The World’s Loudest Neil Young Cover Band Will Not Be Denied

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ldquo;The Horse is riding strong,” the madman with the guitar announces. “We’re almost halfway through!” The crowd screams in joy. The weird part is that (1) the band has been playing nearly four hours already, and (2) they just banged out a 40-minute version of “Like a Hurricane.” But nobody’s ready to walk on.

Calling Real Young and Lazy Horse a tribute band is like describing Neil Young as “a weird guy who’s into harmonica solos” — technically not inaccurate, but nowhere near adequate. These guys don’t simply play the Canadian legend’s songbook; they tap into his ornery, obsessive rock & roll spirit. They’ve been riding all afternoon at a Brooklyn industrial garden, in the chilly early-summer Saturday sun, down by the East River. We’re way past hits like “Cinnamon Girl” or “Ohio”; they’re pulverizing this scruffy crowd to cult faves like “Southern Pacific,” “L.A.,” “Lookout Joe,” and “Yonder Stands the Sinner.”

The guys are legends in the Brooklyn DIY punk scene, but today, don’t call them anything except Neil, Poncho, Ralph, and Billy, after the guys in Crazy Horse. Adam “Neil” Reich jams on his “Southern Man” solo for 10 crazed minutes, racing through the crowd, hopping up on tables. The guy at the nearby pizza joint has abandoned his customers to rock out to “Helpless,” air-drumming in his apron. Toddlers, indie kids, stoner grandmas, Rusties (as Neil freaks are called) who know all the words to “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze” — we’ve been raging for hours, but nobody’s leaving, until the boys send us home in a daze with “Barstool Blues.” 

As the man himself sang in the 1970s, some get stoned, some get strange. But sooner or later, it all gets real, and that’s where Lazy Horse ride. 

Real Young and Lazy Horse commit completely, in the spirit of Neil and his raggedly glorious backup band, Crazy Horse. They casually call one another by the names of their corresponding Crazy Horse members: There’s Reich as Shakey himself, Davey Jones (Crazy Horse guitarist Poncho Sampedro), Jeremy Aquilino (bassist Billy Talbot), and Yoni David (drummer Ralph Molina). They’re longtime friends and comrades who’ve played together in countless bands. 

They don’t see themselves as a cover band. As Ralph/Yoni says, “We’re more of a book club.” Reich adds, “Or it’s like a never-ending game of D&D, where it’s just like, ‘Now, we’re at Re-ac-tor.”  

But they’re really just four mates who hang out to play for the sheer love of it. As Reich shrugs, “Some people bowl every Friday night. We ride.”

Ask for a set list, and they look at you the way Neil might react to an AutoTune remix of Tonight’s the Night. “We never have a set list,” Reich says. “We pick the first two songs and the last two songs. They set the tone, then the story tells itself.” Taking the ride with Lazy Horse means embracing that chaos, lurching from song to song.

But as Jeremy — sorry, Billy — explains, “Once you learn the five songs that Neil’s written, you can pretty much play all the others. One in E, one in C, one in D, one in A.…”

Their shaggy sensibility comes from their years as mainstays of the Brooklyn grass-roots punk community. Reich co-founded the legendary DIY spot Shea Stadium, one of the city’s most-loved venues until it closed in 2017. He’s played in bands like the So So Glos — an actual band of brothers from Bay Ridge, his friends since childhood — and Titus Andronicus. The Glos’ drummer Zach Staggers manages the Horse, as their Elliott Roberts figure. 

These guys literally built the stages where the city’s most vibrant bands played, like Davey’s group Lost Boy? (Davey also played with the Glos.) Yoni and Jeremy ran the Bushwick space Big Snow Buffalo Lodge, which shut down after Yoni was wounded in a random shooting on the street outside of the venue. But that didn’t break him — he went right back out on the road as the Glos’ tour manager. 

These guys are lifers, true believers, a family affair. Or as Neil and Crazy Horse would say, they’re prisoners of rock & roll. 

