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Young, Neil
Young, Neil (1945- )
The Canadian-born grandfather of grunge rock was originally a folk rocker with Steven Stills and Graham Nash in the group Buffalo Springfield (“Stop Children, what’s that sound…”).
Also a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, his solo career has influenced on a wide variety of musicians and some of his songs arguably demonstrate what might be called archetypal depth.
Watching Young perform live can be like witnessing a Toltec Elder harness the Powers That Be, especially when he performs tunes like “Cortez the Killer,” the “Halls of Montezuma,” and “Inca Queen.”
Other more intimate songs like “After the Goldrush” (in the 1970 showpiece album by the same title) reflect the noble, if drug induced, dreams and despair of the hippie generation, now revived by the media-hyped fear of Global Warming.
“Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.”
Well before considered fashionable to speak of alien abductions or the possibility of mankind leaving Earth to inhabit other planets, Young related a dream in that same song where “silver spaceships” take “Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun.”
Of course, it could be argued that Young was talking about the US Apollo space program. After all, man had just landed on the moon for the very first time in 1969 and the early 1970s were all about the so-called “space age.”
In the 1980s Young parodies his hippie phase by referring to an earlier Crosby, Still, Nash and Young song in “Hippie Dream” from the album Landing on Water (1986).
And the wooden ships,
were just a hippie dream…
capsized in excess
if you know what I mean
Young has epilepsy but this has not slowed him down nor deterred him from influencing other prominent rockers like David Bowie and Avril Lavigne. In fact, Young has been described as a musical workaholic. He has released seven new albums in the new millennium. » Archetypes
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