Neil Young

6 Transformer Man

Following the critical and commercial triumphs of Comes a Time, Rust Never Sleeps, and Live Rust, the 1980s are widely viewed as Neil Young’s lost decade. The period is marked by an acute artistic restlessness that found him flitting from one genre to another, resulting in inconsistent and sometimes slapdash records that, in turn, led to feelings of confusion, frustration, and downright anger in even his most ardent fans. Record sales plummeted.

Predictably, Young has a different perspective. “I feel really good about what I’ve done in the ’80s,” he told the Village Voice. “Even though I’ve taken a lot of shit for it. Everything I did made sense to me, yet everywhere I went people were telling me, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Why are you doing this? You’re systematically dismantling your record sales.’ There was this huge abyss between me and everybody else.”

What the public didn’t know—because Young forbade his camp to divulge it—was that the music he made during the period was, to some degree, a response to various crises he was facing in his personal life.

His son Ben, born to Young and wife Pegi in 1978, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Young’s older son, Zeke, born to actress Carrie Snodgress, also suffers from the disorder. But Ben’s condition was more severe: he was spastic, quadriplegic, and nonoral.

“I remember looking at the sky, looking for a sign, wondering, ‘What the fuck is going on?’” Young told the Voice. “‘Why are the kids in this situation? What the hell caused this? What did I do? There must be something wrong with me.’”

Young supplied the musical score for Art Linson’s film Where the Buffalo Roam, based on the life of Hunter S. Thompson, 1980.

In 1980, there was another emergency on the horizon. Pegi required brain surgery to repair an arterial problem that, left unchecked, could have killed her. She recovered fully in a matter of months, but one can only imagine the strain the family’s health problems placed upon Young.

To be sure, both situations would impact his music in the ’80s, most strikingly on re·ac·tor and Trans, which offered Young’s artistic response to Ben’s monotonous, repetitive therapy. But first came Hawks & Doves, which showed the artist already adrift creatively, casting about for new genres to work in and navigating the shifting political and cultural tides around him.

They’re country songs, as pure and unfiltered as Young had ever offered.

With vocalist Hillary O’Brien of the Hawks & Doves Band, Bread & Roses Festival, Greek Theatre, Berkeley, California, October 3, 1980. © Henry Diltz/Corbis

Hawks & Doves is a minor effort that Young himself called a “transitional” album, although he also defended it to Mojo as “a funky little record that represents where I was and what I was doing at the time.”

Funky? Not so much. But little it is, clocking in at barely half an hour.

The album is roughly split along the lines of opposing acoustic “dove” tunes and electric “hawk” songs. The two opening numbers are leftovers from Young’s abandoned Homegrown album. “Little Wing” is a short, sweet song about a nurturing woman, which is given new relevance by Young’s nesting with Pegi. “The Old Homestead,” which takes up almost a quarter of the album’s run time, is a nearly impenetrable allegory that seems to describe Young’s warring creative impulses.

“Lost in Space” is another song yearning for domesticity, albeit in an unusual setting: the ocean floor. In one of his loopier moments on record, Young manipulates the tape to make his voice sound like he’s joined by an underwater chorus. In stark contrast, “Captain Kennedy” offers a blast of harsh reality, detailing a sailor’s last few minutes before going into battle.

The album’s electric tunes were newly minted for Hawks & Doves but depart wildly from the take-no-prisoners rock that Young pursued on the Rust albums. Instead, they’re country songs, as pure and unfiltered as Young had ever offered, led by Ben Keith’s swooping steel guitar and Rufus Thibodeaux’s sawing fiddle. At the time, some of them, like “Stayin’ Power” and “Coastline,” seemed slight and somewhat tossed off. But, in retrospect, it’s possible to view them in the context of Young’s longstanding relationship with Pegi and the steadfastness with which they faced down their hardships. In the latter, he boasts, “We don’t back down from no trouble.”

Neil and Pegi Young, the Ritz, New York City, March 2, 1981. © Bob Leafe (bobleafe.com)

Of course, the Hawks & Doves songs that are most remarked upon are the last three, each of which hints at an unexpected shift to the political right. In “Union Man,” Young lampoons the musicians’ union (and by extension other bloated and ineffective unions that did little to make life better for the rank and file). “Comin’ Apart at Every Nail” is a blue-collar anthem that exults in patriotism even as the nation unravels. This was the time, recall, of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise,” the Iranian hostage crisis, and the dawn of the age of Ronald Reagan. If Young’s brethren from Woodstock Nation were aghast at his sudden rightward tilt, they must have been floored by the album’s title track, which blatantly spoiled for war. In it, Young even volunteered his life, or at least his checkbook, for service. It was a far cry from “Ohio.” But it was nothing compared to what would come further down the road.