“WELCOME TO THE RANCH,” Reich says, on a Friday night in June. “This is where it all goes down for the Horse.” The band jams at Reich’s HQ, secondBase studio in the industrial wilds of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where he’s recorded artists like Titus Andronicus, Craig Finn, and Alex Orange Drink. He and the So So Glos built the studio themselves a decade ago, in a deserted cosmetics warehouse. To the indie-rock community, this is one of NYC’s most in-demand creative spaces. But right now, when the Horse gathers, it’s simply “the ranch,” and tonight’s the night.

We watch the Knicks in Game Two of the NBA Finals, a nail-biter that goes down to the wire, counting down the final stressful seconds while listening to Side Four of Neil’s lost 1974 album Dume. “‘Too Far Gone’ indeed,” Reich says, shaking his head when the Knicks miss a free throw. At the final buzzer the Knicks pull it off, 105-104, and to celebrate, the Horse walk into the practice space and blast off into a 15-minute “Country Home.” 

“We’re really ranched out now,” Reich yells as they launch into “Out on the Weekend.” There’s a magic that cannot be explained by the gigantic bottle of tequila that mysteriously evaporates somewhere between “Sedan Delivery” and “Vampire Blues.” Outside of the window, the traffic zooms by on the BQE. A marlin hangs on the wall — a cherished relic of Shea Stadium, where it held court for years. They’re totally in the zone. The only one who even glances at a phone is Ralph/Yoni, understandable since he’s an expectant dad, which might be why they play “Homegrown.” 

The band’s first ride was the Shea Stadium holiday party in 2015, but they moved to marathon summer gigs at the Rockaway Beach boardwalk bar Rippers. This winter, they did a “Winterlong” residency at the hip Williamsburg dive Union Pool, drawing a crowd of fellow crazies. They take pride in never booking a show under three hours. At a typical gig in March, they began with the 1970s outlaw elegy “Tonight’s the Night,” the 1990s angst rager “I’m the Ocean,” and the 1960s hippie death trip “Down by the River” — that was the first hour. 

But they always take the songs somewhere new. They give “Revolution Blues” a timely lyrical tweak, in the famous line where Neil denounces Laurel Canyon — they snarl, “I hear that Mar-A-Lago is full of famous stars!” This winter, at Union Pool, the weekend the Iran War started, they reached back to “After the Garden,” a 2006 anti-imperialist protest that absolutely nobody recognized, though we were all singing by the end. Their marathon gigs are like the best parts of an actual Neil show, stretched out to hours. Nobody’s concerned about playing the notes right — just letting the songs run wild. “You can’t rehearse too much,” Reich says. “You can’t plan too much. It’s just the spirit of it. That’s how the Horse rides.”

Long after midnight, they stumble into “Opera Star,” a dirtbag anthem from 1981’s Re-ac-tor, an oddity Neil famously loathes. It’s the song that made my jaw hit the floor the first time I saw this band, opening for the Hold Steady in 2023 — I couldn’t believe I was seeing any band dip into Re-ac-tor, since Neil won’t touch it. (Hell, I’d waited my whole life to mosh to “Opera Star.”)

Neil might disavow Re-ac-tor, but for these guys, this weird album is the cornerstone of their philosophy. “Collectively, that’s our favorite Crazy Horse record,” Reich says. “Re-ac-tor sounds the most like our band.” In the ranch kitchen, we listen to the rare 1981 “Southern Pacific”/“Motor City” single — triangle-shaped, transparent red vinyl. “Why doesn’t Neil like this album? I mean, anybody who likes ‘Surfer Joe’ and Re-ac-tor, I’m down, let’s go!” One of their dreams is to do a full Re-ac-tor show and call it Re-dac-tor. 

“We live to put respect on the deep cuts,” Reich says. “We love the later stuff, too. I love Broken Arrow, I love Mirror Ball, I love Psychedelic Pill. Ragged Glory, all the way up.” Last summer, they even busted out “Let’s Roll Again,” an anti-Trump/Musk rant from Young’s instantly forgotten 2025 album Talkin’ to the Trees. Poncho/Davey’s left-field fave is American Stars ’N’ Bars. “My daughter today asked me if we played ‘Hey Babe,” he says. “She’s six years old!” 

