In 1997, Buffalo Springfield was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but Young was a no-show. He protested the ceremony’s shift from a Friar’s Club–style insider’s party to a VH1 broadcast. “So, Rich,” Stephen Stills quipped to bandmate Richie Furay at the podium, “he quit again.”
Young, it turned out, was intent on celebrating the Springfield in another fashion. For years he had been working on his magnum opus, a multi-disc box set that was originally titled Decade II but eventually came to be known as Archives. In an act of ego that would qualify as a delusion of grandeur had he not gone on to do such great work, Young had saved all his recordings so one day he’d be able to piece together his own musical history rather than rely on someone else to do it. Of course, that history included Buffalo Springfield, so he sifted through the band’s material with an eye toward compiling a box set separate from his own. He invited Stills to his ranch to hear what he’d done. The two “laughed, cried, and hugged each other,” Young recalled.
At some point, Stills brought out a guitar and played a song he’d just written. Young liked it so much that he volunteered to play guitar on it, and a full CSNY reunion blossomed from there. Young recalled:
I came into the studio and discovered that they were in here working on a record by themselves, and they weren’t using a record company. They had to finance it themselves, so obviously they were really into it. That’s the only real good reason to play music. So it was just a good feeling again; it was three guys who have been making music together for thirty years, and they still want to do it enough to take out bank loans or whatever. That’s why someone would want to be involved in that energy. It was all positive, and the music was really great.
Artist: Jermaine Rogers (www.jermainerogers.com)
Bridge School Benefit, Shoreline Ampitheatre, Mountain View, California, October 31, 1999. Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/ImageDirect/Getty Images
Young had been working on an acoustic album called Silver & Gold, but he told his partners they could mine any of the songs they liked for the CSNY album. They picked four: “Slowpoke,” “Out of Control,” “Queen of Them All,” and the eventual title track, “Looking Forward.” Stills took three writing credits on the album, and Crosby and Nash took two apiece.
Past CSNY endeavors had ended in acrimony, tears, fistfights, and name-calling. This time things were different because, as Crosby noted, “There’s no chemical baggage.” Crosby had cleaned up in prison and was the recipient in 1994 of a liver transplant. He also had a reputation to uphold as a celebrity sperm donor (to Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher); the term “sperm whale” was tossed around during the sessions and subsequent tour rehearsals. Even Stills had beaten his primary demon, cocaine. But despite all the love in the room, Looking Forward was largely a critical and commercial disappointment. Still, the quartet could point to a sold-out arena tour—its first tour of any kind since 1974—as evidence of its continued appeal. Kicking off as it did just after the turn of the millennium, the tour was dubbed CSNY2K.
CSNY2K Tour, Staples Center, Los Angeles, February 12, 2000. AP Photo/E. J. Flynn
He’s only one of the great, historically correct artists of all time. Him and Tom Petty and Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris, these kinds of artists are the foundation of our culture. These people have created the grid that we all can follow, and that’s what’s beautiful, because he never followed the herd. He’s completely original.
—Nancy Wilson, Heart
Promo cigar box, Silver & Gold, 2000. Courtesy Robert Ferreira
Young, having given what he called “the cream of the crop” of his songs to CSNY, still managed to salvage Silver & Gold, pulling together songs from a variety of sources. “Some of them are pretty old, some of them are brand new,” he said. “They’re written in the same state of mind, I think, over the years.”
It’s still an acoustic album as originally envisioned but with the addition of some sidemen, including Ben Keith, Spooner Oldham, drummer Jim Keltner, bassist Duck Dunn, and vocalists Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. The picture that emerges from songs such as the title track, “Daddy Went Walkin’,” and “Razor Love” is one of family values, middle age, and contented domesticity. “Love and a razor may not be an easy analogy to draw,” Young said of the latter song, “but they’re really quite similar because your love is inside something, and a razor or a blade, it cuts right to the point. But there’s no hate in there. It’s not about violence. It’s about cutting to the quick, about getting through all the things that get in the way of love.”
