Today’s episode is about a song that was written just up the hill from where I was born and in the same town where my wife and and I were wed. So it most definitely “strikes close to home.”
Neil Young had emerged from the great north woods of Canada into the public limelight in the mid–1960s. He joined up with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay to create the Buffalo Springfield, an LA-based band that asked the musical question “Stop, hey, what’s that sound” before disintegrating – but not before Young himself had quit and rejoined the band several times. Then, in 1969, he made a self-titled solo album that had great songs, including “The Loner,” (one of my personal favorites) but which didn’t sell well.
And then Young really came into his own. His second solo album got him some much needed publicity, and he hit a creative chord with an ensemble of garage musicians that he dubbed Crazy Horse. His next stop was to sign on with Crosby, Stills, and Nash (wherein he added his own last name to the group) and played the Woodstock festival with them. His participation in the CSNY album Deja Vu brought him both acclaim and paychecks, which he used to purchase a sprawling ranch in the mountains of the San Francisco Bay Area.
One day, Young took a ride around his newly purchased estate with the property’s caretaker, who was at least forty years older than Young at the time. The two men had a long conversation, and the result of that little open-air chat became the basis of one of Young’s most enduring acoustic songs. Let’s find out how the song came together, who played on it, and how the listening public took to it.
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