Neil Young

Young's solo career was simultaneously soaring, as 1970's After the Gold Rush and 1972's Harvest both became bestsellers and were immediately recognized as classics. Harvest, recorded in Nashville with the Stray Gators and crossover pop-rock stars Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, was the biggest-selling album of 1972, and the cut "Heart of Gold" remains the most successful single of Young's career. Between 1972 and 1977, Young released a sequence of six introspective albums of impressive scope (Journey Through the Past, Time Fades Away, On the Beach, Tonight's the Night, Zuma, and American Stars 'n Bars); haunting loss permeated many of his songs during this prolific period, most obviously because of the devastating drug-related deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. In 1977, the release of a double-album retrospective, Decade, attested to Young's importance in rock history. He closed the seventies on a peak with the lighthearted, philosophical Comes a Time, and a half-acoustic, half-electric album,Rust Never Sleeps, so titled at the suggestion of the members of the new-wave group Devo, who thought the Rustoleum slogan, "Rust never sleeps," made a catchy-sounding title. A rollicking live album, Live Rust, and the generally poorly received concert film Rust Never Sleeps resulted from the 1978 tour for the album.

Depending on one's perspective, Young either lost focus in the early- to mid-eighties or deserves credit as an ambitious explorer. Jumping wildly between genres, he opened the decade with the country-tinged Hawks & Doves, moved into Kraftwerk-like electronic sounds with Trans and retro-rockabilly on Everybody's Rockin', but still tore it up with Crazy Horse on Re-act-or and on 1987's Life. The next year, Young headed in a horn-driven, soulful direction with a new band, the Bluenotes, on This Note's for You. The title track won MTV's Video of the Year award, despite the fact that the clip was banned by the network — lampooning the commercial state of rock, the video shows a Michael Jackson look-alike's hair catching fire and being extinguished with Pepsi by a Whitney Houston look-alike.

After all the experimentation, 1989 witnessed Young going back to his roots. Freedom, powered by the anthemic single "Rockin' in the Free World," became his most critically lauded album since Rust Never Sleeps, and its follow-up, 1990's Ragged Glory (recorded with Crazy Horse), was similarly celebrated. Since then, Young has been on a streak of critical and commercial success unparalleled by his peers, making music in his third decade even more distinguished than that in his first. His rediscovery of electric guitar feedback juxtaposed the emergence of the American alternative scene, earning him the nickname "The Godfather of Grunge." Young cemented that description with his satisfying 1995 collaboration with Pearl Jam, Mirror Ball, for which he scored a Grammy nomination for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. An occasional dabbler in movie soundtracks since 1970, Young composed the music to Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man, and followed the early 1996 release of that soundtrack with Broken Arrow, a new studio effort with Crazy Horse that garnered a Grammy nod for Best Rock Album. A subsequent summer tour, which spawned a double live album titled Year of the Horse, was filmed by Jarmusch for a 1997 documentary of the same name. The year 1999 saw Neil collaborating onca again with Crosby, Stills & Nash on Looking Back. Into the new millenium & Neil has produced a great effort in Silver & Gold. This release sees Neil gathering together old friends such as stellar sidemen including Spooner Oldham, "Duck" Dunn and Jim Keltner, along with longtime associate Ben Keith, (who co-produced the record). The result is a relaxed, casual journey through some heartfelt and pensive songs that find Young in both a thankful and inquisitive mood. Comparisons will most certainly be made with Harvest and Harvest Moon because of the acoustic tone. This Neil Young is older, wiser, more reflective and less judgmental. Neil's 2000 summer jaunt across the U.S.A on the "Music In Head" tour with the "Friends & Relatives " culminated in a live album named Road Rock. In addition to Neil's regular line-up of musicians, he also had wife Pegi & half sister Astrid on vocals. Chrissie Hynde also provided guitar & vocals on "All Along The Watchtower" as The Pretenders were opening act on the Tour.

With wife Pegi, Young co-founded the Bridge School for Handicapped Children near San Francisco, and each year holds a star-studded benefit. Their son Ben has cerebral palsy and attended the school. Young has also founded a company that makes devices for the disabled, as well as high-tech toys — one of the company's projects is manufacturing an improved wheelchair that Young helped design. The irascible elder statesman of rock eschews the trappings of fame and lives a rather reclusive life on his Northern California ranch. He declines most interviews, and has said that he will no longer grant them to Rolling Stone, in particular, because of its perfumed ad inserts: "I don't like the way the magazine smells."

There's colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shufflin' their feet
People sleepin' in their shoes
But there's a warnin' sign
on the road ahead
There's a lot of people sayin'
we'd be better off dead
Don't feel like Satan,
but I am to them
So I try to forget it,
any way I can.

Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.

I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage can
Now she puts the kid away,
and she's gone to get a hit
She hates her life,
and what she's done to it
There's one more kid
that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love,
never get to be cool.

Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.

We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores
and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes
for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people,
says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn,
got roads to drive.

Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.

Neil Young

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