The song “Buffalo Springfield Again,” meanwhile, heads in another direction, giving a shout-out to his old band and offering hope for a reunion. “Maybe now we can show the world what we got,” Young sings. The reunion never happened (except, according to Young, in private), but the box set—named, perhaps a tad too matter-of-factly, Box Set—did.
Young kept the Silver & Gold band together, substituting wife Pegi and half-sister Astrid for Harris and Ronstadt, and hit the road. The series of shows resulted in a live album, his third and least impressive such effort of the decade. Road Rock V1: Friends and Relatives features just one new song—“Fool for Your Love,” a remnant from the Bluenotes era—plus a cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” with a guest appearance by the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde.
Music in Head Tour, 2000.
The Bridge School
Bridge School Benefit, Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, California, October 23, 2004. Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
AFTER THEIR SON, BEN, was diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy, Neil Young and his wife, Pegi, were afforded an intensive and sometimes dispiriting look at the state of treatment for children with severe physical and speech impairments. It inspired some of the songs on Neil’s albums re·ac·tor and Trans, but, more importantly, it inspired Pegi to action.
A team composed of Pegi, fellow parent Jim Forderer, and speech and language pathologist Dr. Marilyn Buzolich laid the groundwork for the Bridge School. It was conceived as a local nonprofit program designed, according to its mission statement,
to ensure that individuals with severe speech and physical impairments achieve full participation in their communities through the use of augmentative and alternative means of communication (AAC) and assistive technology (AT) applications and through the development, implementation and dissemination of innovative life-long educational strategies.
It was certainly a cause Neil could get behind. On October 13, 1986, he hosted the first Bridge School Benefit Concert at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. Assisted by concert promoter Bill Graham and joined by Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, the Eagles’ Don Henley, Nils Lofgren, comedian Robin Williams, and a reunited CSNY, he raised a reported $250,000 that allowed Pegi and her cohorts to open a school the following year in Hillsborough, California.
The Bridge School, which opened a permanent facility in 1995, has since grown into an international leader in its field and has implemented a series of worldwide outreach and research programs. Its profile, of course, is ensured by the concerts, which have taken place every year except for 1987, but Neil has always maintained the school’s success “is all Pegi. I’m just the public relations man.”
He’s done a fine job. Expanding to two-night affairs, the concerts have featured special and often “unplugged” performances by a who’s-who of popular musicians for one of the most anxiously anticipated music events of each year. Springsteen, Petty, Henley, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., and Sammy Hagar are among those who have performed at multiple shows, and Young himself has performed every year—on his own and with CSNY, Crazy Horse, the Stray Gators, and some of his other bands. In 1997, an album—Bridge School Concerts, Vol. 1, kicked off by a Young solo performance of “I Am a Child”—was released with proceeds going to the school.
Pegi Young explained:
One of the things that makes me happiest about having the artists come and play the Bridge Show is that they really get an understanding that they probably didn’t have before about people like our students at Bridge. You don’t really understand them as human beings, but when they spend a weekend together and they interact, the artists begin to understand what’s going on inside. That to me is the best thing. It’s much more than a musical moment. It’s like a life-altering moment.
Among those most moved by the experience has been Eddie Vedder, who has performed at several Bridge shows both with Pearl Jam and on his own. “Eddie’s one of the dearest friends the Bridge School has outside of my husband,” Pegi Young said. “He really has honest and true relationships with the kids.”
In 2006, to celebrate the initiative’s twentieth anniversary, the Bridge School also hosted its first Heart of Gold Gala, another fundraiser held a week after the concerts, with Elton John providing entertainment. Information about the Bridge School and its programs can be found at www.bridgeschool.org. 
Fleadh Festival, Finsbury Park, London, June 16, 2001. © Richard Skidmore/Retna
Crazy Horse Eurotour, Berlin, Germany, 2001.
