Neil Young’s 2012 autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream, contains fascinating memories and anecdotes about songwriting, guitars, folk and rock music, musicians, classic cars, Young’s impressive ongoing inventions (including an electric car and a music file format, PureTone, to rival and replace mp3’s), and, unexpectedly, model trains.

Young, like fellow rockers Rod Stewart and Bruce Springsteen, began as a model train hobbyist and collector – for the love of God, do not call them “toy trains” to a model train collector – and eventually dedicated space in his 2800-square foot barn to a massive 750-feet track layout with landscape, tunnels, and buildings. Young brought this track along on his HORDE tour and allowed fans to play with the display, carefully supervised by the six crew members hired simply to travel with, set up. and tear down the track.

Young first created a research and development company, Liontech, to help the storied Lionel, LLC train manufacturing company, founded in 1900, create model trains with sound systems and control units. Young then became part owner of Lionel, along with an investment company. It was Young’s designs and inventions for Lionel that helped to bring the company out of bankruptcy in 2008. Young’s first train-related invention was a control unit, the Big Red Button, that enabled his son, who has cerebral palsy, to control the trains. Other inventions of his include the first-ever wireless remote control device for model trains, the TrainMaster Command Control (for which he paid for the development out of his own pocket), Lionel LEGACY Command Control System, LEGACY RailSounds System, and LionVision, which provides each model locomotive with a digital camera and microphone, allowing a train-view to be shown on a video screen or online.

Young helped Lionel design their Postwar Celebration Series, re-imagining classic designs with new technological features, such as the 5344 NYC Hudson train, first manufactured in the 1930’s. In 2004 Lionel released a limited edition train set based on the Neil Young and Crazy Horse album Greendale, set in a fictional California town.

“I remember one day David Crosby and Graham Nash were visiting me at the train barn during the recording of American Dream, a lot of which we did on my ranch at Plywood Digital, a barn that we converted to a recording studio…Anyway, I saw David looking at one of my train rooms full of rolling stock and stealing a glance at Graham that said, This guy is cuckoo. He’s gone nuts. Look at this obsession. I shrugged it off. I need it. For me it is a road back.” – Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

“Clyde Coil” = Neil Young’s pseudonym for train-related websites and articles. Is this video (I can’t embed it here) a “Bernard Shakey” (another of Young’s nom de plumes) production?

Now I want all future Thomas the Tank Engine movies to feature Neil Young as the voice of the conductor instead of Alec Baldwin.

Below, Young talks model trains with fellow Lionel enthusiast, David Letterman:
 

 
Neil Young takes a break while shooting Journey Through The Past and visits a music store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. He gets righteously upset when he discovers poorly recorded bootlegs of his live performances. This was back in 1971. Neil is still pissed off. This time around it’s MP3s. You can’t accuse of him not being consistent.
 

 
Solo Trans is an uneasy blend of unfunny skits with a 1984 solo concert by Neil Young in Dayton, Ohio. Neil is in Kraftwerk meets Gene Vincent and Bo Diddley mode with some of the bits feeling downright Daft Punkian.

Solo Trans was directed by Hal Ashby and released on long-out-of-print laserdisc. While it’s not Young at his most sublime, it is an entertaining document of Young at his most whacked-out, unpredictable, contrarian and prophetic. Here’s a rare chance to see it. Thanks YouTube.

“Heart of Gold”
“Old Man”
“Helpless”
“Ohio”
“Don’t Be Denied”
“I Got a Problem”
“Hello Mr. Soul”
“Payola Blues”
“Get Gone”
“Don’t Take Your Love Away From Me”
“Do You Wanna Dance?
 

 
In 1965, a year before hooking up with the musicians who would form The Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young had a brief stint in a Canadian rock group called The Mynah Birds fronted by Rick James (yes, THAT Rick James). At this point in James’ career he was known as Ricky James Matthew and did a stellar imitation of Mick Jagger. The group had a raw exciting sound that hinted at The Stones, Them, and various American garage bands. The Mynah Birds nailed a deal with Motown Records (the first white band to do so) and recorded sixteen tracks in Detroit. But things turned bad.

In his authorized Neil Young biography, Shakey, Jimmy McDonough describes the scene:

The Mynah Birds—in black leather jackets, yellow turtlenecks and boots—had quite a surreal scene going. The band was financed by John Craig Eaton of the Eaton’s department-store dynasty. Legend has it he poured money into the band, establishing a bottomless account for the band’s equipment needs.

Those lucky enough to see any of the band’s few gigs say they were electrifying. ‘Neil would stop playing lead, do a harp solo, throw the harmonica way up in the air and Ricky would catch it and continue the solo.’

