At 61, Neil Young continues to be the most unconventional of icons - from reworking old songs to making an eco-friendly documentary. Burhan Wazirmeets a true rock legend
Neil Young recalls inviting Carole King to his summer house on Zuma beach, near Malibu, California, one evening during the summer of 1977. The Canadian-born musician had asked King, already renowned as both a songwriter and arranger, to listen to his recently completed Chrome Dreams album. King listened as Young played her 12 new songs. When the album was finished, she abruptly said: "No, no, Neil! This is not a record. It's just a bunch of your songs. It's a demo. This is not a record."
"I was about to release it. And then I didn't release it," Young says, 30 years after he abandoned the project. "I've left a lot of things unfinished. I would rather write a new song than go back and fix an old one." Casting a backwards look over his career, now etched out over 40 studio albums that display a curiosity for blues jams, heavy metal, soul music and country rock, would be deemed aberrant behaviour by Young. In today's musical landscape, only Bob Dylan can be regarded as a fellow journeyman. Individually, Young's recordings all point to a fear of musical stagnation. Collectively, they display a wide independent streak.
After his only hit single, 1972's Heart of Gold, the singer-songwriter made a path for deliberate obscurity. "Heart of Gold put me in the middle of the road," he said at the time. "Travelling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there."
Before Heart of Gold, Young had already experienced considerable fame - firstly with the continually bickering Buffalo Springfield, later with America's first supergroup, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He has followed up chart-topping albums with oversized disasters. After the runaway success of Harvest, a landmark country rock album, he spent five years recording a deliberately uncommercial trilogy of albums in order to confound his fans. He has been sued by his own record company, Geffen, for failing to turn in music representative of his career. On more than one occasion, his mercurial anger has seen him fire his session groups for failing him. In 1976, he abruptly walked off the Stephen Stills-Neil Young tour, sending his CSN&Y bandmate only a brief note by way of explanation.
When I meet him in New York, I find Young, now 61, still looking to hide from the heavy hand of musical history as if it might corrode his music. Freshly showered after a morning workout, and dressed in a faded T-shirt and jogging bottoms, he looks buoyant with energy. The history of a 40-year career in rock music lines his weather-beaten face - those deep wrinkles, the prominent sideburns, the intense stare. Most of his peers - Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons and Jerry Garcia - are long departed. He declines most interview requests. Instead, like Dylan, he prefers to concentrate on the only two truisms that have maintained his career to date: touring and recording.
HIS UPCOMING ALBUM, Chrome Dreams II, takes its inspiration from the 1977 set of songs first played to King. It features three old songs and seven new compositions. For Young, it also marks a return to glories such as After the Goldrush and Harvest, records that boasted both acoustic and electric songs. "Chrome Dreams represents a kind of record that I like to make where there's a lot of different kinds of music," he says. "I used to make those records all the time in the 1970s. Every record that I made had acoustic and electric songs on it. And then things changed in the 1980s and in the 1990s. The records became focused more on one kind of music. And the radio stations have everything separated, so I made records like that for a while. Chrome Dreams II draws on the past."
The centrepiece of the album is a song called Ordinary People, originally recorded in 1989. Young uses guitars, drums and horns to narrate a tale, over 18 minutes in length, of struggling farmers and factory workers hit hard by government taxes, drugs and crime. Never released, rarely performed, the song has gone down in rock folklore, much like the Beach Boys and their aborted Smile album.
"I think its time has come," he says now. "People may have been distracted 20 years ago with the fact that I was doing a song with horns. Some people were upset with me. So I didn't want to have to fight that battle and release the song. It was such a powerful record that it overtook everything that I put it with."
I have interviewed Young once before - in Los Angeles in 2002, when he was promoting an album called Are You Passionate? He was also touring with a reformed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The album, primarily a collection of ballads dedicated to his wife Pegi, contained a song called Let's Roll, inspired by passenger Todd Beamer's final words on the hijacked United 93 flight of 9/11. The three-chord progression sounded cumbersome and jingoistic.
"It will be misinterpreted," Young told me. "I wrote it because the story struck me as an act of heroism so pure - so incredibly pure. But it will be misinterpreted."
