Neil Young
Singer/songwriter Neil Young is sometimes visionary, sometimes flaky, sometimes both at once, but he has never been boring. Indeed, Neil Young has weathered runs of critical and popular ambivalence only to be vindicated by being periodically "rediscovered" by young musicians and fans. He has maintained a large following since the early '70s with music in three basic styles - solo acoustic ballads, sweet country rock, and lumbering garage rock (with some experimental music side trips), all topped by his high voice - and he veers from one to another in unpredictable phases. His subject matter also shifts from personal confessions to allusive stories to bouncy throwaways. A dedicated primitivist, Young is constantly proving that simplicity is not always simple.
As a child, Young moved with his mother to Winnipeg, Canada, after she divorced his father, a well-known sports journalist. He played in several high school rock bands, including the Esquires, the Stardusters, and the Squires. He also began hanging out in local folk clubs, where he met Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell. Mitchell wrote “The Circle Game” for Young after hearing his “Sugar Mountain.” In the mid-’60s Young moved to Toronto, where he began performing solo. In 1966 he and bassist Bruce Palmer joined the Mynah Birds (which included Rick James and had a deal with Motown Records); after that fizzled, he and Palmer drove to L.A. in Young’s Pontiac hearse. Young and Palmer ran into Stills and another mutual friend, Richie Furay, out west and formed Buffalo Springfield [see entry], one of the most important of the new folk-country-rock bands, who recorded Young’s “Broken Arrow,” “I Am a Child,” “Mr. Soul,” and “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing.” But friction developed: Young quit the band, only to rejoin and quit again, and in May 1968, after recording three albums, the band split up.
Young acquired Joni Mitchell’s manager, Elliot Roberts, and released his debut solo LP in January 1969, coproduced by Jack Nitzsche. Around the same time Young began jamming with a band called the Rockets, renamed Crazy Horse: drummer Ralph Molina, bassist Billy Talbot, and guitarist Danny Whitten. They backed Young on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (#34, 1969), recorded in two weeks. The album includes three of Young’s most famous songs: “Cinnamon Girl,” “Down by the River,” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” which, Young later said, were all written in one day while he was stricken with the flu. The album went gold (and much later, platinum), but Young decided to split his time between Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills and Nash [see entry], whom he joined in June. In March 1970 his presence was first felt on CSN&Y;’s Déjà Vu.
Young’s third solo, the gold (and utterly evocative) After the Gold Rush (#8, 1970), included Crazy Horse and 17-year-old guitarist Nils Lofgren. The album yielded the single “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” (#33, 1970), and that plus the CSN&Y; album put the spotlight on Young. Harvest (#1, 1972), with the #1 single “Heart of Gold,” made the singer/songwriter a superstar.
By the release of its live album, Four Way Street, in spring 1971, CSN&Y; had broken up. In 1972 Young made a cinema vérité film, Journey Through the Past; the film and its soundtrack were panned by critics. Young confused fans further with Time Fades Away (#22, 1973), a rough-hewn live album recorded with the Stray Gators, including Nitzsche (keyboards), Ben Keith (pedal steel guitar), Tim Drummond (bass), and John Barbata (drums). In June 1975 Young released a bleak, ragged album recorded two years earlier, Tonight’s the Night (#25). The album’s dark tone reflected Young’s emotional upheaval following the drug deaths of Crazy Horse’s Danny Whitten in 1972 and CSN&Y; roadie Bruce Berry in 1973. In November Young released the harder-rocking Zuma (#25), an emotionally intense work that included the sweeping “Cortez the Killer.” Crazy Horse now included Talbot, Molina, and Frank Sampedro (rhythm guitar). In 1976 Young recorded Long May You Run (#26) with Stills, which went gold, but he left Stills halfway through a tour.
