![\"Neil](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Neil-Young-2015-Musician-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ Alamy)<\/p>\n
Thu 16 April 2026 20:15, UK <\/p>\n
Neil Young<\/a> was the last person to be apologetic for anything that he ever made. <\/p>\n Even if he has released albums that were great and others that were absolute trash, what you saw was what you got a lot of the time with Young, and if everyone happened to not like what he was doing, that was their problem. But even when he was working on some of the most celebrated records of his career, there were many points where he claimed not to be in the best headspace to get some of his best tunes off the ground.<\/p>\n Granted, it\u2019s not like you can really blame him. Tonight\u2019s the Night is one of his finest records because of how raw it is, and even though Young delivered some of the most chilling songs of his career, chances are he would have traded in the entire record to have been able to get help for Danny Whitten before he passed away. But once he saw his friends fade away, it wasn\u2019t like Young was taking too much care of himself, either.<\/p>\n The 1970s weren\u2019t exactly the decade for everyone to behave like proper gentlemen by any stretch, and a lot of Young\u2019s peak years did have a little bit of chemical assistance helping him out. That was all well and good as long as the music sounded right, but his stint working with The Band on The Last Waltz is more than a little bit difficult to watch whenever Young comes onstage.<\/p>\n Almost every other member of the backing group that guested with them was a superstar in their own right, but even with legends like Joni Mitchell and Eric Clapton next to him<\/a>, Young was more than a little bit embarrassed by how inebriated he was during the show. There were a lot of great moments of him harmonising with Mitchell, but that didn\u2019t stop everyone from noticing the cocaine habit that he was nursing during that time.<\/p>\n The songs still sounded decent, but Young felt like he did himself and The Band a disservice that night, saying,<\/a> \u201cI was fried for The Last Waltz. I was on my way out, falling onstage, and someone said, \u2018Here, have some of this.\u2019 I\u2019d been up for two days, so I had some. And I was gone, you know? I\u2019m not proud of it; I don\u2019t think people should see that and think, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s cool.\u2019\u201d But it\u2019s not like Young was the only casualty that happened behind the scenes with the group.<\/p>\n There was already a melancholy feel to a lot of the songs they were playing, but even when Clapton came out, hearing him cut off his solo mid-song after his guitar strap gave out wasn\u2019t exactly a good sign. But if there\u2019s one thing that The Band were great at, it was rolling with the punches every single time they encountered something that was more than a little bit tricky to deal with.<\/p>\n You have to remember this was the same band that had been working with Bob Dylan<\/a> back in the day, and if they found the time to switch their tunes on a dime the way that Dylan did, they could do the same thing with their own tunes. And even without the rest of their famous friends, hearing them sing some of their final songs together was the perfect bittersweet feeling for everyone who loved tunes like \u2018The Weight\u2019 back in the day.<\/p>\n They needed to close this chapter of their career before everything started to get out of hand, but if there\u2019s any silver lining to Young\u2019s performance<\/a>, it was giving him a wake-up call. He knew that he wasn\u2019t going in the right direction by getting that plastered, and while he wasn\u2019t exactly cutting out all drugs after that show, he was at least a bit more careful about what he was looking like during any performance.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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