Nowadays Neil can't even shut up

 A few months back I was made a confession to my wife: I told her I really was not a big fan of Neil Young anymore. In fact, I found a lot of his music to be mediocre and his cranky-old-man personality to be increasingly off-putting and tiresome.

Neil Young, in his old age, had become the epitome of the “OK, Boomer,” meme. And deservedly so, after his public demands that popular podcaster Joe Rogan be kicked off Spotify, due to Rogan daring to ask questions about the COVID-19 vaccine, among others.

I confessed my Neil Young hesitancy to her, because in 2018 I had written a book titled Rock Catapult: 1966 – The Launch of Modern Rock & Roll.  The book is about the rock and pop and soul music released and/or recorded in the incredible year of 1966, from The Monkees to Donovan to The Kinks and many more. Among the acts I highlighted was Buffalo Springfield, the Los Angeles-based band that had a major hit in early 1967 titled “For What It’s Worth.”

Considered the go-to song for Baby Boomer movie directors and producers when a film is set during the turbulent “Sixties,” “For What It’s Worth” – “there’s somethin’ happenin’ here / what it is ain’t exactly clear” … - is not about anti-war protesters taking it to the streets to demand an end to an unjust war in Southeast Asia. Nope. It was, rather, about the L.A. cops cracking down on clubs on the Sunset Strip; clubs that were being frequented by Buffalo Springfield in that wild year of ’66.

But no matter. Stephen Stills, the guitarist/vocalist for Buffalo Springfield, and co-band leader with Neil Young at that time, and the guy who penned the song, certainly appreciated the checks that came in after it rose to the Top 10 nationally and cemented Buffalo Springfield as a very important band – one that would break up within two years of forming.

But Stills would later tell a reporter that he didn’t want his group to be known as a protest band. What a drag, right? After all, Stills had made some bizarre claims of having spent time fighting in Vietnam and his authoritarian bearing earned him the nickname “Sarge.” I guess it’s a good thing Stills didn’t get that sought-after role on The Monkees TV show – crooked teeth and thinning hair and all.

Was Stephen Stills really for the “peace and love” his hippie brethren claimed to be seeking? And what of Neil Young? Did he share his bandmate’s thoughts on the war? Did he care? Well, he would join Crosby, Stills & Nash a few years after the Springfield’s demise in 1968, penning “Ohio,” the song about the Kent State students killed by National Guardsmen in 1970, students protesting the war. Back then, Neil Young cared about human rights and social justice. Not so much, these days, if his words are to be taken at face value.

In David Roberts’ definitive biography of Stephen Stills, titled Stephen Stills: Change Partners, published in 2016, in the chapter “Follow That Hearse,” we learn that Canadians Neil Young and bassist Bruce Palmer had driven in a Hearse from Toronto to L.A. in search of a singer/guitarist named Stephen Stills. They had no idea where Stills was, only that he was somewhere in L.A. This, after Young left a band called The Mynah Birds, which featured an American singer named Rick James who was in a bit of hot water at the time. Yeah, that Rick James.

Well, as fate or the gods or what-have-you would have it, Stills, Richie Furay and kooky character Barry Friedman spotted Young’s hearse in traffic on the Sunset Strip on April Fool’s Day 1966.

In less than two weeks following this serendipitous encounter in L.A. traffic, Young, Palmer, Furay, Stills and a (Canadian) drummer named Dewey Martin, late of The Dillards (the same hillbilly bluegrass band called “The Darlings” in The Andy Griffith Show) had connected, clicked, named themselves “Buffalo Springfield,” gathered up instruments and made their stage debut at the Troubadour! Now that’s fast!

Now, before I go any further, my dear readers should recall that Young, Palmer and Martin were not American citizens. And yet they had no trouble getting a gig and later getting signed to Herb Abramson’s Atco record label. Within seven months of forming, their debut album, Buffalo Springfield – the one featuring “For What It’s Worth” – would be released to the world.

But let me point the reader to take a darker path. One into Laurel Canyon. The bucolic, Hollywood neighborhood that was home to many household names of the Sixties rock generation: Jim Morrison (The Doors); The Monkees; The Byrds; The Mamas & The Papas; The Beach Boys; Frank Zappa; Love; Steppenwolf; Paul Revere & The Raiders: etc., etc.

How many of these singers and musicians stirred things up enough for the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned us about in 1961? None, really. None of them were drafted and shipped off to the meatgrinder in Southeast Asia. No sir. And while Young was a Canadian (who did get American citizenship), he benefited from American society for decades “after the gold rush” of record sales that has led to Young having an estimated net worth of $200 million, as of January 2022.

So, when Young, last month, complained about Rogan allegedly spreading “misinformation” about the vaccines and such – and demanding Spotify dump Rogan for allegedly “crossing the line” – it reminded me that this was the same Neil Young who praised frustrated and deeply deranged singer/songwriter Charles Manson back in the day, saying Manson was a “living poet.” Young was not exactly a discerning individual, I think it would be safe to say. And we’re supposed to take Neil Young’s demands to cancel Joe Rogan seriously? The same Neil Young who was busted for drugs – alongside anti-vax-mandate musician Eric Clapton, no less – and mysteriously released soon after? I’m beginning to think that Neil Young is on the payroll of  “The Man.”

Now, I have to admit that there are some Neil Young songs that I never tire of. The psychedelic pop of “Expecting To Fly,” from 1967’s Buffalo Springfield Again is absolutely gorgeous and ethereal. The apocalyptic, saucerian sci-fi of “After The Gold Rush” has inspired my writing on a number of occasions. And 1992’s “Harvest Moon” gets an annual spin in my house on the night of the actual Harvest Moon.

But if I am to be intellectually honest about it, the elderly Neil Young has jumped the shark, in the parlance of our times. He is irrelevant and doesn’t realize yet. His grumpiness and petulance is grating and makes me like him even less, especially in light of the fact that he can afford to do just about anything he wants, whereas the rest of us struggle day-to-day in a world increasingly gone mad.

For a guy who released a song in 1989 titled “Rockin’ In The Free World” on an album actually titled Freedom (as the Berlin Wall fell), it is truly disappointing to endure Neil Young’s continued bitchiness, alongside those of fellow Laurel Canyon co-conspirators David Crosby and Joni Mitchell, among others, making demands of Spotify because they aren’t enlightened, woke or whatever.  They have had the world at their feet and in the winter of their years they endlessly complain and come off as really ungrateful and out of touch with the common man.

And if you ever want to know why we know more about San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene than we do about Laurel Canyon, I highly urge you to check out the late Dave McGowan’s 2014 book Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon. You read that book and you’ll never hear Neil Young, The Doors, Zappa or any of those other Laurel Canyon-connected acts quite the same ever again.

Perhaps Neil Young could appear on The Joe Rogan Experience and delve into some of the darker, unanswered questions still hanging over sinister Laurel Canyon like a toxic cloud. I think that would be a massively popular episode were it to be arranged.  Who knows, eh?

But that is a conversation for another day.

Andrew W. Griffin is a writer based in Oklahoma City. He is the author of the 2018 book Rock Catapult: 1966 – The Launch of Modern Rock & Roll.