The classic Neil Young album that pissed off CSN: “It bothered them”
From his stand-out set at Woodstock back in 1969 to his bizarre entries into both electronica and rockabilly during the 1980s, there isn’t a lot that Neil Young hasn’t done during his extensive and illustrious career in the music industry. At times, though, that multifaceted approach came at a cost.
Artists, throughout music history, have tended to do best when they’ve stayed in their own lane, playing to their specific strengths and building their own specific niche within the musical realm. While that approach might work well for commercial success, though, it can hardly satisfy the unwavering artistic appetite of somebody like Neil Young, who has always yearned to explore a vast range of artistic avenues within his work, refusing to stay in one place for too long.
With that constantly moving, changing sound, Young has been consistently busy over the past 50 or so years. The songwriter certainly hit the ground running, emerging alongside folk-rock heroes Buffalo Springfield in 1966, and from those roots embarking upon an expansive solo career alongside recording with both Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills, and Nash – often all at the same time.
At one particularly manic point during the late 1960s, in fact, Young left Buffalo Springfield, performed at Woodstock, released his inaugural solo record along with his first collaboration with Crazy Horse, in addition to joining the ranks of CSN. Seemingly, though, Young’s tireless operations didn’t result in any exhaustion or creative fatigue. They did, however, succeed in thoroughly annoying some of his collaborators.
In fairness to Young, the timeline of Crosby, Stills, and Nash is almost as noteworthy for its constant arguments as for its musical material; the songwriters never needed much of a reason to gripe with each other. At the same time, though, those three songwriters were largely dedicated to their supergroup stylings, whereas CSN was merely one of the many pies that Young had his musical fingers in.
“I was definitely doing a lot of multitasking,” Young admitted to Guitar World in 2009. “At one point I was recording with Crazy Horse in the mornings at Sunset Sound, cutting stuff like ‘I Believe In You’, ‘Oh Lonesome Me’, the original ‘Helpless’, ‘Wonderin’’, ‘Birds’, all kinds of things, and then in the afternoons I’d go play with CSN.” Unsurprisingly, his fellow songwriters weren’t too pleased with that “multitasking”.
As Young recalled, “The only thing I really remember about that is that it bothered them that I was doing both things.” Still, that didn’t stop Young from making a litany of core contributions to CSN around that time.
Given the tracks that the songwriter remembered cutting, his memories of multitasking are dated to around 1970, and his third solo effort, After the Gold Rush, which arrived around the same time as CSN’s masterpiece album Déjà Vu.
Perhaps the only thing that prevented Young from being booted out of the supergroup, then, was the fact that no matter how many extracurricular activities he seemed to embrace, his songwriting contributions to the band were still utterly incredible.
