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NY Times: Neil Young comes clean

September 19, 2012
Neil Young Comes Clean
By DAVID CARR

Driving down the hill above his ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco, Neil Young took a deep whiff of the redwood forest momentarily serving as the canopy for his 1951 Willys Jeepster convertible.

“I can still remember how it smelled when I first pulled in here — I was driving this car,” he said, recalling the trip in 1970 when he bought the place and named it Broken Arrow, after the Buffalo Springfield song.

The author of some of the spookiest, darkest songs in the American folk canon seemed jolly on this late-August day. Even if he was accompanied by a reporter, generally not his favorite species of human, the motion soothed him. “I’ve always been better moving than I am standing still,” he said.
Young, 66, spotted this land out the window of a plane banking out of San Francisco four decades ago and now owns nearly 1,000 acres of it. His song “Old Man” is a tribute to the caretaker who first showed him the place.

“I ran out of money, so I had to sell some of it,” he said. “That’s O.K., because it was too big. Everything happens for a reason.” He kept his eyes on the narrow road through the giant redwoods.

It was hard to reconcile the affable guy motoring along on a sunny day with his past incarnations: the portentous folkie of “Ohio,” the rabid anti-commercialist who gave MTV the musical middle finger with “This Note’s For You,” the angry rocker who threatened to hit the cameramen at Woodstock with his guitar. He was happy partly because he was here.

“For whatever you’re doing, for your creative juices, your geography’s got a hell of a lot to do with it,” he said. “You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.”

We would spend a few hours creeping along — he drove slowly but joyfully, as if the automobile were a recent invention — on our way there or on our way from there, the ranch where Young lives with his wife, Pegi, and their son, Ben. His longtime producer and friend, David Briggs, who died in 1995, hated making records here, deriding the hermetic refuge as a “velvet cage.”

read all on NY TIMES, Neil Young Comes Clean (has also a nice photo of Neil)

Random Quote

\"What is it about JJ Cale’s playing? I mean, you could say Eric
Clapton’s the guitar god, but... he can\'t play like JJ,\" Young told
biographer Jimmy McDonough. \"JJ’s the one who played all that s---
first... And he doesn’t play very loud, either — I really like that
about him. He’s so sensitive. Of all the players I ever heard, it’s
gotta be Hendrix and JJ Cale who are the best electric guitar players.
JJ’s my peer, but he doesn’t have the business acumen — he doesn’t have the idea of how to deal with the rest of the world that I do. But
musically, he’s actually more than my peer, because he’s got that thing.
I don’t know what it is.\"

by -- Neil Young Jimmy McDonough in \"Shakey.\"

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