Unfortunately, everything screeched to a halt when James was busted in the studio for being AWOL from the navy. “We thought he was Canadian,” said Palmer. “Even though there are no Negroes in Canada.” A single, “It’s My Time,” was allegedly pulled the day of release, and the album recordings were shelved and remain unreleased to this day.”

Here’s a couple of hard-rocking tracks from the legendary Motown Mynah Birds’ sessions. The musicians are Young and future Buffalo Springfield member Bruce Palmer and Goldy McJohn and Nick St. Nicholas who would later establish Steppenwolf with John Kay.

“It’s My Time” was co-written by Young and James:
 

 
“I’ll Wait Forever”:
 

 
“I’ve Got You In My Soul “:
 

 
“Go On And Cry”:
 

 
Sublime performance clip of Neil Young and Crazy Horse doing one of Young’s greatest numbers, “Like a Hurricane,” on a French TV show called Jukebox in 1977.

Young wrote “Like a Hurricane” for a girl named Gail that he’d met in a bar after his break-up up with actress Carrie Snodgrass.

In Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography it quotes Young’s neighbor, Taylor Phelps talking about the song:

Neil had this amazing intense attraction to this particular woman named Gail – it didn’t happen, he didn’t go home with her. We go back to the ranch and Neil started playing. Young was completely possessed, pacing around the room, hunched over a Stringman keyboard pounding out the song.

In 1975, when Neil Young wrote “Like a Hurricane” he was unable to sing, or even speak, due to a recent operation on his throat. His friend, artist James Mazzeo, recalls Young handing him an envelope with just two lines: “You are like a hurricane. There’s a calm in your eyes.” Crazy Horse messed around on the song for ten days before hitting on the inspired take on 1977’s American Stars N Bars album.

Note that Young—one of the greatest guitar players ever born, as this song ably demonstrates—is seen playing his highly customized 1953 Les Paul Goldtop, “Old Black.” I guess the wind machine was meant to stand-in for an actual hurricane or something…
 

 
If you would have told me back when I was a defiant teenage post-punk fanboy—clad in Doc Martens and a black trench coat festooned with badges of PiL, The Residents, Kraftwerk, Nina Hagen and Throbbing Gristle—that one day I’d go through quite a long “phase” (as my wife calls my penchant for perhaps slightly over-exuberant musical enthusiasms) for the type of music that I HATED MOST when I was a kid, the laid-back, singer-songwriter sounds of the Southern California folk-rock, I would not have believed you.

I’d have (truly) been horrified. To me, there was nothing worse than The Eagles (maybe just “Southern rockers” like Lynyrd Skynyrd or Molly Hatchet) and anything that even vaguely smacked of the So Cal sound was shit to my ears.

Part of it was really getting into Neil Young (which for me happened in 2002, only after I first read Jimmy McDonough’s masterpiece of biography, Shakey, a book I’ve re-read twice in the past year alone), The Flying Burrito Brothers and Joni Mitchell, and then it sort of spread out slowly from there. A lot of it also had to do with our own Paul Gallagher sending me a copy of Barney Hoskyns’ excellent 2006 overview of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter/folkrock sound, Hotel California.

Hotel California‘s subtitle is “The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends” and aside from some of the aforementioned artists, the book also turned me on to the music of both Judee Sill and the Byrd who could not fly, the great Gene Clark. It’s a great place to dive in, a perfect roadmap through the Canyon sound.

I even found, to my surprise, that there were some Eagles songs I really liked. A lot.

It just goes to show. In any case, Hoskyn’s excellent book was made into an equally essential BBC produced documentary, Hotel California: L.A. from the Byrds to the Eagles, a highly entertaining account of the rise and fall of Laurel Canyon rock. It’s a must see and worthy of multiple viewings.
 

 
Of the dozen or so shows I saw this past weekend at Austin City Limits, the highlights, for me, were Die Antwoord and Neil Young. Two very different musical entities that both delivered outstanding performances within their particular styles. Die Antwoord was dynamic, funny and hugely charismatic. The 10,000 plus people in the audience went apeshit for Ninja and Yolandi and it’s easy to see why: the duo brought some much needed energy and hard beats to the fest.

Young was the storm after the storm. Hitting the stage after a series of monsoon-like downpours, Neil and Crazy Horse were epic. Young may have played these songs hundreds of times but he continues to make them sound heartfelt and fresh. Of all the shows I saw at ACL, this was the purest, heaviest and most bliss-inducing rock ‘n’roll, out-punking Iggy and wiping the floor with Jack White.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse at ACL - Saturday, October 13:
 

 
The windows in the buildings surrounding Central Park must have been rattling last night. Neil Young, Crazy Horse, Dave Grohl and Dan Auerbach perform an epic version of “Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World” at the Global Citizen Festival.

