Recommendations of the Editorial team
Neil Young has released an enormous amount of music over the past 60 years. He has enough famous songs that it would be hard to fit them all into a four-hour concert, especially considering his work with CSNY and Buffalo Springfield. But even these songs only represent a tiny portion of his catalog.
The evaluation of the votes required numerous discretionary decisions. It was a no-brainer to exclude votes for “Old Man” and “Cinnamon Girl,” but “Cortez the Killer,” “Powderfinger,” and “Sugar Mountain” presented a bit of a dilemma. They’re not hits in the traditional sense, but the latter two appear on “Decade,” while “Powderfinger” is his second most-played song (only ahead of “Cinnamon Girl”).
Ultimately, we found that they were simply too well-known to count, even though they all received a lot of votes.
10th place: “Expecting to Fly”
Buffalo Springfield had only been in existence for about a year when Neil Young entered Sunset Sound studios in LA in May 1967 to record “Expecting to Fly” with producer Jack Nitzsche, but the group was already in a downward spiral. The line-up was constantly changing as Neil Young kept leaving and returning and Bruce Palmer took time off for urgent legal matters.
Young also wanted to work alone, which is why no one else in the band had anything to do with “Expecting to Fly”. Influenced by “A Day in the Life,” they brought in an orchestra and spent weeks refining the track. A shortened version flopped as a single, but it was a clear sign that Young had already moved beyond the scope of a band.
He has not performed the song in concert since the European solo acoustic tour for “Greendale” in fall 2003, although he did rehearse it with Promise of the Real in preparation for their summer tour.
9th place: “On the Beach”
If there is any doubt that Neil Young was deeply depressed when he made On The Beach in early 1974, one need only listen to the title track that opens the second side of the LP. “The world is turnin’,” he sings in the first lines. “I hope it doesn’t turn away.” Things only get darker after that as he talks about a radio interview where he ends up “alone at the microphone” before deciding to just leave town.
“I head for the sticks with my bus and friends,” he sings. “But I follow the road, although I don’t know where it ends.” The road led him to a disastrous CSNY reunion tour later in the year that did little to lift his spirits, but toward the end of the year he met his future wife, Pegi Morton, and things took a turn for the better.
He played “On the Beach” at numerous CSNY shows in 1974, but today it is a rare rarity. He has only played it twice since 1975: in 1999 at a solo acoustic show in Chicago and in 2003 at a “Greendale” acoustic show in Hamburg.
8th place: “Vampire Blues”
“Good times are coming, I hear it everywhere I go,” sings Neil Young in “Vampire Blues” from 1974. “Good times are coming, but they sure are coming slowly.”
Featuring guitarist George Whitsell (who played with Crazy Horse in their 1960s band The Rockets) and bassist Tim Drummond scraping his beard with a credit card to create a cool sound effect, “Vampire Blues” is a typically downbeat “On the Beach” song, in which Young compares himself to a vampire bat looking for “high octane” blood.
He only played it live once, at an Eagles show in 1974.
7th place: “Danger Bird”
The death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten in 1972 seemed to spell the end of Crazy Horse, but just a few years later Young met guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro and the group was revitalized.
The new Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s first album was 1975’s Zuma, recorded in a thick fog of drugs and distorted guitar solos. The second track is the seven-minute epic “Danger Bird,” which was actually composed of two quite different takes taken weeks apart.
It’s a haunting song, and apart from a single solo piano performance in 2003, he’s never attempted it live without Crazy Horse. Listen to the 13-and-a-half-minute version on “Year of the Horse.”
6th place: “Pocahontas”
Neil Young originally wrote “Pocahontas” for Chrome Dreams, an album he planned to release in 1977 but remains unreleased to this day. Two years later it resurfaced on the acoustic side of Rust Never Sleeps.
It takes much of the melody from Carole King’s 1963 song “He’s a Bad Boy” and is a surreal journey through time from the 17th century to the era of Marlon Brando and the Astrodome.
Similar to “Cortez the Killer,” the song focuses on the devastating effects of European colonization of the Americas on the indigenous peoples. He has been a staple in Young’s live set for decades.