Young was unable to tour to support either Hawks & Doves or its follow-up, re·ac·tor, which he recorded with Crazy Horse in the fall and winter of 1980 and the summer of 1981. By that time, he and Pegi had enrolled Ben in a radical therapy program designed by the Institute for the Awareness of Human Potential. The demanding program required the couple’s total commitment, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. It also altered Young’s work schedule, forcing him to record only during breaks in the afternoon, when it had been his natural inclination to howl at the moon.

You can feel Young’s desire to break free and rock out on re·ac·tor tracks such as “Opera Star”; the stuttering, slobbering “Rapid Transit”; and the character-driven “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze.” “Get Back On It” expresses a desire to head back out on the road but nebulously hints that he’s otherwise engaged. Still, the album contains enough social commentary to suggest that Young’s attention could be at least temporarily drawn outside the demands of Ben’s program. “Southern Pacific” is a chugging rocker about a railroad worker who gave his life and good health to his profession, only to be cast aside when he reached the age of mandatory retirement. “Motor City” is a seriocomic rant about the American automobile industry, which even then was being savaged by imports. The album-closing “Shots,” meanwhile, is dominated by intense sound effects of automatic weapons fire, and it pairs two topics seldom discussed simultaneously: suburban lust and international ultraviolence.

For both good and ill, re·ac·tor’s standout track is “T-Bone,” a thudding nine-and-a-quarter-minute composition whose repetitiveness is thought to have been inspired by Ben’s therapy. Its sole lyrical content is a koan that most found a bit too Zen for the room. “Got mashed potatoes,” Young declares. “Ain’t got no T-bone.”

With no public acknowledgment of his personal situation, Young’s fans weren’t sure just what to make of “T-Bone” or the rest of re·ac·tor, though at least the album found him kicking out some Rust-style jams. But those who paid attention to album art must have known something was up. The back cover was inscribed with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, which has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step recovery programs: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.”

Maintaining the requisite level of mystery, however, Young had the prayer printed in Latin.

He must have taken the prayer’s wisdom to heart, however, because in short order, he drastically changed a number of aspects of his life to help him regain control of it:

On the personal front, he and Pegi quit Ben’s demanding program and opted for another, less pressure-filled form of therapy designed by the National Academy for Child Development.

Professionally, Young, who was frustrated by the lack of promotional oomph behind re·ac·tor, left Warner/Reprise, his record label for nearly a decade and a half. He turned down a more lucrative deal with RCA in order to sign with David Geffen’s eponymous label, which offered him a huge advance for each album and complete artistic freedom.

Musically, Young purchased two devices that would change the course of his work for the foreseeable future: a synthesizer/sampling unit called the synclavier (first heard on re·ac·tor’s finale, “Shots”) and a vocorder, a device that radically altered the sound of the human voice.

“I was looking for ways to change my voice,” Young told the Voice. “To sing through a voice that no one could recognize and it wouldn’t be judged as being me.”

Young began recording a handful of songs that would eventually wind up on Trans. One of them was a robotic take on his Buffalo Springfield hit, “Mr. Soul,” made to blow the minds of his fellow Springfield bandmates, who were considering a reunion. But when the Geffen deal was signed, Young set the tracks aside and, with Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer in tow, headed for Hawaii to make an album called Island in the Sun.

That album, which also featured Ben Keith, Ralph Molina, Nils Lofgren, and CSNY percussionist Joe Lala, was intended as a commercial album that would please Young’s new label. “It was a tropical thing all about sailing, ancient civilizations, islands and water,” Young told Mojo. But Geffen rejected it. So much for artistic freedom.

In his usual taciturn fashion, Young returned to the mainland and revived Trans, which deals even more explicitly than re·ac·tor with the demands of Ben’s original program. To handle the pressure, Young said, he completely shut himself down emotionally.

“I closed myself down so much that I was makin’ it, doin’ great with surviving,” he told the Voice. “But my soul was completely encased. I didn’t even consider that I would need a soul to play my music, that when I shut the door on pain, I shut the door on my music.”

Young attempted to lay bare his crippled emotional state but to do it anonymously, hiding himself in a cast of characters created by the vocorder’s many voices. It took years for him to let his fans in on the album’s subtext:

Trans was about all these robot-humanoid people working in this hospital, and the one thing they were trying to do was teach this little baby to push a button. That’s what the record’s about. Read the lyrics, listen to all the mechanical voices, disregard everything but that computerized thing, and it’s clear Trans is the beginning of my search for communication with a severely handicapped nonoral person. “Transformer Man” is a song for my kid. If you read the words to that song—and look at my child with his little button and his train set and his transformer—the whole thing is for Ben.

