Neil Young

Neil Young is one of the most influential songwriters and guitarists of his generation, known for recording such favorites as 'Old Man,' 'Harvest Moon' and 'Heart of Gold.'
Synopsis

Born in Canada in 1945, Neil Young arrived in the U.S. in the mid-1960s and co-founded the band Buffalo Springfield. He earned fame both as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSN&Y) and as a solo artist, writing and recording such timeless songs as "Old Man," "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)," "Rockin' in the Free World" and "Heart of Gold"—a No. 1 hit. Nicknamed the “Godfather of Grunge” for his undeniable influence on that genre, Young is also a strong advocate for environmental and disability issues, as demonstrated by his co-founding of the Benefit for Farm Aid and the Bridge School Benefit Concerts. More than 50 years into his musical career, he continues to record and tour on a regular basis.

Starting Out

Neil Young was born on November 12, 1945, in Toronto, Canada. Four years later, his parents, Scott and Edna, who went by the name Rassy, moved to the small rural town of Omemee, where Neil and his older brother, Robert, spent their early youth. Despite the idyllic setting, however, Neil’s boyhood was a complicated one. Suffering from epilepsy, Type 1 diabetes and polio, by 1951 his health had deteriorated so far that he was unable to walk.


With time, Neil was able to overcome his ailments, and with his mother’s encouragement he began to nurture an interest in music, learning to play both the ukulele and banjo. However, his parents’ marriage, which had been strained for some time, did not recover, and in 1960 they finally divorced. Following the split, Robert stayed with his father in Toronto and Rassy relocated to Winnipeg with the teenage Neil, who by this time was far more interested in his musical pursuits than he was in academics. Over the next few years, he would play with several bands before forming the folk-rock group the Squires in 1963. Intent on a career as a musician, he dropped out of high school and started performing at clubs and coffeehouses in the area, first with the Squires and later as a solo act.

While making his rounds on the Canadian folk circuit, Young began to rub elbows with other up-and-coming Canadian musicians, including fellow folk singer Joni Mitchell and rock band the Guess Who. He also met Stephen Stills during this time and briefly joined a band called the Mynah Birds, which included future funk star Rick James on bass. The group managed to win a contract with the legendary Motown label in 1966, but disbanded before they could finish their album. Setting out in search of new frontiers, Young and his friend Bruce Palmer packed their possessions into Young’s black Pontiac hearse and made the long drive to Los Angeles, California.

Down from Sugar Mountain
In Los Angeles, Young ran into Stephen Stills, and soon thereafter, Young, Stills, Palmer, Richie Furay and Dewey Martin came together to form the band Buffalo Springfield. They released their debut, self-titled album in December 1966, and it managed to crack the charts. The single “For What It’s Worth” even became a Top 10 hit. The band soon attracted a large following and was acclaimed for its experimental and skilled instrumental pieces, inventive songwriting and harmony-focused vocal composition. The music-listening public got its first introduction to Young’s talents on such tracks as “Broken Arrow” and “I Am a Child.” However, by 1968, strain in Buffalo Springfield led to Young striking out once more on his own.

Young signed with Reprise Records in 1969 and released his self-titled debut to mixed reviews, though it hinted at the originality and willingness to experiment that would define his body of work. But Young followed up just a few months later with Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, on which drummer Ralph Molina, bass player Billy Talbot and guitarist Dan Whitten, collectively known as Crazy Horse, backed him up. With their raw sound serving as the counterpoint to Young’s distinctively melancholy and untrained voice on such standout tracks as “Cinnamon Girl” and “Down by the River,” the album climbed up the charts to No. 34, and eventually went gold.

Meanwhile, Young had reconnected with Stephen Stills, who had formed a new group with David Crosby of the Byrds and Graham Nash of the Hollies. Young joined the trio, which was renamed Crosby, Still, Nash & Young and they began to perform and record, playing the legendary Woodstock Festival in August 1969. The band’s subsequent tour and album release, 1970’s Déjà Vu, catapulted them to fame—so much so that they were at times referred to as the “American Beatles.” However, Young’s relationship with his bandmates quickly became contentious, and he left the group to focus more exclusively on his solo work.

The Loner

The move quickly paid off, with his 1970 album After the Gold Rush breaking into the Top 10 and featuring such Neil Young classics as “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” “Tell Me Why” and “Southern Man.” (The latter, a condemnation of racism that angered many Southerners, would inspire Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” in which Neil Young is called out specifically.) Young outdid himself the next year with Harvest, a hallmark work that contains the songs “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “Old Man” (inspired by the aging caretaker of the ranch he had recently purchased in the Santa Cruz mountains) and “Heart of Gold,” which is Young’s only No. 1 hit to date.

ut just as he reached this early peak, Young was faced with one of the more difficult periods in his life. At the end of 1972, Young and his girlfriend, Academy Award–winning actress Carrie Snodgress, had a son, Zeke, who was born with cerebral palsy, and Snodgress had to set aside her acting career to care for him. A few months later, shortly after being fired by Young before their upcoming tour, Crazy Horse guitarist Dan Whitten died of an drug overdose. These events were compounded by a string of relatively unsuccessful projects, including the 1972 film Journey Through the Past, the live album Time Fades Away and 1974’s On the Beach. Young and Snodgress split up in 1975, the same year that Young released his album Tonight’s the Night, which had been recorded shortly after Whitten’s death and reflected Young’s frame of mind with its dark character and themes, as well as Zuma, a hard-edged album featuring Crazy Horse’s new lineup, with Frank Sampedro replacing Whitten on guitar.


The second half of the decade would prove to be a more positive one for Young, who teamed up once more with Stephen Stills to record Long May You Run, which reached No. 26 on the charts and went gold. In 1977, he released the more country flavored Stars ’n Bars as well as the triple-LP compilation Decade, which featured a handpicked selection of his work up to that point. Things got even better the next year, when Comes a Time broke into the Top 10, he married Pegi Morton (who was waitress at a restaurant near his ranch and would inspire many of Young’s songs in the future, most notably, “Unknown Legend”) and embarked on a tour with Crazy Horse called “Rust Never Sleeps,” during which they showcased songs from an upcoming album. Released in 1979, Rust Never Sleeps echoed the structure of the concerts, alternating between quiet, acoustic tracks and aggressive electric numbers. Among its highlights is one of Neil Young’s best-known tracks, the anthem “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” A double LP recording from the tour, Live Rust, was released later that year, reaching No. 15 on the charts.

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