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From Canada to California
There’s Something Happening Here
For most of those who know and love Neil Young, this story begins in Los Angeles, California, in the mid-sixties with Buffalo Springfield, and most importantly with Young’s often volatile relationship with Stephen Stills—the lifelong friend, rival, and all-around musical foil who would become one of, if not the most important person in Young’s life.
If there were ever two people on this earth who might as well have been separated at birth, it is Young and Stills. Like two sides of the same coin, these two men have shared the sort of love/hate relationship throughout the decades that is truly the stuff of legend.
It is the sort of kinship that comes about as close to being a sibling rivalry as these things can—at least without the benefit (or the obstacle, depending on your viewpoint) of actual shared blood. It also comes complete with just about all of the elements you might suspect in such a strange but mutually beneficial partnership.
Yet there is no doubt that these two extraordinary musicians also share the sort of mutual, primarily musical bond that can only be described as a type of brotherly love. Although the dynamic of the Young/Stills relationship goes beyond the merely musical, there is also no denying the fireworks that occur between them when sharing a concert stage or in the recording studio together.
One only need listen to the electric sides on the live Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young recording 4-Way Street—and in particular the extended jams on the tracks “Carry On” and “Southern Man” for confirmation of this. Although somewhat rarer, bootleg recordings of CSN&Y’s live version of Young’s “Down by the River” only serve as further evidence. On the latter, Stills and Young feed off of each other’s energy, stretching the already rather lengthy song often to well over twenty minutes in concert.
Perhaps as a by-product of their decades-long musical rivalry, Young and Stills trade off their lead guitar solos like two madmen possessed when sharing a stage, and the results are more often than not positively explosive. This was certainly evident during their early years playing together in Buffalo Springfield, and would become even more pronounced in CSN&Y.
Neil Young photographed during the 1969 television taping with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young for ABC-TV’s Music Scene with David Steinberg. CSN&Y’s “Down by the River” was a high point of the national, prime-time telecast.
Photo by Jeff Allen
Even without Stills by his side, though, Young himself has long been known to get into a hypnotic sort of state onstage—his “zone,” if you will—particularly when the amps are cranked to eleven with Crazy Horse. This same zone that Neil Young often gets into when the Horse is having a particularly great night, and when he’s peeling the paint from arena ceilings with Old Black—his trademark black 1953 Gibson Les Paul guitar—has in fact been one of the major stories within the stories that make up his legend.
But when playing with Stills—who is one of the only musicians the notoriously lone wolf Young is able to feed off of in this way—this zone has been known at times to blast off into different dimensions and universes altogether.
Needless to say, the Young/Stills relationship will be a theme that recurs very often in this book.
Anyway, we’ll get to more on Young and Stills in due course. But before Neil Young ever met Stephen Stills, and before there ever even was a Buffalo Springfield, a CSN&Y, or a Crazy Horse, Young was this slightly weird kid who grew up in Canada.
There Is a Town in North Ontario
Neil Percival Young was born on November 12, 1945, in Toronto to his parents Scott and Edna “Rassy” Young (formerly Ragland). The Young family (which also included Neil’s older brother Bob) eventually settled in the small town of Omemee, which Neil Young would later immortalize in the song “Helpless” from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s classic Déjà Vu album.
Young expressed an interest in music at an early age (his first guitar was a plastic ukulele bought by his parents). But like many kids growing up in the fifties, he fell truly in love with rock ’n’ roll after hearing it on one of those transistor radios that were as much a part of the teenage experience back then as texting, Facebook, and the Internet are now. In Young’s case, these strange-sounding transmissions—which must have seemed like nothing less than personal communications from God himself—came through local Canadian station CHUM.
Since this book is not intended so much as a biography as a guide to Neil Young’s music, we’re not going to spend a whole lot of time on his childhood here.
But by most accounts, when it became apparent that his interest in music was more than just a youthful phase, Rassy was the more supportive of his two parents (who divorced after Scott began a relationship with fellow journalist Astrid Mead, who eventually became his second wife).
Although Scott Young—a journalist, writer, and sports broadcaster of some note himself—may have been the paternal source that Neil’s formidable writing talent actually sprang from, he was the one who most say wanted to see his son pursue a more traditional career path. It should, however, be noted that Scott Young later became a very big fan of his son’s work, even going so far as to write about it extensively in his own book, Neil and Me.
The Squires: Sultans of Surf
Scott Young’s marriage to Astrid Mead also produced a daughter, Neil Young’s half-sister Astrid (who, like Neil, is also a professional singer-songwriter). Neil Young also has four other half-sisters from his father’s two subsequent marriages following the split with Rassy—Deidre, Maggie, Caitlin, and Erin. When his parents split, Neil ended up with his more supportive Mom (at the time), and with her son in tow, Rassy ended up moving her half of the divided family to Winnipeg.
In Winnipeg, Young soon began to make a name for himself in the local music scene with a series of bands with names like the Jades, the Esquires, the Classics, and eventually the band he would make his first record with, the Squires.