In its released form, however, Trans is a mix of Young’s inscrutable computer music and three songs from the Island in the Sun sessions: “Little Thing Called Love,” “Hold On to Your Love,” and “Like an Inca.” True, songs like “Computer Age,” “Sample and Hold,” and “Transformer Man”—the latter of which, in its new context, seems more sweet than foreboding—didn’t go anywhere that the German electronic band Kraftwerk didn’t go first. But the album represented an incredibly bold, risky move for an artist of Young’s stature.

Far riskier, though, was Young’s decision to take the Transband (as it was dubbed) on the road before the album’s release. Unlike the Rust tour, whose backdrop was comically outsized for effect, everything about Young’s European trek was literally too big. It was over budget, used too much equipment, was booked into halls he couldn’t fill, and was too technically complex. Some of the dates were canceled. Several ended in riots. The shows left audiences puzzled and Young awash in red ink.

TRAIN OF LOVE TRAVELS ON THE LIONEL LINE

NEIL YOUNG’S A MODEL TRAIN GUY—has been since age five, when he got his first set, a Marx Santa Fe diesel on an L-shaped track layout in a basement prone to flooding. He never lost his locomotive jones and for a time wound up running the most famous model train manufacturer in the world.

Young’s association with Lionel LLC came from his passion for the product as well as his desire to bond with his sons, Zeke and Ben, both of whom have cerebral palsy. Young owns one of the most extensive model train collections in the world, rolling them around an elaborate layout in a separate barn on his property in Redwood City, California. The spread is decorated with landscapes made from real redwood trunks, living plants watered by an internal irrigation system, ponds stocked with real goldfish, handmade wooden trestles, and a variety of accessories acquired during his travels.

Flying the Lionel flag, Ahoy Hall, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, May 27, 1987. Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty Images

Biographer Jimmy McDonough described the train barn as “a refuge for Neil: no band members flubbing notes, no producers storming off, no surprises outside of the occasional derailment.” But the ability to connect further with his sons is what truly enriched the experience for Young and inspired him to pursue model trains on a larger scale.

Young had set up a train layout for Zeke, and when Ben—whose CP is more debilitating—was old enough, Young began “inventing all these gizmos so he can run the train set with it.” The inventions are mostly simple devices that allow Zeke to regulate the flow of train traffic around the tracks. Young formed his own short-lived company, Yardmaster, in the late 1980s and then worked for a time with Quinn-Severson Industries (QSI) to develop new and more realistic sound systems for the trains.

But all roads led to Lionel.

Young met Lionel’s owner and CEO, Richard P. Kughn, through QSI. Even as Young’s relationship with the latter derailed—and wound up in court—he and Kughn, a self-professed “Bing Crosby fan,” developed an alliance and a surprising friendship. “Neil is a very, very bright individual when it comes to electronics,” Kughn noted, “and he happens to be a very, very fine human being as well as a very talented guy. He’s a very warm and caring human being.”

Young and Kughn partnered in a new venture called Liontech Trains LLC to bring the technology he’d invented at home to the masses. “We believe that the experience of controlling a miniature world can help the physically challenged improve their confidence and self-esteem and their perspective,” Kughn explained. And having Neil Young involved in the company—especially as he was at a music career high with the Freedom, Ragged Glory, and Harvest Moon albums—boosted morale at Lionel, too. One staffer noted:

It’s kind of wild, because he does not have the typical corporate look. Just to see a table full of suits and this guy standing up there talking, saying, “Here’s the game plan,” makes it pretty interesting. But nobody’s going, “Who the hell is this guy?” He knows what he’s talking about, and when he talks, you listen. . . . And he loves trains, which kind of makes you part of the family out here.

Young eventually became a father figure in that family. In 1995, when Kughn was unable to hang on to Lionel, Young joined a partnership that purchased controlling interest in the company, with his share a reported 20 percent.

In a world increasingly dominated by video games, however, the model train industry suffered. Lionel filed for bankruptcy in 2004, following a number of cost-cutting measures—including layoffs and moving some production out of the United States—as well as a $38.6 ruling against the company in a suit filed by rival MTH Electric Trains. The reorganization led to new ownership by the private-equity firm Guggenheim Corporate Funding and the estate of the late Martin Davis, who was one of Young’s partners in the 1995 purchase.

Lionel administration has said that Young retains some interest in the company, primarily via a continued joint venture between Lionel and Young’s Creative Trains LLC in Liontech.

Courtesy Robert Ferreira

Transband, the Catalyst, Santa Cruz, California, July 13, 1982. © Robert Matheu

Trans Band Tour, Wembley Arena, London, September 26, 1982. Andre Csillag/Rex USA

On Live Berlin, a video compiled from the tour’s last two shows, you can see the band—especially Molina (a basher at heart) and Palmer (who’d been suspended from the tour earlier for boozing too much)—fail in its attempt to gel with a tangle of backing tapes, synchedup synclaviers, and Young and Lofgren’s vocorders. It was all too much, especially given that the audience was completely unfamiliar with the new material.

