“It was such a powerful record”: Neil Young on why ‘Ordinary People’ was too big to release
Part of the beauty of Neil Young is his lack of shits to give about whatever people think of his music. He follows no one else but the muse, and he would go against his own bandmates if they didn’t see things the same way he did most of the time. He did understand restraint, though, and he realised that if he was going to spring this musical monster on the world, it had to be done at the right time.
If you told Young about that kind of restraint early on in his career, he’d probably laugh in your face and make a nine-minute classic out of spite. He was the ultimate contradiction of being both beautifully tender and absolutely savage during the early 1970s, and that’s half the reason why so many people loved him. They could latch on to ‘Heart of Gold’, but anyone aching for something heavy could jam along to ‘Cinnamon Girl’.
When Young reached the 1980s, though, he started to learn that he wasn’t as in touch as he used to be. While he never claimed to chase the charts in the same way that many other artists do, ‘The Godfather of Grunge’ could hardly find a foothold throughout the age of MTV, either making strange genre experiments like Trans, trying his best to do what the label wanted on Landing on Water, or even making one of the most lacklustre reunions with Crosby, Stills, and Nash on American Dream.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, ‘Ordinary People’ was slowly festering in the background. Even though the 1980s were known as the age of excess, this tune showed Young’s heart was always in its right place, tending to sing about the harsh realities of the man on the street rather than catering to the kind of music the yuppies wanted to hear.
Everything was in place for Young to have another classic on his hands, but the only problem was it was nearly 20 minutes long. He was never that focused on getting any radio airplay for the single, but when talking about the song in relation to albums like Life or This Note’s For You, there was no way Young was going to be able to make an album statement with something that long.
Even though the record eventually saw the light of day in part of Young’s Chrome Dreams series, he said that the song length, coupled with the addition of horns, would have set off too many fans back in the day, saying, “People may have been distracted 20 years ago with the fact that I was doing a song with horns. Some people were upset with me. So I didn’t want to have to fight that battle and release the song. It was such a powerful record that it overtook everything that I put it with.”
While the tune still has that loose jamming most would come to expect out of something this long, it never feels like Young is fumbling around for a melody, either. The best jams always feel like they are being created by some unknown force, and by the time Young takes off, there’s most likely some celestial spirit that inhabits his body for those few seconds before he brings everything back down to Earth.
‘Ordinary People’ may still seem like a relic from Young’s 1980s period, but it seems like a song that exists in the same space that Bob Dylan’s ‘Murder Most Foul’ does. There might be other quality tunes written around the same time, but compared to everything else, this is more of a musical experience than a song.
