Neil Young: The Last American Hero

I asked him about his childhood, a question that met with a good two minutes of silence. I began to wonder if the interview was already over. Young was born in Toronto, the son of a sportswriter for the Toronto Sun, Scott Young. Young's parents split up when he was ten, and Neil moved to nearby Winnipeg with his mother, Rassie.

"I know the newspaper business," said Young, who was a Sun paperboy. "I had a pretty good upbringing. I remember really good things about both my parents. I don't feel the need to communicate all that much with them. I think back on my childhood and I remember moving around a lot, from school to school. I was always breaking in." He looked over. "I liked to play jokes on people."

Jokes?

"Same old shit," he continued talkatively. "Once, I'd become a victim of a series of chimp attacks by some of the bullies in my room. I looked up and three guys were staring at me, mouthing, 'you low-life prick.' Then the guy who sat in front of me turned around and hit my books off the desk with his elbow. He did this a few times. I guess I wore the wrong color of clothes or something. Maybe I looked too much like a mamma's boy for them.

"Anyway, I went up to the teacher and asked if I could have the dictionary. This was the first time I'd broken the ice and put my hand up to ask for anything since I got to the fucking place. Everybody thought I didn't speak. So I got the dictionary, this big Webster's with little indentations for your thumb under every letter. I took it back to my desk, thumbed through it a little bit. Then I just sort of stood up in my seat, raised it up above my head as far as I could and hit the guy in front of me over the head with it. Knocked him out.

"Yeah, I got expelled for a day and a half, but I let those people know just where I was at. That's the way I fight. If you're going to fight, you may as well fight to wipe who or whatever it is out. Or don't fight at all."

He looked over again, offering me a vision of my own amazement in his shades.

"Few years later, I just felt it," he concluded cheerfully. "All of a sudden I wanted a guitar and that was it."

In his mid-teens, Neil Young hit the Winnipeg dance-band circuit with his band, the Squires, and his own songs — stinging instrumentals heavily influenced by the Shadows and the Ventures. Then came the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and Young started to write lyrics.

"I never forgot," he says, "that every time a new Beatles or Dylan album came out, you knew they were way beyond it. They were always doing something else, always moving down the line."

Moving back to Toronto, Young soon took up a twelve-string acoustic guitar and tried folk singing around the coffeehouses. He made friends easily with other musicians like Stephen Stills, Joni Mitchell and Richie Furay, who were traveling along the same path. Mitchell wrote "The Circle Game" for him after hearing "Sugar Mountain," which was about growing too old to get into the local teen club.

Rock & roll, meanwhile, was booming. One of the biggest bands around Toronto was a group called Ricky James and the Mynah Birds. "We played rock and blues," James, now a disco star, recalls in Los Angeles. "I remember our first gig," continues James. "When Neil took his first solo, he was so excited he leaped off the stage, the plug came out and nobody heard anything."

The Mynah Birds broke up after a flirtation with Motown when James, AWOL from the navy, was pressed back into the service. Their young career at a standstill, James and Young spent a teary afternoon promising each other that they would form another band after James returned. "It was heavy, man," recalls James. "I had really gotten close to the cat. He was never very healthy — he got bad epileptic fits sometimes — but he had balls like you wouldn't believe."

After a few months, money ran out and Young had to sell the Mynah Birds' equipment. Typical of his sense of humor, he used the money to buy a long, black Pontiac hearse and headed for Los Angeles with Mynah Birds' bassist Bruce Palmer. Neither had working permits or the proper papers. "But it you were looking for a break," says Young, "the great Canadian Dream is to get out. So we came down anyway."

They were lumbering down Hollywood Boulevard when the Ontario license plates were spotted by two folkies Young had met up in Canada. Stephen Stills and Richie Furay pulled Young and Palmer over. There, on the street, they talked of their stalled careers. Stills and Furay's folk group had broken up, Stills had even failed an audition to join the Monkees because of his teeth. They decided to form a group, later adding Dewey Martin on drums. They named themselves after a tractor, the Buffalo Springfield.

The Buffalo Springfield were largely a West Coast phenomenon for most of their stormy two-year existence. Around Los Angeles, where their single, "For What It's Worth," became an anthem for the budding hippies battling cops on Sunset Strip, they were a sensation — a tougher, younger brother to the Byrds. Their live shows centered around incredible lead-guitar battles between Stills, the fair-haired, bluesy Southerner, and Young, the dark and fiery "Hollywood Indian" who was always either quitting or rejoining the group. Their fans split into camps and argued for years about why the group broke up.

"Stills and I have always gotten along," explained Young on his bus during his 1976 tour, as we headed for a show in Madison, Wisconsin. "I just had too much energy and so much creative flow coming out that when I wanted to get something down, I just felt like, 'This is my fucking trip and I don't have to listen to anybody else's.' I'd do what they wanted with their stuff, but I needed more space with my own. And that was a constant problem in my head. So that was why I had to quit. Then I'd come back 'cause it sounded so good. I just wasn't mature enough to deal with it. Everything was going much too fast."