Fever Four: The classic songs Neil Young wrote while hallucinating
Neil Young has got a pretty hefty dose of songs in his canon. Across an impressive array of albums, Young has written so many tracks that he even has time to bring some songs back from early in his career when taking to the stage, meaning no single event is exactly the same as another. Playing so many shows around the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Young was absolutely the most prolific and potent songwriter around. He was even able to write tracks while in a fever dream.
On his seminal album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Young’s first step into the wild with his new backing band Crazy Horse, the singer-songwriter came down with a serious bout of the flu during the recording sessions. The singer’s temperature soared above 39.5 degrees and there was genuine concern for his wellbeing.
Most artists would have simply sought the comfort of their beds, rested for a few days, and made the extra effort to keep hydrated. But Neil Young is not like most artists. During the fever and the hallucinations that came with it, Young wrote four classic tracks for the album, and arguably gave the world four of his best songs along the way.
On the album, there are a collection songs which have outlasted the record as Young classics. ‘Cinnamon Girl’, ‘Down By The River’, the title track of the LP and ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’, were all composed during the feverish day. “Sometimes [when] I get sick, get a fever, it’s easy to write,” Young explained to Uncut. “Everything opens up. You don’t have any resistance. You just let things go.”
There is a sense to that notion. The fever likely works as many feel narcotics can aid one’s imagination. It reduces your inhibitions and creates a world in which reasoned thinking no longer restricts possibilities. It offered Young the chance to make some of his best numbers.
‘Cinnamon Girl’ was the first track to be recorded of the fever four and it is one of Young’s most beloved and covered tracks. In the liner notes for Decade, Young said of the song: “Wrote this for a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me through Phil Ochs’ eyes playing finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife.” The song is one of Young’s finest and operates as a wonderful distillation of his talent.
Another track which was featured was ‘Down By the River’, a timeless piece of folk-rock joy from Young. It was a track written and recorded on Young’s favourite guitar ‘Old Black’ and was so loud it became a defining moment of Young’s career: “Immediately, the entire room started to vibrate. I went, ‘Holy shit!’ I had to turn it halfway down before it stopped feeding back,” he said. It’s a feeling that still reverberates around every room the track is played in.
The title track of the album is also a noteworthy moment. It not only has the signature sound Young was so desperately trying to find as he escaped the “fabricated” and move towards a more authentic sonic landscape. Young’s vocal was actually a temporary scratch vocal he sang through a low-quality talk-back microphone on the mixing board, with no effects. Young liked the obvious contrast to the rest of the recording.
‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ may well be the least known on this list but the song is a searing moment of Neil Young’s repertoire, largely because of the wrenching guitar from Danny Whitten. “Nobody played guitar with me like that,” Young says of the guitarist, who passed away after a heroin overdose in 1972. “That rhythm, when you listen to ‘Cowgirl In The Sand’, he keeps changing. Billy and Ralph will get into a groove and everything will be going along and all of a sudden Danny’ll start doing something else.
“He just led those guys from one groove to another, all within the same groove,” he added. “So when I played those long guitar solos, it seemed like they weren’t all that long, that I was making all these changes, when in reality what was changing was not one thing but the whole band. Danny was the key. A really great second guitar player, the perfect counterpoint to everything else that was happening.”
The fact that these four incredible songs could be conceived while Young was in the throes of a deadly fever, shows just how impressive a songwriter Neil Young truly was. There are few artists that feel as genuine as Neil Young. Not plagued by ego or individualism, Young is able to craft songs that transcend generations, matching any of his contemporaries. However, it would be surprising to if those sonic counterparts could write four numbers as brilliant as these while so close to death.
