My best way to explain Neil Young's song "Sedan Delivery" is by borrowing a little bit of internet humorist Lore Sjoberg's explanation of the biohazard symbol:
a completely abstract icon that nonetheless perfectly conveys the concept
Neil Young's lyrics are an abstract,
stream of consciousness reciting of various events that nevertheless manages to convey the life of a
low level drug dealer perfectly.
The album that the song comes from, Rust Never Sleeps, deals with Young's ambivalent feelings to the hippie culture. The songs follow an arc, with the first side acoustic, mostly pleasant songs, and the second side electric songs dealing with themes of defeat or corruption. At least this is the quick sketch: the songs aren't tightly interlaced, and deal with varied and somewhat abstract subjects. "Sedan Delivery" is the penultimate song on the album, and the music is an electric, shrill, off-kilter whine. Neil Young's voice, as normal, is also a shrill, off-kilter whine, but it fits the song perfectly.
Some of the lines of the song don't make particular sense:
Last night I went to the dentist, he pulled some teeth and I lost some blood
He said "I'd like to thank you for the cards you sent us, I can't deny we were all choked up
While some are very obviously about drug use and dealing:
I'm making another delivery of chemicals and sacred roots
I'll hold what you have to give me, but I'll use what I have to use.
To me, even though I have thankfully not been too involved for the drug culture, the whole thing comes across as an almost Platonic picture of that
lifestyle, the same reaction I got from reading
A Scanner Darkly. It is Neil Young at his best: slyly apocalyptic.