[citation needed] After leaving the group as sessions for their first album commenced, the mercurial and reclusive Whitsell was promptly replaced by his younger brother George, a R&B-influenced guitarist also respected in the band's social circle.

Although their album sold only about 5,000 copies, the Rockets soon re-connected with Neil Young, whom they had met two years earlier during the early days of Buffalo Springfield.

Although all parties initially envisaged the Rockets continuing as a separate project, the older band soon folded due to Young's insistence on having his new backing trio keep to a strict practice schedule.

According to George Whitsell, "My understanding was Neil was gonna use the guys for a record and a quick tour, bring 'em back and help us produce the next Rockets album.

55 pop hit "Cinnamon Girl"; the extended, jam-driven "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand"; and a panoply of country and folk-influenced songs exemplified by the spare title track and "Running Dry (Requiem for the Rockets)," a florid tribute to the defunct band that featured a guest appearance by Notkoff.

"[2] Although Nitzsche openly disdained the rhythm section of Talbot and Molina, he retrospectively lauded Whitten (who was of Scotch-Irish American ancestry) as "the only Black man in the band.

The group as a whole appears on just three of the eleven tracks on After the Gold Rush, which was credited solely to Young upon its September 1970 release: "When You Dance I Can Really Love", "I Believe in You", and a cover of Don Gibson's "Oh Lonesome Me" from the 1969 sessions.

[5] Even though Talbot's appearances on the album were confined to the Crazy Horse tracks, Molina was the project's main drummer (often performing in an ad hoc backing ensemble with emergent singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Nils Lofgren and CSNY bassist Greg Reeves on the non-Crazy Horse tracks), while Whitten continued to contribute backing vocals and guitar to several songs (including "Southern Man" and "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", a U.S. No.

Young "fired" the group in the aftermath of the 1970 tour due to Whitten's addiction (partially attributable to his severe rheumatoid arthritis, for which he had previously received a medical discharge from the United States Navy) following an incapacitated performance during the Fillmore East engagement.

[6] Decades later, the extant recordings from the 1969 sessions (most notably a heretofore unknown iteration of "Helpless", long presumed lost due to an engineering error) were combined with select alternate mixes from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere on Early Daze (2024).

84 on the Billboard 200 chart in 1971, Whitten's "I Don't Want to Talk About It" would later be covered by a wide range of artists, including Geoff Muldaur, the Indigo Girls, Pegi Young, and Rod Stewart.

Following the commercial failure of Crazy Horse, Lofgren and Nitzsche left the group to resume their solo careers; meanwhile, Whitten's drug problems pushed Talbot and Molina to dismiss him and turn to outside musicians.

[citation needed] In mid-1973, Young brought together a band comprising Talbot, Molina, Lofgren, and pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith to record a new album, the majority of which became the basis of 1975's Tonight's the Night.

Sampedro's lack of technical proficiency at the time ("Neil kept writin' simpler songs so I could play them") and desire to see Young "rockin' and having fun" would greatly inform the sound of the record.

Following a warmup tour of unannounced appearances at various San Francisco Bay Area bars (dubbed by the media as the Rolling Zuma Revue in contrast to Bob Dylan's contemporaneous Rolling Thunder Revue) in December 1975, Young and the band toured Japan and Europe from March to April 1976.

Following sessions in November 1975 for an aborted Crazy Horse album, the band went on to appear on both 1977's American Stars 'n Bars (including several discrete tracks and the entire first side, which was credited to an expanded lineup [Neil Young, Crazy Horse and the Bullets] with Ben Keith, violinist Carole Mayedo and backing vocalists Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson) and on two tracks ("Look Out for My Love" and "Lotta Love") on 1978's Comes a Time.

As Young spent much of the eighties pursuing his most experimental work to date, Crazy Horse recorded with him more sporadically after the critically disparaged 1981 album Re·ac·tor.

Immediately thereafter, Young included all three members of Crazy Horse in a horn-augmented ensemble, the Bluenotes, and toured clubs in the fall of 1987.

According to Jimmy McDonough, Crazy Horse had begun a sixth album of its own in the mid-1990s, but left the project unfinished when Young called upon the group to join him for some secret club dates in California (for which the quartet billed themselves as the Echoes), leading to the recording of Broken Arrow.

Although Sampedro was employed as a full-time assistant to Kevin Eubanks on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno from 1992 to 2010, the band continued to rehearse several times a year and more intermittently with Young during this period.

Americana was composed entirely of covers, mostly of American folk music revival standards, while Psychedelic Pill featured original songs written by Young for the band.

Young and Crazy Horse embarked on the Alchemy Tour throughout 2012 and 2013 in support of both albums, traveling to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

In 2023, the members of Crazy Horse released All Roads Lead Home, a compilation comprising primarily solo recordings made during the COVID-19 pandemic.

[16][17] In September 2023, the band performed two shows celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Roxy, with Promise of the Real guitarist Micah Nelson filling in for Lofgren.

Fuckin' Up, a live recording of a private November 4, 2023 performance of Ragged Glory at Toronto's The Rivoli, was released on April 26, 2024; credited to "Neil & the Horse," it features a line-up of Young, Talbot, Molina, Lofgren and Nelson.