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Neil Young Biography

in full Neil Percival Young

(1945–)

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Albums
1969 Neil Young
1969 Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
1970 After The Goldrush

1972 Harvest
1972 Journey Through The Past
1973 Time Fades Away
1974 On the Beach
1975 Tonight's The Night
1975 Zuma
1977 American Stars 'N' Bars
1978 Comes A Time
1979 Rust Never Sleeps
1979 Live Rust
1980 Hawks And Doves
1981 Re-Ac-Tor
1983 Trans
1983 Everybody's Rockin'
1985 Old Ways
1986 Landing On Water
1987 Life
1988 This Note's For You
1989 Eldorado
1989 Freedom
1990 Ragged Glory
1991 Weld
1991 Arc/Weld
1992 Harvest Moon
1993 Unplugged
1994 Sleeps With Angels
1995 Mirror Ball
1996 Dead Man (soundtrack)
1996 Broken Arrow
1997 The Year Of The Horse
2005 Prairie Wind
2006 Living With War
Compilations
1977 Decade
1985 Greatest Hits
1992 Lucky Thirteen
2002 Decade
Singles
1972 Heart Of Gold
1972 Old Man

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(born Nov. 12, 1945, Toronto, Ont., Can.) Canadian guitarist, singer, and songwriter best known for his eclectic sweep, from solo folkie to grungy guitar-rocker.

Young grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with his mother after her divorce from his father, a well-known Canadian sportswriter. Having performed in bands since his teens and later as a soloist in Toronto coffeehouses, Young was both folkie and rocker, so when he arrived in Los Angeles in 1966 he was ready for Buffalo Springfield, the versatile and pioneering group he joined. His material defied categorization and tested unusual forms and sounds. Fuzztone guitar duels with Stephen Stills offset Young's high-pitched, nasal vocals; his lyrics veered from skewed romanticism to metaphoric social commentary, but his voice's naked, quavering vulnerability remained the constant in Young's turbulent, shape-shifting explorations.

His 1969 solo debut, Neil Young, sold poorly but staked out ambitious musical territory. Its follow-up, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), teamed Young with the garage band Crazy Horse. When nascent FM radio played “Cinnamon Girl,” whose one-note guitar solo encapsulated Young's sly sarcasm about established forms, and “Down by the River,” a long, raw-edged guitar blitzkrieg around lyrics about murder, the album made Young an icon.

Soon he joined Crosby, Stills and Nash, who had already released their first hit album. Young added heft, but Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was an ongoing clash of egos. Following the release of the quartet's first album, Déjà Vu (1970), Young penned and sang “Ohio,” an anthem that rallied campus activists after National Guardsmen killed four antiwar demonstrators at Kent (Ohio) State University in May 1970.

Young's next characteristic zigzag led him back to acoustic music—a move forecast by Déjà Vu's “Helpless,” which depicted him as totally vulnerable, trying to bare his emotional world musically. His confessional singer-songwriter mode became a key part of his multifaceted persona. On his next solo album, After the Gold Rush (1970), Young underlined his stance as a rock-and-roll shaman, a visionary who projected his psyche onto the world and thereby exorcised his own demons and those of his audience. Harvest (1972) continued the confessional vein, and its rare stylistic continuity made it one of Young's best-selling but, in the minds of some, least-satisfying discs. Its simplistic attitudes apparently set off an internal reexamination; at least it started a decade's artistic wanderings. The experimentation cost Young both artistically and commercially. Nevertheless, in 1979 Rust Never Sleeps reasserted his mastery—ironically, in response to the punk revolt. Young made the Sex Pistols' singer, Johnny Rotten, the main character in “Hey Hey, My My.” Thus, Young's reenergized reaction to punk sharply contrasted with that of his aging peers, who generally felt dismissed or threatened. It also demonstrated how resistant he was to nostalgia—a by-product of his creative restlessness.