Has Neil Young ever had a number one single?
Rock stardom is a fickle mistress. One that often alludes to the artists who want her most and drapes herself over those who want her least. Chief among the latter examples is Neil Young. The cantankerous canuck took to fame like a duck to the cockpit of a Boeing 747.
Memorably, but probably not for the right reasons. The idea of tailoring his art to anyone other than to his own liking was anathema to Young, and yet by the mid-1970s, he was one of the world’s biggest and most celebrated artists.
Perhaps for a brief period of time, this was ideal. After all, if it’s clear that the guy has a knack for finding the zeitgeist, oftentimes, it’s best to just stand back and let him cook. He was always something of an industry insider as well. His work in Buffalo Springfield got him invited by that band’s frontman, Stephen Stills, to join his follow-up band, Crosby, Stills and Nash, when Young’s initial attempts at a solo career stalled.
This was exactly the platform Young needed to get his foot in the door of rock stardom. His earlier solo albums started selling and in 1970, after splitting from CSNY, he released his first masterpiece After The Gold Rush. While this made a dent in the charts, nobody could have predicted how stratospheric its follow up would be. Harvest wasn’t just an improvement on his previous record, it wasn’t just a success, it was the biggest selling album of 1972 in the US.
For context, 1972 also saw the release of The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars and Elton John’s Honkey Chateau. Harvest has all of them beat and then some. As of 2024, it has sold 4million copies in the US alone and is still Young’s biggest-selling album worldwide. The success of the album also launched Young’s profile into the stratosphere, leading to the song that would also become Young’s biggest-selling single of all time as well.
Which Neil Young song hit number one?
The record’s lead single ‘Heart Of Gold’ hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Typically, that song also became the catalyst for Young, now one of the biggest names in music, to start desperately trying to rid himself of the huge success he’d amassed. Rather than continue on with the folk-pop of Harvest and …Gold Rush, Young immediately released a trio of thunderous hard rock albums backed by his band Crazy Horse, beginning with the live album Time Fades Away and ending with 1975’s exceptional Tonight’s The Night.
Typically, Young wasn’t exactly subtle regarding his feelings toward his commercial peak either. In the liner notes of his best-of record Decade, he wrote of ‘Heart of Gold’: “This song put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.”
The following records have since been referred to as the ‘Ditch’ trilogy and show just how much worth Young put into the idea of commercial success.
