Weekly Neil: Look At All The Things
I'll be leaving before I turn to stone
Take note of who appears front and center on the cover of Neil’s newest archival release, Early Daze, which captures some tremendous Hollywood studio sessions with Crazy Horse in 1969. It’s not Neil, who occupies stage right, hunched into a microphone nearly out of frame.
In the middle stands Danny Whitten, the erstwhile Crazy Horse leader whose throaty and soulful vocals can be heard on some of the most beloved Neil tunes from that era. When The Horse began to back Neil up, many of their tunes had co-lead vocals from both of them. It’s Whitten’s voice that colors “Cinnamon Girl” and “Winterlong” and “When You Dance, I Can Really Love.” His magnetic guitar force acts as a counterbalance to Neil’s more frantic bursts on “Down By The River” and others.
And he was dead by 1972.
But here in this wonderful blur of a photograph from the late ‘60s, he’s golden even in black and white, sharing a hum with his best collaborator. Maybe they’re singing “Look At All The Things,” a slight number Whitten penned that can’t really hold a candle to many of the highlights from that time. Nevertheless, it still made it onto Crazy Horse’s 1971 debut album. It sounds more like Buffalo Springfield than maybe we ought to admit but let’s lean into it anyway and share the secret.
Early Daze is a great document even if many of the versions have already been released on various other compilations. “Look At All The Things” is not a head-turner by any means. Neil singing “Helpless” as a straight-ahead desperate rocker with Crazy Horse makes his more famous middle-of-the-road CSNY take seem like vanilla dribble by comparison. “Dance Dance Dance” and “Everybody’s Alone” also both sound wonderfully leveled-up.
But I like focusing in on “Look At All The Things” to hear the real Danny Whitten instead of the myth, or the half-remembered version Neil evokes in a drunken haze midway Tonight’s The Night on the incredible “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” a song Whitten wrote about scoring drugs.
On “Things,” Whitten is bold and assured, his country croon fleshing out what’s really a skeletally thin song embodying horniness. The version he leads on Crazy Horse from ‘71 is borderline Spectoresque in its multi-voice grandeur — almost disorienting in how the voices swallow up the song and disappear down a black hole in stereo. Early Daze captures Whitten and Neil, two birds on the same branch, offering little more than a simple take on a version of a love song. I like that.
I also like to consider the alternate timeline where Whitten cleaned up his act enough to join Neil on the Harvest tour in ‘73 and remained with it enough to sing a tune in the middle of the set, exposing his talent to new audiences. It didn’t happen. But both Rod Stewart and Everything But The Girl covered Whitten’s song “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” — which bears more than a passing resemblance to The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” a song released a few months later — and found mild chart success in the years after his death.
That’s a kind of legacy. So is this entire Early Daze project, as well as everything he did with Crazy Horse before they had to boot him out. I like backstories. We all do — it’s kind of what this entire newsletter is all about. But more than that I like songs and Whitten could play the hell out of them. Look at all the things he sang.
“Look At All The Things,” written by Danny Whitten, from Crazy Horse (1971) and Early Daze (2024)
Danny Whitten: vocals, guitar
Neil Young: vocals, guitar
Billy Talbot: bass
Ralph Molina: drums, vocals