Long May He Run: Neil Young at 70
Seventy years ago today, the legend that is Neil Percival Young was born in Toronto, Ontario. There are, of course, many reasons to love the man who’s nicknamed “Shakey” by his friends: whether it’s his role in unforgettable groups like Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young or his incredible string of solo albums, or even his amazing work with causes such as Farm Aid and the Bridge School.
In celebration of this extraordinary man’s 70th birthday, here are seven amazing Neil stories — one for each decade of his remarkable life. These stories not only demonstrate just how unique, uncompromising, and downright funny Neil can be, but also show just why we love Neil so much (besides his tremendous talent).
At heart, he’s a farmer.
Young has lived on a sprawling ranch in California called Broken Arrow since the early 70s. He also co-founded the annual Farm Aid benefit, in aid of American farmers, which has been running now for 30 years. It’s no surprise then that as a teenager Young was interested in farming and wrote in a school report: “When I finish school I plan to go to Ontario Agricultural College and perhaps learn to become a scientific farmer.” He even had a small business raising chickens and selling the eggs, and became so attached to the chickens that he gave them all names.
Fortunately for us, Neil then discovered rock n’ roll and left his chickens behind. Despite this when Joni Mitchell first met Young while they were both fledgling songwriters in the early 60s, he still had farming in mind: “He was the same way he is now – this offhanded dry wit,” she told Rolling Stone in 1979. “And you know what his ambition was at the time? He wanted a hearse and a chicken farm. And when you think of it, what he’s done with his dream is not far off. He just added a few buffalo and a fleet of antique cars. He’s always been pretty true to his vision.”
Years later, Neil’s own son, Ben Young, has followed his dad’s youthful dream and has his own successful business selling organic eggs: “I have a hand in every part of the business,” he told SFGate in 2012. “The most challenging part — besides the tedious paperwork — is having cerebral palsy. It takes more time to do things, and some people think I don’t understand them, which can be a challenge. The help of good friends, though, gets me through any obstacles.”
He appreciates good sound.
It’s been well publicized that Young was so disgusted with the sound of digital music that he launched his own high resolution music player, Pono, and has even recently pulled all his music off Spotify. But in the past, he’s gone to even further lengths to achieve the ultimate sonic experience.
The best tale in Jimmy McDonough’s excellent biography of Young, Shakey, comes from Neil’s CSNY bandmate Graham Nash, who got to hear his friend’s latest album in the most unique way: “I’m down at the ranch and Neil goes, ‘Hey Willie, wanna hear something?’ So we go down to the lake and row out to the middle in this rowboat and I think, ‘Jesus Christ, this guy’s been a fuckin’ mystery to me all my life — if he wants to talk to me privately, surely there’s more places to do it than in the middle of a fucking lake in a rowboat.’ What he’d done is he’d wired his house as the left speaker and his entire barn as the right speaker, and they played Harvest. And at the end of it Elliot Mazer comes down to the shore of the lake and goes, ‘Neil, how is it?’ Neil turns around and shouts, ‘More barn!’”
He enjoys defying his audience.
I’ve personally experienced Neil on several occasions beginning to play a song live but then abandoning it altogether when a rowdy member of the audience demands one of his hits (if you really want him to play one of your favorites, it’s best to keep quiet and hope for the best). No time was this more apparent than on the Tonight’s The Night tour of 1973. At the time, Neil was enjoying the biggest success of his career on the back of his multi-platinum selling album Harvest and was booked on his largest tour to date; however, instead of treating everyone to gentle acoustic versions of “Heart Of Gold” and “Old Man,” he decided to try out completely new songs with a full electric band (the Santa Monica Flyers).
Band member Nils Lofgren told it best to the BBC in 2008: “We were playing an album that he wanted to turn people on to that hadn’t been released. He was an icon already in England; everyone expected to hear his hits and he played none of them. He played the record from beginning to end starting with “Tonight’s The Night,” finishing with “Tonight’s The Night.” And the English audiences really were not okay with it. They started yelling a lot, they started booing, they started complaining, whining – every show. He’d get to the end of the night and he’d say, ‘Alright, we’re going to play something you’ve all heard before.’ And everyone would go crazy thinking it would be some Buffalo Springfield hit or whatever, and then we’d play “Tonight’s The Night” again.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lh83SIapmY
Almost two decades later, Neil would face a similar situation with an angry New York audience hungry for the “Rockin’ In The Free World” Neil in 1992 during an acoustic solo tour. Ironically enough, this was where he debuted the songs that would soon become one of his most beloved albums, Harvest Moon. But, as ever, nothing deters Young from his vision and often it even spurs him on. “I’ve been booed for my music,” he said in 1993. “Bob [Dylan] was booed for going electric. I was booed here in London. I was booed in Germany, Spain, Italy, everywhere. But they never made me run. It doesn’t bother me. I just keep on going.”