I love the guy, and sometimes he makes my head turn a little bit because I feel like he releases everything, and I love that about him. “Here’s the next album I’m putting out right now,” and he releases his Archives of everything. He really wants you to be part of his entire journey, his entire process, without caring about the criticism or anything that could come with it. I find myself in a position where people are always saying, “Don’t put that out right now. You gotta wait,” or “You don’t want to put that out right now ’cause people might think this or that.” And when I look at Neil Young and the career retrospective that he offers, he’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff, constantly, and he never stopped. He just kept releasing, kept releasing, kept releasing, and to me that’s what we should be doing. And he really is a rocker; I saw him at Glastonbury, and that guy’s still playing like he was in “Cortez the Killer,” just really shredding and doing lengthy jams and taking people on journeys. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the guy. I kinda want to understand his secret to longevity.
—Jason Mraz
The album’s real flaw, though, is that the band, built for the subtle acoustic stylings of Silver & Gold, is ill-suited for the long guitar freakouts of “Cowgirl in the Sand” (clocking in at eighteen minutes), “Words” (eleven minutes), and “Tonight’s the Night” (ten and a half minutes).
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Young lent his voice to the chorus of support given to victims’ families by artists including Bruce Springsteen, U2, Billy Joel, Dave Matthews, and Alicia Keys. He sang a plaintive rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a performance that can be found on America: A Tribute to Heroes.
Conjuring the spirit and immediacy of “Ohio” three decades prior, Young also wrote “Let’s Roll,” which he released just weeks after the attacks. The song takes its title from words spoken by United Airlines Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer, one of the doomed travelers believed to have overpowered the hijackers before the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field. “You got to turn on evil when it’s coming after you,” Young sings grimly. “It struck me as heroic in a legendary way,” he said. “These guys weren’t doing this to be martyrs or because they thought they would get a payback.” He figured, though, that someone else would tell the story in a song before he would:
I said to myself, “There’s gonna be ten people that come out with songs called ‘Let’s Roll’ next week—there’ll be two country ‘Let’s Rolls’ and a rock and roll ‘Let’s roll’ and an R&B ‘Let’s Roll.’ They’ll be everywhere.” So I sat back and waited for six weeks or so, and nothing happened. And then [President George W.] Bush goes on TV and says, “Let’s roll,” and for me that was the last straw. I said, “I just gotta do this. I don’t care if it’s the most obvious thing that ever happened.”
He performed the song with CSNY when the band went on tour again in 2002. Young thought the quartet’s presence in the wake of 9/11 would offer fans “some kind of feeling of comfort . . . seeing that we’re still here, and everybody’s still here, and we’re still doing what we do.”
I just gotta do this. I don’t care if it’s the most obvious thing that ever happened.
“Let’s Roll” eventually found its way onto Young’s album Are You Passionate? Except for one Crazy Horse track, the album was recorded with Booker T. and the MGs, who Young had first played with at Bobfest. As for favoring the seasoned Stax band over his traditional backing unit, Young said, “It’s just that the groove and the feeling and the vibe of the music was more uplifting.” True, the album opened him up to criticism of returning to his old days of genre exercises, positing himself this time as a Southern soul man. But the combination of Young and the MGs turned out to be no more audacious than his signing to Motown Records as a member of the Mynah Birds in the ’60s. Though it’s surfaced in many different ways over the years, Neil Young has always had soul.
Greendale Tour, Saratoga Springs, New York, 2003. Artist: Bob Masse (bmasse.com)
Bonnaroo, Manchester, Tennessee, 2003. Artist: Pasty Poster Co.
His next project would take on a variety of dimensions. Greendale was a concept album–cum–rock opera that Young fleshed out more fully than almost anything he’d ever done. Beyond the album, there was a companion film—another low-budget flick in the spirit of Journey through the Past and Human Highway—plus a book and website. All of it was designed to tell the story of the Greens, a fictional small-town American family struggling with issues of corruption, violence, environmental destruction, and media overload. It’s a postmillennial rock ’n’ roll version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Young is backed by the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Molina and Talbot (with Sampedro hopping back on board for the tour).
When Young took the album on the road, his high-concept/low-budget show featured cardboard sets of the fictional town and a company of actors who lip-synched his lyrics while he and Crazy Horse played live onstage. Young told Rolling Stone:
These characters are all part of me, part of my family and my life—and part of the greater family, the American family. The beautiful thing about the Greendale show is that I’m standing there for an hour and a half, singing these new songs, and people are not looking at me. They’re looking all over. And in the film, I play the music. I sing everything. I see images I want to see, because I filmed a lot of them myself. But I’m not lip syncing, I’m not faking. I really hate that shit.
