The story of Neil Young

Omemee, polio and a Winnipeg bedroom

Neil Percival Young was born in Toronto on the twelfth of November 1945. His father, Scott Young, was a journalist who would go on to write forty five books and become one of Canada's best known hockey writers. His mother, Edna, known to everyone as Rassy, had deep roots in Manitoba. Soon after Neil was born the family moved to the small Ontario town of Omemee, a place he later remembered fondly as sleepy. Then, in the late summer of 1951, when Neil was five, he caught polio during the last big outbreak of the disease in Ontario. It left him partly paralysed on his left side for a time, and the family spent a winter in Florida hoping the warm weather would help him recover.[1] [2]

His first instrument was a plastic ukulele. His father bought it for him on impulse, then surprised his son by playing a song on it. Neil worked his way up through better ukuleles and a banjo ukulele before he ever touched a guitar. He listened hard to the radio, idolising Elvis Presley and loving guitar instrumentals by Link Wray, the Ventures and Hank Marvin of the Shadows. When Neil was twelve his father left the family, and his parents divorced in 1960. Neil's older brother Bob stayed in Toronto with their father, while Neil moved back to Winnipeg with his mother. They settled in the working class neighbourhood of Fort Rouge, and Winnipeg became the place he would always call his hometown.[1] [2] [3]

In Winnipeg he formed his first band, the Jades, and then the Squires, an instrumental group that had a local hit called The Sultan. On the first of February 1963, at seventeen, he reportedly played his first paid show with them at a Winnipeg country club. He dropped out of Kelvin High School to chase music, and the Squires played hundreds of shows around Manitoba and northern Ontario. On one trip to Fort William, now part of Thunder Bay, he met a young American named Stephen Stills, whose band was playing the same club. Back in Winnipeg's folk clubs he met Joni Mitchell. He wrote Sugar Mountain, a song about leaving childhood behind, and Mitchell wrote The Circle Game as a reply.[1] [2] [3]

His first real success as a writer came when the Guess Who took his song Flying on the Ground Is Wrong into the Canadian top forty. In early 1966 in Toronto, bassist Bruce Palmer brought him into the Mynah Birds, an R and B band fronted by a young American singer who called himself Ricky James Matthews. He would later be famous as Rick James. The band signed to Motown in Detroit, but before their album was finished, a dispute with their manager led to James being exposed as a deserter from the United States Navy Reserve, and he was arrested. The Motown deal collapsed. Young and Palmer pawned the band's gear, bought a black 1953 Pontiac hearse, and drove to Los Angeles without work papers. Young later admitted he lived in America illegally until he got a green card in 1970.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A hearse on Sunset Boulevard

Young and Palmer spent almost a week in Los Angeles hunting for Stephen Stills in clubs and coffeehouses, with no luck. On the sixth of April 1966 they gave up and headed for San Francisco. Stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard, their hearse was spotted by Stills and his friend Richie Furay, who were driving the other way. Stills remembered the hearse and the Ontario plates. The two cars pulled over, and within days they had a band. Drummer Dewey Martin joined, and they named themselves after a steamroller made by the Buffalo Springfield Roller Company that was parked near where they were staying. On the eleventh of April, just five days after that meeting, Buffalo Springfield played their first show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.[1] [2]

They became the house band at the Whisky a Go Go for seven weeks and signed with Atlantic Records. Their sound mixed folk, country, rock and a little psychedelia, with Stills and Young trading hard edged lead guitar. In late 1966 Stills wrote For What It's Worth about clashes between young people and police on the Sunset Strip, and it became their only American top ten hit, with Young adding the ringing guitar harmonics. Their second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, carried two of Young's most adventurous songs of the era, Mr. Soul and Broken Arrow, and critics began to see the band as pioneers of folk rock and country rock.[1] [2]

Behind the scenes the band was falling apart. Bruce Palmer was deported twice over marijuana. Young kept walking out, and in June 1967 he missed their set at the Monterey Pop Festival, where David Crosby of the Byrds stood in. In the spring of 1968 police broke up a rehearsal party, and Young, Furay and new bassist Jim Messina were arrested and taken to the Los Angeles County Jail, while Stills climbed out a bathroom window next door. After a show in Long Beach on the fifth of May 1968 they agreed to split. When the band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, Young stayed away, writing that the televised ceremony had everything to do with making money and nothing to do with the spirit of rock and roll.[1] [2] [3]

