If Neil Young has a pronounced weakness, it's a lack of focus. Restless
to a fault, he's apt to rush into the recording studio without fully
forming his ideas.
is that kind of album--and
yet it's one of his best. Jarred by the death of Kurt Cobain (the rock
& roll martyr quoted Young in his suicide note), he dashed off this
collection of songs in 1994 with backing from his steadfast electric
warriors, Crazy Horse. At least two songs--the title track and "Change
Your Mind"--seem to directly refer to Cobain. Others--"Driveby" and
"Safeway Cart" among the most striking--are mesmerizing and gloomy.
Still others--"Piece of Crap," "Blue Eden"--are raw and cutting. Goes to
show an elegy, no matter how somber, needn't be a hushed affair.
IN the course of
his thirty-year career as a recording artist, Neil Young has
experienced as many extreme low points of critical and commercial
success as he has high, but without a doubt, he is one of the most
important rock composers and performers North America can claim. His
signature raw nasal tone, shrill guitar playing, highly personal
lyric-writing, and hippie-cowboy loner stance have helped shape rock and
roll as it has advanced from adolescence into maturity. Through his
experimentation with every genre, from folk to heavy metal to rockabilly
to techno, Young has created a sound and feel uniquely his own.
Born the son of Edna "Rassy" Young, a former quiz show panelist on
Canadian Television, and Scott Young, a sportswriter for the Toronto
Sun, Young's first musical inklings were encouraged when his father gave
him a ukulele for Christmas in 1958. His parents split up not too long
after that, and in 1960, Young moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, with his
mother. A rather apathetic student, he was far more interested in
playing the banjo and guitar than turning his mind to his studies, and
he eventually dropped out of high school to concentrate his attention on
the band he had formed, Neil Young & the Squires.
Mrs. Young supported her son's musical endeavors, and through her
aggressive booking, helped the Squires gain a fair amount of regional
notoriety. Drawing influence from Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, the Beatles,
the Ventures, and the Shadows, the band evolved from an instrumental
group to a folk-rock band, and began performing in clubs around the area
between 1963 and 1965.
After the Squires disbanded in the summer of 1965, Young recorded some
demos for Elektra Records, but failed to secure a contract. He spent the
rest of the year playing the Toronto coffeehouse circuit, both as a
solo artist and with the Mynah Birds, a group fronted by future
soul-music star and "Super Freak," Rick James. On the circuit, Young met
a number of folk artists, including Joni Mitchell, guitarist Richie
Furay, and Stephen Stills, who was then playing with his own folk band,
the Company.
When the Mynah Birds disbanded after recording one album, Young and
Mynah Birds bassist Bruce Palmer moved to the promised land of L.A.,
where they hooked up with Stills, Furay, and drummer Dewey Martin to
form the seminal folk-rock band the Buffalo Springfield. Stills'
counterculture anthem "For What It's Worth" earned the band nationwide
fame, but it was Young who drew the most attention for his idiosyncratic
style and high-energy guitar playing. In their two-year existence, the
band recorded three successful albums and a retrospective (Buffalo
Springfield, Buffalo Springfield Again, Last Time Around, and The Best
of the Buffalo Springfield) for Atco before splintering in 1968.
Following the demise of the band, Young signed a solo deal with Reprise
Records, and released a poorly received eponymous debut in January of
1969. His second solo effort, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, recorded
in his own studio setup at his Topanga, California, home with his new
backing band Crazy Horse (the band's original lineup included lead
guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot, drummer Ralph Molina, and
pianist-producer-arranger Jack Nitzsche), became a major hit and went
platinum on the strength of songs like "Cinnamon Girl," "Cowgirl in the
Sand," and "Down by the River." With the understanding that he could
come and go as he pleased, Young elected to join David Crosby, Steven
Stills, and Graham Nash's supergroup in the summer of 1969, just in time
to appear at the historic Woodstock Festival.
