Neil Young

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

In the 1991 Trouser Press Record Guide, writer Jon Young chose a host of adjectives to describe Neil Young: "Dirty rock 'n' roller and hippie narcissist. Rockabilly hepcat and techno-troubadour. Folkie romantic and bluesy bad boy." To that list could be added "godfather of grunge," since by the early 1990s Young's iconoclastic music and personal style had been discovered by a new generation of music aficionados desperately in search of a credible hero. His longevity in the sometimes fatal world of rock and roll, exploration of radically different musical styles, and the consistency of his own distinct sound over time all combined to bring Young renewed popularity.

Born in Toronto in 1945, Young is the son of a sports reporter and local television personality. Bouts with diabetes, polio, and epilepsy marred his childhood, and after his parents divorced, Young and his mother relocated to Winnipeg, Manitoba. While his first musical endeavors involved a ukulele, Young later switched to guitar, and by the early 1960s he had performed with a number of local bands. His first steady success came with a folk-rock ensemble called the Squires, a group that made regular appearances in both Manitoba and Ontario. In 1965, at a bar in a small Ontario town, Young first encountered Stephen Stills, an American musician who would become an occasional collaborator of Young's over the next few decades.

Slowly establishing a base in Toronto, by 1966 Young was playing with a group called Rickey James and the Mynah Birds. James later became famous in the 1980s for his hit "Super Freak" and some well-publicized legal troubles. With the Mynah Birds, Young achieved some minor successes, including a jaunt to Detroit for recording sessions at the legendary Motown studios. Yet the tracks were never released, and the Mynah Birds disbanded when James clashed with authorities in 1966. At that point Young and another band member, Bruce Palmer, decided to leave for greener pastures.

The Rise and Fall of Buffalo Springfield

Young and Palmer bought a hearse, filled it with everything they owned, and drove out to California. In a Los Angeles traffic jam, Stephen Stills spotted the vehicle and recognized the Canadians. With Stills's friend Richie Furay and a fifth member, Dewey Martin, the Buffalo Springfield was formed. The group was an almost immediate success and released three albums, but the quick money and fame was difficult for the still-youthful musicians. Buffalo Springfield was often plagued by temporary defections, including Young's own just before the pivotal Monterey (California) Pop Festival in June of 1967.

By 1968 Buffalo Springfield had disbanded permanently, leaving Young free to record his first solo album. The self-titled work was released in January of 1969, and Young has sometimes referred to the record as "overdub city" for its rather overproduced sound. Later that year, Young formed a band with some former members of a local L.A. group called the Rockets. With Danny Whitten on guitar, Ralph Molina playing drums, and Billy Talbot on bass, the ensemble took shape as Crazy Horse, and within a short time they recorded their first release together, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. The 1969 work "marked the first of many radical shifts, turning to the raw, driving rock many feel still suits him best," wrote Jon Young in the Trouser Press Record Guide. The writer also noted that Young's backing band "display the ratty fervor of punk years before the fact."

For the Record …

Born on November 12, 1945, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; son of Scott (a sports reporter) and Edna (a television celebrity) Young; first wife's name, Susan (divorced, 1970); second wife's name, Pegi; children: Zeke (with actor Carrie Snodgrass), Ben, Amber (with Pegi Young).

Guitarist, singer, and songwriter. Member of rock bands the Squires, 1962–64, Rickey James and the Mynah Birds, c. 1965, Buffalo Springfield, 1966–68, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 1969–71, and the Stills-Young Band, 1976; solo artist (and with accompaniment from bands Crazy Horse, the Bluenotes, the Shocking Pinks, and Pearl Jam), 1969–; composer of soundtracks for films, including Where the Buffalo Roam, 1980, and Dead Man, 1995; director of films (under pseudonym Bernard Shakey), including Journey through the Past, 1972, Rust Never Sleeps, 1979, Human Highway (co-directed with Dean Stockwell), 1982; and Greendale, 2003.

Awards: Rolling Stone Music Award, Album of the Year for Tonight's the Night, 1975; citations in Rolling Stone critics' poll for Best Rock Artist, Best Male Vocalist, and Best Album, all for Rust Never Sleeps, 1979; Juno Award (Canada), Album of the Year, 1994; Male Vocalist of the Year, 1995; Best Male Artist of the Year, 2001; Adult Alternative Album of the Year, 2006.

