Lyrically Speaking: What is Neil Young’s ‘Powderfinger’ about?
The great Neil Young has always kept fans on their toes with his words. The master at crafting lyrical palettes that appear to have explicit meanings but are actually more subtle than first thought, aside from Bob Dylan, it’s arguable that no other artist has caused such intense debate through the power of their language. Whilst he has constructed many moments of poetic genius over the years, one of the most intriguing is ‘Powderfinger’.
One of the highlights of 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, featuring a rousing chorus and one of Young’s most impactful riffs, this song, as with the record on which it arrived, helped establish the Canadian as the ‘Godfather of Grunge’. Musically far ahead of their time, both track and LP remain testaments to Neil Young’s timeless force as a creative.
Yet, for all of the musical and dynamic verve Young and Crazy Horse exhibit on ‘Powderfinger’, the lyrics are the most alluring aspect. Since it was released, they have been a contentious subject among fans of Young’s, with some believing the song is clearly about the American Civil War – with the side that the narrator falls on another divisive juncture.
Young sings at the track’s commencement: “Look out, mama, there’s a white boat coming up the river / With a big red beacon, and a flag, and a man on the rail.” Even the nature of this opening verse has split opinion. Following this, the narrator notes that the boat represents mortal danger: “I think you’d better call John / ‘Cause it don’t look like they’re here to deliver the mail / And it’s less than a mile away / I hope they didn’t come to stay / It’s got numbers on the side and a gun / And it’s making big waves”.
Whilst many have taken the setting of this scene to be historically placed in the Civil War, others see it as a more contemporary setting, with it posited that the “white boat”, that at first glance looks like it could be delivering mail, seems similar to that of the Coast Guard Cutter in description. Like many boats deployed in action during the bloody conflict between the Union and Confederacy, they are also fitted with a gun. Perhaps, it’s meant as a timeless manifestation of the people versus the machine of power, but again, it’s open to interpretation.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. The lyrics appear to be the posthumous story of the narrator, who tells us, “I just turned twenty-two”. Attempting to protect those around him from the boat, whether they be family, like “Big John” or “Mama”, it is stated that the powers that be have left him “to do the thinking”, and be the leader of this group of people.
Young sings: “Daddy’s gone and my brother’s out hunting in the mountains / Big John’s been drinking since the river took Emmy-Lou / So the powers that be left me here to do the thinkin'”. Even these three lines are packed with possibilities. The protagonist’s father is evidently dead, with his brother out of action as he’s hunting. Following this, Big John has fallen into the depths of alcoholism since a presumed accident involving the river that killed his loved one, Emmy-Lou.
The duality of the line “the powers that be” is also interesting. Whilst nothing is sure, with Young typically opaque about the song’s meaning, it reads as if the father has died because of the broader conflict – a manifestation of the machinations of political power. The other incidents, such as the one involving Emmy-Lou, suggest the powers that be in this sense are haphazard and how cruel fate can be.
As the gunboat approaches, the young narrator takes action, as no one is going to it for him or the group of people he’s in charge of. Young’s lyrics are as follows: “And I just turned twenty-two / I was wondering what to do / And the closer they got / The more those feelings grew”.
Whilst he is understandably nervous, grasping his father’s rifle provides solace as the protagonist readies to face the boat. However, it seems that the young man’s efforts are all in vain and that as he prepares to shoot the firearm, a round from the gunboat blasts him, and graphically, as you’d see in an action movie like Saving Private Ryan, he is torn apart by it.
Young sings: “Daddy’s rifle in my hand felt reassuring / He said me, red means run, son, numbers add up to nothing / When the first shot hit the docks I saw it coming / Raised my rifle to my eye / Never stopped to wonder why / Then I saw black / And my face splashed in the sky”.
There are two readings here. One is literal, that the narrator is blown to shreds by the blast from the gunboat to the point that his face is thrown up into the air. There are also some suggestions that the line “read means run, son”, refers to the law coming for the man, with “numbers add up to nothing” meaning either the unit number, the number of years he’s going to spend in jail or the age you live to doesn’t matter and it’s what you do with your time on the earth that counts.
Regardless of the discussion, he certainly dies: “Shelter me from the powder and the finger / Cover me with the thought that pulled the trigger”. The late Neil Young biographer Johnny Rogan described the lines as the character’s “moving epitaph”: “Just think of me as one you never figured / Would fade away so young / With so much left undone / Remember me to my love; I know I’ll miss her”.
Eagle-eyed fans will fully know the nod to the most culturally important moment on Rust Never Sleeps, ‘My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)’ that Young includes in the final section. Notoriously, the line, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”, was made famous by Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in his April 1994 suicide note and remains the song’s most well-known aspect. In ‘Powderfinger’, Young subtly pipes: “Just think of me as one you never figured / Would fade away so young”.
There is much more to ‘Powderfinger’ than the literal story. Young allegedly offered the track to Southern rock heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd, but they never managed to record it before the tragic plane crash that killed members Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines in 1977. Furthermore, there has long been thought to have been a respectful feud between the two parties due to that classic line in Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, where Van Zant sings: “I hope Neil Young will remember, a southern man don’t need him around anyhow”.
This line was a response to Young’s songs ‘Southern Man’ and ‘Alabama’, which Lynyrd Skynyrd took exception to for their negative depiction of the Southern states. They said he “took the entire South to task for the bloody history of slavery and its aftermath.” When ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ came out, their frontman said, “We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two.”
It seems that any feud was pretty lighthearted, though, with Skynyrd’s comments, Young offering the band a song, and his comments in the years following adding to this thinking. In his 2012 autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace, Young writes: “My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue.”
In light of his previous depictions of the South, maybe there is some validity to the claims that ‘Powderfinger’ tells the story of a Confederate soldier and that it is a more balanced, albeit fictional, account of the area and its history.
Whilst up until this point, things have felt relatively simple when discussing the lyrics of ‘Powderfinger’, when speaking to SPIN in 1995, Young explained that there’s a lot of anger and angst behind it and that a wealth of life experiences influenced the writing. The songwriter spoke about strength and weakness, parenthood, and likened life to being on the frontlines in a war.
Could the song actually be a subtle metaphor for Young’s life and all that he had encountered, from the deaths of friends such as Danny Whitten and the Lynyrd Skynyrd tragedy to the adultery of his partner Carrie Snodgress, and then, more positively, the birth of his children. Adding credence to this is that Young mentions watching his kids go through the emotional mangle of life and being powerless in averting its effect. He also concluded that he has to make life rewarding, in a strange parallel to what the narrator does with his honourable death.
Young explained: “You may not see the anger, or the angst, or whatever in me lay behind a song like ‘Powderfinger’. But I’ve seen things in my life that I’ll never forget—and I see them every day. And I see strength that I can’t understand and weaknesses that I can’t deal with. Watching my kids grow up—they go through all these things. All of it comes again; it just keeps happening, and you’re on the front lines; you watch them, and there’s nothing you can do, you can’t tell them what to decide. You can see life going on. If you keep looking out, you can remain vital and vibrant in what you’re doing. That’s what I try to do with my life. Make it rewarding. No one wants to hear me go out and just not be there. That would be the worst thing I could ever fucking imagine. Just kind of going out and going through the motions.”
Listen to ‘Powderfinger’ below.
