Bob told me it was a very honest song. Bob Dylan. I sang it for him, he said, “Well, that’s an honest song.” Because it’s like this confession of all the fuckin’ drugs an’ everything that I took that I felt like I had to do for some reason. Neil Young "Shakey" by Jimmy McDonough 2002

NK: But Don't Be Denied for example is one of your best songs. It's also your most openly autobiographical... NY: 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

One night, Dylan came by and I played him a couple of new songs, “Hitchhiker” and “Cortez the Killer.” When he heard “Hitchhiker,” a confessional about the progressive history of drugs I had taken through my life, he told me, “That’s honest.” That moment still crosses my mind. It makes me laugh every time I think of it because Bob’s humor is so wry. I think it was his way of saying kindly that the song was not very inventive as far as creating a story goes, just that I was following a history and not making up anything new. It’s still funny to me, at any rate, the way he put it. Neil Young Special Deluxe October 2014

NY: I keep thinking that there is a song that I don't remember, that's right on the edge. When I start looking through my mind I can't find it. Daniel Lanois: That would fit in with ... NY: Like another one of those ones that I found the last time which just sort of showed up. There may be something around there - somewhere. Just trying to go through what I left off - of like forty albums from forty-five years. You get a little lost. If there is anything left - I've been doing a lot of mining. DL: Do you have a way of knowing your favorites from the orphanage? NY Well - I've been doing that. They get more obscure. Like Hitchhiker was pretty obscure. I wrote that around the same time I wrote Cortez. In the house - the same time - the same kind of drugs. Mark Howard: What was the drugs? NY: It was a combination. Neil Young Le Noise Sessions directed by Bernard Shakey 2010, broadcast August 2019 in the NYA Hearse Theater

When I wrote “Cortez the Killer” and “Hitchhiker,” I called for the Horse to come and record. We decided on Briggs’s Point Dume house with the Green Board as the ideal location. I lived a few miles north near Zuma Beach. Malibu, with the Crazy Horse Saloon, was a few miles south. It was a perfect situation for good times. Neil Young Waging Heavy Peace 2012

Well I don't think we need to get much darker than that. Not right now anyway. [after completing the second ever performance of Hitchhiker] Neil Young Garden State Arts Center, Holmdel, New Jersey, USA June 25, 1992