He was prepared for—and received—a drubbing from critics and fans alike, though, noting, “I’ve heard people saying, ‘This is worse than Trans.’”
Neil’s kind of an enigma to me. I’m very aware of Neil and what he does, old and new. I can’t figure the guy out—and I don’t really need to. Neil’s just awesome. He keeps doing his thing. I saw him when I was on tour with Bob [Dylan] and we were in Italy. We were playing a piazza and had a day off in this town, and Neil and Crazy Horse were playing and it was just unbelievable, particularly his solo part of the show. Neil is just part of that awesome handful of people, him or Joni or Bob or Neil Diamond or whoever; they do their thing, and they’re obviously lifers.
—Charlie Sexton, Arc Angels
Greendale was a surreal experience but nothing like what real life handed Young next. During the sessions for his album Prairie Wind, Young was shaving one morning and noticed an object, somewhat like a piece of broken glass, in his field of vision. No matter what he did, it wouldn’t go away. “So I went to my doctor,” Young told Time magazine, “had an MRI and the next morning I went to the neurologist, Dr. Sun—a Chinese guy, very funny guy. He says, ‘The good news is, you’re here, you’re looking good. The bad news is, you’ve got an aneurysm in your brain. You’ve had it for a hundred years, so it’s nothing to worry about—but it’s very serious, so we’ll have to get rid of it right away.’”
Young handled the situation with superhuman cool. Drummer Chad Cromwell said in the film Heart of Gold:
He said, “I got this brain aneurysm.” And I mean, the world stopped. It was just like, “You what?” He said, “Yeah, I got this brain aneurysm. I’m going to go to New York next Tuesday and they’re gonna do this thing.” He goes, “And it’s really wild what they’re gonna do. . . . They’re gonna go in there and they’re gonna put these little bitty springs in there. And they’re biodegradable and what that does, that makes the body produce this scar tissue which then negates the aneurysm.” I’m sitting there going, “Why are you sitting here? How is that? How can it be that you’re going there next Tuesday and we’re sitting here recording?”
Don’t Be Denied
The Troubled Tale of Young’s Official Biography
WHEN IT COMES TO TALKING about himself, Neil Young has always been something of a reluctant witness. Interviews are hard to come by. “I just don’t like them,” he told Rolling Stone, though he dutifully does a few to promote most of his major projects.
He did, however, enjoy talking to Jimmy McDonough in 1989 for a Village Voice profile. Young subsequently asked McDonough to write the liner notes for a retrospective he was working on, then known as Decade II, and the project soon grew into a full-fledged authorized biography.
But in Neil Young’s world, little is easy—especially when it cuts as close to the bone as a book.
McDonough certainly did the work, spending eight years accumulating three hundred interviews, including fifty hours spent with Young himself, for Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography. By the terms of the agreement, McDonough had full creative control save for matters about Young’s immediate family, over which the artist retained veto power. It was intimate and comprehensive and had all the makings of a blockbuster—a revealing look inside one of pop culture’s most fascinating and ambitious, but guarded, characters.
And it almost didn’t come out.
When McDonough finished the manuscript for Shakey in 1998, Young decided to pull his support. No specific objections were raised about the content, but Young contended that McDonough had delivered the manuscript three years after it was originally due and also violated the agreement by delivering it to the publisher, Random House, rather than directly to Young. McDonough responded with a $1.8 million lawsuit in 2000, noting that the delay was mostly due to having to track down Young for interviews—“This guy kept me in a cat-and-mouse game for another three years,” McDonough told NPR’s Scott Simon—and that Young had waived the contractual deadlines anyway.
Random House sympathized with McDonough. “I am sure that any writer would feel devastated, after spending a decade working on a biography, to have the subject of that biography sabotage its publication,” editor-in-chief Ann Godoff wrote in a letter to the author. But the publisher was not willing to go forward with Shakey without Young’s consent.