Crazy Horse, CSNY and Ohio

After the split Young signed to Reprise Records, the label home of his friend Joni Mitchell, and took on her manager, Elliot Roberts, who would manage him for the next fifty years. He also found a producer in a remarkable way. David Briggs, a hard driving young producer from Wyoming, picked Young up while he was hitchhiking in 1968. They became lifelong friends, and Briggs co produced more than a dozen of his albums. Young's first solo record, simply called Neil Young, came out in January 1969. It was heavily overdubbed and polished, and Young himself soon dismissed it. He wanted something rawer, and he found it in a scruffy Los Angeles band called the Rockets.[1] [2] [3]

The Rockets' guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina had been playing together since their doo wop days. After Young sat in with them at the Whisky in August 1968, he borrowed the three of them, and the Rockets soon folded. Young first called his new band the War Babies, but the name Crazy Horse stuck. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere came out in May 1969 and was cut mostly live, fast and loose. Young said he wrote three of its key songs, Cinnamon Girl, Down by the River and Cowgirl in the Sand, in a single afternoon while sick in bed with a fever of about thirty nine degrees Celsius. Whitten's rhythm guitar, weaving around Young's long solos, became the blueprint for a whole style of rock.[1] [2] [3]

That summer Stephen Stills, now in Crosby, Stills and Nash, needed another player for the stage. Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun suggested Young. He was offered a place as a sideman but insisted on full membership, and the trio became Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, while he kept Crazy Horse on the side. One of their very first shows was Woodstock, in the early hours of the eighteenth of August 1969. Young skipped most of the acoustic set and refused to be filmed, threatening the camera crew. Their album Deja Vu, released in March 1970, topped the charts, but the sessions were full of fighting, above all between Young and Stills, who both wanted control.[1] [2] [3]

On the fourth of May 1970, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University, killing four of them. Young was staying near San Francisco with David Crosby when he saw the photographs in Life magazine, and he wrote Ohio. The band cut it live in a few takes on the twenty first of May, and at the end Crosby broke down crying. Atlantic rushed it out within weeks, even though CSNY's Teach Your Children was still climbing the chart. Naming President Nixon in the song was, Crosby said, the bravest thing he ever heard. Some AM stations banned it, including in Ohio, but it became one of the defining protest records of its era.[1] [2]

After the Gold Rush and Harvest

While he was juggling two bands, Young was living in Topanga Canyon with his first wife, Susan Acevedo, a restaurant owner he married in December 1968. There he recorded most of After the Gold Rush in a home studio he had panelled himself. His friend, the actor Dean Stockwell, had written a screenplay about a flood washing away Topanga's hippie community, and reading it broke a long writer's block. The movie was never made, but it gave the album its title song. Young also brought in an eighteen year old guitarist from Maryland named Nils Lofgren and put him on piano, though Lofgren rarely played keyboards. Released in September 1970, the album made Young a solo star, with Only Love Can Break Your Heart becoming his first solo top forty hit.[1] [2] [3]

The album also carried Southern Man, a furious blues rock attack on racism and the legacy of slavery in the American South. Young later said that the anger in it was partly fed by a fight at home, when Susan threw his breakfast against the studio door. By October 1970 Susan had filed for divorce. That same year Young bought Broken Arrow Ranch in the hills above Woodside in Northern California for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He wrote Old Man for its elderly caretaker, Louis Avila. He also fell for the actress Carrie Snodgress after seeing her in the film Diary of a Mad Housewife. She moved to the ranch, and much of his next album was written about her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Around this time Young badly hurt his back lifting a slab of walnut at the ranch. He could not stand for long or hold his heavy Les Paul, so he went back to the acoustic guitar, and many of the gentle songs of the period came from that forced quiet. On a solo tour in early 1971 he played Toronto's Massey Hall, and in February he went to Nashville to appear on Johnny Cash's television show. There producer Elliot Mazer rounded up local session players, whom Young named the Stray Gators. Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, also in town for the Cash show, sang on Heart of Gold and Old Man. Two more songs were cut with the London Symphony Orchestra at Barking Town Hall.[1] [2] [3]

Harvest came out on the fifteenth of February 1972. It topped the American album chart and became the best selling album of the year in the United States, and Heart of Gold became Young's only number one single. Some critics were unimpressed at first, and Bob Dylan later admitted he hated hearing it on the radio because it sounded too much like him. Young himself felt trapped by the success. In the liner notes to his 1977 compilation Decade, he wrote that the song put him in the middle of the road, that the road soon became a bore, and that he headed for the ditch instead, where the ride was rougher but the people more interesting. On the eighth of September 1972 Carrie Snodgress gave birth to their son Zeke, who was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Into the ditch

