Recorded during the rehearsals for The Northern California Coastal Bar Tour of 1975 with Crazy Horse. Neil Young Decade liner notes 1977

NY: I wrote “Hurricane” in the back of Hernando—Taylor Phelps’s Desoto Suburban. On newspaper. We were all really high, fucked up. Been out partying. Wrote it sitting up at Vista Point on Skyline. Supposed to be right near the highest point in San Mateo County—which was appropriate, heh heh. There I was … the highest point in San Mateo County … I wrote it when I couldn’t sing. I was on voice rest. It was nuts—I was whistling it. I wrote a lotta songs when I couldn’t talk. NY: The Horse got it the first time—that’s the first time we recorded it. Then three or four weeks later we were tryin’ to get it and I said, “I think we already did it—but there’s no vocal on it. Let’s go back and listen to that one.” An engineer was in the truck, rolling on the green board, all our practices and everything—in case we did something. The real recording room wasn’t even on. JM: It wasn’t a live vocal? NY: It sounds kind of meek and mild, doesn’t it? It was a sketch. I went in and I sang both harmony parts, the low one and the high one—and that’s the way the record is. It’s all me singing. JM: What’s the similarity between Del Shannon’s “Runaway” and “Hurricane”? NY: When “Runaway” goes to “I’m-a walkin’ in the rain,” those are the same chords in the bridge of “Hurricane”—“You are …” It opens up. So it’s a minor descending thing that opens up—that’s what they have in common. It’s like “Runaway” with the organ solo going on for ten minutes. Neil Young "Shakey" by Jimmy McDonough 2002

“Like a Hurricane” is probably the best example of Old Black’s tone, although if you listen too closely, it is all but ruined by all the mistakes and misfires in my playing. That was a memorable recording, though, for the feeling that comes out of our instrumental passages. I always record every note played, whether it is a run-through or not, and the recording of “Like a Hurricane” is a great illustration of why I do that. When you do that, you catch everything. Most often the first time something is played is the defining moment. That is what I like to capture in my recordings. It is a strict rule that my engineers are there to record everything. The master recording I used for the final version of the track was the run-through when I was showing the Horse how the song went. That is why it just cuts on at the beginning. There was no beginning. There was no end. It is one of those performances you can never repeat; the cherry, the original expression of the song, the essence. We just kept wailing on those changes until we couldn’t move anymore. One night in late November 1975, I wrote the “Like a Hurricane” lyrics on a piece of newspaper in the back of Taylor Phelps’s 1950 DeSoto Suburban, a huge car that we used to all go to bars in. Taylor was a great friend who lived on the mountain, and everybody loved him. He and Jim Russell were my buds back then. Jim was a cowboy who drove big machinery and was a really nice guy. In the mid-seventies, Jim and I hung out a lot and went to bars looking to get lucky. We had both recently broken up with our kids’ moms, and Zeke and Jenny, our two kids, would be in the truck in the parking lot when we went into the bars for “Daddy’s Boogie.” There was an Alaskan Camper on the back of my new 1975 Dodge Power Wagon, Stretch Armstrong, and Zeke and Jenny used to hang in it while we were doing our thing. As was our habit between bars, we had stopped at Skeggs Point Scenic Lookout on Skyline Boulevard up on the mountain to do a few lines of coke; I wrote “Hurricane” right there in the back of that giant old car. Then when I got home, I played the chords on this old Univox Stringman mounted in an old ornate pump-organ body set up in the living room. It was painted antique white, and I had gotten it from Dean Stockwell, the great actor and another friend of mine in Topanga. None of the original guts were left inside the thing, but it looked great and sounded like God with this psychedelic Univox Stringman inside it I had hooked up so that it was hammering and overdriving a Fender Deluxe. I played that damn thing through the night. I finished the melody in five minutes, but I was so jacked I couldn’t stop playing. A few months later at the Village in LA, I put on all the vocals as overdubs. I just had to hear that song finished. Crazy Horse had never sung it or even heard the words. It was just a rundown of the track, and it became the master recording of “Like a Hurricane.” Neil Young Waging Heavy Peace Sept 2012

