Neil Young

From The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia by Michael Gray:

"Young, Neil [1945 - ] Neil Young was born November 12, 1945 in Toronto, Ontario, his father a
sports-writer on the Toronto Sun. He survived many childhood illnesses and his parents’ divorce, after
which he lived with his mother in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and took up music. His early groups included
the Jades, the Esquires, the Classics, Neil Young & the Squires and the Mynah Birds; his later
groups have included Buffalo Springfield, the Bluenotes, the Stray Gators, the Ducks, Crazy
Horse and CROSBY, Stills, Nash & Young. There’s always an interestingly edgy relationship
between Dylan and Neil Young, especially since Young came along just late enough to be formatively
influenced by Dylan, yet has grown into a music mountain many people believe to be of
near-equal size and significance in the landscape of post-1950s rock. The only two possible other
contenders would be JONI MITCHELL and VAN MORRISON. Dylan himself puts Young first when,
in a 1991 interview with Paul Zollo for Songtalk magazine, he refers to other singer-songwriters.
Young begins almost as a disciple, and ends with a near-matching prophet’s gravitas himself. The two
have often if fitfully come together, sometimes uneasily. By 1965, while still in Yorkville, Toronto, Neil
Young was playing Dylan songs; he performed ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ at a Killington, Vermont,
ski resort that September; and instead of fitting in with Stephen Stills in pop group the
Squires, Young decided to become a folk troubadour. ‘He wanted to be Bob Dylan and I wanted to
be THE BEATLES,’ said Stills. Dylan saw Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at the
Fillmore East in New York in early June 1970 and attended the party at the end of their week’s residency
there. Young’s song ‘Last Trip to Tulsa’, on his eponymous first album (January 1969), is the
first of several Young tracks that either imitate or pay marked tribute to Dylan—these include ‘Days
That Used to Be’ and ‘Ragged Glory’ (both cf. ‘My Back Pages’), ‘Sixty to Zero’ and ‘Ordinary People’—
and when Dylan heard ‘Heart of Gold’ (from Harvest, 1972), he thought it sounded like him. (He
also told Young that the same album’s ‘A Man needs a Maid’ was one of his favourites.) The following
year, Dylan was in the audience for a Young set at the opening of the Roxy Theatre in
LA; invited backstage to meet Young, Dylan reputedly replied ‘No thanks, we’ve just eaten.’
Young was also impressed with Dylan’s approach to live performing in the 1970s, declaring
in 1976 that ‘Dylan . . . has shown so many of us, especially with the Before the Flood album tour
with THE BAND, that a major performer can live with his people’—and, inspired by the early smallhall
ethos of the Rolling Thunder Revue, Young promptly organised his own Northern California
Coastal Bar Tour (aka the Rolling Zuma Revue). Young fans often suggest, perhaps rightly, that influence
moved in the opposite direction when Dylan, untypically, put sleevenotes about each
song on his 1985 collection Biograph: they note that Young had done the same on his earlier retrospective
collection Decade (1977). Possibly too, Dylan’s intimate performances at the Supper Club
in New York in 1993 were a belated paralleling of Young’s five acoustic nights at the 150-seater
Boarding House in San Francisco 15 years earlier. The two first appeared on stage together at the
SNACK Benefit Concert in San Francisco on March 23, 1975. (The acronym covers the revoltingly
named Students Need Athletics, Culture and Kicks.) They performed a 35-minute set with backing
musos TIM DRUMMOND and Ben Keith plus The Band’s RICK DANKO, GARTH HUDSON and
LEVON HELM, playing ‘Are You Ready for the Country’, ‘Ain’t That a Lot of Love’, ‘Lookin’ for a
Love’, ‘Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever’, ‘I Want You’, ‘The Weight’, ‘Helpless’, ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s
Door’ and ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’—yet managed to share vocals only on the last two
songs. Officially unreleased, though bootlegged from a radio broadcast, Dylan’s vocals are barely audible.
The following year, both took part in The Band’s farewell concert at the Winterland, San Francisco
(filmed by MARTIN SCORSESE as The Last Waltz). Young, looking magnificently wasted, performed
two of his own songs watched from backstage by Dylan, and they joined with others for an encore
of ‘I Shall Be Released’. Nine years later, both appeared at LIVE AID, again performing together
only during the ensemble encore (from which Dylan sloped off early). But it was Young whose
phone call persuaded Dylan to take part in Farm Aid, after the latter’s ill-judged remarks at Live Aid
had galvanised WILLIE NELSON into organising the Farm Aid event. Dylan and Young both per-
formed at this, but met up only privately backstage. Another six years on and Young was one of
the best performers at the 30th Anniversary Concert for Dylan at Madison Square Garden, NYC, on
October 16, 1992, giving a ferocious, blazing performance of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, adding
backing vocals (with ROGER McGUINN, TOM PETTY, GEORGE HARRISON and ERIC CLAPTON) on
Dylan’s performance of ‘My Back Pages’, and contributing to the ensemble rendition of ‘Knockin’
on Heaven’s Door’. (An edited version of this concert was released as The 30th Anniversary Concert
Celebration on album and video in 1993.) By this time, Dylan was some years into the
Never-Ending Tour—it began in June 1988—and Neil Young dropped in on this several times over.
Indeed Young was in on the start of it, lending Dylan and his band his ranch for pre-tour rehearsals,
and then took part in the first, third and fourth concerts, playing electric guitar. It was also
Young and his wife Pegi who founded the Bridge School for Handicapped Children near San Francisco,
which holds an annual benefit concert, and for which Dylan appeared on December 4 in that
first year of the Never-Ending Tour, performing six songs with G.E. SMITH on lead guitar.
In 1993 Young revisited Dylan’s tour (October 9, Mountain View, CA), playing guitar on one number,
and then one year and 11 days later he and BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN both played guitar behind
Dylan on two encore numbers at the Roseland, New York City. In 1996, weirdly, Dylan and his
band were second on the bill below Young & Crazy Horse at a July 13 concert in Hamburg; there was
no collaboration that night. When Young toured in the summer of 2000, and the support act was
the Pretenders, he returned to ‘All Along the Watchtower’, with Chrissie Hynde on guitar and
support vocals, one such performance being included on the live album Road Rock Vol. 1—but
then he had also revisited this Dylan song in 1993 when he’d played in concert with Booker T & the
MGs. (Dylan had played harmonica on a BOOKER T album track in 1973—an album called Chronicles.)
Perhaps the gentlest, best conjunction comes late on—when Dylan namechecks Young on the
Time Out of Mind song ‘Highlands’ in 1997—‘I’m listenin’ to Neil Young / I got to turn up the sound /
Someone’s always yelling / ‘‘Turn it down!’’’—and then Young namechecks Dylan on the Greendale album’s
song ‘Bandit’ (2003), and in such a way that it takes us back to two 1960s Dylan songs (‘Talking
World War III Blues’ as well as ‘Like a Rolling Stone’)—‘No-one can touch you now / But I can
touch you now / You’re invisible / You got too many secrets / Bob Dylan said that / Somethin’ like
that.’"