In June 1977 Young was back on his own with the gold American Stars ’n Bars (#21), again a more accessible effort, with Linda Ronstadt doing backup vocals along with newcomer Nicolette Larson. Compiled by Young, Decade was a carefully chosen, not entirely hit-centered compilation. Comes a Time (#7, 1978) was folkish and went gold.
In fall 1978 Young did an arena tour called Rust Never Sleeps. He played old and new music, performing half the show by himself on piano or guitar, and the other half (which was memorably loud) with Crazy Horse, amid giant mock-ups of microphones and speakers. In June 1979 he released Rust Never Sleeps (#8) with songs previewed on the tour, including “Out of the Blue,” dedicated to Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. The album also featured “Sedan Delivery” and “Powderfinger,” which Young had once offered to Lynyrd Skynyrd, though the band didn’t record them. (Back in 1974 Skynyrd had written “Sweet Home Alabama” as an answer to Young’s “Southern Man.”) In November 1979 Young released the gold Live Rust LP (#15), culled from the fall 1978 shows and the soundtrack to a film of the tour (directed by Young) entitled Rust Never Sleeps.
The ’80s was a particularly strange and erratic decade for Young, even by his own unpredictable standards. Right before presidential election week 1980, he issued Hawks and Doves (#30), an enigmatic state-of-the-union address, with one side of odd acoustic pieces and the other of rickety country songs. Exactly one year later he released Re•ac•tor (#27), an all-hard-rock LP. In 1982 he moved to Geffen and released Trans (#19), which introduced what Young called “Neil 2”; he fed his voice through a computerized Vocoder and sang songs like “Sample and Hold.” He toured arenas as a solo performer when the album was released, singing his most-requested songs, covering “backstage” action on a large video screen, and singing along with his Vocoderized video image on songs from Trans.
Young’s wandering got more extreme with Everybody’s Rockin’, a rockabilly-style album recorded and performed with a group he dubbed the Shocking Pinks. Despite an amusing video for the single “Wonderin’,” Young’s work started sliding down the charts. Old Ways was a country record with guest spots by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Landing on Water used synthesizers on standard rock songs. And Life reunited Young with Crazy Horse in lackluster performances. After his disastrous relationship with Geffen - in which he was ultimately slapped with a $3 million suit for making “unrepresentative,” noncommercial music - Young returned to his former label for This Note’s for You, a horn-based R&B; album. The video for the title song attacked rockers who allowed their songs to be used in TV ads and was not shown on MTV, although it earned the network’s Music Video Award for Best Video of the Year. In 1987, after appearing with his old cohorts in CSN at a Greenpeace benefit, Young rejoined the group briefly for the 1988 CSN&Y; album, American Dream (#16, 1988). None of Young’s ’80s albums was particularly well received beyond the artist’s loyal core audience, though some - such as Trans - had captured critics’ interest. Many wrote off his ’80s period as typical Neil Young flakiness.
But there were events in Young’s personal life that shed light on his increased eccentricity. In 1978 his second son, Ben, was born to his wife, Pegi, with cerebral palsy (in 1972, Young’s first son, Zeke, was born to his then-companion, actress Carrie Snodgress, with a milder version of the disorder). Later, in a 1992 interview with The New York Times, Young said his ’80s output had reflected his frustration with not being able to communicate with Ben: “Trans signified the end of one sound and era and the beginning of another era, where I was indecipherable and no one could understand what I was saying.”
Young’s extramusical activities during the ’80s were as unpredictable as the albums. In 1984, to the bewilderment of his fans, he spoke out in favor of conservative Ronald Reagan. He also participated in the 1985 Live Aid benefit and helped organize the subsequent Farm Aid concerts. In 1986 Young and his wife started the Bridge School in San Francisco, a learning center for disabled children. In 1989 a group of alternative rockers, including Sonic Youth, the Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr, contributed to The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young, whose proceeds went to the school. (Young also organized annual benefit concerts for the school, at which a wide range of artists performed each year.)
