I'm still a songwriter - really straight though. Really straight. I hardly, don't take any drugs, no hard drugs, no, not a thing. Believe me, even though I did it, I'm here. I believe in everything organic. I'm not Catholic, but I believe I'm caught in some kind of confession tonight ladies and gentlemen. I wouldn't like to dwell on this any longer. I'd just like to sing a song for Danny Whitten who couldn't be with us here tonight...Jose Cuervo...but however, you try to get the point across. He couldn't be here with us tonight. I'm talking real slow because I'm talking about a good friend of mine. And I don't want to jive his name. This is a song for him - any one of about fifty ... he was almost here ladies and gentlemen.
Neil Young
Rainbow Theatre, London, England
November 5, 1973
A song about the boys in the band.
Neil Young
Empire Theatre, Liverpool, England
November 6, 1973
‘Lookout Joe’ and ‘Borrowed Tune’ were written during my Time Fades Away tour. I never hit ‘Lookout Joe’ the way I wanted to. It was recorded at my ranch during the rehearsals for the Time Fades Away tour just after Danny Whitten O.D.’d. He’d been working on the song with us and after he died we stopped for awhile. When we started playing again, that was the first thing we cut and I wrote ‘Don’t Be Denied’ that day. So ‘Lookout Joe’ one of the oldest songs on the album.
Neil Young
Creem/Bud Scoppa
November 1975
NK: But Don't Be Denied for example is one of your best songs. It's also your most openly autobiographical...
Yeah, certainly. It's one of them, anyway. The other one's called Hitchhiker. It's a contemporary of Don't Be Denied from 1975 and it was all about all the different drugs that I took. I started at the beginning and ran right through my years of drug usage up to that time, drawing parallels with other stuff. It's a very interesting song (laughs). Eventually I mutated it partly into a song called Like An Inca [Trans]. Only the chorus lived, though. All the verses were gone. Hitchhiker is now probably bootlegged 'cos I played it six or seven times on some acoustic tour I did in the '70s [actually 1992].
Neil Young
Mojo/Nick Kent
December 1995
Here I am in Dayton Ohio, remembering my old friend - Stephen. “They came to hear the golden sound” Good times.
Neil Young
NYA - Now Showing in the Hearse Theater
September 15, 2020