1977 · Rock · Behind the Songs
Written in July 1975 and released on American Stars ’n Bars — a fever-dream guitar workout from the Crazy Horse years.
Neil Young wrote “Like a Hurricane” in July 1975 at his ranch near La Honda, California. It was not a studio construction. He cut it a few months later with Crazy Horse, and the recording that appeared on American Stars ’n Bars in 1977 keeps the feel of a band chasing a storm: a long, surging electric arrangement that runs well past eight minutes on the album and often stretched further on stage.
The song’s weather is made by Young’s guitar. Played on Old Black — his battered black 1953 Gibson Les Paul — the lead lines arrive in slow, bending waves, soaked in sustain, while the rhythm section holds a steady, almost hypnotic pulse underneath. It is the clearest statement of Young’s electric philosophy: tone and feeling first, precision a distant second. Few guitar solos of the seventies are as imitated, and few are as hard to imitate convincingly.
“Like a Hurricane” was never a hit single, but it became something better: a permanent fixture of Young’s concerts and one of the defining Crazy Horse epics. The live version on Live Rust (1979) is the one many fans know best — bigger, louder and even more weather-beaten than the studio take. It also gave the decade one of its great song metaphors: desire and turmoil described not in words but in electricity.
What to listen for: the moment the verses give way to the extended guitar passages — the band drops back, the organ swells, and Young’s Les Paul starts to howl. Play it loud. The song was built for volume, and it rewards it.