“Don’t Spook the Horse” & the Mountain Funk of Neil Young

In 1995, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam inducted Neil Young into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame:

Vedder’s induction speech was a revelation at the time because the public persona created by the media was that he was a no fun, killjoy. Instead, the speech showed Vedder ripping jokes about Ticketmaster and telling war stories about hanging out with Young. The one bit that doesn’t get a laugh is when Vedder shares that his bandmate Stone Gossard says that his friend Lonnie calls Young, “the King of Mountain Funk.” With that Vedder shifts into a more serious mode and continues with the rest of his speech.

What is mountain funk? Without hearing directly from Gossard’s friend Lonnie, Neil Young’s type of mountain funk is based on an unhurried groove that is still somehow insistent. It gestures towards the funk of African-American musicians such as James Brown and Parliament, but mountain funk is most certainly white music. It contains hints of country music, though it’s country music made by a Canadian. It’s not necessarily country music centered in the American South, but rather it encompasses everything from the hollers of Appalachia to the Cascades surrounding the fictional town of Twin Peaks and especially the coastal mountains of California. Young’s mountain funk is found throughout his catalog in both acoustic and electric approaches, but it is heard most with the music Young has made with his longtime backing band Crazy Horse. The song that best exemplifies Neil Young’s mountain funk is “Don’t Spook the Horse”:

The track was recorded by Young and Crazy Horse —  Frank “Poncho” Sampedro on second guitar, bassist Billy Talbot, and Ralph Molina on drums — on April 27, 1990 at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch during the recording sessions for what would eventually coalesce into the album Ragged Glory. Molina kicks off “Don’t Spook the Horse” with a few hits on the toms, which initiates forward momentum for the rest of the band. The musical introduction is highlighted by the whining of a guitar. This underscores the feeling that the entire band is like an old combine, which is sputtering to life, plodding along through the only three chords the song needs. Plodding is not a criticism of “Don’t Spook the Horse.” Young and Crazy Horse want to plod.

After a passage displaying the glorious guitar interplay between Young and Sampedro, Young sings the first verse:

If you want to go ridin’
In the tall green grass
Try to not spook the horse.

“Don’t Spook the Horse” is an advice song from the perspective of an older, more experienced man explaining country customs and etiquette. However, the title phrase is a direct reference to the band Crazy Horse itself as shared by Sampedro in a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone. He explained that John Hanlon, the recording engineer for the sessions, inspired the directive by Young’s longtime producer David Briggs:

“John Hanlon was a new guy and we didn’t know him. He started running around behind our amps and looking at everything and checking out the front of the amps where the mics were placed and looking at this and that, and looking at the room mics. He was just everywhere and I ended up calling him ‘The Fly’ because he was floating around everywhere. The next day, we went to play the songs and we just couldn’t. Things we started the day before just fell apart. That’s when Briggs said, ‘Well, you can’t spook the horse.'”

This isn’t the first time that Young has incorporated a reference to his band into one of his songs. Though the lyrics to Young’s 1974 “The Old Homestead” track reads like a time travel acid western, it also works as a not-to-subtle metaphor for Young’s recording tendencies. One of the characters in “The Old Homestead” asks, “Why do you ride that crazy horse?” Young seems to answer by singing that he “still feels the pull” of recording at full moon with his dream band.

Returning to the mountain funk of “Don’t Spook the Horse,” after the first verse, Young goes into another stretched-out solo over the chugging rhythm of Molina, Sampedro, and Talbot. During this solo, Young’s guitar makes a chopping sound, which could be mistaken for the grinding of gears. Then, Young sings the next verse:

If you want to pet that old hound dog
Make sure he ain’t rolled in shit.

The last word in that line gets the whining emphasis of an electric guitar to make sure that everybody hears it. According to Jimmy McDonough’s Neil Young biography Shakey, Young sang and played guitar for “Don’t Spook the Horse”  while standing with “one foot in a pile of cowshit.” Because they were recording at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch, Young and company had easy access to all kinds of shit: cow, horse, chicken, and even bison. Why did he do this? Perhaps it’s a case of form following function. He and the band needed the direct touch of the shit to ensure that they wouldn’t push the tempo too much; they needed to have the nonchalant, relaxed, rumbling gait of an old cow. Most importantly, the smell would direct everyone to follow the narrator’s advice. 

After these lines, Young meanders off into another solo. “Don’t Spook the Horse” doesn’t have traditional verses with multiple lines. Instead, Young serves up country one-liners in between which Young and the band stretch out and play. This was Young’s goal entering into these spring 1990 recording sessions as he told Rolling Stone a few months later:

“I purposely wanted to play long instrumentals because I don’t hear any jamming on any other records. There’s nothing spontaneous going on on records these days, except in blues and funkier music. Rock & roll used to have all that. People aren’t reaching out in the instrumental passages and spontaneously letting them last as long as they can. I love to do that, but I can only really do it well with one band…That style of music is better for me with Crazy Horse. We played just like a band. It wasn’t someone in a control room with a bunch of machines, a MIDI and synthesizers and a drum machine and producers and tech people. You just can’t get that old-time vibrating feeling with machines. That happens with musicians who just love to play and improvise together. I knew that not many people were doing that, so I really wanted to do it.”

