Neil Young's distinctive sound and identity is a little bit country, and a little bit
rock n' roll, but his life story is definitely more of a ballad than a rocking anthem.
He's weathered everything from a fractured family to deadly health scares.
This is the tragic life story of Neil Young.
The polio vaccine was widely distributed in the mid-1950s, saving millions from paralyzation
and days spent in iron lungs.
But for Neil Young, born in Canada in 1945, that all came too late.
In his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, Young remembers being around five years old when his parents
rushed him to Sick Children's Hospital in Toronto, and that it was, quote, "hard for
[him] to walk for some reason."
A painful lumbar puncture revealed what the doctor feared: Young Neil had polio.
The disease had ravaged his body, and his brother, Bob Young, recalls a lengthy hospitalization,
after which Neil had to re-learn how to walk.
Bob said,
"I remember him trying to get from one part of the living room to another by hanging on
to furniture to keep his balance.
He was unsure of what had happened with his battle with polio.
'I didn't die, did I?' he said."
Young felt the wages of polio well into adulthood.
Lower back vertebrae were surgically removed, and he frequently wore a back brace, even
during concerts.
"Well, literally speaking, I see the world through one eye much more than I do through
the other, because one side of my body was affected by polio."
After some time growing up in rural areas outside of Toronto, Young and his family settled
in a tiny, remote town in Ontario.
A few years after the childhood trauma of polio, and then the daunting task of learning
to walk again, Young faced another painful event, the slow deterioration of his parents'
marriage.
According to Young's bio on his website, his father left the family, including 12-year-old
Neil, in order to be with another woman.
The elder Youngs divorced and devised a unique custody arrangement.
Rather than have kids Neil and Bob split their time between Mom's house and Dad's house,
Neil lived with his mother, and Bob stayed with their father.
While Neil and Bob somehow managed to remain close over their lifetimes, it's likely that
the split-in-two family rarely saw each other in the following years, as Neil and his mother
moved over a thousand miles away to the city of Winnipeg.
In 1949, not long before he contracted polio, four-year-old Neil Young was diagnosed with
type 1 diabetes.
That means Young has been taking multiple daily insulin injections for over 70 years,
as of 2019.
Too much insulin can lead to hypoglycemia attacks, or low blood sugar, which can present
with shaking and a lack of body control.
Young thought he was having an episode like this in 1967.
He was hanging out a radio festival called the Hollywood Teen Fair, when he suddenly
found himself on his back on the pavement, as he wrote in Waging Heavy Peace.
He explained on NPR's Fresh Air,
"I was having fun, and you know, maybe I'd forgotten to eat or something, I don't know.
And then I felt kind of sick to my stomach, and then I started to feel all weird and echoey,
and then I fell down, and I don't really remember afterwards."
He'd suffered a seizure, a telltale symptom of epilepsy.
He continued to suffer seizures into the '70s, telling Rolling Stone in 1975 that he'd never
had one while performing, because he always walked off stage when he could feel one coming
on.
As of 2012, however, the rocker told NPR,
"They don't happen anymore.
I think I outgrew them."
Plenty of people see an actress in a movie and develop a serious crush, but famous people
can actually maneuver to meet that person.
According to People, Young saw the 1970 movie Diary of a Mad Housewife and became transfixed
with its star, Carrie Snodgress.
Young tracked Snodgress down to the theater where she was acting in a play.
Snodgress admitted,
"There was a note on my dressing room table that said, 'Call Neil Young.'"
By 1971, the couple was living together, and in 1972, their son Zeke, was born, and diagnosed
with cerebral palsy.
By 1975, Young was done with the whole family thing.
Snodgress explained,
"He started hanging out with the guys, going to L.A. alone.
Then one day he came back and said he thought it was time for me to leave."
After he kicked them out, Young moved his ex-partner and their son around a series of
L.A. rental houses until he gave her a house and gave her substantial amounts of unofficial
child and spousal support payments.
Over the years, taking care of Zeke cost more and more while Young's financial assistance
grew inconsistent.
In 1983, Snodgress took her case to a Los Angeles court, which ordered Young to make
$10,000 monthly child support payments.
In 1975, Young recorded a stark, mostly acoustic album called Homegrown.
His label at the time, Reprise Records, had accepted the LP, finalized the cover art,
and set a release date.
Then Young held a listening party, playing the record for about ten people.
They liked it fine, but then the reel kept playing, which contained another unreleased
album called Tonight's the Night.
Young told Rolling Stone,
"By listening to those two albums back to back at the party, I started to see the weaknesses
in Homegrown."
And so, he decided to release Tonight's the Night, because the overall feeling of that
more straightforward rock n' roll record was, in his words, "much more elevating than Homegrown."
Why so serious?
Young explained,
"A lot of these songs had to do with me breaking up with my old lady.
It was a little too personal…it scared me."
