Neil Young

Neil Young
Neil Percival Young OM (born November 12, 1945, Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist who grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His work is characterized by deeply personal lyrics, distinctive guitar work, and an almost instantly recognizable nasal tenor (and frequently alto) singing voice. Although he accompanies himself on several different instruments 擁ncluding piano and harmonica揺is style of hammer-on acoustic guitar and often idiosyncratic soloing on electric guitar are the lynchpins of a sometimes ragged, sometimes polished, yet consistently evocative sound.
Young has experimented widely with differing music styles, including swing, jazz, rockabilly, blues and electronica throughout a varied career, his most accessible and best known work generally falls into either of two distinct styles: acoustic, country-tinged folk rock, as heard in songs such as "Heart of Gold", "Harvest Moon" and "Old Man," and crunchy, electric hard rock, in songs like "Cinnamon Girl", "Rockin' in the Free World" and "Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)."
Young first came to prominence as a member of the folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in the mid-1960s and then as a solo performer backed by the band Crazy Horse. He reached his commercial peak during the singer-songwriter boom of the early 1970s with the albums After the Gold Rush and Harvest as well as with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
Young was born in Toronto to sportswriter and novelist Scott Young and Rassy Ragland Young. He spent his early years in Omemee, a small country town which he later memorialized in his song "Helpless". A bout of polio at the age of six left him with a weakened left side, and he still walks with a slight limp. He moved to New Smyrna Beach, Florida to recover for a year; his mother later moved there permanently. His parents divorced when Young was twelve, and he moved with his mother back to the family home of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where his music career began. While attending Kelvin High School in Winnipeg, he played in instrumental rock bands, one of which, the Squires, had a local hit called "The Sultan." He later worked folk clubs in Winnipeg, where he befriended guitarist Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell, and spent summers in Thunder Bay, Ontario, playing at local clubs. In the 2006 film Heart of Gold Young relates how he used to spend time as a teenager at Falcon Lake, Manitoba where he would endlessly plug coins into the jukebox to hear Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds."
After the breakup of Buffalo Springfield, Young signed a solo deal with Reprise Records, home of his compatriot, Joni Mitchell, with whom he shared a manager, Elliot Roberts. Young and Nitzsche immediately began work on Young's first solo record, Neil Young (November 1968), which received mixed reviews. In a 1970 interview [1], Young deprecated the album as being "overdubbed rather than played," and the quest for music that expresses the spontaneity of the moment has long been a feature of his career. Nevertheless, the album contains some tunes that remain a staple of his live shows, most notably "The Loner."
For his next album, Young recruited three musicians from a band called Danny and The Rockets: Danny Whitten on guitar, Billy Talbot on bass guitar, and Ralph Molina on drums. These three took the name Crazy Horse (after the historical figure of the same name), and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (May 1969), is credited to "Neil Young with Crazy Horse." Recorded in just two weeks, the album opens with one of Young's most familiar songs, "Cinnamon Girl," and is dominated by two more, "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Down by the River," that feature lengthy jams showcasing Young's idiosyncratic guitar soloing accompanied sympathetically by Crazy Horse .
Although a new tour had been planned to follow up on the success of Harvest, it became apparent during rehearsals that Danny Whitten could not function due to drug abuse. On November 18, 1972, shortly after he was fired from the tour preparations, Whitten was found dead of an overdose. Young described the incident to Rolling Stone痴 Cameron Crowe in 1975,[3] "[We] were rehearsing with him and he just couldn't cut it. He couldn't remember anything. He was too out of it. Too far gone. I had to tell him to go back to L.A. 'It's not happening, man. You're not together enough.' He just said, 'I've got nowhere else to go, man. How am I gonna tell my friends?' And he split. That night the coroner called me from L.A. and told me he'd ODed. That blew my mind. Fucking blew my mind. I loved Danny. I felt responsible. And from there,