Why David Bowie loved Neil Young
When discussing the countercultural generation, there are many stellar artists whose names come up. Whether it be The Beatles, Bob Dylan, or Jimi Hendrix, they were blessed with many pioneering artists who helped popular culture to explode and set it on a path to the multifaceted greatness that it has today. Aside from those above, two others had significant impacts, David Bowie and Neil Young. Without them, alternative culture as we know it today would be without many vital facets.
Although he didn’t break through until 1969 with the timeless track ‘Space Oddity’, Bowie’s career would quickly go from strength to strength afterwards. In the early period of the 1970s he released two albums that saw him develop his skill, The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory, and then everything changed in 1972 with the release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
With a new band in tow and in the form of the flame-haired, taboo-busting rocker Ziggy Stardust, Bowie took the world by storm, and afterwards, life was never to be the same again. He showed us our musical, sexual and cultural futures, which were to be of utter technicolour.
As for Neil Young, he has enjoyed a career as consistent as David Bowie’s; however, at the time Bowie was striving to make it, he had already reached the top. The Canadian artist first made it as the guitarist of countercultural heroes Buffalo Springfield, and when they broke up in 1968, he embarked on his solo career, releasing two albums Neil Young and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, before the decade was up.
Young had a brief detour when he linked up with former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Stephen Stills in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but then returned to his solo career, which over the 1970s was as critically and commercially fruitful as they come, even though it was heavily caveated with some immense personal tragedy. Young’s status is unquestionable, he’s influenced everyone from Nirvana to Oasis and is affectionately hailed as ‘The Godfather of Grunge’.
Given that their reputations precede both Bowie and Neil Young, there can be no surprise that both were fans of each other’s work. Bowie was such a fan of Young’s that on 2002’s Heathen, he even covered Young’s 1968 track ‘I’ve Been Waiting For You’, with Dave Grohl on guitar.
Over his career, Bowie explained why he loved Neil Young so much, and one of the most revealing came when speaking to The Kansas City Star in 2004.
He said: “When things go bad, I’ve always looked to my peers and, in a way, my musical mentors to see what they’ve done in similar situations. Neil Young and Bob Dylan have done similar things: They have both made a few disastrous albums, but they always end up coming back to the point of what they started in the first place. You’ve got to go back to what you were doing when you were rooting around with experimentation, ideas that are going to work for me, not my audience.”
Elsewhere, in another publication, Bowie was quoted as saying of the Canadian musician: “There’s youthful redemption in everything he [Young] does, a joyfulness about being an independent thinker in America.”