Young continues singing:

There’s a pretty little girl and she’s living down there
Deep in the Valley of Hearts
Such a pretty little girl and she’s living down there
Down on her daddy’s farm.

Young’s choice of words and the sentiments conveyed are old-fashioned and could be found in an old Bill Monroe song. Young spent a good portion of the 1980s playing his own brand of country music. Even taking away the loud guitars and drums, “Don’t Spook the Horse” still isn’t country music. It’s more country-adjacent. This designation is even more valid after the next verse as Young sings, “If you’re going to mess around with that chick.” “Chick” is hippie slang for “pretty little girl” and a word you’d never hear Bill Monroe sing in reference to a woman. He would certainly never sing about “messing around” with her. Unhindered by these restraints, Young resumes his advice: 

Be sure to close the barn door
Try to not spook the horse
Make sure she ain’t rolled in shit.

The whine of the electric guitar once again emphasizes the word “shit,” but this time it’s not about a dog potentially rolling in shit, it’s the pretty little girl. And now we’ve arrived at the ultimate punchline of “Don’t Spook the Horse.” It’s all been a shaggy dog story, leading us down this path so that Young can conflate the pretty little girl with the dog.

Unrepentantly, the band keeps going, rumbling along with Young playing a searing yet dazzling solo. Despite — or better yet — because of standing in shit, Young is obviously having a blast playing this song with his Crazy Horse comrades. Maybe because he doesn’t want to finish the song with the girl-in-shit joke, Young sings one final verse:

There’s a field of green and an old red barn
Deep in the Valley of Hearts
If you want to go riding
In the tall green grass
Try to not spook the horse.

Young places “Don’t Spook the Horse” in a location called the “Valley of Hearts,” which is also name-checked in “Love to Burn,” another track recorded during the Ragged Glory sessions:

“Love to Burn” begins with Young singing, “Late one night I was walking in the Valley of Hearts.” It’s a song of desire as Young and Crazy Horse urge themselves and the audience to “take a chance on love.” The words of “Love to Burn” are less of a cornpone advice song as “Don’t Spook the Horse,” but rather an urgent pep talk. There’s desperation in “Love to Burn”:

In the Valley of Hearts there’s a house full of broken windows
And the lovers inside just quarrel all the time
Why’d you ruin my life?
Where you takin’ my kid?
And they hold each other saying, “How did it come to this?”

Here, Young explores the dual nature of excess love. Sometimes it means that one needs to be confident and express one’s feelings, while at other times, this passion is darker. The couple in the second verse of “Love to Burn” are compelled and repelled by each other, a violent connection of love and hate. The Valley of Hearts’ location in this context is ironic as these lovers are a long way from the Valentine’s Day-type connotation that the name might imply. 

Returning to the mountain funk, the Valley of Hearts in “Don’t Spook the Horse” is much less charged with a much more pastoral feeling. It communicates a golden green setting of late afternoon sun pouring over a pasture. The main solo that Young plays at the end of “Don’t Spook the Horse” — like so much of his guitar work on Ragged Glory — is exploratory and engaging. Going into these sessions, Young was inspired by watching old footage of him and Crazy Horse play in 1976. As told in Shakey, he was amazed how loose and free they were and wanted to get back to that space. According to Molina, Neil said, “Do whatever you gotta do—if you were smoking pot then, fine, go ahead, do it.” Drugs — especially weed — are part and parcel to mountain funk. It’s an essential part of California rural. 

Young plays this final solo like someone trying to climb a staircase. He repeats “Try to not spook the horse” over and over again, punctured by delightful tractor-sounding guitar fills. The song finally concludes with feedback from the guitars ringing out as long as possible. Before the recording stops, Young can barely be heard saying, “Did you hear the horse clopping away there? Just went clopping on out.”

“Don’t Spook the Horse” was not included on Ragged Glory, but instead relegated to the B-side of the CD for the single “Mansion on The Hill,” making it a bit of a rarity in the Neil Young canon before the internet. Even though “Don’t Spook the Horse” didn’t make the full album, Young was still thinking about it when he spoke to Rolling Stone that fall, saying it constitutes “a condensed version of the whole album. Especially for reviewers who don’t like me at all. Just listen to that one, and you’ll get all you need.”

Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Don’t Spook the Horse” is an amusing shaggy dog story with more people and places for the world that Young creates in Ragged Glory. It also cements the Crazy Horse myth in song, illustrating the collective personality of the band as one that is stubborn, easily put off, yet also randy, mischievous, and quick to joke. Lastly, “Don’t Spook the Horse” acts as a stand-in for mountain funk, a specific and distinctive sonic expression that Young returns to often throughout his career, representing not only a strand of his music, but also a way of life.

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Other selections of Neil Young’s mountain funk are included here. Comment below with other examples.

All of side one of American Stars ‘n Bars!

Though it’s a cover, certainly Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s version of “Farmer John”:

And pretty much all of Americana!