The crowd is restive and confused—and unhappy—at the Pine Knob Music Theatre north of Detroit on a warm September night in 1983.
The fans came expecting a two-part show from Neil Young. The first went off as planned, with warmly received solo acoustic renditions of favorites such as “Comes a Time,” “Heart of Gold,” “The Needle and the Damage Done,” and “Ohio.” But when Young returns to the stage that night, it’s not with the Shocking Pinks, the rockabilly-styled group he put together for his latest release, Everybody’s Rockin’1, and with which he has closed shows throughout this tour. Instead he encores with a pair of gentle favorites, “Sugar Mountain” and “I Am a Child.”
House lights up.
Show over.
There are surprised looks—what the hell?—and then some boos. Ushers look at each other uncertainly. A few folks up front crane their necks toward the stage wings, as if Young was just kidding and is doing a quick-change into his Shocking Pinks suit. Nobody seems in a hurry to leave, fully knowing that there’s supposed to be more to the show.
Backstage there’s similar confusion. Pink-suited musicians mill around, shrugging at each other. Larry Byrom, the former Steppenwolf member who’s part of the Redwood Boys, the Pinks’ adjunct vocal troupe, walks by and asks nobody in particular, “Are we going on?” One reporter grabs Scott Young, Neil’s famous sportswriter father, to ask why the Pinks section isn’t happening. Another asks tour manager Glen Palmer if he can talk to Neil or if Young will issue some sort of explanation.
“It was the gentlest possible way of giving Neil a chance to explain his cancelation of the Pinks,” Scott Young relates in his book Neil and Me, “or to say anything else he wanted, even to give an excuse, if he wished, that he wasn’t feeling well, or whatever. All of us waited for this answer. ‘No, there’s really nothing I want to say,’ he said. ‘Just tell him I hope he enjoyed the concert.’”
On the tour bus, Young told his father and some visitors, “That crowd just didn’t deserve the Shocking Pinks! . . . I guess I’ll get criticized, but I just have to follow my instincts.”
Neil Young does not explain. He simply does. Over the course of a more than forty-five-year recording career—starting with the Squires and Buffalo Springfield and continuing both on his own and in irregular associations with David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash—Young has followed his muse without question or second-guessing. He’ll switch from roaring electric rock to gentle acoustic fare in less time than it takes to put a guitar strap over his shoulder. Projects are launched and either seen through or abandoned as he sees fit—occasionally, as was the case with the short-lived Stills-Young Band, in the midst of a tour.
Collaborators are embraced and moved aside as needed: Crazy Horse, arguably the most popular of all Young’s own bands, has suffered through several long periods of inaction. “We’re always waiting,” guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro says with a sigh to PBS’s American Masters. And CSNY was on ice for sixteen years on record and twenty-six years as a live act.
“He cycles through different entities, one after another, to keep it fresh,” Crosby explains to PBS. “He doesn’t leave it; he just puts it on hold.” Stills, meanwhile, calls his longtime friend “willfully charming, willfully erratic—and willful.” And Nash confesses to PBS that “there’s a part of me that doesn’t like that part of him because I know people get hurt. If you play only a certain amount a year and you’re going on a Neil Young tour and the day before it gets canceled, your life is changed desperately, and that makes me uncomfortable. But I have to admire Neil for sticking so true to the muse.”
“I’m still trying to do whatever it is that the music makes me do,” says Young, who’s even been sued for that pursuit, to American Masters. “People want to know, ‘Why don’t you make your most famous record over and over again?’ ’Cause it’s death, that’s why. The longer you can go on and do things that people don’t like and then occasionally give them something they like just because that’s the way it happened, the better off you are. It makes the ones that are more palatable to people more palatable ’cause they feel like they’re special and,” he adds with a laugh, “because they might have hated the last three or something.”
Young has certainly put out music people have liked and hated, but seldom are they indifferent toward it. With a prolific drive and hardnosed work ethic, he’s amassed a sweeping body of work that has inspired, confounded, surprised, frustrated, tested, and even downright pissed off his fans and colleagues. For every mainstream hit such as Harvest and Rust Never Sleeps or critical milepost like Tonight’s the Night, there are curve balls that range from the impenetrable (Journey through the Past, Arc) to the unexpected—and therefore initially unwelcome—experiments such as the aforementioned Everybody’s
Rockin’, the electronic excursion Trans, the countrified Old Ways, and the big band blues of This Note’s for You. Young’s oeuvre is dotted with uninspiring efforts, too, and he’s also iced more potential, and promising, projects than some artists release in an entire career—and turned on a dime to rush something out when he wants to comment on the issues of the day.
“My first job is to follow the musical course,” he says to PBS. “It’s always to the detriment of everything. Relationships, projects—they get derailed. There’s gonna be a lot of collateral damage. . . . I’m brutal. I only do it for the music. If the music is saying to do one thing, the people are secondary. You have to do what you have to do. And if you’re always like that, people begin to trust that. They realize it’s not a personal thing.”
That, of course, is what brings those fans and colleagues—and critics—back time and again. Young is nothing if not credible and, most importantly, honest. Even his “failures” have a bravado that lends them potency. He’s not right all the time, but he’s wrong even less, which keeps everyone on their toes and paying attention. As Stills—who probably has more axes to grind than any of Young’s other musical associates—concedes to American Masters, “Even though I know there’ll be disappointments, I still trust him more than anybody.”
Neil Young: Long May You Run endeavors to chronicle Young’s continually shifting life and career with a critical and analytical eye toward his varying moods and moves. The truth is that no one can explain his intrepid creativity better than Young himself, and he doesn’t do that very often—perhaps because he doesn’t necessarily understand it much, either. Even a work as probing as Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, an authorized work until its subject decided otherwise, raises as many questions as it answers and never pins down the muse that steers Young hither and yon.
But what’s certain is that almost no other popular musician—of Young’s vintage or before or since—is as fascinating and fun to track. He’s on a marathon of unpredictable terrain that seems far from over as of this writing. The story is ongoing, and it’s still a great one to tell.
Soundcheck for Trans Tour, National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham, England, September 24, 1982. © Peter Doherty/Retna UK
The famous Squires press photo, 1964. From left: Neil Young, Bill Edmonson, Jeff Wuckert, and Ken Koblun. Courtesy John Einarson
