Lessons from the Master: The classic Neil Young song Bob Dylan was never impressed with
Neil Young never really writes songs thinking about the critics. He can only write about what’s in his heart, and sometimes his best records come out of being able to spend hours in the studio before he comes out with something that the entire world can relate to. Then again, Young did care about the respect of his peers, and he wasn’t exactly getting a pat on the back from Bob Dylan.
At the same time, are we sure that Dylan wasn’t a little bit pissed off with Young in the first place? Here was one of the greatest songwriters of his generation responsible for songs like ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, and here he has to deal with another folksy songwriter from Canada who seemed to have taken his nasal whine to the top of the charts.
Dylan may have had to deal with copycats all the time, but Young was still doing his own thing for the most part. He may have had a bit too much of a Dylan fixation, as evidenced by songs like ‘Heart of Gold’, but he was more motivated by everything he could get his hands on, eventually becoming the ‘Godfather of Grunge’ by blowing up his music to massive proportions live.
When he wanted to be vulnerable, Young couldn’t be topped in his field. Working on albums like Tonight’s the Night, Young made the kind of raw experience that no other band could touch, as he cried out in pain after losing some of his best friends to drugs. Then again, any 1970s songwriter wasn’t going to spend just one album talking about their history of narcotics.
Going into the recording of the album Zuma, Young put together the song ‘Hitchhiker’ about the same kind of problems he was having with drugs, which was ultimately shelved for years before finally turning up on the 2017 album of the same name. While the lyrics detail Young’s use of everything from hash to amphetamines to Valium, Dylan was far from impressed when he heard the song for the first time.
In his memoir Special Deluxe, Young remembered that Dylan was ice cold when he played him the song, saying, “When he heard ‘Hitchhiker’, a confessional about the progressive history of drugs I had taken through my life, he told me, ‘That’s honest’. That moment still crosses my mind. I think it was his way of saying kindly that the song was not very inventive as far as creating a story goes, just that I was following a history and not making up anything new”.
Even though Dylan has a point that the song wasn’t breaking any new ground, it wasn’t really supposed to. Going through every line, this feels more like a diary of Young’s time lost to drugs and what he could do in the future to prevent him from falling off the wagon again.
While Dylan could have used a lot of different avenues when writing a song like this, Young never intended to use his words to preach from a pulpit. He had his own views, and they would appear in his songs, but whenever you listened to his albums, you weren’t going to get a lecture. Young was just another rock and roll journeyman, and ‘Hitchhiker’ is the kind of song that feels like watching that journeyman tell you his story from the other side of the saloon.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.