When we played the original Catalyst, a famous Santa Cruz club [during the 1975 Northern California Coastal Bar Tour], it was in an old building with a high ceiling. That building was later destroyed in the great earthquake of 1982. The night we appeared, it was packed. [...] The true highlight, though, came halfway through our next set as we did “Like a Hurricane.” I remember looking out into the crowd, and it was a dense crowd, with the aroma and fog of weed hanging over it, and all I could see was one girl standing there. She seemed to be floating; her beautiful light blond hair set her apart as she moved to the music in another world from everyone else. She had a light around her, a glowing haziness that set her apart like a queen among peasants, a goddess among mortals. Her clothes were a different color than anything else in the room and she stood out so completely, dancing and floating while not moving at all, a slow-motion masterpiece of a painting. Neil Young Special Deluxe October 2014

I did a few recordings in LA around that time [in early 1976]. One of them was just an overdubbed vocal sketch that I put on a track I had cut at the ranch with the Horse a few months earlier. I was still on voice rest when we cut it, so the song had been recorded without a vocal. The instrumental passages on this recording are some of our best Crazy Horse moments, with Poncho playing a great part on the Stringman keyboard, an amazing analog string synthesizer. It is a very emotional ride. Two months later, I overdubbed all the vocal parts at a studio called Village Recorders. Ben Keith was there at the board, helping me. I loved that track. I knew I had to finish it. The Horse was cosmic. Those sketches are the vocals we used on the final record of “Like a Hurricane.” Neil Young Special Deluxe October 2014

We were between bars on Skyline Boulevard, which ran along the very ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains high above Redwood City, when we pulled over at Skeggs Point Scenic Lookout to park and enjoy some cocaine. The fog was rolling across the ridge, blanketing the beautiful view of the flats with its shimmering lights. There was a newspaper in the backseat with me and I picked up a felt-tip marker, one of my favorite writing tools, and scratched out a few words. Later that night when I got back to the ranch, I sat down at the electric organ I had built. It was made by combining an old antique-white painted and art-decorated ornate wooden pump organ I had received from Dean Stockwell in Topanga with a Univox Stringman analog string synthesizer plugged into a Fender Deluxe amplifier from the early fifties. The unearthly sound resonated in my little cabin for hours and hours while I uncovered the melody and chords that dwelled in those lyrics I had written in Taylor’s DeSoto. Over and over I played the themes and refrains, cascading and blissfully distorted, until I could not stay awake and the sun was rising. Neil Young Special Deluxe October 2014

MT: But Like A Hurricane gets cooking pretty good. NY: Yeah, but if you listen to that, I never really play anything fast. And all that it is four notes on the bass. It just keeps going down. Billy plays a few extra notes now and then. Andthe drum beats the same all the way through. It's like a trance we get into. But if you try to analyze it - sometimes it does sound like it's real fast, like we're really playing fast, but we're not. It's just that everybody starts swimming around in circles and it starts elevating and it transcends the point of playing fast or slow. Luckily for us, because we can't play fast. Neil Young A Conversation With Neil Young/Mary Turner 1979

‘Like Hurricane’ is the second earliest track, cut at the ranch many months before the White House sessions. There, because I was on Dr.’s orders to not speak or sing, I did not sing on the original tracking with the horse at Modern Recorders. I sang all the harmony parts later, doing a “sketch” of the vocal arrangement with Ben Keith at the desk in LA’s Village studios. In the end, we used the sketch. NYA - Album of the Week - American Stars & Bars November 20, 2019

