31
The Most Noteworthy Neil Young Covers, Collaborations, Send-ups, and Tributes
Given his vast and continuing influence as one of the greatest songwriters of the rock-’n’-roll era, it should come as no surprise that Neil Young’s songs have been covered by other artists hundreds, if not thousands of times.
What is truly amazing in Young’s case, however, is the staggering diversity of genre-spanning artists who have either recorded his songs or performed them live. It is a list that stretches across both generations and genres—one that ranges from Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, and Emmylou Harris, to Rush, Radiohead, and the Flaming Lips.
Art rockers dig him too, as evidenced by David Byrne’s version of “Rockin’ in the Free World” as well as Peter Gabriel’s “Philadelphia” and David Bowie’s “I’ve Been Waiting for You.”
As hard as it might be to fathom, even an artist as unlikely as Lady Gaga has recorded her own version of a Neil Young song (“Out on the Weekend”).
When researching the musicians who have covered Young’s songs, the most obvious examples, of course, are those artists who already have their own unique connections with him. So, in that respect it is no surprise that someone like Linda Ronstadt, for example, would have numerous Neil Young songs (“After the Gold Rush,” “Birds,” “I Believe in You,” “Look Out for My Love,” “Love Is a Rose,” and the list goes on) included amongst her own, already considerable recorded body of work. Ronstadt’s own vocal harmonies can also be heard on a number of seminal Young albums including Harvest, American Stars and Bars, and Harvest Moon.
When it comes to newer-generation artists with unique ties to Young, one could also easily point toward Pearl Jam. The Seattle grunge band has covered “Rockin’ in the Free World” numerous times—perhaps most famously with Young himself at the MTV Video Music Awards. Pearl Jam have also been known to cover his songs like “Fuckin’ Up” in concert, and they even made an entire album (1995’s Billboard top five Mirror Ball) with him. When Young was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it was none other than Pearl Jam vocalist Eddie Vedder who did the honors.
There are also those bands that have made something of a second career out of playing Young’s songs. We refer here not so much to the numerous Neil Young cover bands out there playing bars in towns across America, but to those groups that have recorded so many of his songs it’s difficult to keep track of them all. Bands like Uncle Tupelo and fellow Canadians the Cowboy Junkies definitely fall into this category.
Others influenced by Neil Young who have chosen to pay tribute by recording their own versions of his songs include alt-rockers Sonic Youth (“Computer Age”), country legends like Waylon Jennings (“Are You Ready for the Country?”), and, of course, Willie Nelson. In addition to co-founding Farm Aid with Young, Nelson collaborated with him on the Old Ways album, and has been known to cover songs like “Heart of Gold” at his own concerts.
Johnny Cash is another example where the mutual respect between the Man in Black and Neil Young cuts both ways. Cash mined Young’s songbook extensively while making his final series of American Recordings sessions with producer Rick Rubin, ultimately settling on haunting versions of “Pocahontas” and “Heart of Gold” for those amazing final albums.
“Heart of Gold” has also been notably covered by Tori Amos and seventies disco artist Boney M.
It’s Gonna Take a Lotta Love
The list of female vocalists who have uniquely interpreted Neil Young’s songs—particularly those from the sensitive singer-songwriter period marked by the albums Harvest and After the Gold Rush—is likewise a very long one, and includes artists ranging from Dolly Parton, Chrissie Hynde, and Annie Lennox, to Patti Smith, Natalie Merchant, and Tori Amos.
To list all of these would take up an entire book by itself. But Nicolette Larson’s recording of “Lotta Love” probably stands out as among the most memorable, by simple virtue of the fact that she is one of the handful of artists to score a Billboard hit single with a Neil Young cover (another noteworthy example would be seventies one-hit wonders Prelude and their cover of “After the Gold Rush”).
St. Etienne also scored a minor alt-rock hit in the nineties with their version of ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart” (which has also been covered by the likes of Everlast, Psychic TV, Elkie Brooks, and the Mint Juleps).
But speaking of “After the Gold Rush” …
Look at Mother Nature on the Run
The title track of his third solo album—at least according to our research—ranks as one of the Neil Young songs most often remade by other artists. By our count, the number of artists who have either recorded or performed their own versions of this song in concert includes the aforementioned Prelude, as well as the Flaming Lips, Natalie Merchant, Linda Ronstadt, Radiohead, Dolly Parton, Michael Hedges, and others too numerous to mention here.
