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Moderator
Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 16,001
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sheesh - Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot and Mike Heffernan having birthdays all in November...
gotta love it!
here's an article about Neil:
Sat, November 5, 2005
Neil still Young at 60
By MIKE STROBEL
For a guy who sings like a strangled loon, Neil Young has not done too badly.
A week today, he turns 60.
SIXTY?
I hear hearts sinking, crests falling. (Hey hey, my my, if Neil Young is 60, I must be ... )
Don't let it bring you down. After all, he's not dead, though there was that aneurysm in March. Fresh out of hospital, he finished Prairie Wind, his 47th album.
Last weekend, Rusties gathered near San Francisco for the annual International Rust Fest (IRF).
Rusties are hardcore Neil Young fans, so named for albums Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust.
Same as Jimmy Buffett and his Parrotheads, the Grateful Dead and their Deadheads.
Rustie Kevin Chong, 30, was at the IRF, the day after he signed copies of his new book, Neil Young Nation, in Frisco. "Neil Young saved my life," he says in the intro.
SOLACE FOR GEEKS
"I might have ended up a lawyer," he tells me down the line from his home in Vancouver, where he is a novelist and newspaper columnist.
What he means is Neil Young has been solace to so many geeks and loners and fuzzy-haired four-eyes and oddballs and outcasts who wanted a rock star of their own.
Name another rocker offbeat enough to make us weepy with a love song for his hearse. Long May You Run.
And that voice. Part loon, part wolf, part Canada goose, part off key. Caterwauling songs of love and loss and life. Imperfect. Just like us.
"Honest, authentic and from the heart," says Chong. "He does not skate by on gloss."
Gloss? Neil Young? Chalk and cheese.
Dangly hair, dangly shirt, whatever crummy jeans were handy. Mick Jagger must cringe.
"Neil Young on laundry day," is a comic's jab.
But it works. He hasn't aged as oddly as Jagger, 62.
"Neil never strutted around being a pretty boy," says Chong.
Matter of fact, Neil has looked 60 most of his life.
Canadian, too.
Young left us 40 years ago for L.A. Yet he carries our passport and considers himself a Winnipegger.
"Very strange, but we all seem to be one or two degrees away from him," says Chong.
Let me think. Well, I know toker-turned-CBCer Rosie Rowbotham. Young testified for Rosie back in the hippy, dippy, yippy days, though it didn't work. Rosie got 20 years.
Deja Vu was my very first album.
And I lost my virginity, or most of it, to the strains of Cowgirl In The Sand.
Can I stay here for a while? Can I see your sweet, sweet smile?
Some have fewer degrees of separation.
"You should interview me for this book," a faded rose told Chong at last weekend's signing.
"Do you know Neil?" Chong wondered.
"Slept with him. July 1, 1970. The highlight of my life."
You keep me searching for a heart of gold ...
I am somewhere between a Rustie and a Heart Of Gold Toe-Tapper, which is a casual Young fan.
The Rust List is the Internet altar for the truest of the true.
Rust Fests draw folks from Japan and Europe and usually are joined to a Young charity concert.
You sit around campfires, caterwaul, and show off memorabilia.
Thankfully, hardly anyone wears those fringed jackets of Young's Buffalo Springfield days.
Chong met a raft of other Rusties on his road trek for Neil Young Nation (Greystone Books). It is a delightful tour, even if you are not a Young fan.
To Winnipeg, where he cut his musical teeth. To Thunder Bay, where he and Stephen Stills first clicked. To Omemee, his childhood home. To Toronto, where he bombed in Yorkville. Across the States To L.A.
A FAN'S DIARY
There, in 1966, Stills spied a hearse with Canadian plates and the rest is rock history.
Young is thumpin' still, like few of his contemporaries.
Chong has never met him. The book is more fan diary than star bio.
What would you say if you met him on the street, Kevin?
"I think all I'd get out would be 'Thank you.' "
And "happy birthday," of course.
Old man, look at my life.
I'm a lot like you were.
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As i said in my post,Happy Birthday to Neil Young (and co.)