Hailed by a new generation of postpunk musicians as the Granddaddy of Grunge, Young had a major comeback beginning in 1989 with Freedom (#35), his biggest charter since Trans. He introduced its single, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” in an unbridled, transcendent 1989 performance on Saturday Night Live that easily ranks as one of the greatest television moments in rock history. Young then regrouped Crazy Horse for Ragged Glory (#31, 1990), a raucous, critically lauded album. With raw, feedback- and distortion-drenched garage rock, the album proved the extent of Young’s influence on younger alternative-rock bands such as Dinosaur Jr and Soul Asylum. In 1991 he embraced that new generation of bands by taking noise-rockers Sonic Youth and Social Distortion on the road; the tour was documented on Weld (whose 35-minute instrumental companion Arc featured extended, noisy feedback jams). Young also began praising rap, particularly the music of Ice-T.
Reuniting him with members of the Stray Gators, Harvest Moon (#16, 1992) found Young doing his sentimental acoustic/folk songs again. A sequel to Harvest, it was his biggest seller in 13 years. In 1992 Young appeared at the 50th birthday celebration for Bob Dylan, covering Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “All Along the Watchtower.” Released in 1993, Lucky Thirteen compiles Young’s Geffen material, and Unplugged documents his live, acoustic performances following the release of Harvest Moon.
In 1994 Young contributed the haunting title song to Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia, which was nominated for an Oscar. (Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” also from the film won.) He also released Sleeps With Angels (#9, 1994), his strongest, most consistent, and critically lauded album since Rust Never Sleeps.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, who thanked Young for teaching his band a lot about “dignity, commitment, and playing in the moment.” The mutual admiration between the artists resulted in the collaboration Mirror Ball (#5, 1995), with Pearl Jam backing Young on his highest-charting album since ’72. The next year he was back with Crazy Horse for Broken Arrow (#31, 1996). Young recorded a haunting solo electric-guitar score for New York independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s 1996 film Dead Man. Jarmusch then made a documentary of Young, Year of the Horse, released in 1997. Footage from Young and Crazy Horse’s 1996 tour is spliced together with older stock from 1976 and 1986; interviews with Young, band members, crew, and associates run throughout. A soundtrack album was also released. Young headlined the H.O.R.D.E. summer festival tour in 1997. In the late ’90s, Young, a lifelong model train enthusiast, bought the Lionel Toy Train company, reportedly to delight his son Ben.
In 2000 Young released Silver & Gold, a pensive, largely acoustic album featuring drummer Jim Keltner, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, Ben Keith on pedal steel and Dobro, and keyboardist Spooner Oldham. Three years in the making, the album was nearly universally hailed.
At the dawn of the millennium, Young finally gave into the lure of nostalgia by reuniting with CSN for a big money reunion tour. They hit the road again in 2002 and 2006. The latter tour was in support of Young’s politically-charged album Living With War. The quartet faced a torrent of boos in some red states when they sang “Let’s Impeach The President.”
Young remained an extremely prolific recording artist in the 2000s. The best albums, including 2003’s eco rock opera Greendale, 2005’s lush Prairie Wind, and 2012’s Crazy Horse reunion LP Psychedelic Pill, were outweighed by lifeless duds like Storytone, Peace Trail, and The Visitor.
As a live act, however, he remained at the absolute peak of his game. He toured solo acoustic, with Crazy Horse, Promise of the Real, and even the surviving members of Buffalo Springfield for a few short weeks in 2011. Some nights were heavy on hit songs. And on other nights, he didn’t even touch them. “I don’t want to come back and do the same songs again,” he said when announcing a tour in 2023 following a long break from the road due to Covid. “I’ll feel like I was on some sort of carnival ride.” —Andy Greene
- First Name
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Neil
- Last Name
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Young
- Date of Birth
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Nov. 12, 1945
- Place of Birth
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Toronto, Canada
- Notable Bands
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Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Crazy Horse