Young eventually recorded three albums as part of Crosby, Stills, Nash,
and Young: 1970's Deja Vu, 1971's live 4-Way Street, and 1988's American
Dream. Hailed as "quite possibly the most important new poet since Bob
Dylan," Young's notable songwriting contributions to the collective
included "Helpless," "Country Girl," and "Ohio." In Young's estimation,
the latter song, written in response to the tragic shooting deaths of
four students at an anti-Vietnam rally at Kent State University in May
of 1970, was his best C.S.N. & Y. cut.
Young's solo career was simultaneously soaring, as 1970's After the Gold
Rush and 1972's Harvest both became bestsellers and were immediately
recognized as classics. Harvest, which was recorded in Nashville with
the Stray Gators and crossover pop-rock stars Linda Ronstadt and James
Taylor, was the biggest-selling album of 1972, and the cut "Heart of
Gold" remains the most successful single of Young's career. Between 1972
and 1977, Young released a sequence of six introspective albums of
impressive scope (Journey Through the Past, Time Fades Away, On the
Beach, Tonight's the Night, Zuma, and American Stars 'n Bars); haunting
loss permeated many of his songs during this prolific period, most
obviously because of the devastating drug-related deaths of Crazy Horse
guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry.
In 1977, the release of a double-album retrospective, Decade, attested
to Young's importance in rock history. He closed the seventies on a peak
with the lighthearted, philosophical Comes a Time, and a half-acoustic,
half-electric album, Rust Never Sleeps, so titled at the suggestion of
the members of the new-wave group Devo, who thought the Rustoleum
slogan, "Rust never sleeps," made a catchy-sounding title. A rollicking
live album, Live Rust, and the generally poorly received concert film
Rust Never Sleeps resulted from the 1978 tour for the album.
Depending on one's perspective, Young either lost focus in the early- to
mid-eighties or deserves credit as an ambitious explorer. Jumping
wildly between genres, he opened the decade with the country-tinged
Hawks & Doves, moved into Kraftwerk-like electronic sounds with
Trans and retro-rockabilly on Everybody's Rockin', but still tore it up
with Crazy Horse on Re-act-or and on 1987's Life. The next year, Young
headed in a horn-driven, soulful direction with a new band, the
Bluenotes, on This Note's for You. The title track won MTV's Video of
the Year award, despite the fact that the clip was banned by the network
— lampooning the commercial state of rock, the video shows a Michael
Jackson look-alike's hair catching fire and being extinguished with
Pepsi by a Whitney Houston look-alike.
After all the experimentation, 1989 witnessed Young going back to his
roots. Freedom, powered by its anthemic single "Rockin' in the Free
World," became his most critically lauded album since Rust Never Sleeps,
and its follow-up, 1990's Ragged Glory (recorded with Crazy Horse), was
similarly celebrated. Since then, Young has been on a streak of
critical and commercial success unparalleled by his peers, making music
in his third decade even more distinguished than that in his first. His
rediscovery of electric guitar feedback juxtaposed the emergence of the
American alternative scene, earning him the nickname "The Godfather of
Grunge." Young cemented that description with his satisfying 1995
collaboration with Pearl Jam, Mirror Ball, for which he scored a Grammy
nomination for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.
An occasional dabbler in movie soundtracks since 1970, Young composed
the music to Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man, and followed the early 1996
release of that soundtrack with Broken Arrow, a new studio effort with
Crazy Horse which garnered a Grammy nod for Best Rock Album. The
subsequent summer tour was filmed by Jarmusch for a documentary titled
Year of the Horse, and a double live album of the same name is scheduled
for release in June 1997.
With wife Pegi, Young co-founded the Bridge School for Handicapped
Children near San Francisco, and each year holds a star-studded benefit.
Their son Ben has cerebral palsy and attended the school. Young has
also founded a company that makes devices for the disabled, as well as
high-tech toys — one of the company's projects is manufacturing an
improved wheelchair that Young helped design. The irascible elder
statesman of rock eschews the trappings of fame and lives a rather
reclusive life on his Northern California ranch. He declines most
interviews, and has said that he will no longer grant them to Rolling
Stone, in particular, because of its perfumed ad inserts: "I don't like
the way the magazine smells."
A subsequent summer tour, which spawned a double live album titled Year
of the Horse, was filmed by Jarmusch for a 1997 documentary of the same
name.
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