Even had that not been the case, it’s hard to say how much difference it would have made. Young admitted that, bottom line, the songs he was singing were about a communication breakdown that can’t be repaired.

“It was very obscure,” Young said. “[The audience] didn’t have a fuckin’ chance in the world. The whole thing is, Trans is about communication, but it’s not getting through. And that’s what my son is. You gotta realize—you can’t understand the words on Trans, and I can’t understand my son’s words. So feel that.”

Back in the United States, Young jettisoned the band and pared the show down to a solo outing dubbed “A Very Special Evening with Neil Young.” It opened with an acoustic set and ended with an electric one, as Young put to better use the electronic backing techniques he debuted in Europe.

The tour’s true innovation, though, was “Trans TV,” a live in-house video broadcast hosted by anchorman “Dan Clear” (actor Newell Alexander). Clear showed video clips and interviewed the crew, members of the crowd, and even Young himself, who offered a halftime assessment of his performance.

As with so much of Young’s output in the ’80s, such hijinks were, for some fans, an acquired taste.

Anxious once again to move on to the next thing, Young took a brief break from performing to record in Nashville with familiar faces Ben Keith, Tim Drummond, Rufus Thibodeaux, and Spooner Oldham, among others. The result—as much of an about-face as was possible after Trans—was Old Ways, a country record that went even further afield than side two of Hawks & Doves. Among the songs recorded were the working-class anthem “Depression Blues” and the title track, on which Young vowed to stop drinking and doping.

Young returned to the road but canceled the tour after he collapsed backstage in Louisville, Kentucky. Things worsened when Geffen rejected Old Ways, requesting a rock ’n’ roll album instead. Young told PBS’s American Masters:

They said, “Hey Neil, you’ve got to make a rock and roll record, you just have to.” I said, “Do you know what rock and roll is?” and there was kind of a silence and then I tried to figure out what it was. And then I thought in my mind, “Rock and roll, what the hell is rock and roll?

Let’s go back in time to when rock and roll started and try to see what it is.”

Young slicked his hair back, donned a hep-cat suit and tie, and recorded a quick collection of rockabilly and ’50s-style pop tunes that was, in its own way, as puzzling as Trans. His band was called the Shocking Pinks and featured Keith, Drummond, pianist Larry Byrom, drummer Karl Himmel, and vocalists Anthony Crawford and Rick Palombi.

Clocking in at less than twenty-five minutes, Everybody’s Rockin’, beyond being a genre exercise and a peek into the kind of music on which Young grew up, is mostly forgettable. A notable exception is “Payola Blues,” which asserts that pay-for-play radio (and, indeed, MTV) was as prevalent a problem then as in the days of ’50s deejay Alan Freed. The title track, meanwhile, affirms Young’s Republican bona fides, surreally imagining “Ronnie and Nancy” boogying on the White House lawn.

Young got deeply into the Everybody’s Rockin’ character and took the Shocking Pinks on tour, but the album stiffed. Who could blame his fans for wondering if this was just another put-on?

However sincere his retro trip, Young put the Shocking Pinks to rest and attempted a reunion with Crazy Horse, which produced a pair of explosive shows at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California, but fell apart in the studio.

He then formed the International Harvesters, a country band featuring Keith, Drummond, Himmel, Thibodeaux, Oldham, and Crawford.

But then came a move that no one was looking for, and for once it wasn’t perpetrated by Young.

Disappointed and confused by Young’s increasingly outré activities, Geffen slapped him with a $3.3 million lawsuit, claiming his records had become “unrepresentative” of his previous output. Rather than bow to the pressure of the lawsuit, Young simply dove deeper into his latest country excursion. He swore off rock, booked tours with Waylon Jennings and other country artists, and even played the Grand Ole Opry.

Everybody’s Rockin’ promo photo, August 1983. AP Photo

Backed with “Payola Blues,” the Netherlands, 1983. Courtesy Robert Ferreira

Throw Your Hatred Down

The Feud with David Geffen

WHEN FORMER ASYLUM RECORDS founder David Geffen returned to the music industry in 1980 to start Geffen Records with $25 million in startup money from parent label Warner Bros., he began loading up on stars: John Lennon, Elton John, Donna Summer, Joni Mitchell, Peter Gabriel. He wanted to sell lots of records. That’s one of the reasons he signed Neil Young for $1 million per album and total creative freedom.

And that’s why Geffen and Young wound up in one of the most notorious feuds ever between an artist and his record company.

