The one guitarist Neil Young never understood
It’s every artist’s dream to have their own specific sound whenever they walk into the studio. Even though they might not have the tightest grasp on musical theory, the art of making one’s musical presence known from the moment they start playing is everything that an aspiring artist should strive for. While Neil Young may have had more than his fair share of sonic faces throughout his career, there was one guitarist he could never grasp in the early days.
When Young started messing around with the guitar, his first gigs involved playing various British Invasion songs. Famously kicking off his live career playing Beatles tracks to anyone who would listen, it wasn’t long before Young started to move in a much more aggressive direction, pushing the sonic boundaries of the guitar when joining Buffalo Springfield.
While Young would eventually follow Stephen Stills into Crosby, Stills, and Nash, he was always best suited to his solo career, where he would make some of the most off-the-wall music of his career. Though he may have been known on the charts as the man behind such classics as ‘Heart of Gold’, Young was known to mess around with every album he made, often keeping in the more ramshackle pieces of the song in the final mix.
By the time he had reached his elder statesman phase, though, Young had become known for his influence on the world of grunge music because of the way he played guitar. Not one for flashiness, Young was known to wrestle with his guitar half the time when he played lead, creating massive emotional exercises on tracks like ‘Cinnamon Girl’ while only having to play one note.
As Young was learning the basics of rock guitar, one blues legend was quickly laying the groundwork for what a guitar hero was supposed to be. Once the summer of love started crossing over to England, Jimi Hendrix was teaching legions of aspiring guitarists how to emote through their instruments, using Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding as his foundation to create sonic colours no one had ever heard.
Even though Hendrix may have had his fair share of influences from artists like Buddy Guy and Billy Gibbons, most of his lead playing left the most accomplished players dumbfounded. When talking about seeing Hendrix play for the first time, Young thought everything he created was utterly alien to him.
During Hendrix’s induction into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Young remembered how confused he was trying to figure out what Hendrix did, saying, “He was at one with his instrument. Truly, one thing was happening. [There was] no real technique to take note of, no chords that I could recognise. No hand movements that made go, ‘I know what that is’. I didn’t know what any of it was, but I heard it, and I felt it, and I thought maybe one day I could go to that neighbourhood”.
Outside of Hendrix’s debut, he would continue to make mind-bending records that no guitar player could touch, extending his songs into elongated jams on Electric Ladyland and even getting the call to work with Miles Davis in the months before his tragic passing. Young may have pined for that singular voice on the guitar, but Hendrix was the prime example of a musician looking to make his guitar speak.