March 18 – Bad Back But Heart Of Gold

Having a bad back isn’t fun, but they say every cloud has a silver lining. For Neil Young, it turned out to be a “gold” lining, in more ways than one!

Neil hurt his back sometime early in 1971, and that made it difficult to stand up for long periods of time, and limited his ability to play his electric guitar. So he decided to sit down and take it easy, literally and musically. He began writing and playing some acoustic material on his old acoustic six-string. And that turned out to become Harvest, his fourth album. Which in turn was his only #1 album (in both Canada and the U.S) and at 4X platinum, with about six million or more copies sold, his biggest-seller. Although it contained the controversial song “Alabama”,( which piled upon “Southern Man” led Lynyrd Skynyrd to rebuff him with “Sweet Home Alabama”) and “The Needle and the Damage Done”, much of the album’s success was due to its first single. “Heart of Gold” hit #1 in the U.S. this day in 1972. As with the album, it remains his only chart-topping single in both countries. And it made the top 10 in Britain and New Zealand as well, even charting in Japan.

The weary, country-ish song was written for his then-love, actress Carrie Snodgress, with whom he had a five year relationship and a son. Neil had being playing a slightly different version of it, on piano, at some concerts before he recorded it in Nashville, but seems like the Tennessee session got it right. He played harmonica and acoustic guitar on it but added in some top-flight Nashville session players on it like Ben Keith on steel guitar and Kenny Buttery on drums. And, the cherry on the top, he happened to run into James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, who happened to be in town taping a Johnny Cash TV show, and they went back to Neil’s place and sang backing vocals.

The song was obviously right for the times, and has endured what’s more. CBC Radio in Canada ranked it as the third best Canadian song of all-time back in 2005 and Rolling Stone has consistently listed it among their 500 greatest songs of all-time, noting it “signaled the arrival of a new countrified prettiness that would come to define the laid-back Seventies.” But one person who wasn’t thrilled with it was Neil himself. He said “the song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.”

Another was Bob Dylan, who says in general he likes Neil and his music but he felt it was a rip-off of his style. He’s said “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’…(I thought) s*** that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me!” That considered, it’s perhaps ironic that “Heart of Gold” was replaced at #1 by America’s “Horse With No Name”… a song many people complained was a total rip-off of Neil Young’s sound!

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