Addresses: Office—c/o Lookout Management, 9120 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069. Record company—Reprise, 3300 Warner Blvd., Burbank, CA 91510. Website—Neil Young Official Website: http://www.neilyoung.com.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Young was fast becoming a pivotal figure in music. He reunited with Stills in the latter's new band, Crosby, Stills & Nash, in the summer of 1969, and together the act played at the Woodstock Festival in August of that year. Their first studio effort together was Deja Vu, released in 1970, followed by 4-Way Street a year later. Meanwhile, Young continued to work with Crazy Horse and recorded a number of well-received albums during the seventies, including After the Gold Rush and Harvest, a 1972 work remembered for Young's only number one single, "Heart of Gold." The musician later wrote in the liner notes to 1977's Decade of the mixed demons this country-rock ballad brought out in him. "This song put me in the middle of the road," he said of "Heart of Gold." "Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there."

Work Became More Autobiographical

The success of the Harvest album was marred by tragedy when Young's guitarist, Whitten, died of a drug overdose shortly before a scheduled tour. The resultant turmoil in Young's life was evident on the 1973 release Time Fades Away, and on Tonight's the Night, written and recorded during this period but not released until 1975. In a 1978 Newsweek article, Tony Schwartz called Tonight's the Night "a depressing tribute-out of tune and repetitive, but hauntingly memorable." Young told Schwartz that it was his personal favorite. "When I handed it in to Warner [Bros. Records], they hated it. We played it ten times as loud as they usually play things and it was awful," he recalled in the interview. "Tonight's the Night was a story of death and dope. It was about a sleazy, burned-out rock star just about to go, about what fame and crowds do to you. I had to exorcise those feelings. I felt like it was the only chance I had to stay alive."

Young rejoined Crosby, Stills & Nash briefly in 1974 for some unreleased recordings and a tour and continued to put out albums with Crazy Horse. He also reunited with Stills for the 1976 release Long May You Run. Young's 1977 work American Stars 'n Bars was memorable for its hit "Like a Hurricane." The following year he released Comes a Time, another switch back to a less rock-influenced, more country sound, toward which Young often veered during this time. The softer sound prompted Young to tell Schwartz in Newsweek that "folk music can be as authentic as rock 'n' roll. It's the in-between that bothers me. Soul and depth matter most."

Forty musicians appeared as guests on Comes a Time, while ten engineers added their production skills. The too-many-cooks maxim seemed to work against the LP. Young was dissatisfied with the final product at its first pressing. His label re-did it, and offered to mix in with the first pressing the shipments of the better records at a later date. Young purchased all copies of this first pressing himself for a dollar apiece, setting him back $200,000.

Young's status in the pantheon of living rock legends had achieved epic proportions by the late 1970s. He released his acclaimed Rust Never Sleeps album in 1979 and toured the same year in support of the LP, selling out shows across North America. Sailing with his wife, Pegi, and young son across the Pacific, Young came up with the scenario for the Rust tour: he would awaken atop oversized amplifiers, role-playing a youngster seduced by rock 'n' roll and then dwarfed by the industry and hype of it. Evil-looking "road-eyes" with glowing eyes and hooded heads moved the giant "equipment" around. Young played an acoustic set the first half, replayed announcements recorded at Woodstock during the intermission, then returned with Crazy Horse for a full-blown electric set. Live Rust, a chronicle of this tour, was released later in 1979.

Building "the Bridge"

As the 1980s progressed, Young was sometimes accused of having lost his cutting edge. Yet his musical efforts had taken second place in his life to some other, more personal, issues. His first son, Zeke, with actor Carrie Snodgrass, was born with a mild form of cerebral palsy. A second child, with his wife, Pegi, was also born with the condition, but in a more severe form. Having two children afflicted with cerebral palsy from different mothers prompted Young to be tested, and doctors told him that it was literally a one-in-a-million coincidence. A third child, daughter Amber, was not affected. Pegi became involved in setting up a Bay Area school for disabled children called the Bridge School, while Young put together an annual fundraising benefit noted for its celebrity roster.

Trouser Press's Jon Young termed Young's releases both with and without Crazy Horse during the eighties "particularly erratic." 1980's Hawks & Doves contained "a few incisive tunes amidst the throwaways," the writer noted, and was followed by "a series of genre exercise that seem more arbitrary than heartfelt." Two years later, Trans ventured into a heavily synthesized sound, while Everybody's Rockin' of 1983 experimented with rockabilly. A 1987 work, Life, was made with Crazy Horse and occasionally exhibited "a tough edge not glimpsed in years," according to Jon Young. The work was Neil Young's last for Geffen Records, who initiated a lawsuit against the artist. Rolling Stone's Alan Light explained that the court action was taken by the label against the iconoclastic musician "for making what the company called 'unrepresentative' albums—for making albums that didn't sound like Neil Young albums, whatever that could possibly mean."

