Neil Young is the vagabond chameleon, easily bored and always searching for something new. His wild, maverick spirit and surging creative energies have always been given free rein, his commitment always total. For Neil, ever since his childhood, when he found himself moving house so many times, change has been the norm. But whatever it is he’s doing, it’s always 100%.
Neil is the rock ‘n’ roll gypsy, always on the move, never parking his caravan long in any one spot. As Neil said in his autobiography Waging Heavy Peace: ‘I have a thing for transportation, cars, boats, trains. Travelling. I like moving’.
Fame and fortune were rarely his motivation, as he worshipped his art, the music always came first. There was never any compromise. Friendships, lovers and relationships were sacrificed on the altar of his obsessive music.
Whereas most rock musicians went into music to pull the chicks (Jimmy McDonough quotes Graham Nash in his biography Shakey: ‘anyone who tells you that they didn’t get into rock ‘n’ roll to get laid is lying’), that was not the case with Neil, he was the exception – Neil went into it for the music. Indeed, in the early days, there was no time for girls. Jimmy quotes Neil’s mother Rassy: ‘Neil didn’t have any girlfriends. He was too busy playing music’.
That love of the seminal excitement of rock music never diminished. In later years, following the advent of digital sounds and the MP3, he set off on a musical crusade to take digital music back to the quality of the analogue sounds that first gave him that transcendental spiritual experience he had felt as a youth. He wants future generations to experience the delight and rapture that so moved him when he was young. He thinks they are being short-changed.
Neil Young 1963 to 1970: Every Album, Every Song: Amazon.co.uk: Opher Goodwin: 9781789522983: Books