‘Walk Like A Giant’: The Neil Young epic that took his whole band by surprise
Trust an artist as committed to his own vision as Neil Young to find a way of confounding musicians he began playing with mere months after Richard Nixon took the White House. It gets even more impressive when you consider that Crazy Horse, the band that backed Young on classic albums like Rust Never Sleeps, Zuma and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, were no mere backing band.
They were a fully fledged band in their own right. One that Young collaborated with, who released their own albums and who were formed by legendary guitarist Nils Lofgren. After collaborating for the whole 1970s and working on their projects for most of the 1980s, 1990 saw the beginning of the longest continuous time of collaboration by Young and Crazy Horse.
In 2012, Young began conceptualizing the record that would become Psychedelic Pill, an album that firmly put aside the plaintive folk songwriting and blistering hard rock we know and love in favour of yet another curveball. As if the title wasn’t a dead giveaway, this would be a full-on psychedelia record, one that Young was going to throw the kitchen sink at in a way that not even his most trusted lieutenants were ready for.
Among the first songs completed for the record was the 16-minute centrepiece of the record’s second side, ‘Walk Like A Giant’. While it may sound difficult to believe that a group of men who worked on a particular song can be surprised by it, guitarist Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro talked about it to Rolling Stone Magazine. He said, “We played it one time, and the next thing we know, we’re doing overdubs. Then he played it for us. The playback just blew our minds. We had no idea we’d done something that big.”
It wasn’t just the length of the song that affected him so greatly though. This was also Neil in full-on, cantankerous gremlin hectoring at the world mode and ‘Walk Like A Giant’ is particularly seething. Even by the standards of late-period Young. An agonized howl about realizing the world you spent a lifetime fighting for will never be realized, ‘Walk Like A Giant’ was so angry even his collaborators were shocked.
Sampedro elaborated on what he thought the song was about in the same interview. He said, “I imagine it’s about Earth being destroyed by this giant, and we’re screening the planet for survivors and shit. I have all these images going through my head. It’s really crazy.” He’s not too far off. The song begins with Young talking about the personal toll of it all, saying, “Me and some of my friends / we were gonna save the world / but then the weather changed / and the white got stained / and it fell apart / and it breaks my heart.”
Over a raging backing plucked straight from the summer of love’s worst Acid trip, the heartbreak curdles into something bitter and vengeful. Young ranting, “We could see it in the distance / Getting closer every minute / Then we skipped the rails, and we started to fail / And we folded up, and it’s not enough / Think about how close we came”
Lyrically, it’s fairly on the nose, but the true, shocking despair is actually best communicated by the music. After twelve minutes of spirited chugging, the band begin to slow. Over time, the band descends into an almost doom metal style finale of a single floor tom, thudded like a hell’s own marching tattoo, as the guitars chug and feedback for six endless minutes. A chilling portrait of a very 21st-century apocalypse. One that doesn’t take us by surprise. Slow and changeable, yet one we are inescapably tied to. It’s not that we can’t escape. We won’t.
