The 1994 song that crowned Neil Young the ‘Godfather of Grunge’
You’d be forgiven if, when you think about grunge, your mind doesn’t immediately go to Neil Young, but there is a connection between the genre and the oft-referred-to ‘Godfather of Grunge’.
This was because Young had a guitar tone and a songwriting style towards the back end of the 1970s, which seemingly inspired the grunge pioneers who came the generation after, and one of the albums often cited as his greatest contribution to the genre is 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps.
The album was born out of his desire to continue making music, even if he was struggling to come up with the right ideas, because he hated the idea of remaining stagnant as an artist, even if it meant burning himself out. The idea of rusting was much worse to him than the idea of becoming too tired from the amount of work he did, and that’s what inspired the whole album.
“Burning up means you’re cruising through the elements so fucking fast that you’re actually burning, and your circuits, instead of corroding, are fucking disintegrating,” he said in an interview with Spin, “You’re going so fast you’re actually fucking the elements, becoming one with the elements, turning to gas. That’s why it’s better to burn out.”
The album did more than just stop Young from being stagnant for too long; it would go on to inspire a lot of different artists who would eventually dabble in the grunge scene. The bands that made it big out of the movement never made it a secret how much of an influence Young was. In fact, Eddie Vedder was the person who inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“He’s taught us a lot as a band about dignity and commitment and playing in the moment and when I hear, you know, the speeches and inducting Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa, I get, uh, I’m just really glad he’s still here,” he said, “And I think I’m gonna have to say that I don’t know if there’s been another artist that has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to commemorate a career that is still as vital as he is today. Some of his best songs were on his last record.”
Young was always happy to be associated with the grunge movement, but he was deeply saddened to learn that his lyrics had had such an impact on Kurt Cobain that the Nirvana singer had opted to put them in his suicide note.
Young spoke about how he felt having learnt such a thing, and he said that it was hard to take, recalling, “When he died and left that note, it struck a deep chord inside of me. It fucked with me. I coincidentally had been trying to reach him. I wanted to talk to him. Tell him only to play when he felt like it.”
In a bid to commemorate Kurt Cobain, Young opted to write a song about him in 1994 called ‘Sleeps With Angels’. It was a touching tribute, and you can feel the mutual respect that grunge artists and Neil Young have for one another within it. Granted, it’s hard to listen to without getting emotional, but it’s still a beautiful song. While it was the album Rust Never Sleeps that originally inspired grunge artists, there’s no escaping that the tag of ‘godfather of grunge’ was well and truly earned with this gorgeous tribute to one of the genre’s very best.