“They didn’t look at me as an artist,” Young told Rolling Stone after the dust had settled and he was back with Warner’s Reprise imprint. “They looked at me as a product, and this product didn’t fit in with their marketing scheme.”

To be fair, Young did present Geffen with some of his most ambitious and challenging—some would say just plain weird—music: 1983’s Trans, his foray into electronic music, and Everybody’s Rockin’, a short (25-minute) rockabilly celebration that came out later that year. But, Young counters, he also presented the label with albums he felt were definitely saleable that Geffen ultimately rejected, including the tropical-flavored Island in the Sun and a version of Old Ways that he described as Harvest II. “I really tried to do my best during that period, but I felt I was working under duress,” Young said. “It was blatant manipulation. It was just so different from anything I’d ever experienced.”

The situation exploded in November 1983, when Geffen sued Young in Los Angeles Superior Court for $3.3 million, accusing him of making albums that were “not ‘commerical’ and . . . musically uncharacteristic of Young’s previous recordings.” Young countersued for $21 million. Needless to say, the rapport between them was a bit . . . tense. “To get sued for being noncommercial after 20 years of making records, I thought was better than a Grammy,” he told Musician. He related to Q that he told Geffen executives to “back off or I’m going to play country music forever. And then you won’t be able to sue me anymore because country music will be what I always do so it won’t be ‘uncharacteristic’ anymore. . . . I’ll turn into George Jones.”

The stalemate ended on April 1, 1985, with both parties dropping their respective suits. Young volunteered to restructure his deal with Geffen, reducing the per-album fee to $500,000. After the legal swords were sheathed and Geffen personally apologized, Young was charitable in his comments, empathizing with the financial pressure of running a label and telling biographer Jimmy McDonough that Geffen took Young’s low sales “personally—that I was making these weird records just to make him look like an idiot.” He noted that Geffen was “still my friend.”

He was not Young’s boss for much longer, however. Young recorded several more studio albums for Geffen, including an even more country-flavored Old Ways in 1985 and a set with Crazy Horse, Life, in 1987, as well as the 1993 compilation Lucky Thirteen. And, if it made Geffen feel any better, Young’s first release back with Reprise was the brassy blues set, This Note’s for You.

In 1990, David Geffen sold Geffen Records to MCA Music Entertainment for an estimated $800 million in stock, which multiplied when Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. bought MCA the following year. Geffen stayed with the company until 1995, when he joined forces with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg in the multimedia DreamWorks SKG.

International Harvesters Tour, Pacific Amphitheatre, Costa Mesa, California, October 24, 1984. © Robert Matheu

“I miss the feeling of community that rock had in the ’60s,” Young told Rolling Stone. “But I got back that feeling when I started hanging out with country guys.”

Eventually, the suit blew over. Young agreed to take a smaller advance for future recordings, and Geffen agreed to release his previously rejected country album, albeit in a completely revamped form.

Old Ways bore little resemblance to its earlier version. Only a couple of the original songs survived, including the title track, which was recast as a duet with Willie Nelson. In place of some of the other cuts were epic overproductions, including a schmaltzy remake of “The Wayward Wind,” a ’50s hit for Tex Ritter and Gogi Grant, and the string-laden “Misfits,” which proved Nashville hadn’t quite wrung all of the hippie out of him. The song imagines the inhabitants of the space station watching “re-runs of Muhammad Ali.”

More damning, though, was Young’s replacing the cadre of trusted sidemen he had brought to the earlier sessions with a host of Nashville pros, whose approach to music had little to do with Young’s vibe-dependent technique. In short, the album became another case of style over substance.

As before, it was difficult to tell where the real Neil Young ended and the role he was playing began. In interviews, Young trashed rock music and its fans, touted Ronald Reagan, and toed country’s conservative line on subjects such as patriotism, welfare, and foreigners—never mind that Young, who had never given up his Canadian citizenship, was one himself.

If Young’s pronouncements hurt his reputation at home, they all but destroyed it in Europe, where he also canceled a tour due to fear of Libyan terrorism (then on the rise following the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland). Indeed, it would take Young years to rebuild his relationship with his fans abroad.

That doesn’t mean he turned his back on the rest of the world, however. In 1984, Young’s third child was born, a daughter named Amber. And in early 1985, Young took part in the charity single “Tears Are Not Enough,” the Canadian collective Northern Lights’ equivalent to USA for Africa’s “We Are the World” and Band Aid’s U.K. effort “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Young performed twice at the Live Aid concert for Ethiopian famine relief: first in a set backed by the International Harvesters, then in a surprise return with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Under-rehearsed, plagued by monitor problems, and thrown off by a drug-addled Crosby, the two-song CSNY reunion was a disaster. Though fans continued to long for a new album and tour from the supergroup, the Live Aid performance made clear how unfortunate such an endeavor would be if Crosby didn’t pull himself together. Young even made that a condition of any future get-together.

