The Open Man

After the polio, he remained permanently skinny. He walked awkwardly. ("I had to learn to walk again," he said in the car. "That was interesting.") Having set his mind on something, his mother said, he couldn't be deterred. He insisted on walking the few blocks to the doctor's office by himself. He would sometimes fall on the way, and people would come out of their houses and help him.

His body seemed too frail for winter clothes, so his parents took him to Florida. He loved the cars in America. The ones in Canada were older and tended not to have as many accessories. When the family returned to Canada, they lived in the country outside Toronto, and Young raised chickens and had a paper route. "When I finish school I plan to go to Ontario Agricultural College and perhaps learn to be a scientific farmer," he wrote in a school essay. He was ten when he began listening to rock & roll. By himself in the house, he would dance to his parents' records and pretend that he was winning a contest. The first instrument anyone remembers him playing was a plastic ukulele from his Christmas stocking. His father's family included farmers who were musicians. When rain kept them from the fields, they sat in the living room and played. He had three girl cousins who sang harmony parts, a scene he describes in "Far From Home," on Prairie Wind.

Young was thirteen when his parents separated. His brother went with his father, and Young lived with his mother. One of Young's friends of the period recalls that Young was much affected by the collapse of the household and that when he talked about it, which was often, his face would flush. His mother moved him to Winnipeg, on the prairie. If he could manage on the way there in the car not to bite his nails for an hour, she let him play the guitar.

The first song he wrote was called "No." It had a chorus that went, "No, no, no." A friend from this period told McDonough, "Looking back at it, I think he was alone more than he should have been."

In 1962, Young was a member of a band called the Squires, which another member said was the third-best band in the city. The first single he released was on V Records, a polka label. "At that point I was different," he said while we drove. "I wasn't into sports. I wasn't an exceptionally good student -- I didn't have the focus for it. I was a musician. I was more concerned with playing shows on the weekends, and I missed a lot of the social aspects growing up. Instead of thinking about who was I going to pick up at the dance, who was I going to be with or what was I going to do, I was thinking about playing. That whole part of me was put on the back burner until my twenties. I was late that way. I think I moved at a slower rate. In my own head, a lot of times, I'm still twenty. When I dream, I'm very young. I feel that way and I see things that way -- it's my outlook in the dream. I don't see things as a mature person. I feel like everybody's doing this; the human condition is not really understood on the surface; the waking, walking person and the sleeping person are completely different. That's why we need sleep; that's how the soul develops, in sleep."

In his twenties, from an instinct for self-preservation, Young avoided psychedelic drugs. "I was too scared, because my thoughts were already there," he said in the car. "People were talking about what happens to them when they're tripping, and I'd think, 'That's what happens to me all the time.' I was warned by neurologists, 'Don't do these drugs -- you won't be able to come back.' I was already having enough trouble." As a boy, he had mild seizures that became severe as he got older. Playing with Buffalo Springfield, he would often have a seizure that would begin during the last song of the night and have just enough time to escape the stage before it became pronounced. McDonough writes that while in the grip of them, Young would see other people, as if in another world. They would ask how he was and where he had been, and they would call him by a different name. His identity would return to him slowly -- it was as if he were putting himself back together a piece at a time.

[Excerpt From Issue 992 — January 26, 2006]