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Watch Bob Dylan cover Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’

Sat 20 August 2022 22:00, UK

Neil Young’s love of Bob Dylan is a profound force. He inspired Young back when he was starting out and he still continues to inspire him now. And as it happens, that fact alone is just about the greatest gift you could ever give Dylan who once commented: “Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”

When recalling the Promethean wallop that Dylan delivered, Young told Charlie Rose: “I love Bob Dylan, I think he is great. In the very beginning I knew he was great.” That might not sound like ahead-of-the-curve thinking given the place Dylan now holds in cultural history, but in actuality, Young was more of an early convert than most to the original vagabond who only reached 22 in the US charts with the album that changed everything: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t this moment that crystallised things for Young. As he continued: “I was walking on down the street and there is this guy in a Lincoln Navigator or continental, I can’t remember, was one of those black cars. He is in there and he is blasting ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and singing at the top of his lungs. It’s an afro-american guy sitting there, he is about 30 years-old in a suit, just rocking”.

Young adds: “I heard Bob’s voice and I went ‘This is Bob, you know. This is the essence of his feeling and everything. The moment that he was delivering that song is so powerful, you can’t keep that’. That comes and goes through you. You can’t strive to be that, there is no way you own it.” Dylan agrees with that himself, as he once wrote “you have to get power and dominion over the spirits. I had it once and once was enough.”

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Young continues: “I’ve heard Bob say that he doesn’t know who wrote, he doesn’t know the guy who wrote those songs anymore. I understand what he was saying, the feeling behind it. I look at it and I go ‘Well, I must been in a really different place doing that, but I was, I wrote those words, I sat down and I believe it”. As it happens Hoagy Carmichael defined it both for them when he said about his own songs which somehow confounded him, “Maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you.” When it comes to depth of Dylan’s songs, he was often yelling this back down the well.

This notion the music was now more than pretty melodies and tales of holding hands was one that struck Young solidly and spawned a career of his own. The Harvest masterpiece ‘Old Man’ is a paragon of that. It is, perhaps, Young’s finest moment.

In the movie Heart of Gold, Young describes being a “rich hippie” for the first time and buying his ranch off an elderly couple, before introducing the song with the following bit of remembered dialogue with the Old Man himself: “Well, tell me, how does a young man like yourself have enough money to buy a place like this?” And I said, “Well, just lucky, Louis, just real lucky.” And he said, “Well, that’s the darnedest thing I ever heard.” And I wrote this song for him.”

Well, ain’t that the darndest thing indeed! Like all the best traditional folk songs, this finds poignancy in universality and humanity in the humble. It leaves you trying to figure how something so delicate can pack such a punch. When it meets with the sand and glue of Dylan’s latter-day vocals, the punch hits like a bludgeon. And you can feel the force of it in the video below.