The rockers co-headlined a UK gig for the first time as the sun set over London’s Hyde Park on 15 July 2019
The work of Bob Dylan and Neil Young is comparatively unparalleled in the world of pop music. The two icons have carved out careers that stretch back to the 1960s and are rarely blemished by shoddy work. (Excerpt from Farout Magazine)
Famously, before the two men became great companions, Dylan chastised one of Young’s greatest songs, ‘Heart of Gold’. The track arrived some years after Dylan had cemented his sound within a rock paradigm and was becoming more and more guarded of the sonic structures he had been using as a climbing frame for most of his career. He lashed out when he assumed another artist to be taking a similar route. Young, in particular, pushed Dylan over the edge, “The only time it bothered me that someone sounded like me was when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about ’72 and the big song at the time was ‘Heart of Gold’,” the singer told SPIN.
The Dylan track in question is 1973’s ‘Forever Young’, found on his album from the following year, Planet Waves. According to his biographer Clinton Heylin in a 2009 Rolling Stone article piecing the secrets of his tracks together, Dylan penned the sentimental tribute to his children whilst living in Arizona. Famously, he moved there to escape the limelight and “rabid fans” of New York. Forever Young’ isn’t the only song Dylan wrote about Neil Young.
However, soon enough, Dylan’s fury cooled and the duo enjoyed a heartfelt and rewarding friendship. Dylan did nearly once perish in the back of Young’s hearse..
He Napped in Neil Young’s Hearse
In the Neil Young biography Shakey, artist Sandy Mazzeo remembers taking Young’s ’54 Pontiac hearse for a drive. (This is in the mid-’70s.) Mazzeo hears a series of loud bangs. “I’m thinkin’, Oh my God, it’s a ghost.’ I look in the rearview mirror and it’s Bob.”
Dylan had, for whatever reason, climbed into the back of the vehicle and gone to sleep. “Dylan was in his turban stage, and he’d slept in his turban and it had come all undone — he looked like the mummy.”
His 30th studio record, Time Out of Mind, Dylan chose to pay homage to his friend within ‘Highlands’ when he sang, “Well, my heart’s in The Highlands / I can only get there one step at a time / I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound,”
A few years later, clearly noting the privilege, Young responded to the track by including a reference to Dylan on Bandit, Young’s 25th studio album. It’s not the most flattering response: “No one can touch you now. / I can touch you now. / You’re invisible. You’ve got too many secrets. (Like a Rolling Stone)
