In the past few months, Young has released a CD of new songs, Prairie Wind, and with Jonathan Demme has made a movie, Heart of Gold, that will be released on February 10th. The movie features Young performing most of the CD's songs. Both projects record the deeply felt testimony of a maverick mind that has been at work for forty years. The songs' arrangements are restrained and unembellished; not a note is played for show. The themes are those of mature life, both backward-looking and hopeful, the expression of a sensibility determined to preserve its integrity. They are suffused with mortality and with ardent feelings for his wife and family and his friends. In the movie, he talks disarmingly about his love for his daughter, a college student, and because his manner is typically so subdued, even remote, the profound sentiments have the quality of being nearly a revelation.
It is well known that Young's circumstances while writing and recording Prairie Wind were dire. Last spring he had an episode of blurred vision, which turned out to be the result of a migraine. In performing tests to arrive at the diagnosis, however, doctors in New York discovered that he also had a cerebral aneurysm. It had likely been in place for years, but it might fail at any time. Surgery was scheduled to take place in four days. The procedure was not notably ambitious, but any invasion of the brain includes the possibility that a person might not wake up as who he was before he went under the knife. Young and his wife, Pegi, a singer, flew from New York to Nashville and stayed at the Hermitage, a hotel Young likes especially. On an old guitar that had belonged to Hank Williams, he began writing songs and recording them with musicians he had played with for years. He recorded three or four songs a day, then came back to the hotel and wrote three or four more. They appear on the record in the order in which they were written. Young says that he has never been very good at determining the sequence of songs on a record -- "too impatient," he says. He finished all but one song, "When God Made Me," a hymn, then had the operation. He was to play at a Canadian awards show in Winnipeg, where he was partly raised. Several weeks before the show, he was walking with a friend when blood appeared on his pants leg. He began to bleed heavily from an incision made in his leg to remove a blood vessel used to patch the aneurysm. When he came to, he was staring into a bright white light. He was in an ambulance, but for a moment he thought he might have gone to glory. Needing more time to heal meant missing the awards show, and canceling meant having to explain his absence. Otherwise, he wouldn't have let anyone know.
Young's father, Scott, a sportswriter famous in Canada, died last year, in his eighties, after a period of dementia. As a child, Young would watch his father writing. On those occasions when he pointed out to his father that he appeared to be doing nothing, his father would say, "That's when I get my best ideas." Waiting for an idea is a hallmark of Young's method. His father's death was not unexpected, but it haunted Young, especially in light of his own mortality. He felt blessed to have escaped any lasting consequences and fortunate to have discovered his problem by means of an MRI and not as the result of having a stroke in a backstage hallway of a stadium.
* * *
Young lives in Northern California, south of San Francisco, on property he calls the Broken Arrow Ranch. On the Rand McNally Road Atlas, a small fir tree appears more or less where the ranch is. He bought the place thirty-five years ago. Before moving to it, he lived in Los Angeles, in Topanga Canyon. Leaving L.A., he drove through a brush fire. "The freeway was in the middle of it," he told me. "Both sides of the road were in flames. It was very dramatic. I was driving out of town, and the place was burning up."
Young said this a few weeks ago, in Northern California, while we were riding in an old Plymouth he owns and more or less widely circling the borders of the ranch. He has a fleet of cars from the era of his childhood -- he is sixty. His fascination with cars has its genesis in an early misfortune. When he was six, he went swimming with his father in the Pigeon River and woke that night with his shoulder hurting. Before the morning was through, he was so stiff that his father described him as moving like "a mechanical man." In Shakey, Young's biography, written by Jimmy McDonough, there is a description of his being taken to the hospital and how the polio he'd contracted in the river nearly killed him. When his parents came to take him home, he said, "I didn't die, did I?" The nurses sang "Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes" to him, and he wept. He had lost so much weight, his mother told McDonough, that "he looked like hell on the highway. Skin and bones." He had been a fat baby, as wide as he was tall, she said. When she played "Boogie-Woogie," by Pinetop Smith, he would stand up in his playpen and hold on to the rails and dance. A family friend described him as "a sullen, fat, dark-eyed little baby. Not a happy baby, not a smiler, not a joiner." Young has an older brother, Bob, who is a former club golf pro in Florida. Their parents, absorbed with the difficulties of a failing marriage, sometimes overlooked them, so Neil "became a little watcher," the friend said. He liked turtles and fishing. He liked to draw trains, and he could do so with either hand. His mother predicted that he would become an architect or a musician. His father used to take him and his brother for rides in the car and sing "Bury Me on the Lone Prairie." A relative said he was "a droll little boy."
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.
(Excerpted from RS 992, Jan. 26, 2006)
Posted Jan 12, 2006 2:02 PM
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