He’s a rebel.
Young has always followed his muse no matter the consequences; this even led to him being sued by his old friend and music mogul David Geffen in the early 1980s for making music “uncharacteristic” of Neil Young. The last straw came when Geffen, unhappy with Neil’s electronic (Trans) and country (Old Ways) albums, demanded a rock n’ roll album. He was presented instead with a rockabilly album called Everybody’s Rockin’ that saw Young channeling the likes of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis.
After finally escaping his contract with Geffen, his successful return to old label Reprise, This Note’s For You, also met with controversy in 1988: MTV banned his new video for the title song. Neil’s Julien Temple-directed video parodied the relationship between rock music and advertising and featured Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson impersonators as well as parodies of popular characters from famous adverts of the time.
In response, Neil wrote MTV an open letter: “MTV, you spineless twerps. You refuse to play ‘This Note’s For You’ because you’re afraid to offend your sponsors. What does the ’M’ in ‘MTV’ stand for? Music or money?”
Neil had the last laugh when MTV soon relented and put the video in heavy rotation and it eventually went on to win “Best Video Of The Year” at the 1989 MTV Music Video Awards.
He’s a total perfectionist.
Young has been known to scrap entire albums on a whim, the most famous being his hugely anticipated follow-up to Harvest — the still unreleased Homegrown — which he dropped at the last minute in favor of releasing Tonight’s The Night. But three years later, Young went even further for his 1978 record Comes A Time, buying 200,000 copies that had already been pressed from his record company because he was so unhappy with the song order. Then, when all the copies were delivered to Broken Arrow ranch, he shot bullet holes through every box so it could never be sold.
The sequencing that Neil went to so much trouble for? Just two tracks, “Lotta Love” and “Peace Of Mind.” “Lotta Love” was originally supposed to close the first side of the record; after hearing it, though, Neil decided “Peace Of Love” was a better final track for the A side of his new album and wanted the two songs swapped around.
This wasn’t the first manufacturing problem Comes A Time went through either. The record, which was originally to be called Give To The Wind, was held up for months before that because Young had been bothered by a tick noise on side one of the first few test pressings. Legend has it, though, that no one but Neil himself could hear the noise. Later, Young was proved to be right when the audio flaw that had bothered him so much (the one that no one else could hear) turned out to be a defect on the master tape itself, which was then fixed to his satisfaction.
He has flirted with nearly every genre of music.
During the 1980s, Young flirted with many different styles and genres of music, including folk, electronica, country, R&B and old time rock n’ roll and has even been called the “Godfather of Grunge.” But his most surprising genre experiment came in 1987 when he made a New Age instrumental album called Meadow Dusk. “The cover would be me standing in a misty meadow wearing these baggy corduroy Dockers with a Ford Aerostar — sort of like a subtler On The Beach kinda thing,” Young said.
But the album never saw the light of day when, after his famously fraught relationship with his record label, he was finally dropped by Geffen that year. Hopefully it will turn up on a future installment of the Archives, although Crazy Horse member Frank “Poncho” Sampedro worryingly described it as “an album of crickets farting.”
He’s basically a nice guy at heart.
Not only did Young co-found Farm Aid, but he also organizes the annual benefit concert for the Bridge School, an educational organization in California for children with physical and speech impairments. The concert was founded by his former wife Pegi Young; their son, Ben, has cerebral palsy. In addition to this, Neil is a noted environmentalist, putting his own money into developing an environmentally friendly electric car called LincVolt; producing a protest documentary about controversial company Monsanto called Seeding Fear (his latest album, The Monsanto Years, also tackled this topic); and, most recently, he launched a new green-friendly website called GoEarth.org.
But my favorite story about Young’s activism and charity work has a more personal touch: the rock legend has been spotted helping out the homeless near his manager Elliot Roberts’ offices in Santa Monica. According to a witness in an article from 2009: “We see him, he’s a great guy. He stops and sits with the homeless and talks to them. Once he even brought this old woman crying about her tooth to the dentist.”
Good old Neil. In the words of one of his best loved songs, long may he run.
