The 1965 track Neil Young called one of the best guitar songs: “Just so good”
The heart of every great Neil Young always came from the emotion that he created.
He didn’t stop for a minute and think about what his songs would sound like on the radio, and half of the greatest records that he ever made usually came from him trying his best to go against the grain whenever he came up with a new song. He needed to follow his muse before anything else, but while his songwriting usually takes centre stage, he felt that his best moments came from when he could unleash hell on guitar.
Then again, the idea of Young being one of the greatest guitar heroes in the world doesn’t normally come up that often. He could get some of the greatest players that he could find to join Crazy Horse, but when you listen to all of them lying together, it’s nearly impossible to figure out anything that Young was doing on guitar. It verged between utter chaos and actual notes half the time, but that was part of the beauty of it all as well.
Some of the more snobby guitarists will look at a song like ‘Cinnamon Girl’ and get pissed because Young is only playing one note throughout the entire solo, but he didn’t really need a bunch of notes to prove his point. He was in a battle with his guitar half the time, and his greatest solos are ones that sound like he’s trying to survive by the skin of his teeth every single time he plays.
You can actually hear a lot of that in action on records like Live Rust, but Young was just as comfortable doing that with an acoustic guitar. Everyone else at the time was dumbstruck by what Jimi Hendrix could do with an electric guitar, and while Young was right beside everyone else, drooling over Hendrix’s tone, Bert Jansch had the same kind of effect on him every time he heard his playing.
There’s nothing to really hide behind when you have an acoustic guitar in your hands, and Jansch was ready to explore every facet of the instrument whenever he played. He was making tunes that captured the essence of what a guitar could do, and while he didn’t need mountains of distortion pedals to prove his point, Young was still taken aback when he heard the song ‘Needle of Death’.
Jansch was known to record some of his tunes over again if they weren’t how he envisioned them, but Young felt that ‘Needle’ was one of the purest guitar songs he had ever heard, saying, “He made [his] records with different versions of the same songs. I was particularly impressed by the song ‘Needle of Death’. It’s a really outrageous song. Beautiful. This guy was just so good. I don’t know what he’s doing now. Years later, I wrote ‘Ambulance Blues’ and I picked up the melody exactly without realising it.”
And it’s not like Young was the only one knocked out by what Jansch was doing, either. As much as people like to idolise what Jimmy Page was doing in Led Zeppelin, a lot of his acoustic work came from poring over Jansch’s records and studying the way that he approached picking the strings and finding out how to find his own voice when working on some of those records.
So while ‘Needle of Death’ did get nicked by Young a little bit, it’s not like he was trying to outright copy Jansch whenever he could. If anything, Jansch is one of the forgotten links in guitar history for the average rock and roll fan, and calling more attention to any of his work is a rabbit hole that any guitarist is more than happy to go down.