A bluesy, big-band sound on This Note's for You, released in 1988 with a backing band called the Blue-notes, brought Young back into the limelight. The title song was a biting indictment of the selling-out of rock—the use of classic tunes in advertisements hawking everything from beer to sneakers, and the near-necessity of winning large corporate sponsorship contracts with beverage giants in order to underwrite the increasingly overblown costs of putting on large-scale tours. Young's video for the title song was banned for a time on MTV, but the network relented and eventually it was voted best video of 1988 in its annual video awards. The year also saw the reunion of Young with former bandmates for a well-received but unimpressive Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album entitled American Dream.

Young ventured back into the world of amplified, guitar-driven rock with 1989's Freedom. Like some of his other releases, the work contained some softer, acoustic numbers as well. It opened and closed with two versions of the same song, "Rockin' in the Free World," "a sing-along ball spinning on an axis of deadly irony, its superficial cheerleading charm soured by Young's parade of victims," declared David Fricke in Rolling Stone.

In the same review, Fricke also spoke of an apparent pattern in Young's career: As each decade neared to a close, he released a seminal, biting record that tore apart what rock music, and the promise of the decade, had really devolved into in the preceding years. In the lyrics of this album, Young seemed to indict the hollow patriotic slogans of U.S. President George Bush's administration, and pay homage to the underclass of destitute people government policies of the decade created. "Freedom is the sound of Neil Young, another decade on, looking back again in anger and dread," Fricke noted.

Entered Cult-Hero Pantheon

It was also in 1989 that The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young was released, marking the beginning of the aging rocker's entry into the status of cultural icon for a new generation. Several alternative rock acts, at the time heard little outside the college-radio circuit, covered Young's songs for The Bridge. Artsy New York noise band Sonic Youth took one of his early 1980s forays into electronic music, "Computer Age," while Minneapolis rockers Soul Asylum submitted a version of "Barstool Blues." The project was the idea of a dedicated Young fan, Terry Tolkin, who coordinated the bands and arranged for part of the tribute album's proceeds to go to the Bridge School, the institution set up with the help of Pegi Young.

Ragged Glory was Young's first 1990 release and was recorded with Crazy Horse in a few weeks at Young's northern California ranch in a session memorable for the series of local earthquakes on its final day. By this point Young and Crazy Horse had been working together for almost two decades, a relationship marked by members' periodic artistic differences. After one particularly grueling European tour, Young had declared that he was through working with them, but they regrouped for Ragged Glory and another tour.

Ragged Glory was marked by longer, solo-laden tracks—some stretching on toward ten minutes—and a mood Henke compared to Young's first release with Crazy Horse, 1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. The writer termed it "a classic Crazy Horse album, with lots of rough edges, screeching guitar and feedback." Another Rolling Stone writer, Kurt Loder, praised the collaboration between Young and his backing band, whom he termed "maybe the last great garage band of our time and definitely Neil's greatest group." Loder called the record "a monument to the spirit of the garage-to the pursuit of passion over precision, to raw power and unvarnished soul."

Young and Crazy Horse also announced plans for a tour—to be designated the "Don't Spook the Horse" tour, named after a seven-minute bonus track on Ragged Glory. Young invited several alternative acts, such as Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Social Distortion, to open dates. The tour was held in smaller arenas left behind in the wake of the predominance of the mammoth sports stadiums.

The aural result of the successful 1991 tour in the smaller venues could be heard on the double compact disc Weld, released later that year. The tour began during the Persian Gulf crisis, and Young rearranged the set list to include a cover of Bob Dylan's antiwar protest song "Blowin' in the Wind." A companion release to Weld called Arc, 30 minutes of feedback-drenched live guitar, also appeared in 1991. The brainchild of Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore, Arc took introductions and endings to Young classics, as well as some solo moments, and distorted them into what Rolling Stone's Fricke called "utter melodic holocaust" and perhaps "the most extreme record he's ever released."

Young's next move was the release of a follow-up of sorts to his acclaimed folk-rock album of 20 years earlier, Harvest. The 1992 offering, entitled Harvest Moon, was an introspective look back. Deaths of friends, the disabilities of his sons, and his legal battle with Geffen seemed to have taken their toll. Rolling Stone's Light called the record "a chronicle of survival, focusing on loss and compromise and the ultimate triumphs of being a married father approaching fifty." Young also performed on MTV's popular acoustic show, Unplugged, in support of the record. The year was also marked by Young's performances in separate concert tours with such disparate veterans and sixties legends as Bob Dylan and Booker T. and the MG's.

