The two guitarists who inspired Neil Young most
For Neil Young, being a great guitarist isn’t about knowing your scale inside-out and upside-down; it’s about expression. “Nobody gives a shit if you have good technique or not,” he told Guitare & Claviers Magazine back in 1992. “It’s whether you have feelings that you want to express with music, that’s what counts, really. When you are able to express yourself and feel good, then you know why you’re playing.”
The technical aspect of guitar playing has always been “hogwash” in Young’s eyes. In fact, the singer-songwriter’s two favourite guitarists both thrived on a certain scuzziness, which isn’t to say that they were weren’t technically gifted musicians; only that they’d found the balance between technical virtuosity and emotional articulation. In that same 1992 interview, Young called Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen “guitar geniuses” but confessed that being able to pull off a 100-note solo “doesn’t really grab me.”
Young’s emphasis on feeling is echoed by his affection for the great JJ Cale. In his biography, Shakey, he ranks the American guitarist alongside the great Jimi Hendrix. “What is it about JJ Cale’s playing? I mean, you could say Eric Clapton’s the guitar god, but… he can’t play like JJ. JJ’s the one who played all that shit first. And he doesn’t play very loud, either – I really like that about him. He’s so sensitive.”
Young went on to describe Cale and Hendrix as “the best electric guitar players,” he’d ever heard. “JJ’s my peer, but he doesn’t have the business acumen – he doesn’t have the idea of how to deal with the rest of the world that I do,” Neil added. “But musically, he’s actually more than my peer, because he’s got that thing. I don’t know what it is.”
Many years later, in a 2005 interview with the Musicians Hall of Fame, Young explained why Hendrix was so unbeatable in his eyes: “Hendrix was the best at being able to do his expression with his guitar. I’d say, out of the ’60s, as far as someone taking the guitar to another place, Hendrix was number one. No other guitar player even came near Hendrix in the way he handled playing rock ‘n’ roll in a trio, guitar, bass and drums. He was so unique, he had his own place. It was the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Out of all the trio’s, there was nothing like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and the way they all played together, the bass player, the drummer, it was all three of them together that made that sound.”
For Young, Hendrix wasn’t so much a genius as a supremely talented musician surrounded by the ideal bandmates. “Jimi wasn’t the same when he played with other bands,” he concluded. It was what happened when he played with those guys that made him free enough to express himself and to go to those places he went.”
It may not be an entirely simple task to connect the technique of JJ Cale and Jimi Hendrix to that of Neil Young. However, refuting their mammoth influence on his career is impossible.
