Neil Young

From Wiki Gonzalez

Neil Young is a Canadian singer/songwriter/guitarist whose prolific output over the past 40 years ranks among the greatest of any figure in rock history.

The son of a well-known Canadian sportswriter, Scott Young, Neil is known for writing honest, searing songs in styles that range from three-chord garage rock to acoustic folk to techno-pop to rockabilly to country. His genre-hopping has become something of a trademark, and has contributed towards keeping much of his latter-day music vital and interesting when compared to his peers - particularly his sometimes cohorts Crosby, Stills and Nash. Young suffered polio as a youngster, and is an epileptic. A natural left-hander at birth, he plays guitar right-handed, which may account for his leads sounding both awkward and deft at the same time.

Young rose to prominence in the 1960s as lead guitarist for Buffalo Springfield; after the breakup of that band he went solo. In 1969 he was invited to join Crosby, Stills and Nash, and as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young they became one of the most popular American supergroups of the period before dissolving due to internal feuds. CSN&Y have intermittently regrouped, and have toured several times in recent years.

Young has worked with several backing bands during his solo career, but the best known is Crazy Horse, whose plodding, thunderous sound is perfectly suited to Young's electric work.

Young was revered by the Seattle grunge movement of the early 1990s, and is sometimes called "the Godfather of Grunge" - he toured and recorded with Pearl Jam, and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain quoted his lyric "It's better to burn out than to fade away" in his suicide note.

Young's well-known albums include the classics Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Harvest, Zuma, On the Beach, Rust Never Sleeps, Freedom, and Prarie Wind, but his personal favorite (and mine) is the dark Tonight's the Night, a drunk, sloppy masterpiece of an album that Young recorded after the deaths of two of his closest friends to hard drug use, and which stands as the most chilling warning against the drug culture I've ever heard.

Young has two children who are developmentally disabled; in recent years he has invented several devices that have allowed the developmentally disabled to operate electric train sets. Young is a part owner of Lionel Trains.

Young rarely uses baseball imagery in his songs, but when he does, it can be a doozy, as seen in "For the Turnstiles":

All the bush-league batters are left to die on the diamond
In the stands, the home crowd scatters
For the turnstiles

[edit] Also see

• List of bands