That "old lady" was, presumably, Carrie Snodgress, meaning Young hadn't acted as cruelly or callously
as it seems like he did.
He'd just taken his pain and sadness and made it into art.
But the result was so raw that Young didn't only pull it off Reprise's release schedule,
he completely buried it.
Homegrown, recorded during Young's mid-1970s peak, remains unreleased.
However, in April 2019, Rolling Stone reported Young had planned, then once again, delayed
its release.
In 1982, Young signed with Geffen Records, which offered a contract that paid a minimum
of $1 million per album.
The first record he made under this deal was Trans, a collection of electronic music with
garbled computerized voices all over the place.
While electronic music was on the rise in the early '80s, Young's real inspiration for
Trans was his son, Ben, born with cerebral palsy.
Young told Mojo in 1995,
"My son is severely handicapped, and at that time was simply trying to find a way to talk,
to communicate with other people.
That's what Trans is all about.
And that's why, on that record, you know I'm saying something but you can't understand
what it is.
Well, that's the exact same feeling I was getting from my son."
And what did Young get for this profound attempt to connect with and understand his son?
According to Consequence of Sound, he got served.
In November 1983, Geffen sued Young for $3.3 million on the grounds that Trans and some
other works were, quote, "not 'commercial' [and] and musically uncharacteristic of Young's
previous recordings."
In other words, Geffen sued Neil Young for not sounding enough like the Neil Young they'd
paid so much to get on its roster.
Young countersued for $21 million, and in a few months time, both suits were dropped.
Since childhood, there have been two constants in the life of Neil Young: music and more
than his fair share of scary health problems.
He's survived and recovered from polio, managed epilepsy and type 1 diabetes, and in 2005,
he suffered a brain aneurysm.
In March 2005, Young performed with the Pretenders at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
According to Billboard, it was while playing on stage that he noticed, quote, "visual field
disturbances."
He went in for an MRI scan, where doctors discovered that he had an aneurysm.
This medical situation can often be treated with surgery, and Young's case qualified,
although he delayed that potentially life-saving surgery for a week to go record something
in Nashville.
Finally, he went under the knife, and his procedure was declared "a complete success."
The part about the ordeal that truly seemed to bug the Canadian-born Young was that his
recovery time forced the cancelation of an appearance at that year's Juno Awards, which
is the Canadian equivalent to the Grammys.
Back in 1974, while he was still partnered with Carrie Snodgress, Young met Pegi Morton,
a waitress in her early 20s, who worked near his Broken Arrow Ranch in northern California.
According to The Guardian, Young ditched Snodgress and married Morton in 1978.
In addition to helping found the Bridge School, a world-class institution for children with
special needs, she performed as a backup singer for her husband, and finally released her
first album in 2007.
Pegi Young completed her final album, Raw, in 2017, essentially a concept album about
divorce.
In 2014, Young filed divorce papers, and took up with Kill Bill star Daryl Hannah.
Some of Pegi Young's lyrics refer to this dark time, like when she sings the words:
"Why'd you have to ruin my life?
Why'd you have to be so mean?"
So while Young might not look or act like a party-hearty rock star, he did the most
rock star thing ever, just shy of his 70th birthday, and left his wife for an actress.
2018 was one of the worst years on record in terms of California wildfires.
A lot of famous people lost a lot in the fires, including Miley Cyrus and Gerard Butler, who
each lost a house.
Sadly, Neil Young also lost his home.
He bought his home for $3.6 million from girlfriend Darryl Hannah before they married, only to
see it burn down.
As if that's not tragic enough, it's not the first time this has happened to Young.
He wrote on the Neil Young Archives,
"I have lost my home before to a California fire, now another."
He was also very clear about what he thinks is the root cause of the loss and the fires.
He wrote,
"California is vulnerable, not because of poor forest management, because of Climate
Change."
Young announced in 2014 that he planned to take on Apple with a personal music player
that offered significantly higher-quality audio files, more comparable to the rich and
nuanced sound of vinyl than the compressed vibe typical of digital music.
To fund what he called the Pono Player, Young launched a Kickstarter campaign which earned
more than $6 million, eight times his goal and one of the biggest crowdfunding campaigns
ever.
The yellow PonoPlayer, with a 128 gigabyte capacity, which allowed for the storage of
several hundred songs, went on sale in January 2015 at a cost of $400.
The device sold well enough, but Young said his pet project was doomed when the record
labels who would provide the high-res music wanted to charge extra for high-quality music,
according to Noise11.
His dream of bringing really good digital music to the masses died, ultimately unable
to break into a marketplace dominated by Apple's iTunes, and at a time when streaming was well
on its way to replacing downloading as the music delivery method of choice by the time
consumers could get a PonoPlayer in their hands.
According to Apple Insider, Apple actually bought out Omnifone, a music software service
that contracted with a number of companies, including Pono, in July 2016.
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