BILLW
11-04-2005, 11:23 AM
Originally posted by Borderstone:
Just to let you know,another great Canadian is having a birthday this month. The living exampe of a "crazy horse" himself,Neil Young is going to be 60 on November 12th! :)
Just saw him on Conan O'Brian last night and he's stil going good! ;)
I wonder if being 60 means he'll stop performing "Old Man" in concert? :D I'd like to hear 'im do a cover of this, LOL
Sweet Home Alabama
(Ed King - Ronnie VanZant - Gary Rossington)
Big wheels keep on turning
Carry me home to see my kin
Singing songs about the Southland
I miss Alabamy once again
And I think its a sin, yes
Well I heard mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don't need him around anyhow
Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I'm coming home to you
In Birmingham they love the governor
Now we all did what we could do
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth
Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I'm coming home to you
Here I come Alabama.......
Bill :)
Valerie Winslow
11-11-2005, 10:32 AM
Yes, I saw the Conan show and thought the same thing, "is this really Neil, he actually has some pleasntries... flowing from his face and eyes. It was different, but pretty cool, as well. It's Neil, who can predict, who would want to, what he will do next?
charlene
11-13-2005, 09:39 PM
Neil Young: The T.O. years
Canada's most influential rocker is 60 today. To celebrate, we've compiled this gentle reminder of where he spent his formative years,
Nov. 12, 2005. 02:01 AM
JOHN GODDARD
STAFF REPORTER
Neil Young was conceived, his father always maintained, on the dining room floor of a friend's house during a record snowfall.
"I remember the street in Toronto, the wild February blizzard through which only the hardiest moved, on skis, sliding downtown through otherwise empty streets to empty offices," Scott Young recalls in his 1984 memoir, Neil and Me.
Scott would later become one of Canada's best-known journalists — a featured columnist for The Globe and Mail, and intermission host on the country's most popular television show, Hockey Night in Canada.
On Feb.4, 1945, when the storm hit, he was a sub-lieutenant in the Navy on home leave.
He, his wife Rassy and their 3-year-old son Bob were visiting the home of Ian and Lola Munro, near Eglinton Ave. and Mount Pleasant Rd.
Five inches of snow fell that evening, The Toronto Daily Star reported the next day. After dinner, the Youngs had no choice but to stay over.
"A mattress was hauled down to the dining-room floor and shoved against the wall for Rassy and me," Scott recalled. "We were just past our middle 20s and had been apart for most of the previous year ... We tried to be fairly quiet."
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Toronto General Hospital,
585 University Ave.
Neil entered the world on Nov. 12, 1945, at the Private Patients' Pavilion of Toronto General Hospital, since torn down. "He had a lot of black hair," Scott wrote of his first glimpse of the boy.
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315 (formerly 335)
Brooke Ave.
A modest three-bedroom bungalow became the Youngs' first home. A monster home now stands on the site. There, he displayed an early musical affinity.
"In his playpen, when the record player or radio was on, he would jig to Dixieland music even before he could stand up by himself," recalled Scott. "His whole body moved to the rhythm."
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Hospital for Sick Children,
555 University Ave.
In 1951, the family was living 100 kilometres northeast of Toronto in Omemee, then a village of 750 people.
Late one night, Scott heard Neil groan painfully in his bed and got up to investigate.
"What's the matter, pally?" he asked his son.
"My back hurts," the boy replied.
That afternoon, the family drove through a lightning storm to Toronto, where a doctor confirmed Neil had polio. For the next several days, he endured excruciating pain and, although he survived, the disease brought him lifelong problems.
"I was in and out of hospitals for the two years between After the Gold Rush (1970) and Harvest (1972)," Young once told Rolling Stone magazine.
"I have one weak side and all the muscles slipped on me. My discs slipped. I couldn't hold my guitar up ... I wore a brace ... I could only stand up four hours a day ... The doctors were starting to talk about wheelchairs, so I had some discs removed."
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133 Rose Park Dr.
In the summer of 1954, when Neil was 8, the Youngs moved to a handsome red-brick duplex on a quiet street in Moore Park. The boys enrolled at nearby Whitney Public School.
The family was seeking a new start. While still in Omemee, Scott had been travelling and carrying on an affair. He had asked for a divorce, then changed his mind. That winter Scott wrote his first novel, The Flood.
"And then the flood came," the jacket copy reads. "Martin was to find solace not in his children, but in the person of a married woman."
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49 Old Orchard Grove
From late 1955 to late 1958, the Youngs lived on a rural property east of Toronto in Pickering. Then they moved back to Toronto, to a tidy two-storey brick structure with a front bay window.
Neil had just turned 13 and enrolled in Grade 7 at nearby John Wanless Public School. He was also getting into music. Late at night, he would listen to the local Top 40 radio station CHUM 1050 and to other stations picked up from the southern United States.
"That's when I really became aware of what was going on," he once told rock journalist and filmmaker Cameron Crowe. "I knew that I wanted to play, that I was into it. `Maybe,' by the Chantels, `Short Fat Fannie,' Elvis Presley, Larry Williams, Chuck Berry, those were the first people I heard. I used to just fall asleep listening to the music. I was a real swinger."
And he began to play his first instrument — a plastic ukulele.
"The first thing I learned is that three chords are the basis to a lot of songs," he later told British rock journalist Nick Kent, for the 1994 book The Dark Stuff. "It's a blues-based idea. You start in G, go to C, and resolve it all with a D chord ... I basically just taught myself, figuring out as I went along."
