There's something frighteningly direct about Neil Young's music, not the kind of blunt exaggeration found in Bruce Springsteen's piano-driven ballads or the disillusioned squalor heard roaring whenever someone cranks up a Sex Pistols' album. There's something much different about Young, something raw, something bare, something downright bullish.
He can rip his Les Paul guitar into a splintered frenzy on "Down by the River," he can croon haunting epitaphs like "The Needle and the Damage Done," he can turn a cold shoulder to all his country-rock supporters and play synthesizer-heavy music while singing through a vocoder. He can even gather a rockabilly band together and play 50s cover songs.
And he can do it all with a sincerity that makes everyone around him wonder, "Has Neil lost his mind? Does he really think his fans will go for this?"
But that appears to be the man's secret, according to Flea, the Red Hot Chili Pepper's bassist.
"There's a rare contradiction in Neil Young's work," Flea wrote in an issue of Rolling Stone magazine.
"He works so hard as a songwriter, and he's written a phenomenal number of perfect songs. And, at the same time, he doesn't give a fuck....[His music's] never phony. It's always real."
But not caring about what your audience thinks and not caring about your art are two entirely different feelings. During much of the '80s, critics thought Young expressed the latter.
The alternative and indie rockers of the late 1980s understood him a bit better and to show their support, "The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young" was released in 1989. It featured the talents of many up-and-coming alternative rock acts like Pixies, Sonic Youth, The Flaming Lips and Dinosaur Jr.
Young could relate to their struggles, even as a well-known solo artist. As an up-and-coming artist in the late '60s and early '70s, he must have wondered countless times, "How do I maintain artistic integrity while still managing to control growing fame?"
According to Flea, the answer is simple.
"He's never, ever sold out, and he's never pretended to be anything other than what he is," he said.
Though many '80s alternative rock bands could only wish for Young's dilemma, many of them, most notably Nirvana's frontman Kurt Cobain, found themselves struggling with it in the early '90s.
"Should we continue playing what first made us popular?" was the question on many bands' minds. To this, they responded with a page straight from Young's playbook: Play whatever and pay no attention to the feedback.
Had Young failed to release "Ragged Glory" (1990), a fuzz-guitar brawl driven by Crazy Horse and spontaneous recording conditions, critics may have been less apt to see the similarities between a disaffected 90s alt-rocker and an aging but still brilliant hippie icon. But the album dropped onto shelves at just the right time-less than a year before Nirvana released their seminal album "Nevermind" and grunge became a nationwide phenomenon. Now Young wasn't just one of the best singer/songwriters of the '70s, he was also the Godfather of Grunge.
One photo of Young, taken in June of 1973, shows his reaction to the death of roadie Bruce Berry. Dressed in a flannel shirt and scowling behind long, tattered locks and an unshaven mug, he evokes Cobain and grunge-era fashion. But it wasn't just his looks that enticed the comparison.
Young's sound, especially the one he culled from his amps on Crazy Horse recordings, hailed grunge like no other sound from the '60s and '70s. "Cinnamon Girl," the opening track on Young's debut with Crazy Horse, "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere," punches away with heavy distortion, a melodic but masked tune, and an incredibly evocative one-note solo that serves as the song's coda.
Young warily received his title, though he understood why it was given.
"People need to have a name," he told his biographer Jimmy McDonough.
"They can't understand why I'm still here, so they call me the Godfather of Grunge. That's easy to relate to."
Cobain never could play guitar with any finesse and neither could Young. Both rock stars didn't need to. The actual sounds they managed to create never really mattered as much as the emotional weight behind them.
Cobain also fashioned songs much like Young did. Indelible melodies and chord progressions permeate much of "Nevermind" and 1993's "In Utero," and when songs required a guitar solo, Cobain tore apart his Fender with the same scatterbrained enthusiasm that Young displayed.
In his book, "Shakey: Neil Young's Biography," McDonough summed up their shared musical space best while lamenting Cobain's suicide and what he called "...the end of rock and roll-until the next end comes along":
"[Cobain] was not unlike Neil Young-a funny, big-hearted misanthrope with a lethal attitude somewhere beyond pessimism, capable of amorphous lyrics that millions connected with on a multitude of levels, his music containing the same sense of dread that permeated Neil's best work"
