Neil Young has successfully recorded rock, folk, folk-rock, country, techno, and blues over his five-decade career. He has also made some consummate weird news.
• In 1965, Young first rolled into Los Angeles from Toronto in a black 1953 Pontiac—a hearse, Mort II. He slept in it for a week before meeting up with his friend and future collaborator Steven Stills.
• One of Young’s current projects is building an electric car he hopes to drive to the White House. This is not his first attempt at eco-friendly cars. In 2010, in an attempt to turn his (5,000- 5,000-pound) 1959 Lincoln Continental into a biodiesel-electric hybrid, a malfunction occurred while the car was charging, setting off a fire and causing $1 million in damage, including the destruction of a building filled with Young’s memorabilia.
• Young loves model trains and is listed on seven U.S. model train–related patents as a coinventor.
• In 1989, MTV banned his video “This Note’s For You,” which brutally satirized both product placement and MTV. What won the MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year in 1989? Neil Young’s “This Note’s For You.”
• Young directed the 1982 film Human Highway described as a “surreal nuclear comedy” set in a gas station diner next to a nuclear power plant. Its customers’ last day alive on earth, and these unknowing customers include actors Young, Dennis Hopper, and Devo.
• During the late ’60s Young met and played guitar with future mass murderer Charles Manson. Young describes Manson as, “kind of like Dylan. The songs were fascinating.”
• In the liner notes to the 1977 anthology Decade Young reveals that he wrote three songs on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere while sick with a 103 degree fever—in one afternoon.