Danny Whitten had become addicted to heroin, which he first found eased his severe rheumatoid arthritis. His drug use got Crazy Horse fired from Young's sessions in 1970, and Young wrote The Needle and the Damage Done partly about him. In late 1972 Young hired Whitten again for the big Harvest arena tour and let him stay at the ranch, but in rehearsals he simply could not keep up. On the eighteenth of November 1972 Young sent him home to Los Angeles with fifty dollars and a plane ticket. That night Whitten died from a mix of alcohol and the tranquilliser diazepam. He was twenty nine. Young said the coroner called him with the news, that he loved Danny, and that he felt responsible. It took him years to stop blaming himself.[1] [2] [3]

Days later he had to start a tour of huge arenas. It went badly. Drummer Kenny Buttrey demanded a salary of one hundred thousand dollars, and Jack Nitzsche made Young pay the whole band the same, a quarrel Nitzsche believed never healed. Young fought with his voice and with the band, drank tequila, and swapped his beloved Les Paul for a Flying V that would not stay in tune. Crowds wanting Heart of Gold heard loud, raw new songs instead. The live album from the tour, Time Fades Away, was the one Young often called his least favourite, and he kept it off CD until 2017. It became the first part of what fans call the Ditch Trilogy.[1] [2] [3]

In June 1973 Bruce Berry, a roadie for Young and for Crosby, Stills and Nash, died of a heroin overdose. He was the brother of Jan Berry of Jan and Dean. That August, Young gathered what was left of Crazy Horse, along with Nils Lofgren and pedal steel player Ben Keith, in a rehearsal space at Studio Instrument Rentals in Hollywood, which Bruce Berry's brother Ken ran. They drank tequila and shot pool from late afternoon and began playing around midnight, singing to their two dead friends. Young called the result an overdose letter, a record about life, dope and death. The title song names Bruce Berry directly. Reprise hated it, and the album sat on the shelf for almost two years.[1] [2] [3]

In the meantime he made On the Beach, released in July 1974. Sessions were fuelled by what the musicians called honey slides, a sticky mix of cooked marijuana and honey pushed on them by the Cajun fiddler Rusty Kershaw. The songs dealt with the death of sixties idealism and the dark side of fame. One of them, Revolution Blues, was inspired by Charles Manson, whom Young had met through Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys about six months before the Manson family murders. Young had even been impressed by Manson's music. That summer Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunited for one of the first ever stadium tours, a money spinning excess Crosby called the Doom Tour, and Young travelled apart from the others.[1] [2]

Young's relationship with Carrie Snodgress had collapsed, and he poured it into a quiet, acoustic album called Homegrown. The cover was ready. Then at a playback party at the Chateau Marmont, the shelved Tonight's the Night happened to be on the same tape reel. Rick Danko of the Band heard both and told him to put out the dark one. Reprise warned him it could end his career, and Young answered that they had better release it right away then. Tonight's the Night finally came out in June 1975, with a sleeve note apologising that listeners did not know these people. It sold poorly but is now seen as a landmark. Homegrown stayed in the vault for forty five years, until 2020.[1] [2] [3]

Zuma, the Last Waltz and Rust Never Sleeps

In 1975 Billy Talbot introduced a new rhythm guitarist, Frank Sampedro, known as Poncho. He was not a polished player, so Young kept his songs simple, and a heavier, more direct Crazy Horse was born. They cut Zuma in the basement of David Briggs's rented house in Malibu. It included Cortez the Killer, a long retelling of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. In 1976 Young and Stills made an album together as the Stills Young Band, even wiping Crosby and Nash's vocals off the tapes. Midway through the tour, Young's bus simply went a different way, and he sent Stills a short telegram telling him to eat a peach. Stills had to finish the dates without him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In November 1976 Young played the Band's farewell concert, the Last Waltz. When Martin Scorsese's film of the night was being prepared, the release was delayed while Scorsese reluctantly edited out a lump of cocaine visible hanging from Young's nose during his song Helpless. In 1977 Young played a summer of bar gigs around Santa Cruz with a band called the Ducks. Back in 1974 he had met a waitress named Pegi Morton at a place near his ranch, a moment he later wrote about in Unknown Legend. They married in August 1978, the same year he released the gentle Comes a Time, which featured his friend Nicolette Larson, whose version of Lotta Love went top ten.[1] [2] [3]