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Ciccone's Dining Lounge,
601 King St. W.
The Youngs often ate together at Ciccone's, now the high-end restaurant Susur. It was also there, in September, 1959, that Scott told his sons that he was moving out for good this time. Bob was 17, Neil not yet 14. During an assignment out west, Scott had fallen in love with a press officer.
"Helpless, helpless, helpless," Neil sings in his 1970 childhood reminiscence, with Crosby, Stills and Nash.
"His music always had a sort of forlorn and desolate undertone," Rassy once recalled. "At times I would wonder why his face would light up with a sort of joy when he'd play something he'd composed that was so sad it brought tears to my eyes."
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The Night Owl, 102 Avenue Rd.
Neil attended Grade 9 at Lawrence Park Collegiate. A year after Scott moved out, Rassy and Neil moved to Winnipeg, where the boy played in high-school bands and developed as a guitarist. After a stint in Fort William, now Thunder Bay, he returned to Toronto in mid-June, 1965, determined to make it big.
On almost no money, with notions of failure constantly on his mind, he lived a transient life, moving from apartment to apartment mostly in the Yorkville area.
"Well, I'm up in T.O. keeping jive alive," he sings in "Ambulance Blues," on his 1974 On the Beach album, "and out on the corner it's half past five."
"That's the beginning of that whole (introspective) side of my music," he told journalist Nick Kent. "I was by myself, just me and my guitar travelling alone, just showing up at these places."
Among the many addresses where Young lived, one stands out for its minor moment in rock history: the apartment of folk singer Vicki Taylor, above the Night Owl coffeehouse in Yorkville.
She had been living there with John Kay, later famous as lead singer for Steppenwolf and for the hit "Born to be Wild," but he moved out.
"A week later I returned to pick up a few odds and ends and met another fellow there ... a singer/songwriter from Winnipeg named Neil Young," Kay writes in his 1994 autobiography, Magic Carpet Ride.
"We said hello and talked briefly. He had a guitar, I played him something, and we talked about music."
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The Mynah Bird Club,
114 Yorkville Ave.
As a promotional gimmick, the owner of the Mynah Bird coffeehouse helped sponsor a band of the same name and, in January 1966, Young replaced the lead guitarist.
The singer was Ricky James Matthews, later famous as Rick James for the 1981 hit "Super Freak."
"When Neil took his first solo," James once told Rolling Stone, "he was so excited he leaped off the stage, the plug came out, and nobody heard anything."
Another sponsor was John Craig Eaton, scion of the Eaton department store family. He lined up gigs at Rosedale house parties and opened an Eaton's account for band members to buy equipment.
Things were going well until Motown Records invited the band to record and James was arrested in Detroit for having deserted the U.S. Navy.
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The Cellar Club,
169 Avenue Rd.
The Mynah Birds disbanded. In early March 1966, Young and bass player Bruce Palmer met at the Cellar jazz and chess club, now a TD bank, to plot their next move.
In his 8 1/2-month Toronto interlude, he had not once been able to play one of his own songs to a live audience.
"Let's get the hell out of here," Young said, as Palmer recalled in John Einarson's 1992 biography of Young, Don't Be Denied.
"What do you mean?" Palmer said.
"Sell everything we can and get a car and go to L.A."
They sold the equipment Eaton had advanced them and bought a 1953 Pontiac hearse. Three days after arriving in Los Angeles, they helped form Buffalo Springfield. Ten days after that they opened on a tour with the Byrds, the No.1 U.S. band at the time. And three months after that, they opened at Hollywood Bowl for the Rolling Stones.
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The Riverboat,
134 Yorkville Ave.
While living nearby, Young never came close to performing at the Riverboat, a showcase for major U.S. and Canadian folk acts. In February 1969, however, he returned from California to play a week-long engagement. By then, he had recorded three albums with Buffalo Springfield and had released his first solo album, Neil Young.
"He sings with a light, high, near falsetto voice," Toronto Star reviewer Jack Batten wrote approvingly of the show, "with a quaver near the end of dying lines."
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Massey Hall, 178 Victoria St.
Tickets sold so fast to Young's homecoming at Massey Hall on Jan. 19, 1971, that a second concert had to be added the same night.
The year before, he had released two hit albums: Déjà Vu as part of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and After the Gold Rush with Crazy Horse.
The "Journey Through the Past" tour that brought him to Massey Hall was to be a series of solo concerts on piano and guitar to help him catch his breath. He was 25 years old.
"Rich in emotion," the Star said of the concert.
John Craig Eaton got a court order to seize Young's ticket receipts up to the cost of the equipment cashed in five years earlier.
"It was the end of my dalliance in trying to help people in showbiz," Eaton said in an interview a few years ago.
"I paid the whole shot without question," Young told biographer Einarson.
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Maple Leaf Gardens,
60 Carlton St.:
On Jan. 15, 1973, building on the success of his 1972 album Harvest, Young played what was then the city's largest concert venue, part of his Time Fades Away tour with the Stray Gators.
With that concert, Young became the first Torontonian, other than a religious leader, ever to fill Maple Leaf Gardens to its 18,000-person capacity.
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Neil Young's recent self-descriptions as a prairie boy are not to be taken literally.
"Bury me out on the prairie where the buffalo used to roam," he sings on his latest album Prairie Wind, released in September, "then I won't be far from home."
His affinity for the prairies owes to his family heritage — his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all lived in Manitoba. Young's desire to return there may have been stirred — as he suggests in one song — by his father's death from Alzheimer's in June this year.
No matter where he is or where he's going, Neil Young remains a Toronto boy. His life and his artistic expression were shaped here. Happy birthday, Neil.
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