It is no mistake that Mojo magazine ranked “After the Gold Rush” #1 in its 2010 list of the 50 Greatest Neil Young songs ever. However, when it comes to the all-time champs of his songs covered by other artists, it is far from being the sole contender.
When You See Me Fly Away Without You
“Birds,” the seemingly obscure track from the same After the Gold Rush album, has been covered by—among others—the Meters, Paul Weller, Bette Midler, Everything but the Girl, and Ronstadt (yes, her again). “The Needle and the Damage Done” boasts cover versions by no less than Duran Duran, the Pretenders, Our Lady Peace, Simple Minds, and Tori Amos (yes, her again too).
“Cinnamon Girl,” which certainly ranks as one of Neil Young’s greatest rockers ever, is another classic that has been reinterpreted often, most frequently by alternative rock bands like Type O Negative and the Smashing Pumpkins. There are also versions of “Cinnamon Girl” out there by Courtney Love and Hole, Dream Syndicate, Uncle Tupelo, and even Who bassist John Entwistle (on his solo album Smash Your Head Against the Wall).
There are also some very memorable reworkings of Neil Young songs out there by what most would refer to as “jam bands,” including a lengthy live version of “Cortez the Killer” from Built to Spill and Phish’s take on “Albuquerque.” Another of Young’s more jam-tastic songs, “Like a Hurricane,” has been covered by the Mission U.K., the Walkabouts, Roxy Music, and even Saturday Night Live comic Adam Sandler.
Four Strong Winds
Of course, this whole cover song thing obviously goes both ways, as Young has been known to record and perform a number of songs by some of his own influences and favorites over the years.
Bob Dylan comes most immediately to mind here. Young has paid homage to his closest equal as the greatest living songwriter of his generation on numerous occasions. Among the many Dylan songs he has covered are his versions of “Blowin’ in the Wind” (the incendiary performances on the Ragged Glory tour); “All Along the Watchtower” (his best performance of which arguably took place at the 1992 “Bobfest” Madison Square Garden Dylan tribute); and “Forever Young” (which, contrary to some, is not a song that Dylan wrote about Young).
On the mostly forgettable album Everybody’s Rockin’, Young covers a number of blues artists including Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, and Albert Lee, reinventing songs like “Payola Blues” as goofball rockabilly rave-ups. The album also includes a cover of “Mystery Train,” a song made famous by one of Neil Young’s original idols, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll himself, Elvis Presley.
Speaking of immortals, Young has also been known on rare occasions to take on Otis Redding’s most famous song, “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” (a great version can be found on the bootleg Archives Be Damned box set). Young’s version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” was likewise one of the highlights of the 9/11 “Tribute to Heroes” broadcast that aired on American television shortly after the Twin Towers attacks in New York City.
On some of the latter shows of the Chrome Dreams II tour, Young also took to performing a wild version of another Lennon track, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper classic “A Day in the Life.” During his performance of the song at 2009’s Hard Rock Calling festival in London’s Hyde Park, he was joined onstage by another former Beatle, Sir Paul McCartney.
Young has also covered songs by Don Gibson (the country classic “Oh, Lonesome Me” from After the Gold Rush), the Drifters (the very loud, very fucked-up reworking of “On Broadway” heard on the Freedom album), and Don and Dewey (the lascivious version of “Farmer John” with Crazy Horse on Ragged Glory).
Young’s most famous cover probably remains his version of Canadian folk singer Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds” from the Comes a Time album. Young has called this song his favorite of all time on more than one occasion, and has many times recounted personal stories of feeding pocketfuls of dimes into a jukebox to repeatedly hear the song during his youth in Canada.
Looking Like a Fool with Your Pants on the Ground
Out of all the versions of Neil Young songs performed by other artists (that we have attempted to keep to a brief discussion here), there are also, of course, those that stick out as some of our personal favorites.
For sheer weirdness, it’s hard to beat Lady Gaga’s version of “Out on the Weekend,” for sure. But the seventies gay disco singer Sylvester doing a song like “Southern Man” also warrants a mention in the high strangeness department—for the sheer audacity of it alone. Speaking of seventies disco, how about trying on the Undisputed Truth’s version of “Down by the River” for size? It just doesn’t get much weirder than that.
