“One night, Dylan came by and I played him a couple of new songs, ‘Hitchhiker’ and ‘Cortez the Killer.’ When he heard ‘Hitchhiker,’ a confessional about the progressive history of drugs I had taken through my life, he told me, ‘That’s honest.’ That moment still crosses my mind. It makes me laugh every time I think of it because Bob’s humor is so wry. I think it was his way of saying kindly that the song was not very inventive as far as creating a story goes, just that I was following a history and not making up anything new. It’s still funny to me, at any rate, the way he put it.” Neil Young, Special Deluxe, October 2014
“Hitchhiker” is one of several loosely autobiographical songs (like “Don’t be Denied” and “Thrasher”) Neil has written and released. Dating from the 1975 Zuma sessions, it was slated to appear on Hitchhiker (the album) originally scheduled for release in 1976, but ultimately held back until 2017, when it was released as part of Neil’s NYA Special Release Series.
The song had already been released in 2010 on Young’s 32nd studio album, Le Noise, produced by fellow Canadian, Daniel Lanois (get it?). That version featured Young solo on Old Black and performed the same way on his “Solo but not Acoustic” 2010-2011. The Le Noise version is notable for the changed lyrics acknowledging his wife, Pegi, and family: “I’m thankful for my children, and my faithful wife.” The album as a whole is somewhat dark as two of Young’s closest collaborators, filmmaker L.A. Johnson and steel guitarist Ben Keith, died during recording, not to mention that Lanois survived a near-fatal motorcycle accident during the sessions.
The song was first performed publicly on the second leg of his 1992 solo tour, perhaps because the sting from the laundry list of drugs (hash, valium, cocaine, grass, amphetamines, etc.) with which he had experimented in the 70s was too explicit to confront at the time. The song appeared again, unexpectedly, once during a performance in Berlin in 2003.
The debut performance remains a favorite, though a bit of a trainwreck, it nonetheless embodies the truths expressed in the closing lyrics of the Le Noise version: “I tried to leave my past behind, but it’s catching up with me, it’s catching up with me.”
Listen to the 1992-06-23 performance of “Hitchhker” here:
Apropos of today’s post, RustWorks will be on the road for the next few weeks and so posting will be paused. However, when we return we’ll dive into some of Neil’s most beloved songs. ¡Hasta luego!