“I Never Got Over It”: Why Bob Dylan Hates This Neil Young Song (And What He Wrote in Response)

Imitation is supposedly the highest form of flattery, but Bob Dylan certainly didn’t think so the first time he heard this Neil Young song from 1972. The song that grated on Dylan’s nerves so badly became a signature track for the Canadian songwriter, leaving Dylan with many opportunities to get annoyed by his radio.

Videos by American Songwriter

Unfortunately for Dylan, the introduction of Young’s son seemed to coincide with a strange, divisive dip in Dylan’s career. Fame was wearing on him. The public wasn’t receiving his albums as well. His personal relationships were failing. In the throes of all this flux, Dylan found himself living in Phoenix, Arizona.

“I was stuck on the desert someplace, having to cool out for a while,” Dylan told Spin in 1985. “New York was a heavy place. Woodstock was worse. People living in trees outside my house, fans trying to batter down my door, cars following me up dark mountain roads. I needed to lay back for a while, forget about things, myself included, and I’d get so far away and turn on the radio. There I am, but it’s not me.”

Dylan was right, of course. He wasn’t listening to himself on the radio. He was listening to Neil Young sing “Heart of Gold”.

Bob Dylan Always Felt Like Neil Young Was Ripping Him Off

Bob Dylan has influenced countless musicians in the decades that followed his meteoric rise to fame in the early 1960s. Normally, an artist as integrally himself wouldn’t bother with people imitating sounds and styles Dylan had already moved on from in his own creative endeavors. But Neil Young was different. The singer-songwriter’s 1972 track, “Heart of Gold”, sounded so much like Dylan (to Dylan) that it got under his skin. “I’d say, ‘S***, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.’” He told Spin. “I used to hate it when it came on the radio.”

Dylan clarified that he never had hard feelings toward Young on a personal level, but something about “Heart of Gold” seemed to hit too close to home. “It bothered me every time,” Dylan lamented. “It seemed to me somebody else had taken my thing and had run away with it, you know? I never got over it. Maybe tomorrow.”

According to Clinton Heylin’s Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan 1957-1973, Dylan released “Forever Young” the summer after “Heart of Gold” came out. Heylin posits the title is a literal play on words, with “Young” being his contemporary’s last name, not an adjective for someone in their younger years. This theory contradicts some other stories about the song, like when engineer-producer Rob Fraboni claimed Dylan said he had the song in his head for years.

Still, it’s certainly linguistically clever enough to pass as an actual Dylan joke. But for whatever it’s worth, this writer would argue that “Heart of Gold” didn’t sound all that much like Dylan. But coming off the heels of the late 1960s and in a bad place mentally, maybe Dylan was more sensitive than usual.

Photo by Thomas Monaster/NY Daily News via Getty Images