While they are not exactly covers, we would also be quite remiss if we didn’t mention a few of the more uncannily accurate comedic send-ups of Neil Young over the years.
The National Lampoon comedy troupe’s “Southern California Brings Me Down” from the sadly out of print album Goodbye Pop hilariously mocks Neil Young songs from “A Man Needs a Maid” (sample lyric: “I need someone to live with me, keep my bed warm, and sew patches on my jeans”) to “Alabama” and “Ohio.” Both the singer and the guitarist on this “song” have got Young’s vocal and guitar sound down cold.
Sheet music for Nicolette Larson’s cover of Neil Young’s “Lotta Love.” Neil once commented that in giving Nicolette the big hit, she had gotten his “Fleetwood Mac song.”
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
But the undisputed all-time champ of comedic Neil Young impersonations is Jimmy Fallon. No contest here, Fallon wins it hands down. On his hilarious bits of “Neil” doing American Idol reject General Larry Platt’s “Pants on the Ground” and the “Double Rainbow” song, Fallon nails Young to the point where you could almost be fooled into thinking it was actually him. Since then, Fallon has struck again, this time in a duet with Bruce Springsteen (the real one) doing “Whip My Hair” as Neil Young and the bearded Bruce from the Born to Run era. Freaking hilarious.
Adam Sandler’s performance of “Powderfinger” with Young at the 2009 Bridge School benefit also warrants a mention here (although Sandler actually seems to be playing it fairly straight in the video we’ve seen).
Okay, so that’s the funny stuff. Here are some of the other Neil Young covers (the serious ones) that we really like.
Radiohead: “On the Beach”
Any musical comparisons between Neil Young and Radiohead really boil down to two things. First would be their willingness to boldly experiment regardless of any resulting commercial fallout. But secondly (and for the purposes of this discussion, perhaps most importantly), the similarities really come down to Thom Yorke and that haunting voice of his.
Remind you of anyone else we know?
Musically—on the surface anyway—these are two great acts who couldn’t be further apart in terms of their approaches to creating a sound that (frequent and distracting side trips aside) remains uniquely their own.
But while both artists have repeatedly shown a bold willingness to take musical risks over the course of their careers, Radiohead’s experiments with sonics and texture on albums like Kid A, In Rainbows, and the recent King of Limbs have done more to stretch the boundaries of what is possible while working within the limitations of pop music than anything Neil Young has ever done.
Young, meanwhile, while being equally eager to experiment with his own sound, has always done so while remaining within more traditional music genres. This has remained largely true even as Neil has sometimes jumped wildly between these same genres, as he did in the eighties with albums like Trans.
Where Neil Young and Radiohead really meet, though, is in their stubborn devotion to their art. A very convincing argument could be made that Radiohead is really the first band to consistently record noncommercial, experimental albums like Kid A—while still maintaining a huge level of commercial success—since Neil Young was doing the same thing in the seventies with the Ditch Trilogy.
But more than anything else, Thom Yorke’s falsetto on songs like “Everything in Its Right Place” has an uncanny resemblance to the tone that Neil Young uses on his own songs like “Will to Love” or “On the Beach.”
Yorke himself has said in interviews that he fell in love with Young’s work after reading reviews of Radiohead albums that compared his own voice to Young’s. Curious, he purchased a copy of After the Gold Rush and became an instant fan, or so the story goes.
Although Radiohead have never officially recorded a Neil Young cover, they have performed several of his songs in concert. Of those we have heard, we especially like the acoustic version of “On the Beach” they did for a BBC radio broadcast a few years back, which, if you can find it, can be heard on a bootleg called Gagging Order (Acoustic Renditions). If not, you can always do a YouTube search like we did.
For a band known to stretch musical limits, Radiohead play it very straight on this letter-perfect version of the song, and Yorke’s vocal fits the melancholic feel of the lyrics like a glove—especially when his voice cracks with a rare show of emotion during the line “I went to the radio interview and ended up alone at the microphone.”
That one alone is guaranteed to produce shivers.
Radiohead have also been known to cover the Neil Young songs “Tell Me Why,” “Down by the River,” and “After the Gold Rush” in concert (the latter often coming as an intro to their own “Everything in Its Right Place”).
Buddy Miles: “Down by the River”
Although you don’t hear it much anymore on the radio today, the late, great Buddy Miles’s version of “Down by the River” was nearly as much of an FM staple as Young’s own recording back when he originally released the song in 1970 as part of the Them Changes album.
