Elton John’s opinion on Neil Young

There are not many musicians in the business who have managed to keep their songwriting creativity intact despite the harassment of record companies, which often tried to make them fit the latest trends or the kind of sound that was on the charts. But Neil Young and Elton John are two artists who were able to experiment from one album to another, making the kind of music they really wanted throughout most of their careers. The musicians had the chance to meet each other and Elton has already given his opinion on Neil’s music.

What is Elton John’s opinion on Neil Young

“Neil has remained on top of his game on all counts, there’s not many people you can say that about. He can move me whether he’s playing loud music, soft music or country music. There’s so many different facets to Neil. I think that’s why he has so much respect from everybody, whether they’re older musicians like myself or the younger generation like the Pearl Jams. He just goes out there and gives it his all,” Elton John said in an interview for the book “Shakey”.

Elton and Neil have been really good friends since the early 70s when after going to see the Canadian musician play at the Royal Festival Hall in London, invited him back to his apartment and Young played his entire “Harvest” album on the piano. “One night, after we went to see him play live, Neil Young came back home with us. After a few drinks, elected to perform his forthcoming album in its entirety for us at 2 a.m.”

“Already alerted to the fact that an impromptu party was going on by the nerve-jangling sound of my friend Kiki Dee drunkenly walking into a glass door while holding a tray containing every champagne glass we owned, the delight of the adjoining flats at Neil Young performing his forthcoming album was audible. So that’s how I heard the classic ‘Heart Of Gold’ for the first time, presented in a unique arrangement of solo piano, voice and neighbour intermittently banging on the ceiling with a broom handle and loudly imploring Neil Young to shut up,” Elton John said in his autobiography “Me”.

They have played live and recorded together

Neil and Elton’s friendship continued over the decades and besides having the chance to play live, they also recorded together. Back in 2006, Neil performed at the AIDS Foundation fifth annual benefit at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He played “Harvest” and later “Your Song” with Elton. Four years later, Elton invited Young to appear on his album with Leon Russell called “The Union”. He was one of the singers in the track “Gone to Shiloh”, which the British artist later said was one of his favorites.

“I wanted to make live records again, as far as actually putting the track down with a band. On analog instead of digital, which Neil Young has been telling me to do for so long. (…) Neil Young and I have been friends since 1971, when he came over to the Royal Festival Hall. (I) had him back to my flat in the Edgware Road and he played the whole ‘Harvest’ record on the piano, which I’ll never forget. We’ve been friends for quite a while, we don’t see each other very much. But I asked him to sing on that and he did a fantastic job. That’s probably one of my favorite tracks, actually,” Elton John said in an interview in 2011 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).

He was a fan long before he had the chance to meet Neil, having praised him already in 1970, during an interview with Rolling Stone, saying he was an artist that you knew exactly which were his musical roots. “Neil Young, whew. I had the tape of this album in the States before the album itself came out. Great. My eight-track stereo is in my car in Britain and I’m sitting in a hotel room looking at the cartridge.”

He continued:

“People like Neil Young, you know where their heads are by their music. You can see their roots too. My roots are… listening to records. All the time. I live, eat, sleep, breathe music. Neil Young, The Band, the Springfield, the Dead, the Airplane. I feel more American than British. Really. Over here the scene is all these people slaggin’ Ten Years After week after week for makin’ so much money and being no good. I don’t like them myself but they must get pretty pissed off after a while.

Although they didn’t see each other often over the years, whenever they met, they would have a lot of fun together as he once told Howard Stern. “(Yes, he sang his entire ‘Harvest’ album to me) on piano. I went to see him at the Royal Festival Hall (in London), he came back to the apartment and played. Of course the neighbors complained but I wasn’t going to shut him up, was I? He has always been another person who’s always been so great to me and so sweet.”

“We went out in Honolulu one night and got really, really, drunk. We went to a great restaurant and I started doing ‘Hey, hey hey hey cripple creek ferry’ (with a funny voice) over dinner. I probably shouldn’t have, but anyway, (then) he’s got to go. Then he rang me up the next morning, at the crack of dawn and went ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ (singing with a funny voice),” Elton John said laughing.

Elton said you needed Valium to listen to Neil Young’s albums released in the late 70s

Although Elton has always been a big fan and friend of Neil’s, he didn’t like everything the musician released, saying in 1980 that to listen to what Young was putting out at the time, you needed to take some Valium. “The Police to me are the best band that’s come out in five or six years. When I listen to their records they have something nobody else’s records has at the moment. I’ve got just about 20 albums in my hotel.”

“People like Stevie Wonder and Neil Young. God! You need valium when you have Neil Young! Jesus! You listen to them and you go, ‘There’s nothing exciting’. And you listen to The Police album and you go, ‘There’s something!’ They’ve got to be the biggest group out of the whole lot,” he said in an interview with Marc Rushton in 1980.

During that decade, both of them had record contracts with Geffen Records for a few years, with which they did not always have a good relationship, as the company often wanted to interfere with their creativity and give them directions, pushing them to come up with albums that would have a better chance of commercial success. Elton was able to get through that period, although it didn’t always please him. But Neil Young really had a hard time, even being sued by the label, which claimed that he had recorded “uncharacteristic” and uncommercial music that did not sound like “Neil Young.” In Jimmy McDonough’s Neil Young biography Shakey, Elton commented on that.

He said:

“David’s (Geffen) a very controlling person, a very powerful person. He’s got his own ideas about what people should do and what they shouldn’t do. And no artist likes to be told what to do. They can be told what to do if someone knows what they are talking about. They’ll listen to a producer, for example, but if they’re being told what to do by someone they have no respect for on a musical level, I think then things start getting a little uncomfortable, to say the least.” .

“I had a very uncomfortable time at Geffen. I hated it. It went sour, and then I had so many more albums to do. It was ‘Oh my God, what am I gonna do?’ I got through it, I survived it. But I can definitely sympathize with an artist who has a clash with somebody at the record company. It’s a fucking miserable existence, because you’re putting down what you think is good stuff and they don’t care,” he said.