“It was belittling”: The show that made Neil Young leave Buffalo Springfield
Neil Young never had time for the superficial side of the music business. Even if he liked the idea of being one of the most celebrated rockstars of his time, it was never going to work if he was forced to dress in a posh suit and play the kind of music that music executives wanted him to play. Before he even had a proper solo career to his name, though, he put his creative principles before anything else when he refused to play this concert with Buffalo Springfield.
Looking at how the rock legends worked, Buffalo Springfield was always a bit grittier than most people remember. Around that time, the lion’s share of hard rock acts normally came from Detroit, but out in California, Buffalo Springfield seemed to take everything that made The Rolling Stones sound nasty and push it a little bit further, especially when Young started playing with what distortion could do on their later records.
That’s the whole reason why he was accepted into Crosby, Stills, and Nash at the time as well. Stephen Stills was already a creative dynamo who played anything with strings on it, but in a band that was all about singing with passion and making pillowy soft rock music, Young gave them the edge that they needed and the political bent when they started working on tunes like ‘Ohio’.
But when Buffalo Springfield started moving in a different direction, Young could already see the writing on the wall. ‘For What It’s Worth’ had been a national hit, but thinking back on the tune itself, there were bound to be a few people who were stuck singing the iconic lines about looking at what was going down without ever bothering to know the context of what the tune meant.
Because had they known what their intentions were, the executives on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson may have had some second thoughts about booking them. The band were still ready for any type of exposure they could get, but seeing how most of the audience was nothing but yes men and the industry types that Young loathed, he knew that he would never step onstage with the band again if he went through with it.
Although Young was already halfway out the door by this point, he points to this gig specifically as the reason why he left Buffalo Springfield, saying, “Actually, the reason I initially left the group was because I didn’t want to do the Johnny Carson Tonight Show. I thought it was belittling what The Buffalo Springfield was doing. That audience wouldn’t have understood us. We’d have been just a fuckin’ curiosity to them.”
Even if Young would eventually be ready for primetime TV, he would always do it on his own terms. ‘Ohio’ may have shot him into the headlines, but even when he was being adopted as the ‘Godfather of Grunge’, his decision to play one of his new songs on the MTV Awards with Pearl Jam was another way that he could please the system while still being able to do whatever the hell he wanted.
While that kind of behaviour made Young a thorn in the side of the music industry for so long, it’s also why he should still be considered a model for what a true artist should do. He could have cashed in when he wanted, but he would much rather have a legacy of doing what he wanted than be anyone’s musical meat puppet.
