‘Down By The River’: The Neil Young song he called a guitar “masterpiece”
Neil Young wasn’t always that concerned with making everything sound perfect in the studio.
Creativity never stopped for him, so there was no point trying to make the same tune over again when he had a take that sounded honest. But he knew with the right musicians behind him, he could make the guitar scream like no one could have ever thought of before.
When looking at how Young plays guitar, though, it’s not like every piece of his playing is pristine or anything. His electric guitar tones are often incredibly fuzzy, but that’s partly what gives it the attitude that it needs. Sure, his solos can sound like he’s strangling the guitar half the time, but the art of improvisation was what gave his music the edge that it needed and what made him an absolute necessity when working off of Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
But the story of Neil Young can’t fully be told without Crazy Horse. Even though the band has changed lineups numerous times and have come in and out of Young’s studio discography a lot of the time, picturing him without the band is like James Brown not having his band behind him or Bruce Springsteen trying to play without The E Street Band. It’ll still be good, but you can tell there’s something missing.
While Young worked perfectly fine when making albums like Harvest, it was important for him to have that subtle push whenever he was working on his tunes. An album like Zuma works perfectly fine because the songs sound great, but the loose jams that happen midway through a song like ‘Cortez the Killer’ can only come from musicians playing together in the room and bouncing musical ideas off each other.
The only real tragedy of Crazy Horse always comes down to Danny Whitten. Young knew that Whitten was something special when he first began performing with him, but compared to the soft acoustic material that he could do on his own, Whitten had the technical prowess to turn any one of his songs into a guitar extravaganza. Every band member should know not to step on any of their bandmates’ toes, but all Young could do was let Whitten do his thing.
He was clearly an artist who came along once every generation, and as early as Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, Young knew he was working with a genius on ‘Down by the River, saying, “His work on that song is a masterpiece. The rhythm guitar position is a very powerful slot. You have to understand you’re part of an orchestra. You’re the backbone. You’re putting horn parts in. Opposition. Changing the groove. Every time you change the groove it changes what the lead guitar does. And with Danny and me it just happened. We never talked about any of it.”
And if you ask any of the greatest guitar duos of the time, they would probably say the same thing. Keith Richards and Mick Taylor didn’t need to orchestrate their parts by any stretch, but when they worked together during The Stones’ 1970s era, there were hardly any songs where they needed to tweak anything once they were finished.
It’s still one of the great tragedies of the 1970s to see Whitten pass away so soon from a drug overdose, but when listening to Young grieve on Tonight’s the Night, he’s not only crying over the loss of a friend. This was the kind of relationship that could tell an entire story with no words, so when that soul falls silent, it’s bound to hit like a ton of bricks.
