The reason why Neil Young called himself “a lost cause”
Following his rise to fame alongside Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash in various combinations over the late 1960s, Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young returned to a more permanent solo career with his seminal third solo album, After the Gold Rush, in 1970. This slice of magic would kick off the venerable musician’s most prolific and indisputably vital decade.
“I need a crowd of people, but I can’t face them day to day.” As this excerpt from ‘On the Beach’ hints, Young is a particularly capricious artist. When writing material for his acoustic masterpiece, Harvest, in the early ’70s, Young revealed his double life in the countryside as his peaceful hippie retreat.
“About that time when I wrote [‘Heart of Gold’], and I was touring, I had also—just, you know, being a rich hippie for the first time—I had purchased a ranch, and I still live there today,” Young said of ‘Old Man’ in the film Heart of Gold. “And there was a couple living on it that were the caretakers, an old gentleman named Louis Avila and his wife, Clara. And there was this old blue Jeep there, and Louis took me for a ride in this blue Jeep.”
He added: “He gets me up there on the top side of the place, and there’s this lake up there that fed all the pastures, and he says, ‘Well, tell me, how does a young man like yourself have enough money to buy a place like this?’ And I said, ‘Well, just lucky, Louis, just real lucky.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s the darnedest thing I ever heard.’ And I wrote this song for him.”
As an introverted extravert and capricious musician, Young has spanned a healthy spread of genres throughout his rollercoaster career. From a background of blues, country and folk, Young trailblazed a raw rock ‘n’ roll sound in the late 1970s, earning him the title of ‘Godfather of Grunge’. While Young undoubtedly enjoyed some of the 1990s grunge music to which he was the progenitor, it appears his tastes stagnated long before the millennium.
In a 2003 interview with Rolling Stone, Young discussed the contemporary musical climate and revealed his old-school listening habits. The subject came about when Young was asked if he had ever watched the talent show American Idol. “I got roped into watching it,” Young admitted. “I happened to be in a room where people were watching it one day. And that guy came on – he was in Rolling Stone, on the cover.”
“Clay Aiken?” the interviewer asked. “Yeah, Clay,” Young agreed. “You want my opinion? When I saw Clay on the cover of Rolling Stone, I thought, ‘Well, it’s not Jerry Garcia. Things have really changed.’ We went from music and a movement – people living the music and loving the message, the freedom.”
Having identified a recent shift from music as the main driving factor behind cultural evolution, Young was asked what the last record he bought was and whether there were any contemporary pop artists he enjoyed listening to. “A Jimmy Reed record. What I like to listen to is not pop music,” Young asserted. “I’m interested in the roots of the blues and folk music. I’m out of touch, a lost cause. You can write me off.”