Neil Young, the Canadian musician, celebrates his 79th birthday today. He was born in Toronto in 1945, and contracted polio when he was 6. It was the last major outbreak of that disease in Ontario, and it left him partially paralyzed on his left side. His family began spending winters in Florida, in the US, to try to help Young’s convalescence — and he was able to regain control of his body.
He attended Earl Gray Junior High School in Winnipeg, where he formed his first band, the Jades. In high school (Kelvin High, also in Winnipeg) he played in several more bands, and finally dropped out of school to pursue music full-time. He may have briefly attended Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute in Toronto in 1959, but might have been expelled in his first year (accounts differ). If he was expelled, it was for riding a motorcycle down in the school hallways.
Young had his first commercial success in music with the band The Squires. They recorded demos and played at venues throughout Winnipeg and rural Manitoba. After he left The Squires, he performed as a solo act in which he played folk music. He later said that Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs were his biggest influences. Another might have been Joni Mitchell, who he met at a folk club where he was performing (and she might have been, too). He wrote the song Flying on the Ground is Wrong, which became his first hit song when it was recorded by The Guess Who.
Young was in the band Mynah Birds in 1966, and after the band disbanded he and the bass player pawned all the instruments, bought a car (a used hearse), and drove to Los Angeles. It turned out to be a good move, at least professionally, when Young and his traveling companion Bruce Palmer had a chance meeting with some other musicians (in a Los Angeles traffic jam), and formed a new group: Buffalo Springfield. That group didn’t survive for long, but its records sold well and according to Rolling Stone, the band helped create both the folk rock and country rock genres.Buffalo Springfield was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which was only the first time Young was to be inducted.
In 1968, Young returned to being a solo musician and recorded his first solo record, Neil Young. After about a year he recruited another band to form Crazy Horse, but kept himself apart and performed as Neil Young with Crazy Horse. The album they recorded became Young’s next major hit, including three songs written by Young that are still standards: Cinnamon Girl, Cowgirl in the Sand, and Down by the River. Young later said he wrote all three songs the same day while he was sick with the flu and had a 102°F (39°C) fever.
If there was one constant in Young’s career to that point it was inconstancy, and in 1969 he changed course again, rejoining his former band mate Stephen Stills to form Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. That group performed at the famous Woodstock Festival in August, 1969, although Young skipped most of the performance. Evidently the quartet argued constantly, as both Young and Stills vied for control.
Young’s work with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young added to his fame, and led to his next solo albums, After the Gold Rush and Harvest, achieving immense popularity. Harvest was the best-selling album of any genre in the US in 1972, and included the song Heart of Gold, which is Young’s only “number one hit” according to the music industry charts.
The success of Heart of Gold took Young by surprise, and he reportedly didn’t like all the attention. He wrote liner notes for a later album that described Heart of Gold as “the song that put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.”
During the 1980s, Young cut back on recording and writing, partly because he was caring for his son Ben’s suffering from cerebral palsy. 1984 was the first year since 1966 that he didn’t release a new album. He resumed a full schedule in the 1990s, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 1995, his second induction.
In the 21st Century he’s continued to tour and record at a pace you might not expect, given his age. He has also founded and maintained the Neil Young Archives, which is also a website, and publishes his own newspaper, The Times-Contrarian. He helped found the Bridge School, which provides educational support for children with verbal and physical disabilities, and continues to support them through annual concerts. He’s an activist for ecological and farm-aid charities, as well as indigenous peoples’ rights. He has campaigned against fossil fuels, old-growth logging, and oil pipelines. He also holds several patents related to model railroads, and is on the board of directors of Lionel, LLC, a company that makes model railroad trains and accessories.
Young has also heavily criticized popular digital audio formats as too low-quality and too highly compressed, and his company PonoMusic developed a download service and music player featuring no compression at all. The company and the service were discontinued in 2017, though.
If you’d like to know more about Young (and there is an enormous amount more to find out), you’ll have to look it up yourself, because this is getting pretty long. A good place to start would be the Neil Young Archives.