Young was also making a strange film called Human Highway with Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper and the art punk band Devo. It cost him three million dollars of his own money over four years. In a San Francisco studio in May 1978 he jammed a new song with Devo, and singer Mark Mothersbaugh threw in a slogan from an old Rust Oleum advert, rust never sleeps. Young took it as a warning against complacency. On his 1978 arena tour, with giant stage props of amplifiers and microphones, each show began with a solo acoustic set and ended with Crazy Horse at deafening volume. The song, in quiet and loud versions, mentioned Johnny Rotten, and linked Young to the punk explosion in a way few of his peers could manage.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rust Never Sleeps and the concert album Live Rust both came out in 1979, along with a concert film Young directed under his pseudonym Bernard Shakey. Rolling Stone's readers and critics named him artist of the year and Rust Never Sleeps album of the year, and the Village Voice named him artist of the decade. Critics would later hear the album's distorted second side as an early blueprint for grunge. One of its songs, Powderfinger, a story about a young man defending his family's home, had been offered to Lynyrd Skynyrd, but members of that band were killed before they could record it.[1] [2] [3]

The strange eighties

Neil and Pegi's son Ben was born with severe cerebral palsy and could not speak. Young now had two sons with the condition, from two different mothers. From late 1980 into 1982 he spent much of his waking time on an intensive therapy programme with Ben, telling almost nobody. The records of that time were coded messages. On Trans, released at the end of 1982, he sang through a vocoder that made his voice robotic and hard to understand, which he said matched how it felt trying to talk with his son. He also built a model train layout with Ben and helped design a remote control that let Ben run the trains with a switch moved by his head.[1] [2] [3]

Trans was his first album for Geffen Records, which had promised him total creative control. David Geffen expected rock hits and got synthesisers, then a short album of rockabilly covers called Everybody's Rockin'. In 1983 Geffen Records sued Young for making music that was unrepresentative of himself. Young countersued. Both suits were eventually dropped and Geffen personally apologised. In 1984 Young released no album at all, the first empty year of his career, and that year his daughter Amber was born. She would later be diagnosed with epilepsy. He spent much of the next two years touring country music with a band called the International Harvesters.[1] [2]

This was also the most uncomfortable chapter of his politics. Young publicly supported President Ronald Reagan. In a 1985 interview with Melody Maker he made a crude, homophobic remark about gay men and the AIDS crisis, and also attacked people living on welfare. Rolling Stone later wrote that he almost certainly regretted it and had quickly left right wing politics behind. The same year he joined Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp to found Farm Aid, after Bob Dylan suggested at Live Aid that some of the money should help struggling American farmers. The first concert, in Champaign, Illinois, in September 1985, raised more than nine million dollars. In 1986 Neil and Pegi founded the Bridge School for children with severe physical and speech disabilities.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By the late eighties Young was back on Reprise and fronting a horn band, the Bluenotes. The video for This Note's for You mocked corporate rock and the advertising world, and parodied Michael Jackson. MTV refused to play it at first, partly because it named sponsors' brands. Young wrote an open letter asking whether the M in MTV stood for music or money. The next year MTV named it video of the year. He also rejoined Crosby, Stills and Nash for the 1988 album American Dream, a promise he had made to Crosby if he ever got clean. Crosby had just come out of prison after years of drug addiction.[1] [2] [3]

Godfather of grunge

In February 1989 a planned tour of the Soviet Union fell through, and Poncho Sampedro joked that they would just have to keep on rocking in the free world. Young thought it was a great hook and had the song finished the next day. Rockin' in the Free World took aim at the first months of George H. W. Bush's presidency and the state of the world. On Saturday Night Live that September, Young lifted weights with his trainer in a separate room so his blood would be pumping as if he had already played for over an hour, then walked on and tore through it. Comedian Dennis Miller later called it the greatest performance in the show's history. The album Freedom became his comeback.[1] [2] [3]

Young and Crazy Horse recorded Ragged Glory in 1990 in the barn at his ranch, playing each set twice a day and keeping the best takes. He took Sonic Youth on tour with him, to the confusion of some older fans, and Thurston Moore persuaded him to make Arc, a thirty five minute collage of feedback taken from the ends of songs. The tour ran through the Gulf War, and Young tried to make the music sound like violence and heavy machinery. He later said he permanently damaged his hearing while mixing the live album Weld. The hearing problem pushed him back to quiet acoustic music, and in 1992 he released Harvest Moon, a gentle sequel to Harvest with several songs written for Pegi.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A new generation claimed him. Pearl Jam played Rockin' in the Free World night after night, and the press called Young the godfather of grunge. Then in 1994 Kurt Cobain of Nirvana killed himself, and his suicide note quoted a line from Young's song My My, Hey Hey. Young had reportedly tried to contact Cobain before his death. He was deeply shaken, and wrote the title song of Sleeps with Angels about Cobain, beginning the lyrics on a matchbook at a charity golf event. He has refused to explain the album in interviews ever since. He vowed never to play My My, Hey Hey again, then changed his mind at the request of Nirvana's surviving members.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 1995 Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam inducted Young into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Days later Young went to Seattle and made Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam in just four days of studio time. He had already earned an Oscar nomination for his song Philadelphia, from Jonathan Demme's film, and now he improvised the eerie electric guitar score for Jim Jarmusch's western Dead Man while watching the film alone in a studio. Then in November 1995 David Briggs died of lung cancer at fifty one. Young answered the loss the way he always did, by calling Crazy Horse. At the end of the decade he rejoined Crosby, Stills and Nash for Looking Forward and a reunion tour that grossed more than forty two million dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aneurysm, protest and a new life