Trade ad, 1985 Australia tour.

I actually did meet Neil, and, of course, the Bob Dylans and Neil Youngs and Willie Nelsons, and all those guys from that era are fantastic poets, songwriters. You just don’t see very many guys being successful in this day that do what they do, which is too bad. I expected Neil to probably not dig my patriotic image, but he’s one of those guys that don’t take an issue with you being patriotic. They really don’t put being patriotic into the political category; they just view you as an artist out doing your own thing, and that’s the way Neil was.

—Toby Keith

The “Tears Are Not Enough” famine-relief single recorded by Canadian artists, February 10, 1985.

Live Aid, JFK Stadium, Philadelphia, July 13, 1985. AP Photo/George Widman

Crosby would indeed clean up, but he wouldn’t do it willingly. He entered and abandoned numerous treatment programs and established a substantial rap sheet along the way. By year’s end, he was in the Texas State Penitentiary on drug and gun charges. The only way he would quit hard drugs, it seemed, was by doing hard time.

At Live Aid, Bob Dylan made an offhand pronouncement that he’d like to see some of the money raised go to help pay the mortgages of American family farmers. Willie Nelson took that ball and ran with it, joining with Young and John Cougar Mellencamp to make Farm Aid a reality. The first of many such concerts was held at the University of Illinois’ Memorial Stadium and featured thirty-eight acts—Bob Dylan among them—raising millions of dollars and, perhaps more importantly, awareness for the plight of the family farmer.

Not everyone was in such a charitable mood, however. Geffen rejected the idea of Young releasing a five-song EP to benefit Farm Aid.

Whether to placate his increasingly difficult label chief—which is unlikely—or because he sensed his time as a country artist was at an end, Young returned to the studio to record a rock album, Landing on Water. But rather than hire Crazy Horse for the task, he brought in two studio pros: drummer Steve Jordan, whose credits included numerous jazz, rock, and funk sessions, and guitarist/co-producer Danny Kortchmar, best known as a veteran sideman and songwriting partner of Don Henley and Jackson Browne.

Initially, Young was fired up. “That album was like a rebirth,” he told Rolling Stone. “Something came alive; it was like a bear waking up.”

Young revived some of the songs he’d tried to record with Crazy Horse in 1984, including “Touch the Night” and “Violent Side,” but his approach this time was very different. Instead of employing the Horse’s shoot-from-the-hip spontaneity, the songs this time were tightly produced and heavily overdubbed, emphasizing Jordan’s drums and all manner of percussive clinks and clanks. And while Young’s guitar rings out in ways that it hadn’t in years, the album is dominated by synthesizers instead. In its attempt to sound utterly contemporary, the album sounds positively stuck in the ’80s. It’s dated—one of the very few Neil Young albums to wear that particular badge of shame.

With (from left) Anthony Crawford, Waylon Jennings, and Rufus Thibodeaux, Farm Aid I, Memorial Stadium, Champaign, Illinois, September 22, 1985. © Robert Matheu

Field of Opportunity

Farm Aid

Farm Aid–organized protest to support the Freedom to Farm Act, U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C., September 13, 1999. Photo by Michael Smith/Getty Images

ON JULY 13, 1985, some of the world’s top music stars had spent nearly fifteen hours at seven sites around the world singing to raise money for the people of famine-ravaged Ethiopia. As the “global jukebox” known as Live Aid drew to a close, Bob Dylan stepped up to the microphone at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia and said, “I hope that some of the money . . . maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe . . . one or two million, maybe, and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms . . . the farmers here owe to the banks.”

The comment angered Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof, but the idea stirred Willie Nelson, who subsequently enlisted Neil Young and John Mellencamp as the artistic muscle behind a new venture called Farm Aid. All three remain members of Farm Aid’s board of directors and were joined by Dave Matthews after the 2001 concert.

Nelson brought the idea to Young first, a few days after Live Aid at the video shoot for “Are There Any More Real Cowboys?” from Young’s forthcoming Old Ways album. Enlisting Mellencamp and country singer John Conlee, they made the first Farm Aid a reality, with thirty-eight acts playing on September 22, 1985, at the University of Illinois’ Memorial Stadium in Champaign-Urbana.

Prior to the concert, Young wrote an open letter to President Ronald Reagan, which was published as a full-page ad in USA Today and read aloud at the concert. In it, Young told Reagan, who he called “in many ways . . . a great leader,” that it was time to aid family farmers both in the U.S. and around the world. He argued that America’s food exportation “undercut the family farmers in those countries, forcing them out of business.” He told Reagan that his administration’s policies would “deal a fatal blow” to America’s family farm community and also send “a tremor of fear through every small family business in America. What will this do to the American spirit?”

