Neil Young Early Life

Neil Young was born in Toronto to sportswriter and novelist Scott Young and Rassy Ragland Young. He spent his early years in Omemee, a small country town which he later memorialized in his song "Helpless". A bout with polio at the age of six left him with a weakened left side, and he still walks with a slight limp. His parents divorced when Young was twelve, and he moved with his mother back to the family home of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where his music career began. During high school in Winnipeg, he played in instrumental rock bands, one of which, the Squires, had a local hit called "The Sultan." He later worked the folk clubs in Winnipeg, where he befriended guitarist Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell, and also spent summers in Thunder Bay, Ontario, playing at local clubs.

In 1966, after an aborted record deal on the Motown label with the Rick James-fronted Mynah Birds, Young and bass player Bruce Palmer relocated to Los Angeles, where they joined Stills, Richie Furay, and Dewey Martin to form Buffalo Springfield. A mixture of folk, country, psychedelia, and rock lent a hard edge by the twin lead guitars of Stills and Young made the Buffalo Springfield a critical success, and the first record Buffalo Springfield (1967) sold well after Stills' topical song "For What It's Worth" became a hit.

Things did not go smoothly for long, however, and distrust of their management as well as the arrest and deportation of Palmer exacerbated already strained relations between group members. A second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, was released in late 1967 but two of Young’s three contributions were actually solo tracks recorded apart from the rest of the group.

In many ways, these three songs on Buffalo Springfield Again are harbingers of much of Young's later work in that, although they all share deeply personal, almost idiosyncratic lyrics, they also present three very different musical approaches to the arrangement of what is essentially an original folk song. "Mr Soul," the only Young song of the three that all five members of the group perform together, is driven by a fat guitar riff that owed more than a little to the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." In contrast, "Broken Arrow" was confessional folk rock of a kind that would characterize much of the music that emerged from the singer-songwriter movement. Young’s experimental production intersperses each verse with snippets of sound from other sources, including opening the song with a sound bite of Dewey Martin singing "Mr. Soul" and closing it with the thumping of a heartbeat. "Expecting to Fly" was a lushly produced ballad featuring a string arrangement that Young's co-producer for the track, Jack Nitzsche, would dub "symphonic pop."

In May of 1968 the band split up for good, but in order to fulfill a contractual obligation, a final album, Last Time Around, was compiled primarily from recordings made earlier that year. Young contributed the songs “On the Way Home” and “I Am a Child,” although he sang lead only on the latter.