Words Came Back to Haunt

In the spring of 1994 Young's seminal title track from Rust Never Sleeps release became tragically infamous when a line from it—"it's better to burn out than to fade away"—was quoted in the suicide note left by Kurt Cobain, frontman of Seattle, Washington's breakthrough alternative act Nirvana. Young had heard about Cobain's drug-related problems and, shortly before Cobain's death, had unsuccessfully tried to contact him through Nirvana's manager. The title track of Young's 1994 Sleeps with Angels is a response to the death of the young musician.

Sleeps with Angels' other songs seemed to condemn the increasingly violent and consumerist nature of American culture, and the 14-minute "Change Your Mind" was characterized by Newsweek's Jay Cocks as "equal parts rhapsody and guitar dementia that describes the full course of a difficult love affair." Stereo Review writer Steve Simels lauded the LP's plethora of instrumentation and unusual production techniques, a "kind of studied primitivism [that] disguises a canny sophistication" comparable to Young's earlier works with Crazy Horse. Simels found Sleeps with Angels rife with "extremely interesting songs and a consistently vivid atmosphere."

In a Rolling Stone review, Fricke termed Sleeps with Angels "as charged with fighting spirit and romantic optimism as it is fraught with warzone shell shock and deathbed fear." The critic also reflected that the work "is not the first album Young has made about the widening cracks in the American dream or what's left of it for the teen-age refugees after the broken promises of the '60s and the worthless covenants of the [Ronald Reagan-George Bush] era [of conservative politics]. But it is among his best, a dramatic wrestling of song and conscience that suggests—no, insists—that walking through fire doesn't necessarily mean you have to go up in flames."

As Young's prolific career chugged well into its third decade, his legions of dedicated fans were awaiting a definitive multi-CD release. "That's a giant," he told Rolling Stone's Kurt Loder in 1990. "I'm still working on it. It's ridiculous." Young supposedly possessed hundreds of hours of unreleased material, and a retrospective record would incorporate many of those as-yet-unheard songs. Young's own creativity continued to hinder the release—he had began working on it in the late 1980s, and was continually interrupted by the need to write more songs while digging up the older ones from his archives. The artist had also considered headlining the annual alternative music-industry festival, Lollapalooza, in what would have been the ultimate act of 1990s career reincarnation.

In 1995 Young released the well-received album Mirror Ball, a collaboration with the highly acclaimed and popular alternative act, Pearl Jam. Although Pearl Jam's name does not appear on the LP's cover—reportedly for legal reasons—the group serves as Young's backup band on every song. Commenting on the generational gap between himself and the young grunge band, Young told Time's Christopher John Farley, "Actually, in many ways, I feel like Pearl Jam is older than me…. There's an ageless thing to the way they play." The result of the two acts' winter 1995 recording session in Seattle is, according to Farley, "one of the most consistently rewarding works of [Young's] long, winding career."

In 1996, Young scored the Jim Jarmusch film Dead Man, followed by the release of the Young and Crazy Horse recording Broken Arrow. Director Jarmusch filmed Broken Arrow's tour the following year resulting in the concert film and the live soundtrack album The Year of the Horse. For the first time in almost a decade, Young also reunited with Crosby, Stills & Nash for the album and the subsequent tour of their 1999 album Looking Forward. Young was quickly back in the studio for a new solo album for the mostly acoustic Silver & Gold. Young recorded a two-night concert from the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado that summer and released it in the fall of 2000 as the live disc Road Rock, Vol. 1: Friends & Relatives.

Teaming up with legendary Stax soul band Booker T, and the MG's, in 2002, Young and the group released the romantic, southern soul album Are You Passionate? The following year, Young embarked on one of the most ambitious projects of his career. The 2003 album Greendale was a concept album about a fictional small town. The elaborate album resulted in a wide-scale tour with actors and a movie. Rolling Stone's Milo Miles wrote that the Greendale album "has a tattered, buzzing, demolike sound, rude as any Young has put out." The film version of Greendale was shot in California on Super 8 film with Young as director and family, friends and crew as actors who spoke Young's lyrics as dialogue.