The guitar apocalypse was for a good cause:

This September, as the world’s leaders gather in New York for the UN General Assembly, the Global Citizen Festival will bring top artists and 60,000 change makers together on the Great Lawn of Central Park on September 29 to urge our leaders and fellow citizens to do more to help end extreme poverty.

This advocacy concert will celebrate the progress already made in fighting extreme poverty, secure financial commitments for tackling extreme poverty and disease, and mobilise thousands of ambassadors for change. We’ll unite around a simple yet powerful idea: that by giving every child a chance to thrive, our generation can end extreme poverty.

I’ll be seeing Neil at ACL in a couple of weeks. The dude seems ageless.
 

 
Here’s the new video for “Walk Like A Giant” from Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s upcoming album Psychedelic Pill, which will be released on November 30. The tune is a sixteen minute epic on the album so this video is a pretty radical edit.

I am reading Young’s memoirs Waging Heavy Peace. The book is very much like Young’s longer songs. It loops and arcs and sails around a lot, like an eagle soaring through time. It speaks as intimately as a diary or journal, a confessional or one-on-one conversation. For folks who just want the inside skinny on Young’s life as a rock ‘n’ roller, the book may be a bit frustrating . This isn’t full of juicy bits like Keith Richards’ memoir. Young seems less engaged with the life he lived as he is with the life he’s living and the evolution of his consciousness. While the book covers Young’s roots with Buffalo Springfield and Crazy Horse and he shares the anecdotal stuff we want rockers to share, Young is mostly in a philosophic frame of mind and fixes his eye on the bigger picture of how to live a decent life as a human being, a citizen of the world, an artist, father and husband. If that sounds like it might be dull, it’s not. Whenever the book gets a bit sluggish, Young “reboots” the mother fucker, jumps the track and finds a new obsession with which to engage us - stuff like digital recording, vinyl, the future of music and his Herculean struggle to get sober after years of drinking and pot smoking.

Young calls Waging Heavy Peace a “a hippie dream.” The book does have a loosey goosey hippie vibe while hewing to the way life works: a series of awakenings and dreams.
 

 
I’ve been listening to the new Patti Smith album for the past two days and my initial enthusiasm for Banga has only grown stronger. At first I thought my lust for a Smith album that knocked me sideways like Horses was coloring my take on this new one, but I think I can fairly objectively say it is the second or third best album of Patti Smith’s career.

Smith’s voice has never been finer and, unlike many of her albums after Easter, Banga is full of lovely melodies and hooks. Lyrically, the album follows in the spirit of Smith’s memoir Just Kids: ruminative, prayerful, melancholic and hopeful - a delicate, tough and occasionally fierce expression from a spiritual warrior moving forward with grace and determined soulfulness.

Banga was produced by Smith at Electric Lady Studios (where Horses was recorded in 1975) and features her group (Lenny Kaye, Jay Daugherty and Tony Shanahan) in stellar form. Tom Verlaine provides some shards of psychedelia to two tracks and there’s some drumming and guitar work from Johnny Depp on the title track.

For fans of rock legends who still deliver the goods, Neil Young has added Smith to his tour schedule. The Patti Smith Group will open for Young in these cities:

Nov. 23 – Montreal, Quebec, Bell Centre
Nov. 24 – Ottawa, Ontario, Scotiabank Place
Nov. 26 – Boston, Mass., TD Garden
Nov. 27 – New York City, N.Y., Madison Square Garden
Nov. 29 – Philadelphia, Pa., Wells Fargo Center
Nov. 30 – Fairfax, Va., Patriot Center
Dec. 4 – Bridgeport, Conn., Webster Bank Arena

The following video was shot at Detroit Institute of Arts where an exhibition of Smith’s photographs is taking place concurrent with the addition of her late husband’s, Fred “Sonic” Smith, guitar to the museum’s collection.

The song “April Fool” is the opening track of Banga. Accompanying Patti are her son and daughter, Jackson and Jesse.
 

 
Bob Egan’s PopShots blog has a wonderful deconstruction of Neil Young’s iconic After the Goldrush album cover. In the above shot, you see the image in context, where it was shot at Sullivan and 3rd Street, just off Washington Square Park in New York’s Greenwich Village.

After Egan’s exhaustive coverage was posted on his blog, Young’s archivist Joel Bernstein, who took the shot, wrote in with his recollection of the shoot, as well as sending in the original, uncropped photo with Graham Nash standing to the side:

“The photo was not “a mistake.” I saw the small, old woman coming towards us down the sidewalk, was intrigued, and wanted to catch her passing Neil. The mistake, to me, was that I had in my haste focused the lens just past the two figures, closer to the fence than to Neil’s face. That was the original reason why I made a small-sized print and solarized it; to help with the apparent sharpness. But the solarization in this case added a somewhat spooky dimension to the image, which Neil took to immediately.”

