(Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Wed 1 October 2025 1:00, UK
Legitimately, one of the hardest parts about being Neil Young must be choosing what songs to play on tour.
Granted, that is a sign that the cantankerous Canuck has it pretty sweet these days, but still, can you imagine the headaches? Do you dig out the Les Paul and shred away on Ditch Trio jams? Do you electrify the fans by picking from Harvest and Tonight’s The Night? Do you expand some minds with some of your more recent work? Perhaps you make some die-hard Neil Young crate-diggers’ entire lives by throwing in some rarities that they never in a million years thought they’d hear?
At the very least, you can be sure that one thing makes the process of picking from one of the best back catalogues in rock a little easier. The fact that Young himself will make absolutely no concessions to what other people might want to hear in picking his setlists. The man will play whatever he damn well pleases. Perhaps it helps to know that a large portion of his fanbase loves him for this fact but if they didn’t, it would bother him as much as anyone else on this planet’s opinion does. Which is to say, it wouldn’t.
Thus, there’s something quite heart-warming about the recent spate of beloved Neil Young classics coming back into his setlists. After The Gold Rush‘s utterly magical ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart‘ worked its way into his recent tour with the Chrome Hearts and one can be absolutely certain that wasn’t there because some suit pressured him into it. It’s there because Young seems more comfortable with his back catalogue than ever and another recently surfaced masterpiece seems to prove this fact.
What made Neil Young start playing ‘Ambulance Blues’ again?
On July 1st, Young and the Chrome Hearts took to the stage in Gröningen, Netherlands, as part of the Summerstage Festival. In lieu of any real introduction, Young growled, “I haven’t played this in, like, 100 years, we’ll see what happens.”
Then, amid gasps from his assembled fans, eased the Chrome Hearts into On The Beach‘s nine-minute-long closing track ‘Ambulance Blues’, one of his most beloved songs from arguably the most beloved era of his career.
Now, Young is being a little hyperbolic here, and not just in the obvious way. It’s been six years since he last played his eulogy for the hippy dream live but that time, along with most times he’s played the song, was as a solo, acoustic number. For the last time ‘Ambulance Blues‘ got a full band airing, you’re looking at nearly three decades ago, when REM convinced Young to play the song with them at the 1998 Bridge School Benefit. The song has since been the standard opener for Young and the Chrome Hearts’ summer tour, so why the change of heart?
Micah Nelson, Young’s guitarist in the Chrome Hearts talked to Uncut about exactly that, and said the song came from a stoned jam in Brussels before one of the tour’s early shows in Brussels. Through the weed smoke and booze, the subject of folk genius Bert Jansch came up. “Neil went, ‘Oh, yeah, I knew Bert. He opened for me once, years ago…’ Neil said, ‘That song – ‘Ambulance Blues’, I totally ripped off the melody from ‘Needle Of Death’, just that first part of it.’ So I started playing that and we began singing it.”
This turned the jam from a stoned goof into a rehearsal, and the band learned the song proper as a result. The next night was the Groningen show, where ‘Ambulance Blues’ was put in prime place as the show’s opener, which continued from then on out and not only because the song’s a classic. As Nelson says, “Starting with, ‘Back in the old folkie days…’, it’s setting this tone where Neil’s back at the Riverboat in Toronto. It’s like this little rock‘n’roll history saga that we’re about to take everybody on.”
Hopefully it’s a saga that all of us can see soon.
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