Neil Young talks to Conan O’Brien about his best and worst TV appearances – Rolling Stone

When Howard Stern asked Conan O’Brien to name his favorite musical artist a few months ago, he answered without hesitation. “I absolutely love Neil Young,” he said. “He’s managed to remain completely authentic and raw in a way that seems almost impossible to me. What was he doing with Buffalo Springfield [1966], he still does. It is not calcified. It has not formed a crust. He still strives for it. So this guy blew me away.”

O’Brien has introduced Young on his various late-night talk shows in several locations over the past few decades, and he just sat down with him for an hour-long conversation that will air today on SiriusXM’s Team Coco Radio. Their chat touches on several of Young’s most memorable television performances, starting with his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance as Buffalo Springfield in a 1967 episode of the CBS detective series Mannix. “Our managers thought it was a great opportunity to move into television,” Young said. “I don’t think we even looked at it. We just kept going.”

Appearance looms large in Stephen Stills’ mind. The Buffalo Springfield singer brought it up unprompted in a 2018 interview with A rolling stone. “The best sound we ever got was when we did this stupid TV show where we only played a small part of a song,” he said. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, this is the sound we were looking for.’ It was the only place we could get the right sound.

Four years later, Young had a much more memorable television performance when he appeared in Johnny Cash show to play The Needle and the Damage Done and Journey Through the Past. “You have to understand that I’m 23 years old and I’m going to be on a TV show,” Young told O’Brien. “I was petrified. I was thinking about the song I was going to sing and whether or not I was going to screw up. That’s all I was thinking. I don’t really remember much more about it.

He clearly remembers his legendary performance of Saturday Night Live in September 1989, where he played a brilliant rendition of “Rockin’ in the Free World” with drummer Steve Jordan, bassist Charlie Drayton and Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro. According to several Young fans, this is his best performance in a TV show. Conan O’Brien was a young SNL writer at the time and recalled seeing it live.

“Lorne Michaels has a saying that ‘television is the worst way to experience music,'” O’Brien said. “I think he’s usually right, except something happened that night. It was transcendent and permeated by the television. I’m on the floor in [Studio] 8-N. i am a child i am twenty years old I watch you do it. The place, you just melted it. I think there is structural damage to 30 Rock. It has never been completely repaired.

Young released two Crazy Horse albums and a steady stream of archival releases from the start of the pandemic, but he hasn’t played a single concert since 2019. In several recent interviews, he said he doesn’t want to play concerts unless venues change the way they deliver their food from concession stands.

“When I look at the compromise I have to make to do this, the things I don’t believe in, that I have to approve of, it doesn’t turn me on,” Young told Q’s Tom Power in November 2022. “I can handle it with the power in place, i can do it cleanly. I can make the PA clean, the lighting clean, the electricity in the building clean. I can clean all my vehicles. I have the right fuel. I can do all that. But the food – all these places feed from factory farms.

He sounded more optimistic about future concerts in a Dec. 2, 2022, reply to a fan in the Neil Young archive. “We are looking for places for next summer,” he wrote. “I love the Earth.”