After the attacks of September 2001 Young wrote Let's Roll, about the passengers of Flight 93. In 2003 he made Greendale, a concept album about a small California town shaken by the killing of a police officer, and filmed it himself with friends and family as the actors. On that tour he switched his trucks and buses to biodiesel. Then in March 2005, after playing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he noticed his vision blurring. Doctors found a dangerous brain aneurysm. Before surgery he flew to Nashville and recorded most of Prairie Wind, writing songs in the order they appear. The procedure in New York worked, but two days later he collapsed on the street from bleeding where the catheter had gone in.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Prairie Wind was full of thoughts of mortality, and of his father, Scott Young, who had long been ill and died in June 2005, a few weeks after it was finished. Young recorded some of it on a guitar that had belonged to Hank Williams. Within months of surgery he was back on stage at Live 8 in Barrie, Ontario. His anger at the Iraq War poured out in 2006 on Living with War, written and recorded in less than a month, and including a song called Let's Impeach the President. On tour with Crosby, Stills and Nash that year, some audiences in conservative states booed it. He also began converting an old 1959 Lincoln into a hybrid called LincVolt.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2010 Young lost two of his oldest collaborators, the pedal steel player Ben Keith, who had been with him since Harvest, and the filmmaker L. A. Johnson. Their deaths hang over Le Noise, a solo album of echoing electric guitar made with producer Daniel Lanois. In 2012 he published his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, partly, he said, because he feared the dementia that had taken his father. He launched Pono, a high resolution music player and download store meant to rescue the sound of recorded music, but it closed in 2017. His campaign against genetically modified crops on The Monsanto Years so worried the company that, as The Guardian later reported, Monsanto monitored his activity and considered legal action.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In July 2014 Young filed for divorce from Pegi after thirty six years. He gave her the ranch, and Ben stayed there. He began a relationship with the actor and activist Daryl Hannah, and they married in August 2018 in Atascadero, California. David Crosby called Hannah a purely poisonous predator, Young announced that CSNY would never tour again, and Crosby later apologised to them both on air. The losses continued. His Malibu home burned down in the Woolsey Fire in 2018. Pegi died of cancer on the first of January 2019, aged sixty six, and Elliot Roberts, his manager of half a century, died that June.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Still raging, 2019 to 2026

Frank Sampedro retired with arthritis in both wrists, so Nils Lofgren rejoined Crazy Horse, and they made Colorado in 2019, Barn in 2021 and World Record in 2022. Young's application for United States citizenship was held up because he admitted to smoking marijuana, but in January 2020 he became a dual citizen, singing a joke song about being a Canarican. In 2021 he sold half the rights to his song catalogue to the Hipgnosis fund. Meanwhile his Neil Young Archives grew into a high resolution streaming site with his whole career in it, from teenage Winnipeg demos to lost albums like Homegrown and Toast.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In January 2022 Young told Spotify it could have Joe Rogan or Neil Young, not both, accusing the company of hosting Covid vaccine misinformation on Rogan's podcast. Spotify removed his music. Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren and Crosby, Stills and Nash followed him out. Young thanked his record company for taking a hit of about sixty percent of his streaming income. He returned in March 2024, saying he could not keep up the fight across every platform. That spring he toured with Crazy Horse for the first time in a decade, with Micah Nelson, Willie Nelson's son, standing in for Lofgren, but illness in the band forced them to cancel the rest of the dates.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In late 2024 Young formed a new band, the Chrome Hearts, with Micah Nelson, bassist Corey McCormick, drummer Anthony Logerfo and the veteran organist Spooner Oldham, and they released Talkin to the Trees in June 2025. After first pulling out over the BBC's coverage, then changing his mind, he headlined Glastonbury's Pyramid stage that month. In August he premiered Big Crime, a furious song aimed at Donald Trump's deployment of troops in Washington. In October he pulled his music from Amazon, accusing Jeff Bezos of backing the government, and in January 2026 he gave the people of Greenland a free year of access to his archive after Trump's threats to take the island.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In February 2026 Young cancelled his summer tour of Britain and Europe, telling fans he had decided to take a break and was listening to his body. In May he made a surprise appearance at a Vancouver benefit for the environmentalist David Suzuki's ninetieth birthday, playing After the Gold Rush and Heart of Gold alone. On the eighteenth of September 2026, at eighty, he released Second Song with the Chrome Hearts, a mostly acoustic album that includes songs he first wrote back in the mid sixties. Days later he was back on stage with Willie Nelson, and on the twenty sixth of September he stood at Farm Aid, which he had helped start forty one years earlier, calling farmers the soul of America.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

