Neil Young
singer, songwriter, guitarist | born 1945
BornNovember 12, 1945 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Biographyby Stuart Berman
Neil Young isn’t just the most eminently revered icon in Canadian rock history, he’s also its most enigmatic. Populist folksinger, punk-loving electric-guitar-playing ruffian, concept-album visionary, genre-hopping absurdist, old-timey cover-song specialist—for more than 50 years, his career has amounted to an extended game of surprise between the artist and his audience. No one can be sure of which Neil Young they’re going to get.
IN DEPTH
Of all the tall tales recounted in Jimmy McDonough’s 2002 Neil Young biography, Shakey, none distills the essence of its complicated subject better than the story of Young’s residency at L.A. club The Roxy in September 1973. Still riding high on the success of 1971’s Harvest, Young was also mourning the sudden, drug-related passings of his guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. He treated fans to a set composed entirely of the woozy, death-obsessed rambles from the then-unreleased Tonight’s the Night, opening the shows with an extended take on the mantric title track. After an hour of unfamiliar songs, Young would throw the increasingly impatient crowd a bone by announcing, “Here’s one you’ve heard before.” As attendees expressed cheers of relief, Young and his band then hurtled into “Tonight’s the Night.” Again.
That antagonizing spirit has come to define Young as much as his flannel shirts, “Old Black” Gibson Les Paul and muttonchop side burns. He may have amassed a deep discography of FM-radio staples and cottage road-trip classics, but he’s always refused to play jukebox, forever staying one step ahead of his audience regardless of whether they’re in the mood to play catch-up.
Not that anyone should be surprised by Young’s contrarian behaviour; his path in life has been plotted by a series of sharp left turns. He was born in Toronto and spent his early years shuffling between there and the town of Omemee, Ont. Upon the divorce of his parents, Rassy and Scott, a famed sportswriter, Neil was shipped off to spend his teens with his mother in Winnipeg, where, at 17, he formed surf-rock combo the Squires. Touring in a hearse Young cheekily named Mort, the band worked the dance-hall circuit, including a fateful residency in Fort William where he first crossed paths with a young Stephen Stills. But once Mort conked out (as commemorated in the 1976 Stills-Young collaboration, “Long May You Run”), so too did Young’s enthusiasm for the Squires. That prompted his return to Toronto in ’65 to join the burgeoning folk scene in Yorkville—where he played with a pre-funky Rick James in the Mynah Byrds—and then to L.A. in ’66 to track down Stills and form psychedelic roots-rock outfit the Buffalo Springfield.
Though the Springfield became an instant national phenomenon thanks to their chart-topping single “For What It’s Worth,” Young was already flashing a mercenary streak, recording many of his songs independent of the band. Mere months after their breakup in 1968, he released his self-titled solo debut on Reprise Records. However, his dissatisfaction with that album’s uncharacteristically low-dynamic production would send Young Ping-Ponging from one extreme to the other. He shifted between stormy electric-guitar jams with backing band Crazy Horse (1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere) and countrified pop on his own solo releases (1970’s After the Goldrush, Harvest) or with hippy-dippy harmonists Crosby, Stills and Nash (which became CSNY for 1970’s Déjà Vu).
Those releases count among the most commercially successful of Young’s career, however, for him, stardom was not a ticket to extravagance, but to artistic freedom. The mid-’70s saw a series of bleakly introspective, radio-resistant releases, capped by 1979’s serene/savage Rust Never Sleeps, on which Young aligned himself spiritually with the emergent punk movement so maligned (and feared) by his classic-rock peers. In the 1970s, Young was also drawn to filmmaking. His directorial debut, Journey Through the Past (1973), is a surreal, shapeless collage of tour footage and staged fantasy sequences that provides an intimate if fractured portrait of his ascent to rock stardom in the early ’70s. Another self-directed effort, Rust Never Sleeps (1979), documents an October 1978 show at San Francisco’s Cow Palace where Young and Crazy Horse road-tested the punk-inspired songs from the album of the same name, all while roadies dressed like Jawas crowd the stage with oversized microphones and amps, just because.
The ’80s yielded an infamous string of high-concept experiments—from synth-pop to rockabilly—whose poor commercial performance so infuriated his label at the time, Geffen, it tried to sue Young for making “unrepresentative” albums. Young got the last laugh by returning to Reprise in 1989 and releasing his biggest-selling album in years, Freedom.
That comeback couldn’t have been better timed—with grunge oozing up from the underground at the turn of the ’90s, Young came to be viewed less as an erratic dinosaur rocker than a model of middle-finger-flashing independence for a new generation of misfits. And that DIY ethos extends beyond music to his oddball filmmaking efforts, his development of a remote-control system for toy-train-makers Lionel (an interest spurred by having two sons born with cerebral palsy), and, more recently, his messianic mission to launch a new digital-music format, Pono, to combat poorly compressed mp3s. And despite suffering a near-fatal aneurysm in 2005, Young has continued to issue radically different releases at a steady clip, from his first studio double album (2012’s Psychedelic Pill) to a covers collection cut straight to vinyl inside a 1940s-era recording booth (2014’s A Letter Home). Long may he run—just don’t try to predict what direction he’s going.