The case was settled out of court in 2001, with Shakey finally hitting stores in May 2002. McDonough told Reuters that despite the legal punch-up, “This is the book I originally wrote. He didn’t screw with it. He let me write it the way I wanted to write it.” And he continued to voice admiration for Young as an artist.
“Too much of today’s rock ’n’ roll is about producing atmosphere for a Wal-Mart store,” McDonough said. “There is something about Neil that conveys a real feeling. And he’s got it in spades.”
He says, ‘The good news is, you’re here, you’re looking good. The bad news is, you’ve got an aneurysm in your brain. You’ve had it for a hundred years, so it’s nothing to worry about—but it’s very serious, so we’ll have to get rid of it right away.
Greendale Tour, Los Angeles, 2003. Artist: Emek (www.emek.net)
Duncan, British Columbia, September 17, 2004. Artist: Bob Masse (bmasse.com)
The operation was a success, the surgeons having accessed Young’s brain through his femoral artery. But a couple of days later, the artery burst, and he was rushed back to the hospital. He canceled a scheduled appearance at the Juno awards, forcing him to explain publicly what had happened—which he wouldn’t have done otherwise. “I came very close to no one ever knowing,” Young said. “I would have had an aneurysm, got rid of it, and no one would know the difference. It would have been so cool.”
Cut in Nashville, Prairie Wind—as well as Heart of Gold, the sumptuous Jonathan Demme concert film that accompanied it—bears the marks of Young’s near-death experience. Both are deeply nostalgic and even a little sad as he says goodbye to some of his fellow travelers, including his father, who suffered from dementia before his death. “I had a great relationship with my dad, and I felt like everything was O.K. when he died, that I was at peace with him and everything was cool,” Young told Time. “Then I went to the service and completely broke down out of nowhere.”
On the Heart of Gold set with director Jonathan Demme, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee, August 18–19, 2005. © Paramount/Everett Collection/Rex USA
Prairie Wind’s closing song, “When God Made Me,” is a hymn questioning the creator’s motives—not in an angry fashion but a prayerful one. Young told PBS’s Charlie Rose the most significant way that his aneurysm had changed him:
It gave me more faith. . . . I know there are a lot of stories. There is the Bible. There is the Koran. There are all of these things. Everybody’s got one. Everybody has a faith. And there are stories that have gone through the ages, and I respect all of them. But I don’t know where I fit in. I just have faith.
God didn’t disappoint Young, but men still did. As the war in Iraq continued to rage, Young suddenly found that he’d had enough. He told Rolling Stone:
I went down to the coffee machine and there was USA Today. The cover showed a large military craft converted into a flying hospital. The caption said something about how we are making great strides in medicine as a result of the Iraq conflict. That just caught me off guard, and I went upstairs and wrote “Families” for one of those soldiers who didn’t get to come home. Then I cried in my wife’s arms. That was the turning point for me.
And there was no turning back. The songs for Living with War, which he called his “metal folk protest album,” poured out of Young, culminating in “Let’s Impeach the President,” a no-holds-barred attack on George W. Bush.
“You know, it is a sad thing,” Young acknowledged to Rose. “It is terrible to be involved in . . . criticizing the president and doing this and that, and talking about things in the first person and getting right in there.”
Young created an elaborate section on his website, neilyoung.com, called Living with War Today, a mock news site with stories about the war and its aftermath for soldiers and their families. There are also links to hundreds of protest songs and videos posted by musicians from all over the world. Young also took the album on the road, turning it into a CSNY tour dominated by the album. “We tried sprinkling my songs throughout the show and that didn’t work,” Young told Rolling Stone, “because they disturbed everything. We put them all together, basically, and isolated the other ones.”
With David Crosby, CSNY Freedom of Speech Tour, Red Rocks Ampitheatre, Denver, Colorado, July 17, 2006. © Scott D. Smith/Retna Ltd.
I think it was Peter Buck from R.E.M. and Neil Young, and they were doing an interview, and they were talking about music and talking about their love of vinyl and the analog sound compared to the digital sound and what a shame it was the industry kind of pushed it aside.
—Eddie Vedder, Neil Young’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech
The tour, captured by Young (under his nom de film, Bernard Shakey) in the documentary CSNY/Déjà Vu, reveals just how contentious the shows became.
