Weekly Neil: The Losing End (When You're On)

And I feel that way again

When I was 21 I played “The Losing End (When You’re On)” at an open-mic event hosted inside our campus bar. It was exactly the kind of place where I could try and fail to sing a Neil song and still feel supported enough that the failure didn’t really matter. Harsh brick corners, a stage all the way in the back, a crackly PA — you didn’t really need to see or hear it anyway. You’ve experienced a guy in a flannel play a guitar before.

On 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Neil is that guy. Except he’s got a band: Crazy Horse, arguably his most famous collaborators and the trio that have backed him up on his most successful recordings to date. Billy Talbot on bass, Ralph Molina on drums, and Danny Whitten on second guitar and harmony vocals. (After Whitten’s death in 1972, he was replaced by Frank Sampedro and eventually Nils Lofgren.)

It’s hard to start exactly how important Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere remains. You could certainly make the case that it’s where the modern invention of Neil begins (I won’t, but you could). There are seven songs here, two of which stretch on for 10 minutes as an opportunity for Neil and the Horse to shred. And shred they do. “Down By The River” and “Cowgirl In The Sand” are songs I would play on my iPod as I practiced some guitar shredding of my own on a candy-red Squier Bullet played through a Fender practice amp. The one-note solo of “Cinnamon Girl” is one you can master in an afternoon and feel like you’ve unlocked some real axeman potential.

Then I got a bit older. Then the songs that first appeared like background tunes on the album became my favorites. In that same campus bar a year earlier, one of my philosophy professors played the electric down-home title track with his bar band and I, buzzed, got so excited I ran my chest directly into a handrail and knocked the wind out of myself. It’s a great song! I love it almost as much as “The Losing End.” But I have a certain place in my heart for heartbroken Neil, which is why “The Losing End” remains a personal favorite.

Neil is not known as a heartbreak poet per se. “Will To Love” spends seven minutes warbling through a fish metaphor about losing love. “Love Is A Rose” and “Separate Ways” from Homegrown find ways to process his pain without being overly flowery. There are dark Neil moments of loss and grief (I’m sure we’ll get to Tonight’s The Night soon enough) but he doesn’t have a lot of lyrics that would’ve worked as AIM away message material after your girlfriend dumps you at the mall. This is fine. He’s a country soul at heart, reciting the inevitably of seasons and change and driving down another lonesome highway.

Yet “The Losing End” finds him in rare form: confused and alone, but ultimately resolved to continue on. The first verse of the song is among the most open-hearted expressions of loss you’ll hear in any pop song: “I went in to town to see you yesterday, but you were not home,” he sings. “So I talked to some old friends for a while before I wandered off alone.” It’s so hard for him now, you see, but he’ll make it somehow. Later, he’s not making it so easily: “I miss you more than ever since you've gone,” he admits, getting vulnerable. “I can hardly maintain.” He’s crying! The tears fall like rain. Even though he knows enough to know he’ll make it somehow, he’s also smart enough to know he’ll never be the same. And he feels that way again.

What do you do when you feel bad about lost love? There’s not much that can be done, so writers have attempted to capture that feeling for centuries. By exclaiming that you feel bad, you may, in fact, feel a little less bad. You may not, but you may. It’s worth a shot, right? If you’re Neil in 1969, recording with a new group in Hollywood in the early months of the year, you can’t do what you’ve already done. His self-titled album from the previous year remains a gem but it’s plagued by overwritten singer-songwriter fare and drowned by syrupy string sections. He wasn’t yet Harvest Neil. He hadn’t even made Deja Vu with Crosby, Stills & Nash yet. His next recording had to be different. So he plugged in and made a terrific country record as raw and loud as a buzzsaw. The guitar solo as played by Whitten elicits an automatic smile, like an old friend walking through the door. His harmonies, too, underscore that even though Neil feels alone, he’s not singing alone.

“The Losing End” does sound great when Neil sings it alone, of course. On Songs For Judy, a live bootleg from 1976, he’s without Whitten’s striking harmonies, solo strumming and eventually blowing into his harmonica. The pain and the twang mingle. His brittle voice falls into a crevasse created by the major-to-minor chord progression on the chorus. And three years earlier, with the Santa Monica Flyers at the Roxy in Los Angeles, he Tonights The Night-ifies the song, wringing every ounce of drunken majesty from its injured underbelly. Two very different takes on the same song. One awful feeling of loneliness.

In 2010, Elvis Costello sang it alone in tribute to Neil, transposing the key from a bright G major to a more solemn E major. This is the version I played, too, at the campus bar — I had just gotten into Elvis and felt I could recreate the burly yet nasal tones of his singing voice. (I couldn’t, but it felt nice to try.) Onstage at the MusiCares Tribute to Neil Young, Elvis captures the lonesome country spirit but turns the room into ice by injecting a serious amount of cool. I’m wounded, he seems to exude, but I’ll make it… somehow.

I write this the same day I found out that come next week, I’ll no longer have the job I’ve worked for the past eight years. I picked this song and penned most of this piece well before I knew any of that. It’s springtime, and there’s a certain freedom in knowing I will make it somehow, even if it’s hard for me now. When you’re on the losing end, it’s not a great feeling.

And I feel that way again. But I won’t forever.

“The Losing End (When You’re On),” written by Neil Young, from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)

Neil Young: guitar, vocals
Danny Whitten: guitar, vocals
Billy Talbot: bass
Ralph Molina: drums, vocals