Neil Young, 40 Years On

In 1969, when he was 24, Neil Young was already a mega star among the college kids whose explosion into adulthood was presaged 3 years earlier by Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” That song served as part of the sound track for the protest against war, authority, profit, and government secrecy which steamrolled through our generation during the late sixties.

That Young, a quiet, mellow Canadian, could serve as a key troubadour for the epoch and its inhabitants’ subsequent growth should not be so surprising. It is often outsiders who see America best, from Lafayette and De Tocqueville to today’s immigrant engineers and entrepreneurs. At 21, he and Stephen Stills crafted a simple line – “Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep, it starts when you’re always afraid, step out of line, the man comes, and take you away” – which still resonates. We took him to heart, and when his first solo album came out in 1969, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, we snapped it up, mesmerized by the combination of politics, protest, and poetry of love. Oh, and he could play the guitar, too.

Neil’s on another cross country tour, a solo venture featuring old and new songs and a staggering collection of guitars with varying levels of distortion. He appeared at Seattle’s Paramount recently, opening with a simple acoustic set-up for a few of his older pieces, from After the Gold Rush: “Tell Me Why” and the title song. The simple, almost naive approach towards environmental pessimism, and its hopeful resurrection by simply flying away to a new planet is clearly ironic 40 years later, when an entire ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico can be threatened by one massive uncapped undersea gusher.

The crowd was respectful, and hopeful at this point. So he moved on to some new, meaning not yet recorded, songs, which reflected his life-long concerns, but with a depth of sadness and anger not available to someone in his 20’s. “Peaceful Valley” could be a re-work of “After the Gold Rush”, but much more resigned, haunting, and complex. “You Never Call” is another of Neil’s homages to a departed friend. But unlike “The Needle and the Damage Done”, or the entire album Tonight’s the Night (tossed out after the drug death of one of his roadies), his 21st century elegy reflects the inevitable winding down of life, and celebrates spiritual reunion. This subtle, previously unseen side of Young, not known publicly as a man of faith, is continued in “Walk with Me”.

These new songs drew raves from many in the crowd, but did not get as big a cheer as “Ohio”. That song brought flooding back to me a whole set of emotions and memories I’d almost forgotten, and the crowd’s reaction set my hair on edge.

In April of 1970, after four year of campus-based protest, much of the country was ready for the Vietnam war to be over and done, for the killing not only of American soldiers, but also SE Asian ones, to stop. In that month, Richard Nixon, elected President on a promise to end the fighting, began saturation bombing in Cambodia. This act set off a firestorm of protest, again infecting the college campuses not only of the elite Northeast,  and California, but also in the mainstream middlebrow midwest. At Kent State University in Northeast Ohio, one afternoon in early May, Ohio National Guard troops sent in to maintain order surrounding a peaceful march of mainly students, inexplicably opened fire on them, killing four.

That spring, I was to graduate from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., But I was home in Cincinnati, Ohio, having spent the winter as a ski bum in Aspen, and returned home to drive back for the commencement ceremony in just a week or so (I’d collected sufficient credits to be able to skip the second semester of my senior year.)

The evening of the killings, I was watching the local news with my father in our den. Seared into my brain, never forgotten, was his mumbled comment as the scenes flashed across the screen, “Goddam Agnew … Goddam Agnew.”

I was almost shocked, first, because my father NEVER swore in my presence, and second, because he’d never given a hint of sharing the same vitriol which young people did against Nixon’s dedicated attack-dog VP.

In any event, colleges across the country saw escalating protests, snowballing across the country, shutting down campuses. By the time I got to Connecticut a week later, the protests had reached my campus, and within a day of my arrival, graduation ceremonies were canceled. I never did get to walk on stage in a gown and get my hand shook by the President, receiving in person my diploma. That loss, at the time, seemed meaningless to me, given the depressing state of affairs in our country, where it appeared we truly had devolved into the police state Buffalo Springfield had suggested might happen 4 years earlier.

Now, I’m a bit mad about not getting my diploma in person, but I still feel the horror, anger, and sadness about those four contemporaries of mine, peacefully assembled on a leafy campus quadrangle, kids just like me, I thought, who died just because they wanted their voices of protest to be heard. To hear the Paramount crowd cheer and whistle at the song made me cringe, made me feel they could not have “been there”. Respectful silence, followed by “Amen,” seemed a more appropriate response to me.

Neil kept on moving through his repertoire, bringing in a black guitar for the power chords in “Cortez the Killer”, sequeing into “Cinnamon Girl” and on into his encores. Cheryl and I left pleasantly drained, ready to snap up his next album, whenever it might appear, with those three new songs he’d showcased early on.