The 1970 Neil Young classic Denzel Washington calls “one of my favourite songs of all time”
In 1970, Denzel Washington was a 16-year-old student at high school in Florida, with no possible idea that 50 years later he would be named by the New York Times as the greatest actor of the 21st century.
In fact, acting wasn’t even something he’d particularly thought about pursuing; instead he was obsessing over basketball, considering becoming a doctor, and, thanks to the new friends he’d just made at the school he’d been sent to to get away from the old ones who were falling into crime, discovering what happened if you dropped acid and listened to The Beatles’ White Album.
That same year, Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young was 25, going through a divorce and had just officially been granted permission to permanently stay in the United States. Young had already been through the formation and break-up of one band, Buffalo Springfield, and released two solo albums in five months in 1969. Working incredibly quickly, he also joined Crosby, Stills and Nash to release their second album Déjà Vu in March and was ready to release his third solo album, After the Gold Rush, in August.
Without knowing it, he had recorded a song that, more than 50 years later, Denzel Washington would be singing out loud in the middle of an interview about his stellar career. “Southern man, better keep your head…don’t forget what your good book said,” Washington sang to the LA Times in 2022, while doing an impression of Young’s high-pitched voice, adding, “One of my favourite songs of all time.”
During that interview, Washington gave a glimpse into the music he surrounded himself with in that time period, classic albums that seemed to be released almost on a weekly basis. In addition to Young, the actor referenced Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Marvin Gaye’s seminal What’s Going On and Carole King’s Tapestry, all released in the first half of 1971.
On The Beatles and his switch of education, Washington revealed, “My mother is trying to save me from the streets and heroin. And they sent me to a school with a bunch of white kids with acid. So I was introduced to the White Album on some orange Owsley or orange sunshine or some blotter. So it expanded my experience.”
Some 23 years later, Washington and Young would be brought together creatively thanks to the Tom Hanks film Philadelphia. A legal drama about two lawyers working to sue a firm for firing one of them after discovering he was gay and afflicted by Aids, it starred Washington and Hanks in the lead roles and won the latter an Oscar and Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor’.
Young contributed the title track to the film’s soundtrack, along with Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Streets of Philadelphia’. Although Young was originally approached to write an up-tempo rock song to open the film with, after watching it, he decided to write a ballad instead. Both Springsteen and Young each received Academy Award nominations for their respective compositions, with the former taking home the Oscar as well as a Golden Globe.
Ironically, the song that the director initially used over the footage to show Springsteen to give him inspiration to write was Young’s ‘Southern Man’. The album went platinum in the US on its release in 1994.
