Trivia / Neil Young

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• Artist Disillusionment: "Don't Be Denied"
• Breakup Breakout: After Buffalo Springfield split. Temporarily subverted while a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
• Bury Your Art: Despite being a fan-favorite and an influence on numerous Alternative Rock musicians, Young was heavily dissatisfied by Time Fades Away, calling it his worst album in a 1987 interview, and withdrew it from circulation after its initial run in 1973 (with international copies eventually going out of print in 1982). Young would later clarify that most of his hatred stemmed from his bad memories of the tour it was taken from, but nonetheless, his dislike of the album was so strong that the Greatest Hits Album Decade (which includes no material from Time Fades Away) was originally planned to feature a blurb in the liner notes elaborating on how much he hated it, and songs from it were rarely (if ever) played live. It wouldn't be officially reissued until 2014 and didn't make its debut on Compact Disc until three years later (and even then exclusively on a Boxed Set also containing Tonight's the Night, On the Beach and Zuma, with the album not getting a standalone CD until 2022).
• Career Resurrection: Freedom brought back his audience and critical acclaim after a messy set of records in the '80s.
• Channel Hop: Young briefly moved from his longtime label Reprise Records to the fledgling Geffen Records in the '80s. However, his relationship with David Geffen would quickly turn sour, which culminated in a failed lawsuit from Geffen and Young moving back to Reprise in 1987. Because Geffen moved from Warner Music Group to Universal Music Group in the '90s, this results in Reprise's Official Release Series reissues having a conspicuous gap between Re·ac·tor and This Note's for You.
• Creator Backlash:
  • One of the main reasons Time Fades Away wasn't reissued on CD for over four decades: Neil was quoted as saying he regards it as his worst album (as of 1987, anyway). This opinion is not generally shared by fans, who tend to regard it as at least a good album, if not one of his best. It doesn't help that the album was recorded with the Quad-8 Compumix, the first digital mixing soundboard, affectionately referred to as the "Compufuck" for how unreliable it was, which makes remastering it for CD with traditional methods impossible; the album would need to be remixed from scratch using the original multi-track tapes. It eventually saw LP and digital reissues in 2014 and a CD reissue in 2017, all as part of the Official Release Series.
  • He has expressed disappointment towards his first album for relying too heavily on overdubbing.
  • While he doesn't outright hate it, he wasn't too happy with the way Comes a Time ended up, and once claimed in an interview that he used around 200,000 copies of the vinyl as shingles for his barn roof.
  • He doesn't like several of his old albums. His dislike, as mentioned above, isn't always shared by fans. He also regrets supporting Ronald Reagan in The '80s.
  • He's not very proud of "Alabama", which Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote "Sweet Home Alabama" in part as an Answer Song to, as he found its lyrics "accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue" and said he "richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me".
• Creator Breakdown:
  • In 1972, Neil was experiencing fame from his Harvest album and his song "Heart of Gold". At around that time, his guitarist Danny Whitten (the subject of the song "The Needle and the Damage Done") died of an accidental overdose of Valium and alcohol ^note In constant chronic pain from arthritis, Whitten had used heroin to control it, but had stopped using it and had been prescribed the Valium instead. and roadie Bruce Berry, who died from a heroin overdose. Young followed up the radio-friendly Harvest with what is known as The "Ditch Trilogy", named after a remark Young made about averting fame by "heading for the ditch": three albums that shared a gloomy, pessimistic theme. The first, Time Fades Away, was a live album released in 1973 consisting of original tracks. The second, On the Beach, was a studio album, continuing the dark themes in the previous album and being named after a book concerning nuclear war. The last, Tonight's the Night, was directly about the deaths of Whitten and Berry, with one of the songs written by Whitten. Tonight's the Night was recorded in 1973 after the death of Bruce Berry, but was shelved for two years. On the Beach was not released on CD until 2003, after initially being released in 1974. Time Fades Away wasn't released on CD until 2017, due to Neil's Creator Backlash against it.
  • Rust Never Sleeps is a product of Young's fear of growing old, the death of Elvis Presley, and his belief that rock & roll music itself was becoming irrelevant in the age of punk rock.
  • Trans was written and recorded at a time from 1980–82 when Neil was, as The Other Wiki puts it, "carrying out a therapy program for his young son, Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak". The repetitive, electronic nature of the songs reflected the therapy exercises Neil and Ben were going through, while the distorted, vocoder-processed vocals "reflected his attempts to communicate with his son". The Bridge School, founded by Young with his wife Pegi, provides accommodating education for severely affected children and young adults. Ben now uses a Stephen Hawking-like device and runs Ben's Coastside Farm, selling organic free range eggs in northern California.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Although his opinion on his own work hasn't been fully known, Young has mentioned that he's particularly proud of "Harvest" on the album of the same name. According to him, "'Harvest' is one of my best songs. That is the best thing on Harvest."
