During the mid-'60s, he returned to Toronto, where he played as a solo folk act. Not only did he play in garage rock outfits like the Squires, but he also played in local folk clubs and coffeehouses, where he eventually met Joni Mitchell and Stephen Stills. Many of Young's most enduring work arrived in the '70s, when he alternated between such bruised, beautiful introspection as 1970's After the Gold Rush and noisy guitar jams like 1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, taking detours for such after-hours decadence as 1975's Tonight's the Night, but he remained a vital, unpredictable presence for decades, challenging himself and his audience.īorn in Toronto, Canada, Neil Young moved to Winnipeg with his mother following her divorce from his sports journalist father. His willfulness could be as much a hindrance as an attribute - famously, Geffen Records sued him for delivering albums that were 'uncharacteristic' - but his muse also led to a series of distinctive, indelible albums whose legacy sometimes only revealed itself over time eventually, the electro experiments of 1982's Trans were acknowledged as an artistic achievement, not a commercial disaster. Over the years, Young would tap back into these different sounds and personas, but his avoidance of the middle of the road pushed him into eccentric territory his singer/songwriter peers would generally avoid. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch.' Young wrote this passage for the liner notes of Decade, a double-disc compilation that documented the first part of his career, ten years that took him from the pioneering Los Angeles rock & roll band Buffalo Springfield, through emergence as a lone folk-rock troubadour and his alliance with Crosby, Stills & Nash, to his noisy, rambling wanderings with Crazy Horse. Looking back at the blockbuster success of 'Heart of Gold,' the mellow country-rock tune that became his first number one single and only Billboard Top 40 hit in 1971, Neil Young remarked that the song 'put me in the middle of the road.

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