As of 2026, Young is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a solo artist and with Buffalo Springfield, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. His fingerprints are everywhere. Nirvana and Pearl Jam learned noise and nerve from his records with Crazy Horse. Thom Yorke of Radiohead said After the Gold Rush gave him the confidence to sing softly. Johnny Marr credits him as a key influence on his guitar playing, the Australian band Powderfinger named themselves after one of his songs, and a biologist even named a trapdoor spider after him. Through six decades he has kept one rule close, that the worst thing an artist can do is stand still.[1] [2]

The people around Neil Young

Neil Young and Stephen Stills. They met in a Fort William club in 1965 and reunited by chance on Sunset Boulevard a year later. Their twin guitars powered Buffalo Springfield and later Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but they fought constantly for control. Stills said Young wanted to play folk music in a rock band. Young walked out on him more than once, most famously in 1976 with a telegram telling him to eat a peach, yet they kept coming back together into the 2010s.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Neil Young and Danny Whitten. Whitten was the heart of the original Crazy Horse, and Young said Danny was the key to their sound, the second guitar that let his long solos breathe. Heroin wrecked Whitten's talent, inspiring The Needle and the Damage Done. Young fired him in November 1972 and Whitten died that night. Young felt responsible for years, and the grief shaped Tonight's the Night.[1] [2] [3]

Neil Young and David Briggs. Briggs picked up a hitchhiking Young in 1968 and became his most trusted producer, pushing for the rawest sound in the least time. He produced albums from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere to Sleeps with Angels and was working on the Archives when he died of lung cancer in November 1995. Young answered his death by reuniting with Crazy Horse.[1] [2]

Neil Young and Elliot Roberts. Joni Mitchell persuaded Roberts to take on Young after Buffalo Springfield split in 1968, and he managed him for over fifty years, until his death in 2019. Young called him the greatest manager of all time and said Roberts delivered the bad news he could not. Roberts once admitted he only cared about what Neil wanted, not what was fair.[1] [2]

Neil Young and Carrie Snodgress. Young saw the actor Carrie Snodgress in Diary of a Mad Housewife, fell for her, and she moved to his ranch in 1970. She inspired much of Harvest, and their son Zeke was born in 1972. The relationship collapsed by 1975, producing Homegrown. She later suffered a violent attack by Young's former collaborator Jack Nitzsche, and she died in 2004.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Neil Young and Pegi Young. They met in 1974 when Pegi Morton was a waitress near his ranch, a scene he recalled in Unknown Legend, and they married in 1978. They raised Ben and Amber, helped raise Zeke, and founded the Bridge School together in 1986. Harvest Moon was written for her. Young filed for divorce in 2014, and she died of cancer in January 2019.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Neil Young and Daryl Hannah. Young began seeing the actor and environmental activist Daryl Hannah in 2014, and they married in August 2018. They marched together against the Keystone pipeline and moved to Canada after he became an American citizen in 2020. Hannah has directed several of his films, including Paradox and the 2026 concert movie Corduroy Plants.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Neil Young and Ronnie Van Zant. Lynyrd Skynyrd's singer answered Southern Man and Alabama with Sweet Home Alabama, calling out Young by name. The rivalry was mostly for show. Young said he was proud to be in their song, Van Zant wore a Tonight's the Night T shirt on stage, and Young offered Skynyrd his song Powderfinger, though members of the band were killed before they could record it.[1] [2] [3]

Neil Young and David Crosby. Crosby was with Young when he wrote Ohio and cried after they recorded it. Young promised to make an album with CSN if Crosby got clean, and kept the promise in 1988. In 2014 Crosby called Daryl Hannah a purely poisonous predator, Young declared CSNY finished, and Crosby apologised publicly the next year. Crosby died in January 2023.[1] [2]

