The musician Neil Young said was “the key” to Crazy Horse
Whenever Crazy Horse is on the title of a Neil Young record, you know the singer-songwriter is heading somewhere near the ditch.
We say “near”, as his famed ‘Ditch Trilogy’ didn’t in fact feature the band, but much of Young’s most narked and raucous material all boast Crazy Horse providing essential support whenever he roped them into the studio. They’re there scoring the rowdy celebration of punk rock on 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, keenly diving into the world of alternative rock for 1990’s Ragged Glory, or embracing a little lysergia for 2012’s Psychedelic Pill. Whenever Young wants to make an impression, Crazy Horse are on speed dial.
Counting as many as 17 albums together, as well as plenty of their own, Crazy Horse still stands as one of the relics of the 1960s West Coast, still going strong with respective drummer and bassist Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot riding the band for over 55 years.
It’s a legacy and longevity Young once reached into when discussing some of the fallen comrades in the Crazy Horse camp, reaching back to the time before his superstardom when he could already boast one of the finest guitar interplays of his entire career.
“That rhythm, when you listen to ‘Cowgirl In the Sand’, he keeps changing,” Young revealed to Uncut in 2004, reflecting on the guitar skills of Danny Whitten. “Billy and Ralph will get into a groove, and everything will be going along, and all of a sudden Danny’ll start doing something else. He just led those guys from one groove to another, all within the same groove. So when I played those long guitar solos, it seemed like they weren’t all that long, that I was making all these changes, when in reality what was changing was not one thing but the whole band.”
“Danny was the key,” Young asserted. “A really great second guitar player, the perfect counterpoint to everything else that was happening.”
Written during a nasty bout of flu at home in California’s Topanga, ‘Cowgirl In the Sand’s loose and explorative jam reflects the fever Young was suffering, lyrically pouring his zonked connection to reality with the surrealist lyrical vignette of a promiscuous woman wandering the thematic terrain of anything between the dark side of the era’s sexual politics to his diffidence with fame. Whatever the case, it’s a highlight of 1968’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere that owes plenty to Whitten’s powerful grasp of rhythmic soul.
It’s the intuition that gifted Whitten with that secret weapon to his guitar chops. Able to hold such a precarious ten minutes with his gritty fretwork, ‘Cowgirl In the Sand’ is elevated above its jam beginnings to spike its soulful centre, an alchemic fusion with Young’s lead solo that managed to pull the strings on the piece’s direction.
Such a guitar dance wasn’t to last, however. Later succumbing to a fatal heroin overdose, Young was so shaken by Whitten’s untimely death, he poured his grief into the dark and raw Tonight’s the Night, the third and final entry to his ‘Ditch Trilogy’ that Whitten, and thus Crazy Horse, lent a spiritual hand in shaping.