WHFS: Why did they [Decade & American Stars 'N Bars] both come out simultaneously? DB: We did Decade first. We put it together. It's 33 great songs covering 10 years. We had done Hurricane, which is off the Stars 'N Bars earlier before we put together the Decade album. We were on the road - on a gig - and we were driving between Houston and Madison, Wisconsin. We said to ourselves, "wow, Hurricane, that's a really good cut. It should have its own album to be on instead of being released with 32 other songs." We had already pressed 500,000 copies of Decade. We were on the road in Neil's bus. We were rapping about it and we went - "wow man, that's not right". So at three in the morning we called up, from the bus , on the road - to Neil's manager and said, "Hey man, I don't think we should put Decade out until we put Hurricane out on it's own record. Why don't you call up Warners and tell them so?" David Briggs Interview with WHFS Radio Nov 17, 1977

I did record here! [at Village Recorders in Los Angeles] I think I recorded a few tracks here a long time ago. There’s a song, “Like a Hurricane,” that I didn’t record here. But I couldn’t sing at that time, when I recorded that, because I had just had some sort of operation. They told me to stop for a month, but I couldn’t stop the music, so in my studio at home, me and Crazy Horse got together and we played this track. It was about fifteen minutes long, because I’d just written it the night before. I recorded it on an acoustic – now let’s play with all these other instruments and it’s going to be great. So we got the instruments out and we played it once. And we screwed it up really badly at first. If you listen to the record, you can tell we screwed it up. We cut it off. It just starts out of nowhere. But that was over. Now we’re in the record. And it’s divided. It doesn’t matter how cool and together the beginning was. But where it went as soon as it started. So we shortened it. Then I was here at this place in 1974 or something, and I said, “You know, a couple of weeks ago, when I couldn’t sing…” By the way, I know I can’t sing. I mean I couldn’t make a sound. And, of course, this was back in the day, way back there. So I’m saying, “We have this tape here. I brought this piece to multitrack. We’ve never played it. I’m going to sing it, because I never got a chance to sing it.” So we put it on, and he played back about ten seconds, and I said, “Okay, stop. Everything was working, right? We heard everything? Okay, then there’s no reason to listen to it. Because I was there; I know what it is. It’s on the tape. We don’t have to listen to it. Let’s not wipe the shit off the tape listening to it. Let’s record while the stuff is still on – let’s listen to what’s there, and record it to two-track while it’s still there.” Because if you listen over and over and over again, it goes away, bye-bye! Because the tape doesn’t like to rub over this head, and then part of it goes away, it’s terrible! That bothers me every time the tape plays. So I never hardly ever listen! Okay, so they put the tape on and I went out and I talk: “Am I there?” Yes. “Good. Okay. Record. Number one. Just record all the time – that’s why we’re here! Don’t not record at all, ever. Record! It’s a studio! Record! Practice at home! The red button’s not that scary, really not.” So we press the button and they start the tape, and I start singing the song. It’s long, so it’s like, four or five verses over and over again. So I sing one verse, and then the other verse – there’s only two verses, so I just keep singing them, one after the other. Later on, we can cut it down. The other guys aren’t here, and I hear the harmony part, so I want to sing the harmonies now. We did the harmonies, so we did three tracks, three times through, one time on each track. We had all this stuff, and it was the first time I ever heard it. The first time I ever listened to “Like a Hurricane.” And I was hearing it, and I was singing it, and I sang the harmony, and I sang the other harmony, and then we mixed it. So it was like the fifth or sixth time, and then we mixed it. Neil Young January 22, 2014 Acceptance speech for the 2014 President’s Merit Award from the Producers & Engineers Wing of the Grammys Village Recorders, Los Angeles

She had so much love he couldn’t handle it. She was always a step away but he loved her forever. He just couldn’t reach her. But he did, and she never forgot that. Neil Young NYA Letters To The Editor May 15, 2020

I wrote it on an organ, on the string synthesizer. I remember the night I wrote it, I stayed up all night playing it after I wrote it. It always had a feeling to me that it was going to take off. It was never going to be a peaceful little song. Neil Young Rock On Interview/BBC Radio 1 September 29, 1982