Neil Young and David Geffen. Geffen co managed CSNY and later signed Young to Geffen Records with a promise of creative control. When Young delivered the robotic Trans and the rockabilly Everybody's Rockin', Geffen Records sued him in 1983 for making music unrepresentative of himself. Young countersued, both suits were dropped, and Geffen personally apologised.[1] [2] [3]

Neil Young and Eddie Vedder. Pearl Jam treated Young as a guiding spirit of the grunge era, covering Rockin' in the Free World on stage. Vedder inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and within days Young cut Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam in Seattle. Vedder and Young even share a writing credit on Peace and Love.[1] [2]

Neil Young and Frank Sampedro. Poncho Sampedro joined Crazy Horse in 1975, simplifying and toughening its sound. He was Young's cook, bus companion and sparring partner, and his joke about rocking in the free world gave Young a signature song. Producer Niko Bolas said you could not make a Neil Young album without him. He retired from music with arthritis after the 2014 tour.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Neil Young

• As a boy of about eight, Neil ran a small chicken business, delivering eggs along with a newspaper his father wrote for. Young recalled keeping about thirty five chickens as a child. On weekends his father drove him around to deliver the eggs and a weekend paper, and it was on one of those mornings that his father brought home the plastic ukulele that started his musical life.[1]
• Young's first published hit as a songwriter was sung by the Guess Who, not by him. The Winnipeg band the Guess Who, with Randy Bachman on guitar, took his song Flying on the Ground Is Wrong into the Canadian top forty in the mid sixties, before Young had any success of his own as a performer.[1] [2]
• Before Buffalo Springfield, Young drove a 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse he nicknamed Mort. Mort broke down, so the trip to Los Angeles in 1966 was made in a second hearse, a black 1953 Pontiac. Bruce Palmer recalled six hippies inside, three men and three women, stopped again and again by curious highway patrolmen.[1] [2]
• Young once recorded for Motown, as guitarist in the Mynah Birds alongside Rick James. The band completed a single called It's My Time for Motown in 1966, but it was shelved when James was arrested as a Navy deserter. It became a famous lost Motown record and was only officially released in 2006.[1] [2]
• Buffalo Springfield took their name from a steamroller. The band named themselves after the Buffalo Springfield Roller Company, whose steamroller was parked near where they were staying in Los Angeles in 1966.[1]
• Young played session guitar for the Monkees in 1968. Shortly after Buffalo Springfield fell apart, he played on recordings that ended up on the Monkees' albums Head and Instant Replay.[1]
• Young's famous guitar Old Black was acquired in a trade with bandmate Jim Messina. In early 1968 Young swapped a Gretsch for Messina's 1953 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop. Heavy customising and a coat of black paint turned it into Old Black, the guitar behind most of his electric work since.[1] [2]
• Young has collected nearly four hundred and fifty vintage Fender Deluxe amplifiers. He bought his first late fifties Tweed Deluxe in Hollywood in 1967 for fifty dollars. He has since bought hundreds more from the same era, yet still insists the original one sounds best.[1]
• The lead vocal on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was meant to be a temporary guide track. Young sang it through the talkback microphone on the mixing desk at Wally Heider's studio, with no effects at all, and liked the dry sound so much that he kept it.[1]
• Singer Robin Lane thought she was only rehearsing when her take on Round and Round became the master. Lane sang and played on the song with Young and Danny Whitten in March 1969. She later said she did not even know what she was singing, and called Young the original punk rocker.[1]
• The patches on Young's jeans on the back of After the Gold Rush were sewn with his first wife's hair. Susan Acevedo patched his jeans and made him a patchwork vest, stitching with strands of her own hair. Young said that after they split he kept the vest carefully tucked away.[1]
• Only Love Can Break Your Heart was written for Graham Nash after his breakup with Joni Mitchell. Nash said Young came to him and explained that he had written the song for him, because he knew exactly how Nash felt after the relationship ended.[1]
• A B side released by accident in 1970 contained only half a song. An electric take of Birds recorded with Crazy Horse was mistakenly issued as the flip side of Only Love Can Break Your Heart. Young had forgotten the second verse and simply stopped after the first.[1]
• Young asked Graham Nash to judge the Harvest mixes from a rowing boat in the middle of a lake. Young used his house as the left speaker and his barn as the right. When producer Elliot Mazer shouted from the shore to ask how it sounded, Young yelled back asking for more barn.[1]
• Drummer Kenny Buttrey played Out on the Weekend sitting on his right hand. Young told him his hi hat was too busy, so Buttrey sat on his hand for the whole take. He said Young asked for as little as possible from his players.[1]
