The 1975 song Neil Young stole from The Rolling Stones: “Too wasted to write my own”
Every artist takes influence from elsewhere, but few admit it so openly or wear it as a badge of honour. Neil Young, however, is no ordinary musician, and everything he does feels like an artistic statement.
Typically, when an artist takes inspiration from a peer, it’s a subconscious act that they don’t even realise they are doing. Over the years, many artists, even the great George Harrison, were sued on this basis despite never deliberately attempting to take credit for the work of somebody who came before.
It’s such murky territory and rarely an open-and-shut case, but in this case, Young even admitted in the lyrics to stealing from The Stones, who, if they wanted to lose ounces of credibility, could have taken him to the cleaners. However, if they did, it would have defeated the artistic merit of his act of plagiarism, which was used to make a wider point about his fragile state.
There was nothing subconscious at all about what Young did, which is why he chose to shout about it from the rooftops rather than deny its existence.
The track in question is appropriately titled ‘Borrowed Tune’, which appeared on 1975’s seminal Tonight’s The Night. If he went with a different title, and altered the lyrics, few may have noticed the similarities with The Rolling Stones’ ‘Lady Jane’, but that would have defeated his entire message.
On the recording, Young sounds like a broken man who doesn’t know what day of the week it is, let alone in control of the words coming out of his mouth, as he sings, “I’m singin’ this borrowed tune, I took from the Rolling Stones, Alone in this empty room, Too wasted to write my own.”
It’s an admission made by a narrator who has nothing left to lose, willing to confess to his deepest secrets, because life couldn’t get any worse.
As much as Young’s career was riding high at the time and he should have been living the jet-set life, he was plagued by personal problems, as ‘Borrowed Tune’ highlights. He also agonisingly sings on the track, “I’m climbin’ this ladder, my head in the clouds”, which can be interpreted as him suggesting that the only way to make your way to the top is to lie, cheat, and steal up the greasy ladder, which he duly did by plagiarising The Stones.
While Young’s honesty regarding plagiarism is refreshing, it’s also an artistic statement of intent. At the time, Young was battling demons following the death of his close friends, Bruce Berry and guitarist Danny Whitten, which led to him losing sight of himself. He perfectly captures the loss of creative desire he suffered on ‘Borrowed Tune’, which didn’t even contain an original melody.
On the surface, his decision to pinch from ‘Lady Jane’ appears to be pure laziness, but on a deeper level, it was a stroke of songwriting genius that said more about his mindset than he ever could with original words alone. In fact, it’s a million times more of a creative way to express despair than a gut-wrenching lyric about his troubling circumstances, signalling that he’d given up entirely.
At this time, as communicated like a hammer-blow on ‘Borrowed Tune’, music had gone from the only thing he cared about in life to an unwanted chore, with his mojo also dissipating in the process.
Yet, strangely, the cathartic process of pouring his heart out on Tonight’s The Night was crucial in Young rediscovering himself again. It gave him a necessary outlet to deal with the unspeakable grief that was eating him up inside. Even though a recording studio was the last place he wanted to be, it was precisely where he needed to be at his darkest hour.