Some audience members booed Young’s polemics or even walked out, while others sang along or cried while the band sang “Find the Cost of Freedom,” an anthem for another war made relevant once again. “It’s the real deal,” Young said. “I make a whole album about this war, and some people are still stupid enough to say that I just did it for the money because I’m an old fart. They’re out of touch. It’s not about the entertainment business, it’s about a fucking war that people are getting killed in.”
Having said his piece, Young slowly began rolling out samples of his massive Archives project. The first piece of the puzzle, Live at the Fillmore East: March 6 & 7, 1970, surfaced in 2006. It captures a raging concert performance by Crazy Horse, including the version of “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” with vocals by Danny Whitten, that had been culled for Tonight’s the Night. Live at Massey Hall 1971 arrived in 2007, offering an especially compelling solo show. Another solo concert, Live at Canterbury House 1968, was released in 2008. It contains the version of “Sugar Mountain” that was a long-ago B-side for Young and had made its album debut on Decade.
With Pegi, Fifth Annual Benefit for the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, October 3, 2006. Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Chrome Dreams Tour, Northrup Auditorium, Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 8, 2007. © Tony Nelson (tonynelsonphoto.com)
Young continued recording new material even as he mined his past. Chrome Dreams II, in typical Youngian fashion, is a sequel to an album that was never released (the legendary Chrome Dreams that was raided for songs that eventually wound up on American Stars ’n Bars). Some of the Chrome II songs date back to the 1980s, notably the extended jam “Ordinary People,” which features the Bluenotes. Other tracks range from the gentle Harvest-style folk rock of “Beautiful Bluebird” to the meditative “The Way” to the slapdash garage rock of “Dirty Old Man.” Its specific connection to the original Chrome Dreams is unclear.
Hastily written and recorded, Young’s 2009 album Fork in the Road seems less like a cohesive album and more like a series of blog entries—which, in a way, it was. Inspired by his efforts to turn a vintage Lincoln Continental into a vehicle running entirely on alternative energy, Young had been posting his thoughts on the automobile industry—as well as some songs—on the news and opinion website Huffington Post. Songs like “Johnny Magic” (about his Linc/Volt partner Jonathan Goodwin), “Fuel Line,” and “Get Behind the Wheel” continue along the same themes. It’s not one of his most musically inventive albums—perhaps the innovation went into the car instead—but it’s one of his most immediate.
Soon after Fork, Young unloaded the massive Archives Vol. 1 box set, the first of four or five projected anthologies. He’d been working on the set so long, Wired magazine tittered “that the big news in the tech world when it was first announced was Windows 3.0.”
European Summer Tour, Firenze, Italy, 2008. Artist: Steuso (www.steuso.com)
Chrome Dreams Tour, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, 2007. Artist: Todd Slater (www.ToddSlater.net)
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 2009. Artist: Jay Michael (FlyRightStudio.com)
He’s a brilliant artist, I think. I’m a big admirer of his singing and his music. He’s always made really good records. He’s always been a stickler for great recorded sounds. He’s a studio hound and a microphone hound and uses old equipment that sounds great. But yet he’s not so traditionally stumped in it that he can’t find something brand new.
—Ricky Skaggs
I always liked Neil from day one. He’s got a real honest, direct delivery. He never seemed to draw too much from anybody else but himself, his own observations. He’s not afraid to go out there and work with different people . . . and then he’s still rockin’, which is great.
—Taj Mahal
Artist: Jake Early (jakeearly.com)
Hit the Road
The Linc/Volt Story
With the Linc/Volt at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, November 3, 2008. Reuters/Robert Galbraith
“JUST SINGIN’ A SONG won’t change the world,” Neil Young sang in 2009. That’s a startling sentiment coming from a man whose music has had an indelible impact on countless listeners. And if Young’s music has not changed the world—many would argue that it has—at the very least it’s altered our perception of it.
But when Young sang those words on his album Fork in the Road, he had something more in mind than simply changing hearts and minds. This time he was more interested in the place where the rubber meets the road. Literally.