Part of the fun is how Young himself refuses to rust into a nostalgia act. He’s been killing it on the road in recent years, on revelatory tours with his old pals in Crazy Horse and his young crew the Chrome Hearts. At 80, his cranky sense of mischief remains an inspiration. Lazy Horse went to see him together last summer at Long Island’s Jones Beach, a bizarre show where the entire pit got flooded. With his typically unpredictable humor, Neil put a photo of the Jones Beach mess on the cover of his excellent new live album, As Time Explodes.

Young famously said that hits like “Heart of Gold” put him in the middle of the road, but he headed for the ditch. Lazy Horse are punk diehards, so that’s the side of Young’s music they most appreciate. “I haven’t played in too many bands where improvisation is possible,” Reich says. “I’ve never really been into jam music, but I can listen to the Horse play forever. A lot of the bands that we’ve played in have been very ‘1-2-3-4!’ But this is a way to break out of that — to just play and see what happens. It’s like watching Neil wing it.” 

But it’s a labor of love, ignoring the usual slick tribute-band racket. They’re grown-up musicians who’ve paid their dues, just playing this music together for the love of the game. Like they say, their live show is “just an extension of our hang.” Most of their gigs so far have been on the beach, where they’re free to ride for hours at a time. It figures that these NYC boys did their woodshedding at Rockaway, the Ramones’ favorite beach. “We were beach bums for a few years,” Reich admits. “The Horse just took over. It was a nice way to just go out to the beach and ride sand-to-stage. Barefoot. I feel like Neil would be into that.” 

One of their faves is “Prisoners of Rock & Roll,” with the immortal chorus, “That’s why we don’t wanna be good!” If Neil gets to hear them, he’d appreciate how they approach the music with zero reverence, just a playful urge to fuck it up. As Davey/Poncho says, “It’s not like, ‘Oh, this song goes like this, and it’s this fast or this long.’ We’ve done 30-minute versions of songs and we’ve done six-minute versions of the same songs. That’s the essence of the Horse. Like Neil says, ‘It’s all one song.’” 

Reich was just a little kid when he saw his first Neil show, in 1996, at Madison Square Garden. The opener was Jewel, with her debut hit, “Who Will Save Your Soul?” Reich became a Neil freak overnight — as he quips, “My soul got saved.” These days, he tapes Lazy Horse shows to play for his dad, Artie, who took him to that first show. “He’s sick right now,” Reich says. “He has ALS — it really sucks. He used to come to all the shows, so this is like sending him to the shows and listening together.” 

Artie was one of the Neil fans who urged the band to keep doing this. “I have a killer rock & roll dad, who put me onto the right shit at the right age. He’s an O.G. — he was at all the legendary New York 1960s concerts. A couple years ago, when we went to Forest Hills, Neil was ripping, and he turned to me and said, ‘I’ve seen Neil play “Cinnamon Girl” every decade of my life.’ That really hit me — it was beautiful. That’s a big part of why I’m so in love with music.”

At the ranch, the band keeps raging to the break of dawn. Glasses are raised; songs are dedicated to absent friends. “Big Time,” Neil’s mega-obscure 1996 elegy mourning his producer David Briggs, reminds me of a country home I’ll never revisit, and a tear or two might possibly get shed in my corner of the room. Poncho lets me share his mic, even though I can’t sing worth a damn. A second bottle vanishes faster than Neil’s rockabilly phase. “Powderfinger,” “The Losing End,” “Farmer John,” “Tired Eyes” — each song gives up new stories.

The final song of the night, “I’m the Ocean,” goes out to Artie. It’s one of Neil’s most ferocious songs, a 1995 Pearl Jam collaboration about getting older and staying mean — never any kind of hit. But Lazy Horse stretches it out until it seems like the song will keep thundering on forever. There’s more to this picture than meets the eye. Hey hey, my my.