Neil Young

Toronto, Winnipeg, Los Angeles

Neil Percival Young was born in Toronto on 12 November 1945, the son of the journalist and author Scott Young. The family soon moved to Omemee, Ontario, and in 1951 he caught polio. After his parents divorced in 1960 he lived in Winnipeg, left Kelvin High School without finishing, and played in The Jades and The Squires. In 1966 he joined The Mynah Birds, a band with Rick James, then moved to Los Angeles with Bruce Palmer. There he played in Buffalo Springfield, which made three albums before splitting in May 1968.

His first solo album came out on Reprise in January 1969. That year he recruited Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, a Los Angeles group that had started out in 1963 as the doo-wop act Danny & the Memories and later recorded as The Rockets. He renamed them Crazy Horse, and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (May 1969) was their first record together.

Two bands at once

Through the summer and autumn of 1969 he recorded with Crazy Horse at Sunset Sound in the mornings and rehearsed with Crosby, Stills and Nash in the afternoons. He first cut Helpless with the Horse, but the song went to the new quartet and appeared on Deja Vu, a US number one in 1970. The Crazy Horse take waited until Early Daze in 2024. After the Gold Rush (1970) and Harvest (1972), the best-selling album in America that year, followed.

Late in 1972 Whitten came to Young's Broken Arrow ranch to rehearse for the Harvest tour, still strung out. Young sent him home with a plane ticket, and that night the coroner phoned to say he had overdosed. Young later wrote that he was not guilty but felt responsible. On the Beach followed in 1974, and Tonight's the Night, held back for about two years, in 1975.

Crazy Horse reborn

Crazy Horse came back with Frank "Poncho" Sampedro on rhythm guitar, first jamming at Talbot's house in Echo Park. At David Briggs's house on Point Dume they made Zuma (1975), which ends with Cortez the Killer, the first song Young wrote while living at Zuma beach. In late November 1975, at the ranch, they cut Like a Hurricane, and that December both songs were first played on a run of Northern California bar gigs. Hurricane appeared on American Stars 'n Bars in 1977, while the album Chrome Dreams was shelved and not released until 2023. Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust followed in 1979.

Talbot and Molina have stayed in the band from 1968 to the present, and Crazy Horse also made records of its own, from Crazy Horse (1971) to Trick Horse (2009). Young credits Sampedro's heavy power chords with holding the songs together for forty years.

If I played Crazy Horse tours every tour, I'd be dead.

Neil Young, SXSW, 2006

Freedom and Ragged Glory

On Geffen from 1982 to 1987 he made records the label sued him over as unrepresentative. He co-founded Farm Aid in 1985 and helped found the Bridge School with Pegi Young in 1986. Back on Reprise, he made Freedom (1989) with a trio called The Restless, opening and closing it with two versions of Rockin' in the Free World, whose title phrase came from Sampedro.

With Crazy Horse he then recorded Ragged Glory (1990), playing a set twice a day and keeping the best takes, among them Love and Only Love. It topped the Pazz & Jop critics' poll. The 1991 tour, with Sonic Youth and Social Distortion supporting on many dates and the Gulf War on the news, became the live album Weld. Rolling Stone dates his nickname, Godfather of Grunge, to that tour. Kurt Cobain quoted Hey Hey, My My in his suicide note in 1994, Eddie Vedder inducted Young into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and Young made Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam that year.

The archive and the road

After treatment for a brain aneurysm in 2005 he started the Neil Young Archives, whose first box came out in 2009. Crazy Horse returned for Americana and Psychedelic Pill in 2012, and with Nils Lofgren back in the band for Colorado, Barn and World Record. He became a US citizen in 2020. In 2024 the Love Earth tour with Talbot, Molina and Micah Nelson opened in San Diego with a Cortez that restored its long-lost verse, before illness ended it in June. Since then he has toured and recorded with a new band, The Chrome Hearts, headlining Glastonbury in 2025 and releasing Second Song in September 2026.