The heartbreaking moment Neil Young fired his closest collaborator: “He just couldn’t cut it”
Neil Young has garnered a reputation for being an uncompromising and, at times, cantankerous artist whose dogged pursuit of authenticity came before any room for sentimentality. If you found him at a Hollywood party of 1970s excess, you’re more likely to see him in the corner murmuring about a new tuning he just discovered than you would in the kitchen splitting lines with Elton John.
In many ways, it’s made him one of the true paradoxical stars of the era. Albeit delivered in a softer tone, he sort of epitomised the spirit of true rock and roll in those days, but he has since pushed on with a level of artistic consistency that his more substance-plagued contemporaries could only have dreamed of.
But while there are plenty of anecdotes hinting Young cared more about the music than any individual, somewhere deep beneath his furrowed brow existed a true empath. I mean, of course, he is; you can’t write ‘Old Man’ without some sort of emotional availability.
But in the 1970s, his artistic endeavours came face to face with his moral consciousness. Danny Whitten endeared himself to Young musically and emotionally during his years contributing to Young’s Crazy Horse band and, therefore, remained a name firmly on the lips of Young when it came to drafting up any future band lineups.
Come the autumn of ‘72, Young is streamlining his setup for the tour of his seminal record Harvest, and while The Stray Gators make up most of the line-up, there was a spot available to be filled by his good friend Whitten. Whitten, at that point, had been in deep waters with a heroin battle, and so Young saw this opportunity as a lifeline for Whitten, who had to promise the Canadian singer that he was clean before arriving at the studio. Sadly, when Whitten arrived at a party of musicians and technicians all ready to get to work, Young quickly realised the promise had been unfulfilled.
“We were rehearsing with him, and he just couldn’t cut it,” he told Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe in 1975. “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.’”
It was a painful decision for Young, who gave Whitten $50 and a plane ticket to LA in the hope that it would get him where he needed to go to clean himself up. In a sad twist of fate, that $50 bill brought Whitten’s tragic life to an end.
“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 from LA and told me he’d OD’d. 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.”
Such was the music industry at that time that the thought of cancelling the string of upcoming shows wasn’t a possibility for Young or his team. While the darkness that haunts a large number of Young’s songs is appealing, the very real sense of conflict that Young felt between morality and art simply had no place on stage in those early shows.
