Indeed, so unpredictable is Young that “Big Change” could easily be heard as a Maga anthem, and certainly the visuals of a grizzled Young, flag in hand, stomping away, echo those of the rioters of Jan 6.
Days before Donald Trump began his second reign of error, a new track surfaced that captured the spirit of this ominous moment in history, its chorus warning: “Big change is coming/ Coming right home to you.” This urgent salvo isn’t the work of some young punk firebrand or righteous rap soothsayer; instead it’s by a man with over six decades in the game.
After all, in the Eighties Young seemed to flirt for a time with support for Reagan, and his politics don’t easily align with any one side; he could perhaps be described as “chaotic liberal”, though his devotion to ecological issues, his intolerance of racism and the threats to sue Trump for using “Rockin’ in the Free World” at his rallies quickly scorch such a theory.
The drug-related deaths of two close friends, Danny Whitten (guitarist with his regular backing band, Crazy Horse) and roadie Bruce Berry, sent Young into an emotional tailspin that yielded a sequence of challenging, grief-maddened, often fiercely anti-commercial albums navigating this loss.
Young quit after their first album, over a “belittling” booking on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show; The Byrds’ David Crosby stood in (and for a subsequent performance at 1967’s legendary Monterey Pop Festival).
