The guitarist Neil Young admitted to copying “note-for-note”
Every single rock and roll musician will willingly admit to being a songwriting thief in some respects. You can only work with the music that came before you, and the best musicians of all time have made their living out of taking inspiration from their favourite artists and tweaking them ever-so-slightly until they sound original.
But part of the beauty of someone like Neil Young is the fact that you have no idea where the hell he’s going whenever he comes out with a new track.
Throughout his entire career, Young has served nobody else but his own muse, and that was either a blessing or a curse depending on which decade you caught him in. There are many moments where he was transcendent like Rust Never Sleeps or even later projects like Harvest Moon, but the less said about his bids to go commercial on Landing on Water, the better off most of us will be.
If there was one genre to drape around Young’s music, it would be Americana. The dude might be a proud Canadian, but listening to the whine in his voice and his songs about everyday life would convince anyone that he had done some hard living stateside and had been documenting his journey around the country trying to find the next thrill. That might not have been true, but Young was definitely a student of Americana music.
Throughout his records, you can hear pieces of those old country songs that Johnny Cash grew up covering in his material, and getting people like James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt on an album like Harvest fit like a glove with tunes like ‘Heart of Gold’. But when it came to his skills as a guitar player, Young was never shy about shouting the praises of Bert Jansch.
Neil Young admits he “completely copied” Bert Jansch
In fact, the Canadian icon may have followed Jansch’s lessons a little too closely, saying, “This guy was just so good, I don’t know what he is doing now but then years later I wrote ‘Ambulance Blues’ for On The Beach and I picked up the melody from his record, the guitar part exactly, without realizing I had completely copied the whole thing. Then, years later, someone mentioned it to me and I went back and heard him playing. Sure enough, it’s almost note for note.”
But Young was never one to simply lift someone else’s melody if he could help it. This kind of thing is clearly an homage to what Jansch had been doing on his first records, and even if some of the notes were definitely similar, there was no way that Young was going to play them with the same emotion and dexterity as his hero did on the original.
If we’re being honest, hearing Young play something this melodic was also a drastic change of pace from what everyone was used to hearing from him. A lot of Young’s guitar solo work normally revolves around him being in a street fight with his instrument half the time, but instead of being more violent on ‘Ambulance Blues’, the guitar sounds like it’s crying out in pain whenever Young flies up the neck.
After all, that was what Jansch was all about with an acoustic guitar: subtlety. There are certainly moments that people remember that involve him flying off the handle, but when listening to both him and Young play, the spaces in between the notes are as important as the notes themselves.