Since then, Young's albums have increasingly hardened into a sonic fury that recalls both the political rage of his 1970s output and the sonic boom of the 1990s records that so endeared him to the grunge generation. Greendale, from 2004, was a furious tirade against the 24/7 news media. Last year's Living with War, which was recorded in only six days, used all nine songs to attack the war record of the current American administration.
UNLIKE OUR 2002 meeting, when he was struggling to articulate his thoughts on 9/11, Young is now only too eager to address current events. Even so, his thoughts are, much like his music, often impulsive. Young has never been accused of behaving like a textbook liberal. In the late 1960s he wrote Ohio, an outraged response to the deaths of four students at the hands of the National Guard at Kent State University. It stands as one of the greatest protest songs to emerge from the era. By the 1980s, in stark contrast, Young briefly emerged as a supporter of then president Ronald Reagan. Today, he is equally contrary.
"This will be seen as the dark ages of vision where it was right in front of us," he says. "Why are all these people upset? What did we do? There has to be a reason. You have to go back through history, and see what we've done to these little countries - how we've manhandled them into doing different things in the name of doing good. We didn't realise that our way of life is not the only way of life."
He sits and thinks for a while. Back in the 1960s, Young marched in protest against the war in Vietnam. He tells me that the liberal idealism of the era was a success. Then, abruptly, his thoughts turn to Bill Clinton. "In this country we had a bad group of events starting with Bill Clinton and leading up to [ George W] Bush. Clinton was a catalyst for a lot of this stuff because he played out on a moral stage a very bad scenario. He lied directly to the American people about something that has to do with core family values. He's not a bad person; he made a mistake. But in lying he made a much worse mistake. And although it was very human and people forgive him for doing that, he gave the other side, the conservative side, the aggressive side, a huge opening. If it hadn't been for what he did, Al Gore would have been president. We would have had a president who understands the environment. We would have had a smart man in there."
AN AVID COLLECTOR of vintage cars his entire adult life, the environment is a relatively new concern. In March 1966, aged 20, Young drove 3,200km from his hometown of Toronto to Los Angeles. He was searching for musical glory. His vehicle of choice, a Pontiac hearse, was home for several months. He made appointments to meet people at his car. And in the subsequent decades, Young has purchased a number of vintage cars - including a 1951 Chrysler, a 1956 Cadillac and a 1950 Buick Roadmaster hearse. Film-maker Jim Jarmusch, who spent a weekend with him in 1995, trying to coax him to score the soundtrack to his film Dead Man, recalls spending two days driving around northern California in a variety of vehicles owned by Young.
"Neil loves his cars," he told me.
Last week, Young's fascination with transportation took on a brand new guise. From his ranch outside San Francisco, he drove an ageing two-tonne Lincoln to a laboratory in Wichita, Kansas. Picking up and interviewing hitch-hikers en route, Young's vehicle, on reaching its destination, will have its engine replaced with a more efficient electrical substitute. He'll then make the return journey to his ranch.
"It's for a documentary I'm making called Linc-Volt," he says. "It's the story of the resurrection and repowering of the car that represented the American dream. So the car has to go to Wichita, to have its engine replaced with a giant electrical engine. It works off the grid - you plug it in at night. So it has very low emissions and a lot more power. It's a lot faster - it does 0-60 in six seconds. It's part of the spirit of the country. America is never going to be frugal. It's too big; the roads are long, the people are big, they like big cars. So there's a challenge to figure out how to retain all those things and be clean."
I grin at him, and he laughs. At his age, does he feel up to a year-long documentary shoot? There's also the upcoming release of his colossal Archives series: five box sets of unreleased material, each containing eight CDs and DVDs. Yet despite the workload, the pursuit of good health has dogged his entire adult life. He endured polio at the age of five. In the early 1970s, two of his bandmates, Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, overdosed on heroin. In the 1980s, his wife was given a 50-50 chance of surviving cancer. Young himself has epilepsy, and in 2005 underwent brain surgery to remove an aneurysm. "It's a long battle," he says. "I'm 61 years old and there are a lot of things starting to crop up. Different parts of my body don't work the way they used to. And there's pain and stuff. The older you get, the closer to the end of your life you get. It seems like there are a lot of things to do now."
Chrome Dreams II will be released on Wed by Warner Bros