Partnering with companies from around the world—most notably Jonathan Goodwin’s H-Line Conversions in Wichita, Kansas, and Uli Kruger of Australia’s Alternative Energy Technologies (AET)—Young began working on the Linc/Volt, the prototype of a new fuel-efficient car but with a typically Youngian twist. Instead of a tiny vehicle with a futuristic design, the Linc/Volt’s body was that of a 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible: a 19.5-foot, two-and-a-half-ton behemoth that looked more like the kind of car Americans want as opposed to what automotive designers and conservationists think they need.
People love their cars, especially here in America, and have a spirit that they associate with their car. They love their big cars. They love their big roads, and they’re big people. So you can’t sell a tiny electric car to Americans. You can sell it to some of them, but it’s not an easy sell.
So there are ways to eliminate roadside refueling, and what we need to do is make these ways attractive to people so they don’t lose the spirit of the car.
The Linc/Volt team’s goal was to blend electronic and fuel technologies to create a self-charging, emissions-free vehicle that will achieve 100 miles per gallon or more. It was good for the environment, of course, but Young and his partners had a global political impact in mind, too. As their mission statement read: “By creating this new power technology we hope to reduce the demand for petro-fuels enough to eliminate the need for war over energy supplies, thereby enhancing the security of the USA and other nations throughout the world.”
Young, who also owns a 1982 Mercedes coupe diesel that runs on vegetable oil, said:
The gas station is the tentacle of big oil, which reaches out and touches all of us daily. If you can eliminate roadside refueling, then whatever technology can do that will also change the way we generate power—the heat in our houses and the power that turns on the lights and all those things—and the way the world works. I really think it’s time for us to try to do that. No goal was ever met by not setting it.
Young and company gave the Linc/Volt a big roll-out, taking the car around the country, including to events such as the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, and to Sun Microsystems in California. The project’s website detailed its performance. Filmmaker Larry Johnson also chronicled the car’s adventures and travels for a documentary film.
And the Linc/Volt was entered in the 2009 Progressive Automotive X Prize contest, competing with 110 other teams for a $10 million prize awarded to the first practical automobile capable of reaching the 100 mpg standards. “We don’t really care if we win the $10 million,” said Young (although the scientists and craftsmen involved may have felt differently). “We think the race is bigger than that. We think we’re in a race against time, basically, for the planet.”
“And if [Linc/Volt] isn’t the answer,” Young added, “maybe it can give someone else some ideas to come up with the answer.” 
I like the way he is uncompromising and constantly reinvents himself. He’s like a musical brother to me in a way. And of course I got more respect for him when he played on my album than I had before. He was just amazing and played brilliantly and with so much heart, and he did it so quickly. I always knew he was a good musician, but I didn’t know he had that much fast musical acumen, which was a surprise. His own stuff might be a little more introspective and maybe take a little more time, but he worked very quickly on my album. He allowed me to cop his sound, which is very generous to let somebody do that.
—Booker T. Jones
Journey through the Past
The Road to Archives
NEIL YOUNG ASSERTED HIS AMBITIONS for documenting his own career in 1978 when he issued Decade, a then-whopping three-LP set loaded with hits, new and unreleased material, and insightful song-by-song commentary. In the pre–CD box set age, it was the first time a rock ’n’ roll artist had surveyed his work with the kind of serious storytelling ambition that was more familiar to jazz and classical retrospectives.
But his next idea made Decade look like a 45 rpm single in comparison.
After nearly two decades in development, Neil Young Archives Volume 1, 1963–1972 surfaced in June 2008 in three formats—Blu-ray, DVD, and CD—and with 128 tracks, nearly half of which were previously unreleased or alternate versions of studio releases. The Blu-ray and DVD packages also included a 238-page book and the long out-of-print 1972 feature film, Journey through the Past.
But it was the Blu-ray set that offered the true mother lode: a state-of-the-art interactive experience that allowed users to listen to a particular song while surfing through a variety of images and information—and also, via the Internet and BD Live technology, to be able to update that content with other material as it becomes available.
