Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is the second studio album by the Canadian-American musician Neil Young, released in May 1969 on Reprise Records. His first album with longtime backing band Crazy Horse, it emerged as a sleeper hit amid Young's contemporaneous success with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, peaking at number 34 on the US Billboard 200 in August 1970 during a 98-week chart stay. It has been certified platinum by the RIAA.

In 2003, the album was ranked number 208 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and at number 407 in the 2020 edition. Additionally, it was voted number 124 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000).

Background

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was Neil Young's first album with longtime collaborators Crazy Horse. Guitarist, songwriter and singer Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot, and drummer Ralph Molina had already been performing and recording together as the Rockets. They met Young through the Laurel Canyon music scene and started playing together. In a February 2021 interview, Molina remembers how the group ended up collaborating with Young: "Neil would come out to (Billy Talbot's) house in Laurel Canyon, after he left the Springfield, and play acoustic with us and talk. After we became the Rockets, we were going to play the Whisky in Hollywood. We asked him to come sit in with us, which he did. We then formed into Crazy Horse and recorded Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. The sessions went free and easy, like they are to this day. No rehearsals. Neil walks in with a song, then we jump in. We get it in one, two takes. After that, the feel, heart and emotion are lost. Any more takes, and now you're just playing a part. When you're young, there are no politics, nothing to get in the way. We just had fun playing- no thinking, just playing."

Young recalls the atmosphere in an interview with J.C. Costa: "We got together, started rehearsing and we went right in. That whole album was like catching the group just as they were getting to know each other. We didn't even know what we sounded like until we heard the album." In an April 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, he stated that "we'd only been together for six or seven days when 'Down By The River' was cut."

Young credits the album's unique sound to the guitar playing of Whitten and the interplay between the two. He explains in the biography Shakey: "That's what was so great about Crazy Horse in those days: Danny understood my music, and everyone listened to Danny. He understood what we were doing. A really great second guitar player, the perfect counterpoint to everything else that was happening. His style of playing was so adventuresome. So sympathetic. So unthoughtful. And just so natural. That’s really what made "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Down by the River" happen: Danny’s guitar parts. Nobody played guitar with me like that; that rhythm. When you listen to "Cowgirl in the Sand," he keeps changing: plays something one and a half, maybe two, times, and he's on to the next thing. Billy and Ralph will get into a groove and everything will be goin' along and all of a sudden Danny'll start doin' somethin' else. He just led those guys from one groove to another, all within the same groove. So when I played these long guitar solos, it seemed like they weren't all that long, that I was making all these changes, when in reality what was changing was not one thing, but the whole band. Danny was the key."