‘Hitchhiker’: the song that took Neil Young 40 years to finish
We’ve all heard the story by now. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are sitting together in a Parisian café. Dylan says to Cohen, “I love that song ‘Hallelujah’. How long did it take to write?” Cohen says, “About seven years. ‘Like A Woman’ is my favourite of yours, how long did that take?” Dylan takes a sip of coffee and says, “Maybe 15 minutes.” It’s an absolutely perfect snapshot of one of pop music’s great joys. That genius can come from years of meticulously slaving over each individual note and syllable or from fiddling around with some cowboy chords in less time than it takes to cook an oven pizza. Then along comes Neil Young, who says to both of them, “Hold my Tim Horton’s, watch this!”
There’s an argument to be made that of all the folk-rock titans of the 1960s and ’70s, yer Dylan’s, yer Joni’s, yer Crosby’s and the like, Neil Young is the most consistent of all of them. He may not have the heights of Blue and Highway 61 Revisited (by inches, mind), but he may have the most good music out of all of them.
Young’s 1990s saw him completely rejuvenated as one of the only classic rock godheads that the grunge movement could stand, and that energy remains where his contemporaries sank into the nostalgia circuit. His 2010 record, Le Noise, is a perfect example of this. It is a thrillingly stripped-down, uncompromising record built around swirling, distorted electric guitar chords that border on shoegaze and Young’s unmistakable, unchanging voice.
Nestled near the end of the album is ‘Hitchhiker’, one of the record’s genuine highlights. A riveting, almost uncomfortably honest meditation on Young’s history with drugs that dispenses with anything so crass as a metaphor to get its point across. Literally, two verses in, and Young is singing, “You didn’t see me in Toronto / When I first tried out some hash / I smoked through a pen and I’d do it again if I only had some cash”. We’re then treated to a front-row seat as Young takes us through his dalliances with amphetamines, valium and cocaine.
Dylan might have bragged about writing masterworks in 15 minutes. Cohen may have sweated about taking seven years. ‘Hitchhiker’, though, took no less than 40 years to come to fruition. One would hope Cohen could take some comfort in that, but let’s be real here: if Laughing Len could have an existential crisis over something, he would. It’s true, though; the first draft of ‘Hitchhiker’ was completed in 1975. In fact, in Young’s memoir Special Deluxe, he reminisces about playing it to Dylan himself, who wasn’t entirely impressed.
“When he heard ‘Hitchhiker’… he told me, ‘That’s honest.’ It makes me laugh every time I think of it because Bob’s humour is so wry,” he said. “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.” In fairness to the lad, he played it alongside ‘Cortez The Killer’ so pretty much anything would struggle to follow it. So, the song, originally slated for 1975’s Zuma, was shelved.
Perhaps His Royal Bobness had a point, though. He does know a thing or two about songwriting, and the original version can come across like a burnout bragging about his glory days. 40 years of living will teach you a thing or two, and when Young dug it out for Le Noise, he added a final verse that turns the whole thing around, paying tribute first to the years, friends and enemies that have come and gone, then to the family he feels so lucky to have.
With that, the song was finished. It felt like hard-won wisdom, caution learned, unlearned, and then learned again, leading to one of Young’s finest moments in a career full of them.