• Young wanted the Harvest album sleeve to biodegrade once the shrink wrap was opened. The record company overruled him on grounds of cost and the risk of damage in shipping.[1]
• A Man Needs a Maid was partly inspired by a pair of hotel buttons. Young said that on a CSNY tour he saw buttons labelled MAN and MAID in a hotel room, thought they were light switches, and went straight to his piano.[1]
• Young said Heart of Gold was influenced by the French song Love Is Blue. He told a journalist this in 1974, two years after the song gave him his only American number one.[1]
• Joni Mitchell sang with Young's band during the Tonight's the Night sessions and has refused to let him release it. Mitchell dropped by and sang her song Raised on Robbery with the group. Young called it the sexiest, funkiest version the song ever had, and complained that she still will not allow it out.[1]
• Tonight's the Night was originally sleeved with a long review printed entirely in Dutch. Young said he chose it because he did not understand any of it himself. Dutch visitors later translated it for him, and he realised a writer on the other side of the world had understood exactly what he meant.[1]
• Young met Charles Manson in the late sixties and was impressed by his music. They met through Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, months before the murders. Manson wanted an introduction to the record executive Mo Ostin. Young later based Revolution Blues on him.[1]
• Bob Dylan's verdict on Hitchhiker, Young's song about his drug history, was simply that it was honest. Young played it to Dylan in the mid seventies alongside Cortez the Killer. He later laughed that Dylan was kindly saying it was not very inventive as a story.[1]
• On the 1978 Rust Never Sleeps tour, Young's roadies dressed as the hooded Jawas from Star Wars. The stage was built like a giant rehearsal room, with comically oversized microphones and speaker cabinets. Young later used the Jawa theme again for the poster art of the tour film.[1] [2]
• Rick Rosas is the only bassist to have played with Buffalo Springfield, CSNY and Crazy Horse. Rosas played with the reunited Buffalo Springfield in 2010 and 2011, toured with CSNY, and filled in for Billy Talbot with Crazy Horse in 2014 after Talbot's stroke. He died that November.[1] [2]
• Sleeps with Angels is the only Neil Young album on which he plays flute. He played it on Prime of Life and Safeway Cart. He began the title song's lyrics, written about Kurt Cobain, on a matchbook during a charity golf tournament hosted by Eddie Van Halen.[1]
• Old King on Harvest Moon is about Young's dog, Elvis. The dog on the cover of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere back in 1969 was another of his dogs, named Winnipeg.[1] [2]
• Young recorded parts of Prairie Wind on a guitar that once belonged to Hank Williams. He made the album in Nashville in 2005 in the days before his brain aneurysm surgery, recording songs in the order they appear on the record.[1]
• Young is named as a co inventor on seven American patents for model trains. He helped design Lionel's Legacy control system, and developed a controller with his friend Ron Milner that let his son Ben run trains with a head switch.[1] [2]
• Frank Sampedro spent almost two decades working on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Between 1992 and 2010 he ran the house band's MIDI setup under bandleader Kevin Eubanks, skills he had picked up during Young's computer music experiments of the early eighties.[1]
• Pono, Young's high resolution music player, once sought money from Donald Trump. Variety reported in 2015 that the company was struggling for funding, and that Young had earlier approached Trump for backing. The store closed in 2017.[1]
• Donald Trump has described himself as a big Neil Young fan. In 2008 Trump told Rolling Stone that Young's voice was perfect and haunting. Rolling Stone had noticed him at three of Young's concerts, though he could not name a single favourite song.[1] [2]
• Young's American citizenship was delayed because he admitted smoking marijuana. The good moral character part of the application held things up. When he was finally sworn in in January 2020, he celebrated by singing that he was a proud Canarican.[1] [2]
• Leaving Spotify cost Young about sixty percent of his worldwide streaming income, by his own estimate. He thanked Warner for standing with him and taking the hit. He later said Spotify's sound quality was also a reason he disliked the service.[1] [2]
• A species of trapdoor spider is named after Neil Young. In 2007 the biologist Jason Bond of East Carolina University named his discovery Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi, after his favourite singer.[1]
• The Australian band Powderfinger named themselves after a Neil Young song. The song comes from Rust Never Sleeps. In Canada, the band the Constantines sometimes played Neil Young tribute shows under the name Horsey Craze.[1]
• Young's son Ben has run an organic egg business at Broken Arrow Ranch. The Guardian reported this at the time of his parents' divorce in 2014, echoing Young's own childhood trade of selling eggs.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.