The wealth of material is exhaustive and exhausting. “I am kind of a pack rat,” Young confessed to reporters during a demonstration of Archives at JavaOne in San Francisco. “I only give the record company what I want people to hear at the time. So I have a lot of unreleased material. Putting it all together tells a much different story than just what has been produced [for public consumption].”
During the development of the Shakey Platform—named after his nom de film, Bernard Shakey—Young explained that his vision of the Blu-ray version of Archives is a living thing. It never stops. . . . The navigating system is the best. You can drop in at different times of [my] history and see what was going on in the world at that time, the reviews, the photographs, the back story to the music, the outtakes, other takes that were done on the same day . . . everything, just a day-by-day trip.
It’s a whole new thing. I’ve made a lot of CDs, and we’ve made a lot of DVDs, and Blu-ray technology is so far superior to anything else. It’s the future, and I would rather focus on what’s next.
Young began talking about Archives as Decade II during the late ’80s, and even at that time, he envisioned an extensive, multivolume set with some degree of interactivity. Release dates were intermittently reported and canceled, and it became something of a music industry Godot. At one point, there was even an online betting pool to guess whether Archives would beat Guns N’ Roses’ equally tardy Chinese Democracy to the stores (it didn’t). Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro told Undercover in 2003 that he suspected Young was having second thoughts about the project: “I think Neil (and he would never say it) just has a feeling that putting out a boxed set like that is kind of like marking the end of your career.”
The true reason for the delay, of course, was waiting for the right technology, which Young’s team worked hand-in-hand with software developers to create. “On a broader scale,” he told Guitar World after Archives came out, “we’re trying to create a new flow of information. In my case, the music is the glue that holds it all together. But it could be anything; it could be art, it could be film, it could be history.”
Young said he envisions four or five volumes of Archives over time, though he cautioned that while the second set would come “quicker,” it might not show up until “about two or three years” after Volume 1. He also remains interested in putting out single-volume additions to the Archives universe. And while he’s taken an active role in journeying through the past, he was not necessarily looking to glean new perspective on his work. He noted:
Strangely enough, I’m pretty detached from it because it’s more like a collection of things. It happens to be my life, but it could be anything. I obviously absorbed some of the things I’d seen by doing it and some of the changes that my music and music in general have gone through since ’63. But there’s a level at which I have to treat it like a product and make sure it’s something that’s really good and easy to use and has value. 
Trade advertisement, 2008.
U.S. and Canada Fall Tour, Madison Square Garden, New York, December 15, 2008. AP Photo/Jason DeCrow
Released on CD, DVD, and Blu-ray, Vol. 1 spans the years 1963 to 1972 and tells his history the way Young wants it told: warts and all. “You hear the good and the bad,” Young told Rolling Stone. “A lot of people will say, ‘Well, there’s a lot of trash on this thing.’ But if you take it as a whole, it tells a story. And that’s what I like to do.”
Telling stories has always been Neil Young’s specialty. And despite having entered his sixties, he is still attitudinally true to his family name. No one, not even his hero Bob Dylan, has kept pace with him in terms of keeping his music young, fresh, vital, and forward looking. Young has, at times, faltered and even failed, but he has always remained a thoughtful songwriter, an ever-curious multimedia artist, and a live performer of the highest magnitude.
His wife, Pegi, remains his rock. Young told Charlie Rose:
Look what I have done in thirty years of marriage. How creative have I been? I have been able to do all kinds of different things, take on different characters, take on different personalities, do wacky things, get totally out of my mind, you know, drinking tequila to get into one thing, doing this and doing that, doing all of these things for all of these characters that I had to live my way through. And yet, she was sticking with me all the way through that. She deserves a medal for being open and free enough to allow me to be myself. Do you know how many people when they get married, they change, they adjust. I have not had to make an adjustment. She has allowed me to be free and taught me the beauty of the family—so I am very fortunate. Behind everyone who, you know, is doing something, there is a partner, somebody like that, a partner.
With family keeping him grounded and a little help from the great beyond, Neil Young is unafraid to fly. “We’re gonna get in there and let the muse have us,” he says as he prepares to take the stage in Heart of Gold. “Take a shot. Send it out.” 