He also paid close attention to the other bands on the local scene—and particularly to one called Chad Allen and the Expressions, which featured a hot young guitarist named Randy Bachman.
Bachman, who would later go on to his own commercial success with the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO), was one of Young’s earliest influences as a guitarist, and he soon found himself trying to emulate the vibrato- and tremolo-based guitar sound Bachman specialized in with the Expressions, which of course had itself been heavily borrowed from people like Link Wray and the Shadows.
That sound is readily apparent when you listen to the lone Squires single “The Sultan” and its flip side “Aurora,” where Neil’s guitar borrows equally from the echo-heavy sounds of both Wray’s hit “Rumble” and the instrumental surf-rock records of the period by bands like the Telstars and the Ventures.
The single, which was overseen by then mentor Toronto DJ Bob Bradburn and released on the indie V Records imprint, is a far cry from the sort of feedback-laden, heavy guitar assaults Neil Young fans would later come to know and love on songs like “Cortez the Killer” and “Like a Hurricane.” Other Squires tracks like “I Wonder,” “Mustang,” “I’ll Love You Forever,” and “(I’m a Man) and I Can’t Cry” have since surfaced on the massive Archives Vol. 1 boxed set.
But even now you can still hear the earliest hints of just where Neil Young would eventually carry that part of his trademark sound on that single. Fortunately, Neil Young (an artist who has meticulously shepherded the documenting of his career in a way that very few other musicians of his stature have) has immortalized his early work with the Squires for posterity on the Archives set.
Mortimer Hearseburg
One of the more famous Neil Young stories from his early days is how he traveled from his native Canada across two countries in search of fame and fortune, eventually winding up in Los Angeles, where, in his own words, he was going to become a rock star.
Although this account has been retold many times in countless stories and variations over the years, the one constant with these tales is that the trips that eventually got him there were by and large made in a pair of vintage hearse-mobiles.
The first of these, a 1948 Buick Roadmaster Hearse that he nicknamed “Mortimer Hearseburg” (or Mort or Morty for short), served as a combination of reliable transport vehicle (for a while anyway), occasional home, and unique rock-’n’-roll prop for Neil Young and the various incarnations of his early bands—at least before the transmission fell out on one famous and fateful road trip. The second, a 1953 Pontiac hearse called—what else?—Mort II, would be the vehicle that finally got Neil Young to Southern California.
By Young’s own reasoning, the hearse was a perfect transport vehicle for the traveling musician he had by this time become, with the rollers in back ideal not only for rolling out coffins containing dead people but for the guitars, drums, and amplifiers plied in the trade of working rock musicians as well.
So it was on one such road trip, while driving one such hearse, that he would fatefully end up meeting Stephen Stills for the first time, in what was to become one of the most important events of Neil Young’s life up to this point.
That first meeting took place in Fort William, Ontario, and Young bonded instantly with the young guitarist from Texas (who he once described as the funniest person he had ever met). Young would later travel to New York (by way of Toronto), attracted by the burgeoning folk music scene there (which he had by this time become quite enamored with), but also in the hopes of hooking up once again with this Stills guy. To Young, Stills wasn’t just a fellow musical misfit and kindred soul—he was also Young’s potential ticket to becoming the rock star he had so long had dreamed of.
Back in the Old Folkie Days
Neil Young’s introduction to folk music had come largely by way of Canadian folk artists like Ian and Sylvia Tyson (whose song “Four Strong Winds” has been described by Young himself as “the greatest song I’ve ever heard”). Neil Young himself eventually would record his own version of the song for his Comes a Time album.
Young would also meet a then struggling folk artist named Joan Anderson during the same period in one of Toronto’s folkie coffeehouses. Anderson would eventually become better known to the world as the brilliant (and iconic in her own right) artist Joni Mitchell.
The two would, of course, cross paths again many times over the years, traveling in the same social circle of musicians and assorted other freaks populating Southern California’s Laurel and Topanga Canyon hippie communities, as well as sharing management (Elliot Roberts), record labels (Warner Brothers), and numerous concert stages.
In an interesting side note, Young and Mitchell had another thing in common besides music. Both had been afflicted with polio during childhood, producing later effects in adulthood that last to this day. In Young’s case, polio was responsible for his hunched-over posture (which becomes even more pronounced due to his considerable height and lanky frame). With Mitchell, on the other hand, it affected her fingers, leading to the bizarre guitar tunings heard on many of her recordings.
When Young had first met Stephen Stills in Fort William, he was already experimenting with an early hybrid of rock and folk styles with a group of Canadian musical cronies playing under a variety of band names that seemed to change even more rapidly than the musical winds of the times themselves.
Stills, who was performing in town with the Company (an offshoot of his earlier New Christy Minstrels–styled vocal group the Au Go-Go Singers), was notably impressed with the “rock-folk” stylings of Young’s group. But most of all, Stills was impressed with Neil Young himself.
