Neil Young
Neil Percival Young is a Canadian and American singer-songwriter. Son of journalist, sportswriter, and novelist Scott Young, Neil embarked on a music career in Winnipeg in the 1960s. Young moved to Los Angeles, forming the folk rock group Buffalo Springfield. Since the beginning of his solo career, often backed by the band Crazy Horse, he released critically acclaimed albums such as Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Harvest, On the Beach, and Rust Never Sleeps. He was also a part-time member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, with whom he recorded the chart-topping 1970 album Déjà Vu.
Young's deeply personal lyrics and signature high tenor singing voice define his long career. He also plays piano and harmonica on many albums, which frequently combine folk, rock, country and other musical genres. His often distorted electric guitar playing, especially with Crazy Horse, earned him the nickname "Godfather of Grunge" and led to his 1995 album Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam. More recently, he has been backed by Promise of the Real.
Young directed films using the pseudonym "Bernard Shakey", including Journey Through the Past, Rust Never Sleeps, Human Highway, Greendale, CSNY/Déjà Vu, and Harvest Time. He also contributed to the soundtracks of the films Philadelphia and Dead Man.
Young has received multiple Grammy and Juno Awards. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has inducted him twice: in 1995 as a solo artist and in 1997 as a member of Buffalo Springfield. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Young No. 30 on its list of the "250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Young is also on Rolling Stones list of the 100 greatest musical artists, and 21 of his albums and singles have been certified gold or platinum in the U.S. Young was awarded the Order of Manitoba in 2006 and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2010.
Early life (1945–1963)
Neil Young was born on November 12, 1945, in Toronto. His father, Scott Alexander Young, was a journalist and sportswriter who also wrote fiction. His mother, Edna Blow Ragland "Rassy" Young was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Although Canadian, his mother had American and French ancestry. Young's parents married in 1940 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and moved to Toronto shortly thereafter where their first son, Robert "Bob" Young, was born in 1942.Shortly after Young's birth in 1945, the family moved to rural Omemee, Ontario, which Young later described fondly as a "sleepy little place". Young contracted polio in the late summer of 1951 during the last major outbreak of the disease in Ontario, and as a result, became partially paralyzed on his left side. After the conclusion of his hospitalization, the Young family wintered in Florida because they believed its mild weather would help Neil's convalescence. During that period, Young briefly attended Faulkner Elementary School in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. In 1952, upon returning to Canada, Young moved from Omemee to Pickering and then lived for a year in Winnipeg before relocating to Toronto. While in Toronto, he briefly attended Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute as a first-year student in 1959. According to rumor, he was expelled for riding a motorcycle down the hall of the school. He also became interested in the popular music he heard on the radio.
When he was 12, his father, who had had several extramarital affairs, left his mother. She asked for a divorce, which was granted in 1960. She moved back to Winnipeg with Neil joining her there, while his brother, Bob, stayed with their father in Toronto.
During the mid-1950s, Young listened to rock 'n roll, rockabilly, doo-wop, R&B, country, and western pop. He idolized Elvis Presley and later referred to him in a number of his songs. Other early musical influences included Link Wray, Lonnie Mack, Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, The Ventures, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Chuck Berry, Hank Marvin, Little Richard, Fats Domino, The Chantels, The Monotones, Ronnie Self, the Fleetwoods, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Gogi Grant. Young began to play music on a plastic ukulele before, as he would later relate, going on to "a better ukulele to a banjo ukulele to a baritone ukulele – everything but a guitar."
Career
Early career (1963–1966)
Young and his mother settled in the working-class area of Fort Rouge, Winnipeg, where he enrolled in Earl Grey Junior High School. It was there that he formed his first band, the Jades, and met Ken Koblun. While attending Kelvin High School in Winnipeg, he played in several instrumental rock bands, eventually dropping out of school in favor of a musical career. Young's first stable band was the Squires, with Ken Koblun, Jeff Wuckert and Bill Edmondson on drums, who had a local hit called "The Sultan". Over three years, the band played hundreds of shows at community centers, dance halls, clubs and schools in Winnipeg and other parts of Manitoba. The band also played in Fort William, where they recorded a series of demos produced by a local producer, Ray Dee, whom Young called "the original Briggs", referring to his later producer David Briggs. While playing at The Flamingo, Young met Stephen Stills, whose band the Company was playing at the same venue, and they became friends. The Squires primarily performed in Winnipeg and rural Manitoba in towns such as Selkirk, Neepawa, Brandon and Giroux, with a few shows in northern Ontario.After leaving the Squires, Young worked in folk clubs in Winnipeg, where he first met Joni Mitchell. Mitchell recalls Young as having been highly influenced by Bob Dylan at the time. Young said Phil Ochs was "a big influence on me", telling a radio station in 1969 that Ochs was "on the same level with Dylan in my eyes." Here he wrote some of his earliest and most enduring folk songs such as "Sugar Mountain", about lost youth. Mitchell wrote "The Circle Game" in response. The Winnipeg band the Guess Who had a Canadian Top 40 hit with Young's "Flying on the Ground is Wrong", which was Young's first major success as a songwriter.