Neil Young isn’t just the most eminently revered icon in Canadian rock history, he’s also its most enigmatic. Populist folksinger, punk-loving electric-guitar-playing ruffian, concept-album visionary, genre-hopping absurdist, old-timey cover-song specialist—for more than 50 years, his career has amounted to an extended game of surprise between the artist and his audience. No one can be sure of which Neil Young they’re going to get.
IN DEPTH
Of all the tall tales recounted in Jimmy McDonough’s 2002 Neil Young biography, Shakey, none distills the essence of its complicated subject better than the story of Young’s residency at L.A. club The Roxy in September 1973. Still riding high on the success of 1971’s Harvest, Young was also mourning the sudden, drug-related passings of his guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. He treated fans to a set composed entirely of the woozy, death-obsessed rambles from the then-unreleased Tonight’s the Night, opening the shows with an extended take on the mantric title track. After an hour of unfamiliar songs, Young would throw the increasingly impatient crowd a bone by announcing, “Here’s one you’ve heard before.” As attendees expressed cheers of relief, Young and his band then hurtled into “Tonight’s the Night.” Again.
That antagonizing spirit has come to define Young as much as his flannel shirts, “Old Black” Gibson Les Paul and muttonchop side burns. He may have amassed a deep discography of FM-radio staples and cottage road-trip classics, but he’s always refused to play jukebox, forever staying one step ahead of his audience regardless of whether they’re in the mood to play catch-up.
Not that anyone should be surprised by Young’s contrarian behaviour; his path in life has been plotted by a series of sharp left turns. He was born in Toronto and spent his early years shuffling between there and the town of Omemee, Ont. Upon the divorce of his parents, Rassy and Scott, a famed sportswriter, Neil was shipped off to spend his teens with his mother in Winnipeg, where, at 17, he formed surf-rock combo the Squires. Touring in a hearse Young cheekily named Mort, the band worked the dance-hall circuit, including a fateful residency in Fort William where he first crossed paths with a young Stephen Stills. But once Mort conked out (as commemorated in the 1976 Stills-Young collaboration, “Long May You Run”), so too did Young’s enthusiasm for the Squires. That prompted his return to Toronto in ’65 to join the burgeoning folk scene in Yorkville—where he played with a pre-funky Rick James in the Mynah Byrds—and then to L.A. in ’66 to track down Stills and form psychedelic roots-rock outfit the Buffalo Springfield.
Though the Springfield became an instant national phenomenon thanks to their chart-topping single “For What It’s Worth,” Young was already flashing a mercenary streak, recording many of his songs independent of the band. Mere months after their breakup in 1968, he released his self-titled solo debut on Reprise Records. However, his dissatisfaction with that album’s uncharacteristically low-dynamic production would send Young Ping-Ponging from one extreme to the other. He shifted between stormy electric-guitar jams with backing band Crazy Horse (1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere) and countrified pop on his own solo releases (1970’s After the Goldrush, Harvest) or with hippy-dippy harmonists Crosby, Stills and Nash (which became CSNY for 1970’s Déjà Vu).
Those releases count among the most commercially successful of Young’s career, however, for him, stardom was not a ticket to extravagance, but to artistic freedom. The mid-’70s saw a series of bleakly introspective, radio-resistant releases, capped by 1979’s serene/savage Rust Never Sleeps, on which Young aligned himself spiritually with the emergent punk movement so maligned (and feared) by his classic-rock peers. In the 1970s, Young was also drawn to filmmaking. His directorial debut, Journey Through the Past (1973), is a surreal, shapeless collage of tour footage and staged fantasy sequences that provides an intimate if fractured portrait of his ascent to rock stardom in the early ’70s. Another self-directed effort, Rust Never Sleeps (1979), documents an October 1978 show at San Francisco’s Cow Palace where Young and Crazy Horse road-tested the punk-inspired songs from the album of the same name, all while roadies dressed like Jawas crowd the stage with oversized microphones and amps, just because.
The ’80s yielded an infamous string of high-concept experiments—from synth-pop to rockabilly—whose poor commercial performance so infuriated his label at the time, Geffen, it tried to sue Young for making “unrepresentative” albums. Young got the last laugh by returning to Reprise in 1989 and releasing his biggest-selling album in years, Freedom.
That comeback couldn’t have been better timed—with grunge oozing up from the underground at the turn of the ’90s, Young came to be viewed less as an erratic dinosaur rocker than a model of middle-finger-flashing independence for a new generation of misfits. And that DIY ethos extends beyond music to his oddball filmmaking efforts, his development of a remote-control system for toy-train-makers Lionel (an interest spurred by having two sons born with cerebral palsy), and, more recently, his messianic mission to launch a new digital-music format, Pono, to combat poorly compressed mp3s. And despite suffering a near-fatal aneurysm in 2005, Young has continued to issue radically different releases at a steady clip, from his first studio double album (2012’s Psychedelic Pill) to a covers collection cut straight to vinyl inside a 1940s-era recording booth (2014’s A Letter Home). Long may he run—just don’t try to predict what direction he’s going.
(division of Norlin Music Instruments, Ltd.)
amplifier-maker, electronic engineer, musician | 1921 - 2006