Young’s idea was to do something like a combination of the rock and folk styles—something that drew both consternation and awe at the time when he turned traditional folk songs like “My Darling Clementine,” “Tom Dooley,” and “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain” on their ear with his own electrified rock arrangements. It was also during this period that Young wrote what would become two of his signature songs in “Sugar Mountain” and “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing.”
Neil Young and the Squires had by this time become the de facto house band at Smitty’s Pancake House in Fort William, playing under their new moniker of the High Flying Birds, and it was also there that they came across Ray Dee (a.k.a. Ray Delantinsky), who became a mentor for the group and also produced recordings like “I’ll Love You Forever” for them.
“He was the original David Briggs,” Young told biographer Jimmy McDonough, in comparing Dee to the producer who would later play such a major role in his career.
But even then, Young was nothing if not a restless vagabond soul, and before long he felt the need to move on. Leaving trusted friends and bandmates like Ray Dee, Ken Koblun, and Bob Clark behind (this would become one of his trademarks over the years), Young packed up Mortimer the Hearse and headed to Toronto, with the longer-term goal of a reunion with his new best friend Stephen Stills in New York. Back at Smitty’s Pancake House, a sign on the marquee simply read “The Birds Have Flown.”
Reprise Records 2004 reissue single of “The Loner” from Neil Young’s self-titled debut album.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
During this period, Young stayed at his father’s house in Toronto, and he eventually summoned musical accomplices Koblun and Clark to join him there—although the Squires’ reunion would be a short-lived one.
The music scene in Toronto was equally divided between the roughneck crowd who favored the rawer blend of blues, rock, and country played by bands like Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks (who, sans Hawkins, would later back Bob Dylan and become stars in their own right as the Band), and the more willowy-sounding acoustic folk music of artists like Gordon Lightfoot and Ian and Sylvia favored by the more bohemian, beatnik sort of crowd that frequented the coffeehouses.
It was during this time that Neil Young cut several folk-influenced sides with longtime friend and musical accomplice Comrie Smith. With little else but a reel-to-reel recorder, Young’s “Dylan kit” of a guitar and a harmonica, and Smith’s banjo, the makeshift duo recorded six Neil Young songs and a cover of “High Heel Sneakers” in the attic of their old school, Lawrence Park.
The early Young originals include “Casting Me Away from You,” and “There Goes My Babe,” a pair of folkie-sounding duets that may or may not have been influenced by artists like Ian and Sylvia, as well as the more raucous-sounding, R&B-influenced “Hello Lonely Woman.” All three surviving recordings can now be heard on the Archives Vol. 1 boxed set.
The New York meeting with Stills never happened, but Young did meet and hook up with Stills’s friend Richie Furay there—another then struggling musician with whom he would eventually make history by forming the Buffalo Springfield along with Stills and Bruce Palmer. Furay ended up following Stills to Los Angeles, with Neil and Bruce Palmer not far behind them.
The Loner Meets the Super Freak
Prior to that, however, a series of events that began with Young carrying his guitar and amp down a Toronto street one day (this is actually a recurring theme in the Neil Young story) ended with what in retrospect has to be considered one of the strangest musical pairings in rock-’n’-roll history.
Bassist Bruce Palmer, who was already playing in a band called the Mynah Birds (led by a brash young African American musician who fancied himself the next Mick Jagger named Ricky James Matthews), needed a guitarist for the band and asked Young to join.
The Mynah Birds also had a deal with Motown Records—which was a pretty big deal at the time since Motown was the preeminent soul music label of its day, and signing a mostly white rock-’n’-roll band (save for Matthews) was pretty much unheard of. To this day, there are those who continue to claim that the Mynah Birds was the first “white rock band” signed to Berry Gordy’s Motown Records, although the band Rare Earth may have a semi-legitimate beef with the rock history books on that point.
Foreign (and likely bootleg) pressing on “Oscar Records” of Neil Young’s eponymous debut album.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
Matthews would later go on to superstardom as Rick James, the “punk-funk” pioneer with the trademark braids who would sell millions with hits such as “Super Freak” in the eighties, and even get a second act in the nineties when rapper MC Hammer remade the song as a rap smash called “You Can’t Touch This.”
Before James eventually crashed and burned in one of rock ’n’ roll’s most notorious stories of sex, drugs, and rock-’n’-roll excess, he also wrote songs and produced records for a variety of artists including Teena Marie, the Mary Jane Girls, and even comedian Eddie Murphy’s singing debut (anyone remember “Party All the Time”?). Sadly, just before his death, James was reduced to a punchline for cocaine abuse courtesy of a brutal but dead-on portrayal/parody by comedian Dave Chappelle.
The Mynah Birds—with Young—did record some songs for Motown, including the song “Little Girl Go,” which was co-written by none other than Neil Young himself and Ricky James Matthews. But once it was discovered that the future “Super Freak” was in fact an AWOL fugitive from the American navy, nothing further came of it.
But in retrospect, can you imagine the possibilities of what might have been? A few different twists and turns back then, and we might have just seen the world’s first ever folk-rock-punk-funk supergroup—fronted by Neil Young and Rick James no less.
You just can’t make this stuff up.