Miles is today mostly remembered as Jimi Hendrix’s one-time drummer in the Band of Gypsys, and for his work with guitarist Mike Bloomfield in the Electric Flag. Outside of that, Miles’s own solo work has been mostly hit and miss. But he nails it here with a great version of one of Young’s earliest signature extended guitar freakouts.
On Buddy Miles’s version, the guitar work isn’t nearly as crazy as on Young’s version from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. But it does hit a particularly haunting note with its sustained tone—it’s a far cry from the psychedelic histrionics of Young’s recording. Miles’s drums also create the effect of a wall of sound that surrounds you like a vacuum. Miles’s vocal also adds a sweet touch of soul to the song, and one that contrasts nicely with Young’s more detached-sounding voice on the original version.
It is definitely one of the better examples of an early period Neil Young cover song.
Wilco: “Broken Arrow”
As one of those modern-day bands that most proudly wears its Neil Young influence on its collective sleeve, we already loved Jeff Tweedy’s great alt-country band Wilco anyway.
But what we like most about this great cover of Neil’s Buffalo Springfield track “Broken Arrow” (from the MusiCares Tribute to Neil Young DVD) is the way they recreate the groundbreaking effects (at least at the time) of the original recording. The fact that Wilco accomplish this without using tapes (these guys are all incredible musicians) makes this version of the song all the more amazing.
Tweedy’s vocal is also a knockout. He captures the youthful innocence and vulnerability of Young’s voice from the Springfield era perfectly here, in much the same way that Thom Yorke’s voice echoes Young’s more emotionally detached vocal qualities when Radiohead covers Neil Young.
For their next great Neil Young cover, what we’d really like to see is Wilco’s monster guitarist Nels Cline get into some of his signature shredding on something like “Cowgirl in the Sand” or “Change Your Mind.”
Nils Lofgren: The Loner—Nils Sings Neil
Few musicians today are as eminently qualified to cover the songs of Neil Young as the present-day guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, Nils Lofgren. This is exactly what he does on The Loner, an album devoted entirely to covering the music of Neil Young.
In a previous life, Lofgren was Young’s second guitarist on a variety of albums ranging from Tonight’s the Night to Trans. On The Loner, Lofgren offers up his own unique take on songs drawing from Young’s entire career—from “On the Way Home” to “Like a Hurricane” to “Harvest Moon.”
Lofgren’s versions mostly remain true to the spirit of the originals. But because his own vocal style is somewhat similar to Young’s (and of course because he is intimately acquainted with the artist in a way few others can claim), he breathes new life into them.
We especially like his versions of “Don’t Be Denied,” “Don’t Cry No Tears,” and, of course, “The Loner.”
Patti Smith: “Helpless”
Nobody in their right mind has ever denied that Patti Smith is a visionary poet, or a trailblazing figure when it comes to redefining the role of women in the misogynistic world of rock ’n’ roll she was born into during the seventies. But as much as her brilliant debut album Horses made her a critic’s darling pretty much from the get-go, there was also a considerable rub on her back then—at least when it came to her voice.
Thirty years after that landmark album, Patti Smith proved her few critics wrong by making 2007’s remarkable but sadly overlooked album Twelve.
On this album, Patti Smith proves herself to be an amazing singer as well, covering twelve songs by some of her favorite artists including Jimi Hendrix, the Stones, and yes, Neil Young.
On her version of Young’s “Helpless,” Patti breaks the CSN&Y version heard on Déjà Vu down into a stripped-down acoustic arrangement. In doing so, she wrings out the lyrical focus of Young’s wistful memoir about his childhood Ontario in a way that reveals the longing sort of ache largely missed on CSN&Y’s more overproduced version. As a vocalist, Smith displays a gift for interpretation here that even some of her biggest fans may not have realized she had.
On a side note, we also love Patti’s take on Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from this album.
For a more extensive look at the artists who have covered Neil Young’s music, we recommend pointing your web browsers toward the Covers Project. You’ll find them at http://www.coversproject.com/artist/Neil+Young.
The always reliable Thrasher’s Wheat also has a great page devoted to the subject (50 Reasons Why Neil Young Is Important). You’ll find it at http://www.thrashersblog.com/2006/11/50-reasons-why-neil-young-is-important.html.