The issue, of course, was a bit harder to sell to the masses than, say, feeding people in Africa. Nevertheless, the first Farm Aid raised an estimated $10 million. Today, Farm Aid lobbies on behalf of family farm interests—it’s credited with the passage of the 1987 Agricultural Credit Act to help family farms facing foreclosure—provides legal and financial assistance, and educates the public about the importance of family farms. Young has remained an outspoken proponent at each of the concerts, including a memorable diatribe against Vice President Al Gore and Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy for not attending the 1993 show in Ames, Iowa. “Why aren’t they here to hear this?” Young raged. “We shouldn’t be doing this for seven, eight, ten, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty years. Farm Aid is not an American tradition. It’s a band-aid. We ought to get rid of it. We want more from Washington!”

Farm Aid concerts have taken place annually—except for 1988—and have moved from large-scale stadium spectacles to more modest but still impactful amphitheater shows. Young has performed solo as well as with Crazy Horse and CSNY. His “Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)” from 1990’s Ragged Glory was recorded during Farm Aid IV at the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis.

“Farm Aid has been great,” Young told biographer Jimmy McDonough. “We’ve done alotta things. The shortcomings of Farm Aid are many, and the accomplishments are many. It’s just one of those things—you believe in it, you keep goin’ and you keep tryin’ to make it better.”

With John Fogerty, Keith Richards, and Chuck Berry, First Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Awards, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, January 24, 1986. AP Photo/Frankie Ziths

Solo performance at Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior Music Festival, Auckland, New Zealand, April 23, 1986.

Landing on Water promo poster, 1986.

Neil Young in Berlin film poster, 1986.

Eventually, even Young turned on it, admitting to the syndicated radio show Rockline that Landing on Water is “a piece of crap.”

Having already spearheaded one long-running charity in Farm Aid, Young turned his attention to raising funds and awareness for a cause even closer to home: The Bridge School is a Mountain View, California, institution dedicated to aiding severely impaired children with physical and communication issues. Pegi Young was one of the school’s founders. The first Bridge School Benefit was held at Shoreline Amphitheatre and featured acoustic performances from Young, Bruce Springsteen, Nils Lofgren, CSNY, Don Henley, and Tom Petty. The show became an annual event, and the involvement of Young and other noted musicians has raised millions of dollars for the cause.

Despite having cast Crazy Horse aside for the recording of Landing on Water, Young hired them to go on tour in support of it. The shows mixed high concept and low comedy, evidenced by a stage set that brought back some of the oversized props from the Rust era with a few new twists. Billed as the “Third Best Garage Band in the World,” Young and the Horse played as if they were just that. Along the way, they were forced to endure the same type of indignities as a genuine garage band: a mother who phoned in, asking that the music be turned down; household pests, including mechanical insects and giant talking mice (actually a couple of roadies in rodent costumes); and a team of exterminators who interrupted the proceedings.

The tour took on an even more ambitious dimension as Young attempted to record Life, an entirely new set of songs, in concert (later to be finished in the studio á la Rust Never Sleeps) and document the entire process with a film that was to be titled Muddy Track. But Young hadn’t yet gotten the synthesizers out of his system, nor his taste for right-wing politics. “Mideast Vacation” and “Long Walk Home” take note of how isolated America had become from the rest of the world—a predicament to which Young could no doubt relate. “Inca Queen,” meanwhile, is a poor cousin of precursors “Cortez the Killer” and “Like an Inca.” Still, “Prisoners of Rock ’n’ Roll” shows a bit of spirit, railing against “taking orders from record company clowns,” Young’s most pointed reference to his Geffen overlords. “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks,” an emotionally charged ballad, could have been one of Young’s standout tracks from the 1980s, but its indifferent arrangement and placement deep in the album all but buries it.

He’s really one of our last true artists left that follows his muse wherever it leads. He’s got some incredibly beautiful records and records that are unlistenable and downright confusing. Yet he makes them and he puts them out and seems to love them all equally. It’s really an extraordinary journey by an extraordinary guy. I don’t work with anybody who doesn’t think Neil’s the best thing ever. He doesn’t compromise; you don’t see a beer ad or a party on a boat with Neil Young. He’s always maintained a true and full artistic credibility. And he was incredibly nice to us when we did the Bridge School thing; there were 18 million people playing there, and he made everybody who came feel like they were his favorite band and he was as happy as could be to have them there. That’s one more telling act of a very gracious man.

—Steve Berlin, Los Lobos

Crazy Horse Live in a Rusted Out Garage Tour, Patriot Center, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, September 26, 1986. © Chester Simpson (Rock-N-RollPhotos.com)

Spain, 1987. Courtesy Robert Ferreira

Ever anxious to get into the music by playing a character, Young slipped into a ratty suit coat, fedora, and some shades and transformed himself into a bluesman known as Shakey Deal.

