YOUNG & THE RESTLESS
In January of 1969, Neil Young began recording his second solo album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere with Danny Whitten on guitar; Billy Talbot, bass; and Ralph Molina, drums at Wally Heider’s recording studio on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood.
Young’s new trio had toiled as Danny & the Memories and then shape-shifted into The Rockets, who had done an LP on the White Whale label, pure grunge, a loud, sloppy guitar-driven outfit sounding like an open wound, whose backbeat listed like sailors on leave at Subic Bay.
Young saw The Rockets one night in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard at the Whisky A Go-Go, appropriated some group members and rechristened them as Crazy Horse. They became the blank canvas upon which Neil painted his visceral, unmediated masterworks.
It was a band only Neil Young could find common cause with, and he went to hell and back with them.
“Danny Whitten, from the day I met Crazy Horse and Neil Young at the Cellar Door in 1969, it was common knowledge, and Neil would be the first to tell you, that Danny was one of his early mentors and influences,” Nils Lofgren stressed to me in a 2014 interview. “Danny had that great deep ‘Bee Gees’ vibrato, with that California soul and lament.”
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, released on May 14, 1969 on Reprise Records, was the fruit of this idiosyncratic partnership. It’s a quaking dirge for two guitars, bass, drums and woeful voice. Only in 1969 could such a seeming downer become the signature sound of FM radio. Suddenly, Neil Young is the next voice of his generation, whiny and careless, all frayed edges and broken glass.
Rodney Bingenheimer, in his music column for the world’s largest circulation of any pop weekly at the time, was the first to tout “Cinnamon Girl” in print, receiving a promotional test pressing courtesy of Pete Johnson at the Reprise label. “Cinnamon Girl” from Young’s