Read more at PopShots
 

Photo by Joel Bernstein, 1970

 
Neil Young at the “Rock am Ring” festival in Germany on May 18, 2002. Good quality with very good sound. Enjoy two and a half hours of Mr. Young. And Booker T. and The MGs!

Neil Young—vocals, guitar, harmonica
Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro—guitar, backing vocals, piano on “Helpless”
Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn—bass guitar
Booker T. Jones—hammond organ
Steve ‘Smokey’ Potts—drums
Astrid Young—backing vocals, piano on “Quit” and “She’s a Healer”
Pegi Young—backing vocals
Larry Cragg*—additional bass guitar on “Let’s Roll”

 
Part two after the jump…

 
How far would you go for love? Would you give up all your possessions? Renounce this world and all its cruelty? Would you die for love? Would you kill for love?

Kill For Love is the new album by Chromatics, a band from Portland, Orgeon led by the producer Johnny Jewel of Italians Do It Better renown. I’ve written about the Italians Do It Better label before, drawing a comparison between the IDIB roster’s sound, and the lo-fi, tripped-out, “haunted retro” aesthetic of acts like Ariel Pink and John Maus.

The Italians Do It Better sound is rooted very firmly in late 70s and early 80s disco music, particularly the more soundtrack-oriented work of Giorgio Moroder, Claudio Simonetti and Patrick Cowley. As those names would also suggest, Johnny Jewel (who produces practically everything on the label) LOVES the sound of analog synthesizers. Jewel was the original choice to compose the soundtrack to last year’s 80s-noir sleeper hit Drive, and with his trademark throbbing, moody sound, it’s not hard to see why.

Chromatics are one of Italians Do It Better’s flagship acts, and one of its most popular, so expectations for this new album are high (particularly as it was originally due for release in 2010.) Thank god then that it doesn’t disappoint. It goes without saying that there’s nothing radically new here, no re-invention of the wheel, but when a form and function are just so perfect, why would you want to reinvent them?
 

 
Having said that, there is less of a reliance on arpeggiated synth lines on Kill For Love as there has been on past Chromatics releases. Of all the IDIB acts, Chromatics seem most like a “real” band, in that they aren’t afraid to adopt the “traditional” band roles of bassist, guitarist and drummer. In fact, the addition of live electric guitar on a lot of Kill For Love is perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the album.

Still, that chilly John Carpenter-vibe is present and correct, like a sliver of ice through a beating heart, as are the hauntingly distant female vocals of singer Ruth Radelet. The opening cover of Neil Young’s “Into The Black” is simply stunning, one of the musical highlights of the year so far for me, and as an opener it sets up the rest of the album perfectly. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Jewel explained the rationale behind that particular cover version:

It was very, very intentional in terms of rock mythology. You can’t underestimate the power of the guitar for an American audience. It’s a really strong symbol—just everything the guitar and Western culture represent—and Chromatics is part of that fantasy. The Neil Young song was recorded in 2009, and I knew I wanted to open the album with it, for multiple reasons. Part of it was a challenge to us as beatmakers or mood-makers, to see if we could actually write songs that could stand up in a pop sense. Because if you cover a song like that, you’re biting off a lot. You can’t touch Neil Young, but I wanted to challenge us to go beyond the loop and think about songs more. 

The rest of that interview is well worth a read.

You can hear (and download) the Chromatics cover of “Into The Black” right here:
 

 
 
Here’s another free download from the album, the single “Kill For Love”:
 

 
And here’s the “Kill For Love” album in full:
 

 
For LOTS more great music, visit Johnny Jewel’s Soundcloud page.

To order Kill For Love, and for more info on Italians Do It Better, visit Viva Italians. 

 
Personally, I think this is punk as fuck. Neil Young and Crazy Horse (Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Frank “Poncho” Sampedro) rock the garage with “Oh Susannah”—the first video from the new album Americana —coming June 5th.

The vintage film footage in the video is quite striking and may cause a bit of a stir. There’s a kid smoking in it. YouTube busted one of my videos (“88 Lines About 44 Women”) that had a kid smoking in it…but I’m not Neil Young.
 

 
Neil Young sitting on a sidewalk in Glasgow back in 1976 singing the “Old Laughing Lady” and playing his banjo as people file past him with little clue as to who this longhaired hippie is.

When Dangerous Minds’ contributor Paul Gallagher shared a shorter version of this video last year, he wrote…

[...] Hoots mon! Rare film of Neil Young busking in Glasgow city center, April 1 1976, prior to headlining at the city’s legendary Apollo Theater later that night.

Mr Young performed outside Glasgow’s Central Station, on Gordon Street, where he sang “Old Laughing Lady”. Because of the date - All Fool’s Day - it has been suggested that Mr Young was carrying out his own practical joke for the benefit of those lucky denizens of the Dear Green Place.”