In 1965, Young toured Canada as a solo artist. In 1966, while in Toronto, he joined the Rick James-fronted Mynah Birds. The band managed to secure a record deal with the Motown label, but as their first album was being recorded, James was arrested for being AWOL from the Navy Reserve. After the Mynah Birds disbanded, Young and the bass player Bruce Palmer decided to pawn the group's musical equipment and buy a Pontiac hearse, which they used to relocate to Los Angeles. Young admitted in a 1975 interview that he was in the United States illegally until he received a "green card" in 1970.
Buffalo Springfield (1966–1968)
Once they reached Los Angeles, Young and Palmer met up with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay after a chance encounter in traffic on Sunset Boulevard. Along with Dewey Martin, they formed Buffalo Springfield. A mixture of folk, country, psychedelia, and rock, lent a hard edge by the twin lead guitars of Stills and Young, made Buffalo Springfield a critical success, and their first record, Buffalo Springfield, sold well after Stills' topical song "For What It's Worth" became a hit, aided by Young's melodic harmonics played on electric guitar. According to Rolling Stone, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and other sources, Buffalo Springfield helped create the genres of folk rock and country rock.Distrust of their management, as well as the arrest and deportation of Palmer, worsened the already strained relations among the group members and led to Buffalo Springfield's demise. A second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, was released in late 1967, but two of Young's three contributions were solo tracks recorded apart from the rest of the group. From that album, "Mr. Soul" was the only Young song of the three that all five members of the group performed together.
In May 1968, the band split up for good, but to fulfill a contractual obligation, a final studio album, Last Time Around, was released. Young contributed the songs "On the Way Home" and "I Am a Child", singing lead on the latter.
In 1997, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; Young did not appear at the ceremony, writing in a letter to the Hall that their presentation, which was aired on VH1, "has nothing to do with the spirit of Rock and Roll. It has everything to do with making money."
Young played as a studio session guitarist for some 1968 recordings by The Monkees which appeared on the Head and Instant Replay albums.
Going solo, Crazy Horse (1968–1969)
After the breakup of Buffalo Springfield, Young signed a solo deal with Reprise Records, home of his colleague and friend Joni Mitchell, with whom he shared a manager, Elliot Roberts. Roberts managed Young until Roberts' death in 2019. Young and Roberts immediately began work on Young's first solo record, Neil Young, which received mixed reviews. In a 1970 interview, Young deprecated the album as being "overdubbed rather than played".For his next album, Young recruited three musicians from a band called the Rockets: Danny Whitten on guitar, Billy Talbot on bass guitar, and Ralph Molina on drums. These three took the name Crazy Horse, and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is credited to "Neil Young with Crazy Horse". Recorded in just two weeks, the album includes "Cinnamon Girl", "Cowgirl in the Sand", and "Down by the River". Young reportedly wrote all three songs in bed on the same day while nursing a high fever of.
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (1969–1970)
Shortly after the release of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Young reunited with Stephen Stills by joining Crosby, Stills & Nash, who had already released one album, Crosby, Stills & Nash, as a trio in May 1969. Young was originally offered a position as a sideman but agreed to join only if he received full membership, and the group – winners of the 1969 Best New Artist Grammy Award – was renamed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The quartet debuted in Chicago on August 16, 1969, and later performed at the famous Woodstock Festival, during which Young skipped the majority of the acoustic set and refused to be filmed during the electric set, even telling the cameramen: "One of you fuckin' guys comes near me and I'm gonna fuckin' hit you with my guitar". During the making of their first album, Déjà Vu, the musicians frequently argued, particularly Young and Stills, who both fought for control. Stills continued throughout their lifelong relationship to criticize Young, saying that he "wanted to play folk music in a rock band".Young wrote "Ohio" following the Kent State massacre on May 4, 1970. The song was quickly recorded by CSNY and immediately released as a single, even though CSNY's "Teach Your Children" was still climbing the singles charts.