The singers Neil Young called “the best on the planet”
Neil Young was never one to talk up his own voice.
While his singing has always been an identifiable part of his sound, no one was going to admit that he was going to be giving someone like Robert Plant a run for his money when he stepped out onstage with his acoustic guitar. Even if his voice was full of character, Young knew that there were vocalists that were bound to breathe new life into his music whenever he worked with them.
But it’s not as if Young has a terrible voice by any stretch. His music has always catered to singing that was a bit rough around the edges, and given that one of his biggest influences was Bob Dylan, it’s easy to hear shades of his tone of voice in a lot of what Young does. Then again, Young didn’t want to be a Dylan clone, and when he started to get too close to his voice on Harvest, he immediately needed to switch things up.
When his songs needed that extra boost, though, bringing in the biggest names of the time wasn’t out of the question. Nils Lofgren wasn’t yet the guitar genius everyone knows now when he first joined Crazy Horse, but hearing his playing on After the Gold Rush is still fantastic, and even when Young tried being the adopted uncle of Pearl Jam on Mirror Ball, he knew to use the best musicians as different shades of colour as he painted his masterpiece.
If he ever needed great singers, though, he normally could find them in his other band. Crosby, Stills, and Nash were already among the finest singers in the world when Young joined their ranks, but while ‘Helpless’ still felt like a straight ahead Young ballad, hearing all of them singing in harmony on ‘Ohio’ was about more than raw talent. It was the sound of pure passion being channelled on the spot.
That’s not to negate any of the heights that Young set for himself, though. Despite wanting to move as far away from Harvest as possible once he made it, it’s not like he didn’t have a lot of help getting there. He was working with a lot more country musicians around that time, but getting some high-profile guests like Linda Ronstadt into the mix couldn’t have hurt his chances of becoming a star.
Young always liked the idea of mixing up musicians now and again, but he knew he was working with vocal giants here, saying, “Well, with Linda and James Taylor, you’ve got two of the best singers on the planet singing with you. You know the song and they’re learning it, they’re doing it for the first time – it has to be disconcerting.” But even if Young was nervous about his performance, he rarely seemed to show it.
He was known to put on a stoneface whenever he needed to, and it wasn’t hard to see him having fun in between takes as well. Playing with someone like Johnny Cash in the audience would have left anyone shaking in their boots half the time, but even then, Young knew that he wasn’t there by mistake. He had created pure beauty on his records, and no amount of vocal giants were going to stop him from delivering the goods.
And when you think about it, his vocals on those records are half the reason why they work so well. No, they aren’t the most tuneful takes in the world, and it wasn’t going to be able to compare to what the vocal powerhouses were doing, but he knew that he could make a song come to life in a way no one else could.