Troubled Times

A day after inducting Chrissie Hynde into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the spring of 2005, Young noticed something strange in his eye that wouldn't go away. After it began to get larger, Young went to see a doctor where he was told he had a brain aneurysm. The doctor explained that the aneurysm had been there for a very long time and that he was in no immediate danger, but that he should have surgery to remove it as soon as possible. In the week between his diagnosis and his surgery, Young wrote and recorded the album Prairie Wind. "The whole album's chronological-I wrote and recorded in the order it appears on the record," Young told Time's Josh Tyrangiel. "Then I went back up to New York on Monday for a presurgery thing, flew back to Nashville, wrote and recorded … And then I got admitted, and they put me under." Andy Langer, a journalist for Esquire, called Prairie Wind a, "quiet, laid-back charmer designed to sit alongside Harvest and Harvest Moon in a troubadour-period trilogy."

No stranger to singing about American politics and his disdain for President Bush, Young's 2006 release Living with War was an obvious political statement put to melody. Written and recorded in two weeks, Young was backed by a 100-person choir on a collection of songs, which Rolling Stone's David Fricke called, "an impressive measure of Young's refusal to burn out or fade away that he states his case with clarity as well as dirty garage-trio momentum." Lead by the single "Let's Impeach the President," the entire Living with War album was streamed free online a month before its May release. Young was a part of another successful live concert film with Jonathan Demme's Heart of Gold, which captured two of Young's concerts at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium. Never one to stay put very long, Young spent the summer of 2006 touring with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for their tour dubbed "Freedom of Speech '06."

Selected discography

Solo and with Crazy Horse (unless otherwise noted)

Neil Young, Reprise, 1969.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Reprise, 1969.
After the Gold Rush, Reprise, 1970.
Harvest, Warner Bros., 1972.
Journey through the Past, Reprise, 1973.
Time Fades Away, Reprise, 1973.
On the Beach, Reprise, 1974.
Tonight's the Night, Reprise, 1975.
Zuma, Reprise, 1975.
(With the Stills-Young Band) Long May You Run, Reprise, 1976.
American Stars 'n Bars, Reprise, 1977.
Decade, Reprise, 1977.
Comes a Time, Reprise, 1978.
Rust Never Sleeps, Reprise, 1979.
Live Rust, Reprise, 1979.
Hawks and Doves, Reprise, 1980.
Reactor, Reprise, 1981.
Trans, Geffen, 1982.
(With the Shocking Pinks) Everybody's Rockin', Geffen, 1983.
Old Ways, Geffen, 1985.
Landing on Water, Geffen, 1986.
Life, Geffen, 1987.
(With the Bluenotes) This Note's for You, Reprise, 1988.
Freedom, Reprise, 1989.
Ragged Glory, Reprise, 1990.
Weld, Reprise, 1991.
Arc, Reprise, 1991.
Harvest Moon, Reprise, 1992.
Sleeps with Angels, Reprise, 1994.
(With Pearl Jam) Mirror Ball, Reprise, 1995.
Dead Man, Vapor, 1996.
Broken Arrow, Reprise, 1996.
Year of the Horse, Rerprise, 1997.
Silver & Gold, Reprise, 2000.
Road Rock, Vol. 1: Friends & Relatives, Reprise, 2000.
(With Booker T. & the MG's) Are You Passionate?, Reprise, 2002.
Greendale, Reprise, 2003.
Prairie Wind, Reprise, 2005.
Living with War, Reprise, 2006.

With Buffalo Springfield

Buffalo Springfield, Atco, 1967.
Buffalo Springfield Again, Atco, 1967.
Last Time Around, Atco, 1968.
Retrospective, Atco, 1969.

With Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Deja Vu, Atlantic, 1970.
4-Way Street, Atlantic, 1971.
So Far, Atlantic, 1974.
American Dream, Atlantic, 1988.
Looking Forward, Reprise, 1999.

Sources

Books

Trouser Press Record Guide, fourth edition, Collier Books, 1991.

Periodicals

Billboard, August 19, 1995.

Entertainment Weekly, October 14, 1994; June 30-July 7, 1995.

Esquire, November, 2005.

Newsweek, November 13, 1978.

Rolling Stone, June 4, 1987; November 2, 1989; September 20, 1990; October 4, 1990; November 14, 1991; November 28, 1991; October 15, 1992; January 21, 1993; August 25, 1994; July 13-27, 1995; September 4, 2003; May 1, 2006.

Spin, May 1995.

Stereo Review, October 1994.

Time, October 17, 1994; July 3, 1995; October 3, 2005.

Variety, October 6, 2003.