“I didn’t want it”: The song Neil Young admitted he should have ditched
Not every songwriter has to be in love with everything they record. As much as people might be in love with what they’re doing at the time, it’s easy for any seasoned veteran to look at their long history of music and see more than a few songs that they could have done differently or should have shelved. But even by rock and roll standards, Neil Young seemed interested in releasing every single thing that popped into his mind.
Or at least that’s how it feels when looking through his discography. From the minute that he left Buffalo Springfield, Young seemed to want to play anything and everything that he could think of, whether that was working with Crosby, Stills, and Nash or working with Crazy Horse until they sounded like a well-oiled machine. But getting to the level of Rust Never Sleeps or Zuma was something that was going to happen overnight.
He wanted the opportunity to stretch his muscles, and listening to his self-titled debut, it feels like looking into another world where Young was reborn as a pure singer-songwriter. Yes, there were moments throughout his career where he could make soft-spoken tunes with his acoustic guitar, but this almost feels like he listened to what people like Joni Mitchell had been doing and figured he would try his hand at that.
It’s far from the worst idea in the world, but it’s not exactly what Young was about in his prime. He was always used to leaving all of the blemishes in to give his songs character, and when everything is finely produced to sound pristine, it loses a good chunk of his identity. Since he was used to bringing an edge to every band he played with, to see him like this feels like looking at Young at a distance, especially on ‘Last Trip to Tulsa’.
While Young was born in the era of the Summer of Love, never before or since has he ever written something this trippy. There are pieces of the song that feel like him taking a trip throughout the United States, but given all of the drug references that happen over its nine-minute runtime, it was clear that he was going for a far different method than what he would be doing on tracks like ‘Sugar Mountain’ and especially ‘Heart of Gold’ later in his career.
“The Last Trip To Tulsa,’ in my opinion, after I did it, I didn’t like it and I didn’t want it. After the album came out, that’s the one I really didn’t like, you know, and I still don’t, but a lot of people really dug that better than anything else.”
Neil Young
Before the song was even out for a year, though, Young had said that he would have happily ditched the tune if he had the chance, saying, “‘The Last Trip To Tulsa,’ in my opinion, after I did it, I didn’t like it and I didn’t want it. After the album came out, that’s the one I really didn’t like, you know, and I still don’t, but a lot of people really dug that better than anything else on that whole album. See, it’s strange. Just because it doesn’t happen to be my favourite part, and I know a lot of people really didn’t like it, you know, and I can dig why. Because it sounds overdone.”
As we would see later, though, the fact that other people loved his song wasn’t all that important to him in the long run. Young wasn’t willing to do anything that didn’t serve his muse, and listening to everything from Everybody’s Rockin’ to Trans to Freedom, he was willing to risk his career if it meant doing something he wanted to do.
It may have been nice to see what a flower-child version of Young could have sounded like, but hearing this is like watching Bob Dylan trying to write Tin Pan Alley songs. It’s far from the worst combination in the world, but if this were his future, we would have missed out on one of the elder statesmen of rock and roll.