• Denial of Digital Distribution: Young indefinitely pulled all of his music from Spotify in 2022 to protest their support for controversial podcaster Joe Rogan, who Young accused of spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 Pandemic. Young issued the platform an ultimatum, stating that he'd remove his material unless Rogan was kicked off, and he made good on his threat two days later. Young returned to Spotify in 2024 after Rogan signed deals with other streaming services.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • "The Missing Six", albums that Neil for a long time refused to re-release on CD. He eventually released five of them ^note  Time Fades Away, On the Beach, American Stars 'N' Bars, Hawks & Doves, and Re·ac·tor, but Journey Through the Past is still unavailable.
• Missing Episode:
  • "Cortez the Killer", from Zuma, was originally much longer, but 7:30 into the recording, an electrical circuit experienced a power surge and shut down the mixing console, losing an entire third verse and extended jam in the process. When producer David Briggs informed the band, Neil replied "I never liked that verse anyway", and went on to perform the song as it appeared on the album. The additional verse was never officially recorded or performed, but during his Greendale solo tour, he added some extra lines to the song; whether they came from the lost verse or not, is unknown.
  • The original Buffalo Springfield recording of "Mr. Soul". Recorded in an emotionally fraught session on January 9, 1967, and produced by Bruce Tergesen, Neil later tweaked the mix and replaced Stills' guitar parts with his own work. Later realizing the original was better, Neil found he'd lost the original tape, and went to great lengths to track down the backup acetate recording Tergesen had made. You may hear it on Archives Vol. 1.
  • Chrome Dreams II is so named because it's a sequel to an unreleased album Neil made in the '70s. Most of the first album's songs later made it to other albums in other formats, though some, like the original acoustic version of "Powderfinger", were radically different. Some finally saw an official release on Hitchhiker in 2017, forty years later. Wikipedia, as is often the case, has more information. The full album was eventually released in August 2023.
• Rarely Performed Song: Despite being a major fan-favorite, Young scarcely performs songs from his Time Fades Away, thanks to bad memories of the tour it was taken from that resulted in major Creator Backlash, with Young dismissing the album in 1987 as his worst and refusing to reissue it for several decades.
• Sequel Gap: It took 20 years between Harvest and Harvest Moon, and 30 years between Chrome Dreams and Chrome Dreams II — more, if you count the fact that Chrome Dreams was never officially released until 2023.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: Young has a habit of recording albums and then leaving them on the back-burner for extended periods of time:
  • Tonight's the Night was recorded in 1973, but shelved by the record label because they thought it was too noncommercial. It was eventually released as submitted to the label two years later, and while it didn't sell well to begin with, it was almost immediately canonized as a masterpiece.
  • Hitchhiker was recorded in 1976, but wasn't made officially available in full until 2017, over four decades later.
  • Homegrown was recorded in 1974-1975 and set for release in the latter year. However, it was held off in favor of Tonight's the Night and ultimately went unreleased until 2020 as part of that year's Record Store Day.
  • Toast was recorded with Crazy Horse at the start of the 2000s, but was held off in favor of Are You Passionate?, recorded at around the same time. Toast wouldn't come out until 2022, twenty years after the album that replaced it.
  • Chrome Dreams was originally put together from 1974 to 1977, but went unreleased until August 2023, by which point the sequel had been out for 16 years.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Stills-Young Band's lone album, Long May You Run, was at one point going to be a full-on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion album. However, David Crosby and Graham Nash left the sessions to finish recording an album of their own as a duo, and Stills and Young responded by removing all of their vocals and other contributions from the final product. The original mix of the song "Long May You Run", with Crosby and Nash's harmonies intact, appeared on the 1977 compilation Decade.
  • Young intended to produce Love's Forever Changes album. All that survived of the collaboration on the finished album was Young's arrangement of "The Daily Planet".
  • Wikipedia claims that producer David Briggs convinced Neil at the last minute to swap the A-side and B-side of On the Beach to the order used on the album. He later said that he regrets doing this, though many fans may disagree with him.
  • Young's Mirror Ball album with Pearl Jam was at one time planned to have a spiritual sequel with Phish as his collaborators. Young had enjoyed playing with the jam band at Farm Aid and the Bridge School Benefit Concert in 1998, and had talked with them about recording an album together and taking them on a European tour. Neither project ever materialized.
  • Young is one of the biggest roots-oriented rock artists to have never played the famous Newport Folk Festival. He was supposed to perform there with Buffalo Springfield in 1967, but they had to cancel a few days beforehand because of a medical issue. The band broke up the next year, and the festival was inactive from 1970 to 1984, including the entirety of Young's 1970s commercial heydey. Although he has long been rumored as a special guest, particularly in the years when some or all of Crosby, Stills & Nash are on the bill, he has still yet to perform there as of 2020.
  • Young had sent a demo of the song "Powderfinger" to his friend Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd, with the intention of Skynyrd recording the song. However, Van Zant and two other members of the band died in a 1977 plane crash before they had the opportunity to do so. Young instead recorded the song himself for Rust Never Sleeps.
• Vaporware: Archives was first proposed in the late '80s, but didn't come out until 2009.^note Hilariously, Young owns Vapor Records.

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