walking upstream…
Neil Young
photo: billyshiverstick · cc0 ↗Neil Young
sourcesWikipedia — Neil Young (lead background) · Thrasher's Wheat — mirror of TIME Magazine 2005 interview (backs the "he's the master" quote) · Rock and Roll Garage — Neil Young's favorite songs (backs the Waging Heavy Peace "Like a Rolling Stone" quote) · Fresh Air Archive — Neil Young on Link Wray and "Rumble" (backs the NPR quote) · Wise Famous Quotes — Neil Young on Link Wray (backs the "beginning of grunge" quote) · Thrasher's Wheat — Elvis Presley & Neil Young
In the mid-1950s in Winnipeg, a teenager collecting Elvis Presley trading cards was also chasing down a country instrumental with a guitar sound so distorted two cities had banned it from the radio. Neil Young found in that noise, and later in Bob Dylan's plainspoken poetry, two competing models for a career built on nerve rather than polish. He passed through Buffalo Springfield before going solo, splitting his catalog ever since between Harvest's hushed acoustic confession and Crazy Horse's feedback-soaked wreckage, refusing to settle in either camp long enough to be filed there. "Cortez the Killer" and "Heart of Gold" sound like two different careers; the restlessness underneath is the same one that first heard rawness and tenderness as never actually being opposites.
the sound in question
1989
Rockin' in the Free WorldNeil Young
walk the tributaries ↓
Bob Dylan1960s · Folk / Folk rock / Rock
Young has never hedged on this one. Asked by TIME in 2005 who he'd most want to be, he answered immediately: "He's the master. If I'd like to be anyone, it's him... he's written some of the greatest poetry and put it to music... not so consistently or as intensely" as anyone else he could name. In his authorized biography Shakey, Young goes further, calling himself a "B student" of Dylan — a grade he has, by his own account, carried for six decades without closing the gap.
listen: upstream & heresource: Thrasher's Wheat — Bob Dylan and Neil Young (backs the "B student" claim from Shakey) ↗
1965
Like a Rolling StoneBob Dylan
1972
Heart of GoldNeil Young
listen forDylan's 1965 single unspools over a chiming organ and a sneering vocal that treats a pop single like an argument nobody asked for. Young first heard it in Toronto and later wrote that it "was as fresh as the first day I heard it... the poetry, attitude, and ambience of that piece are part of my makeup." Seven years on, "Heart of Gold" takes that same plainspoken, image-driven verse and strips it down to a hushed harmonica and acoustic guitar — the argument turned into a confession, but still a lyric doing work a melody usually would.
Elvis Presley1950s–70s · Rock and roll / Rockabilly / Pop / Gospel
Young idolized Elvis before he'd taken a guitar seriously, collecting his trading cards as a Winnipeg teenager, and the debt kept resurfacing in stranger forms than a cover song. He named a touring dog Elvis and later wrote him into "Old King," and in 1989 he played "Rockin' in the Free World" on Saturday Night Live wearing an Elvis Presley T-shirt — tribute worn onstage instead of sung. By 2005's Prairie Wind, that decades-long attachment finally got its own eulogy.
listen: upstream & heresource: Elvis Daily — Neil Young and Elvis Presley connection (backs the "working class kid" quote) ↗
1956
Hound DogElvis Presley
2005
He Was the KingNeil Young
listen for"He Was the King" opens on the refrain "The last time I saw Elvis...", each verse a different half-remembered scene rather than one throughline, the way Presley's own early singles built a persona out of vignettes and swagger instead of confession. "Hound Dog" is all sneer and forward motion, daring the band to keep pace; Young's tribute trades that speed for a slow, harmonica-laced eulogy, but the same theatrical bravado — a performer building myth in real time — survives the almost fifty years between them.
Link Wray1950s · Rock and roll / Instrumental rock
Link Wray recorded "Rumble" in three takes for $57, three months after surgeons removed a lung during his recovery from tuberculosis. "Isn't God wonderful?" he said of the session years later. "It was a four-million seller. So yeah, I think God loves rock and roll." Young has said that if he could travel back to see any band live, it would be Wray's Ray Men — "he was the beginning of grunge, way before anyone you know" — tracing his own feedback-heavy guitar tone directly back to that one 1958 single.
listen: upstream & heresource: Guitar Player — Link Wray on "Rumble" (backs the $57/lung recording quotes) ↗
1958
RumbleLink Wray
1975
Cortez the KillerNeil Young
listen forWray built "Rumble"'s tremolo-soaked menace by punching holes in his amplifier's speaker cone, giving the guitar a ragged, buzzing decay no other 1958 instrumental had. On Fresh Air, Young remembered the record as "a very distorted sounding guitar that was just hairy, I mean it was great," and said he wanted to learn how to make that sound himself. "Cortez the Killer" answers it two decades later: the same thick, sustained distortion, stretched now across a seven-minute solo instead of Wray's two-minute burst.