More than anything, Life seems like a missed opportunity. Why spend time on heavy-handed production, mechanized beats, and endless overdubs when you’ve got Crazy Horse standing around?

The Muddy Track film, incidentally, has yet to be released.

Also unheard is an album that Young was allegedly going to use to fulfill his contractual obligation to Geffen: a New Age/ambient sound collage called Meadow Dusk. It’s impossible to know how serious he was about the album, but he never got a chance to test the already outraged Geffen’s mettle. Young was unceremoniously dumped from the label.

He wasted no time in rejoining Warner/Reprise, a move that contractually cleared the way for the CSNY reunion Young had promised if Crosby cleaned up. But even as that process began, Young went back on the road, heading to Europe for a dismal tour that proved he had yet to regain his star power overseas.

Returning to the United States, Young inserted into his concerts an impromptu blues interlude, featuring guitar tech Larry Cragg on saxophone. The idea captured Young’s imagination, and eventually Crazy Horse gave way to the Bluenotes, a nine-piece band boasting a sixman horn section. Ever anxious to get into the music by playing a character, Young slipped into a ratty suit coat, fedora, and some shades and transformed himself into a bluesman known as Shakey Deal.

Assembling a quick batch of songs, Young hastily recorded This Note’s for You, which is unquestionably the best of his genre excursions. But the prevailing wisdom about the Bluenotes is that the band’s best work was done in concert, evidenced by several choice bootlegs from the period. Among the officially released album’s better tunes are the haunting “Coupe de Ville,” the trenchant “Life in the City,” and, of course, “This Note’s for You,” an anti–corporate sponsorship rant that earned widespread infamy when its video swung a satirical ax too close to MTV’s purse strings. The video channel banned it, but after being embarrassed by the obvious overreaction, reversed course and not only played the video but awarded it honors as the Video of the Year.

Life Tour, Philadelphia, 1987.

In changing musical styles radically in the ’80s, Young became viewed by many as “his generation’s consummate weirdo,” according to Rolling Stone. Young’s own perspective, though, was that whatever he did, whenever he did it, he meant every word, every note. He told Q:

It’s a very stupid thing to assume that I’m making different kinds of music to draw attention to myself. I made Trans because I wanted to. I did the Shocking Pinks and the International Harvesters because I wanted to and I’m doing the Bluenotes because I want to, and if you don’t like that shit, fine. What are these guys saying? That the cool thing is just to do the same thing over and over again and not be a weirdo? Because if Neil Young did do the same thing over and over and over again and wasn’t a weirdo, then these guys would be going, “Oh, Neil Young, he’s so boring . . . .” You can’t win.

Back on the CSNY front, David Crosby had fulfilled Young’s reunion requirement that he clean up. But he was still in horrific physical shape and, indeed, would eventually be diagnosed with hepatitis C and require a liver transplant. Stills, too, was in a bad way. Though American Dream was eventually completed and released, the album was doomed from the beginning.

The quartet recorded at Young’s home studio with his right-hand man, Niko Bolas, manning the controls. Young contributed three songs—the title track, “Name of Love,” and “This Old House”—and co-wrote two others with Stills. But it’s a bland, milquetoast record and nothing resembling the bold return to form that CSNY fans—and certainly certain members of CSNY—hoped for.

Young likely knew it was a blind alley. As the decade neared its close, he found himself once again looking for a new direction. Though he’d spent the better part of the ’80s doing projects that interested him, he seldom fully engaged his fans. And what magic he did create, onstage or off, during those years was rarely made manifest in the studio.

But at a time when many were ready to dismiss Young as a hippie star who had long ago lost his way, Young set his course for a major comeback that found him stripping his music back to an elemental level: guitar, bass, drums.

Both freedom and ragged glory awaited.

With the Bluenotes. Photo by Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Courtesy Robert Ferreira

Courtesy Cyril Kieldsen

Certainly I think he’s one of the most influential artists of the last 30 or 40 years . . . . I think in many ways he’s had the sort of career that I think most artists, myself included, would kill for. He’s able to just do as he pleases and go from country to rock and folk and blues and do all these things and sort of tie them in seamlessly. It’s been really beautiful to watch. I think artists like him are not affected by downturns in the music business; they’re just kind of immune to it because they exist in their own worlds. That’s the key to success is to do exactly that. In many ways I admire him not only for his music and his creative spirit but also for his entrepreneurial spirit and his philosophical spirit . . . . When he sticks to something that he believes in, it’s full-on commitment, and I think we need more of that. I think he’s a very brave artist.

—Raul Malo