How did Neil Young secure his first top 40 hit?
Following his foundational tenure with Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash in various combinations over the late 1960s, Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young returned to a more permanent solo career with his spellbinding third solo album, After the Gold Rush, in 1970. This early masterpiece would kick off the Godfather of Grunge’s most prolific and indisputably vital decade.
Although Young’s career took off in the 1970s, he had encountered notable success alongside Bruce Palmer, Stephen Stills, Richie Furay, and Dewey Martin in Buffalo Springfield as early as 1965. In 1966, the band received attention for their eponymous debut album and Stills’ enduring single, ‘For What It’s Worth’.
‘For What It’s Worth’ shot to number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 and became Buffalo Springfield’s signature anthem. Elsewhere in the band’s early output was Young’s first top 40 hit. ‘Flying on the Ground Is Wrong’, one of Young’s contributions, was originally sung by Furay on the debut album, but it was a 1967 cover single by The Guess Who? that breached the top 40.
The Canadian songwriter wrote ‘Flying on the Ground Is Wrong’ in the mid-1960s, just after moving into a flat in Los Angeles at the Commodore Gardens. At the time, Young suffered from epileptic seizures and lived hand-to-mouth from a refrigerator stocked with Twinkies and Coca-Cola.
“I put a blue lightbulb in the fridge,” Young recalled in his 2012 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream. “It was an old fridge. I don’t know what I ever put in it. Must have been Cokes and Twinkies. I wasn’t into health food yet, that’s for sure.”
Continuing, Young revealed that several Buffalo Springfield tracks were spawned from this humble environment. “I wrote a lot of songs there for the Springfield, and it was an exciting time for me. ‘Flying on the Ground,’ ‘Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It,’ and ‘Burned’ were among the songs I wrote there. I was also dealing with my newly discovered seizure disorder, and come to think of it, I’m sure the food I was eating was not helping.”
Discussing his first top 40 hit, Young once revealed that ‘Flying on the Ground is Wrong’ was about drugs. “This song is about dope,” he explained on Live at the Cellar Door in 1970. “It’s mostly about grass. It’s about what happens when you start getting high, and you find out that people you thought you knew, you don’t anymore because they don’t get high, and you do.”
Listen to ‘Flying on the Ground is Wrong’ as recorded by Buffalo Springfield and The Guess Who? below.
