than whether every single note is precisely in tune.
But if Young was about organised chaos half the time, Reed was about making the guitar sound tasteful. While he may have his lineage in the blues, different pieces of his tone have been carried throughout the years through legions of imitators like Eric Clapton and modern players like Gary Clark Jr.
Part of the reason why Reed worked so well was how he used the guitar as an extension of himself. For him, no piece of the music was meant to be separated, so by singing, playing the guitar, and having the harmonica holder draped across his shoulders, he was already laying the groundwork for what Young would be doing on his own.
Though The Beatles and Bob Dylan have rubbed off a lot more on Young throughout the years, he knew that Reed’s influence had been etched onto his brain, saying, “We heard all this early R&B and great rock ‘n’ roll, and the first records that I bought were Jimmy Reed albums. I had his whole collection, every record he ever made, and that’s how I learned to play, listening to him.”
Outside of just the raw musicianship that Reed had, one of the key lessons was making every single note count whenever someone played. So whether Young was going for the throat with something heavy or just lingering on one pitch throughout ‘Cinnamon Girl’, he always had the big picture in mind when looking at what any of them added to a song.
Rock and roll is never going to lose its connection to the blues, but the genre didn’t build itself up strictly on its technique. It’s about the artist underneath, and looking at how Young carved out his musical vision, he had just as much focus on what his guitar sounded like as Reed had on those early R&B records.
