Coke-fuelled desire: how Neil Young wrote ‘Like A Hurricane’
Desire makes for exquisite art, especially when left unfulfilled. Just ask Neil Young, who penned one of his most beloved songs after failing to win the heart of a girl he spotted across a “crowded hazy bar” on a particularly wild night in the mid-1970s.
By 1975, Neil Young was on the rebound, having split with his long-time girlfriend Carrie Snodgrass – the subject of ‘Heart of Gold’ – in 1974. Snodgrass was introduced to Young in 1971. “One day,” the actress told People magazine, “there was a note on my dressing room table that said, ‘Call Neil Young.'” She didn’t know who Young was at the time but called him anyway. A few weeks later, they were in love.
Sadly, it wasn’t to last. Hit hard by the birth of their paralysed son Zeke, Young decided to leave Snodgrass. “Quite frankly,” she said, “I think it was time for him to move on. He started hanging out with the guys, going to L.A. alone.”
That brings us to the summer of 1975, at which time, Shakey author Jimmy McDonough claims that Young was still recovering from surgery on his vocal cords and couldn’t speak. That didn’t stop him from hitting the town with his friends, however: “Neil, Jim Russell, David Cline and I went to Venturi’s in La Honda,” Young’s neighbour Taylor Phelps remembered. “We were really fucked up. Neil had this amazing intense attraction to this particular woman named Gail.”
By all accounts, Young was utterly infatuated. But it wasn’t to be. “It didn’t happen,” Phelps said, “he didn’t go home with her.” Instead, Neil and his friends returned to the ranch to relax and play music. Sat at his keyboard, Young tried to calm the fire in his blood. “[He] was completely possessed,” Phelps said, “pacing around the room, hunched over a Stringman keyboard pounding out the song.”
A few days later, Young took a rough draft of ‘Like A Hurricane’ to Crazy Horse. This consisted of two lines written on the back of a scrap of newspaper. “You are like a hurricane, there’s calm in your eye.” In his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, Young recalls writing those introductory lines during one of many coke stops: “As was our habit between bars, we had stopped at Skeggs Point Scenic lookout on Skyline Boulevard up on the mountain to do a few lines of coke,” he remembered. “I wrote ‘Hurricane’ right there in the back of that giant old car. Then when I got home, I played the chords on this old Univox Stringman mounted in an old ornate pump-organ body set up in the living room.”
Crazy Horse worked on the song for ten days before finding an arrangement they liked. “We kept playing it two guitars, bass, drums, but it wasn’t in the pocket,” guitarist Poncho Sampedro told McDonough. “Neil didn’t have enough room to solo. He didn’t like the rhythm I was playing on guitar.”
Still not satisfied, Young decided to strip everything back and record the track in the same way it had been written: with his Stringman keyboard: “I started diddling with it, just playing the chords simply, and Neil said, ‘Y’know, maybe that’s the way to do it – let’s try it”” Poncho said. “If you listen to the take on the record, there’s no beginning, no count-off, it just goes woom! They just turned on the machines when they heard us playing again, ’cause we were done for the day. Neil goes, ‘Yeah, I think that’s how it goes. Just like that.’ And that was the take. That’s the only time we ever played it that way.”
You can revisit ‘Like A Hurricane’ below.
