Neil Young

[Meehowski]

Young steps in his father's shoes

Noel Mengel

November 23, 2003

AN early Neil Young memory, when he was about three: he remembers going up to the attic where his father worked, still trying to make his mark as a writer.

"He had an old Underwood typewriter," Young says. "I walked up there and it took a lot of nerve, because you weren't supposed to go up there because he was writing.

"So I walked over and I looked up at him and I said, 'What are you doing, daddy?' And he said, 'Well, I'm writing'. And I looked up at him and said, 'What are you writing?'

"He said, 'I don't know. I just come up here every day and start writing. Sometimes I don't write anything, sometimes I write all day. I don't know what I'm writing'."

Young thought about that again last year, when the songs for his new album Greendale were arriving. There was no strategy or manifesto, no plan to sit down and write the first concept album of a recording career that now stretches back close to 40 years. But the songs kept tumbling out anyway.

"We never did rehearse it," Young says, on the eve of his first Australian tour since 1989.

The "we" is Young and his occasional band of almost 35 years, Crazy Horse.

"We recorded it as I wrote it. About two or three songs into it, I was pretty sure we had something going on because the characters kept coming up from one song to another and a story started developing," Young says.

Often he would write songs on the way to the studio, stopping the car, writing something, driving on 800km, thinking of something else and pulling over . . . at the studio, everyone was waiting to find out what would happen next.

The story is about a family in turmoil ?the Greens ?living in a small town. There is a murder, jail, bad luck, a new generation that comes through.

One day, much to everyone's surprise, Young killed off his favourite character, Grandpa. The next day, he turned up without a song, even though he had pulled over in all the right places.

He even told the others they might as well go home because he had no idea what was going to happen now. Which is about the time he thought about his father up in the attic, writing, waiting.

And about what happened to Grandma and the rest of the family in his story.

Back on the road with Crazy Horse, Young is playing the songs from Greendale in their entirety before closing with some seven songs from that vast back catalogue.

Among these have been Mr Soul, Expecting To Fly, After The Goldrush, Old Man, Like A Hurricane, Powderfinger, Cinnamon Girl, even Heart of Gold.

"Oh," says Young of his fans. "They're used to me by now." And breaks into the hearty laugh of a man enjoying his latest musical incarnation.

"I was shocked when I went out and played Greendale and read some reviews where people said I was disregarding the welfare of my audience. These people have become so tuned into everything being like it's on a conveyor belt that they think they can predict everything that is going to happen. They forgot that creativity is what made music start happening in the first place."

http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story.js...&storyid=513075