Neil Young admits Ambulance Blues borrowed a melody from Bert Jansch song. (Photo by Getty Images)
Neil Young has written more than a thousand songs across a career that now stretches over six decades. His catalog is enormous and constantly shifting, packed with styles that move from gentle folk to the raw sound that later helped shape grunge.
Along the way he has created some of the most recognizable songs of multiple generations. But like any artist with such a massive body of work, there have also been moments he later looked back on with a bit of regret.
Young built his reputation on constantly trying new sounds and ideas. In the 1960s he explored rich folk harmonies, and not long after that his heavier guitar work would help earn him the nickname Godfather of Grunge. During that era, it was also common for artists to record songs written by others.
Cover songs were a major part of albums at the time, helping musicians fill out tracklists while paying tribute to influential performers. Bands like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones regularly included covers on their records.
Young did the same throughout his career, performing songs by artists such as Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys. But one of the most interesting stories in Young’s long songwriting history involves a cover he never actually meant to create.
While writing his track Ambulance Blues, he reportedly later realized that part of the song closely resembled the work of another musician. The melody in the opening section of Ambulance Blues reportedly mirrored the beginning of a song by legendary folk guitarist Bert Jansch.
Specifically, it resembled Jansch’s track The Needle of Death. Young later openly acknowledged the similarity and admitted that the realization bothered him.
“I always feel bad I stole that melody from Bert Jansch. F**k. You ever heard that song The Needle of Death? I loved that melody. I didn’t realize Ambulance Blues starts exactly the same. I knew that it sounded like something that he did, but when I went back and heard that record again, I realised that I copped his thing… I felt really bad about that.”
For Young, the overlap was never intentional. He explained that the influence happened almost subconsciously while writing the music.
“And years later, on On the Beach, I wrote the melody of Ambulance Blues by styling the guitar part completely on Needle of Death. I wasn’t even aware of it, and someone else drew my attention to it,” Neil Young additionally concluded.
The story has since become one of those fascinating footnotes in Young’s huge body of work, showing how deeply music can influence even the artists creating it.
