Friday Music: Neil Young

Image description: From 2007, a color photo of Neil Young from the waist up. He's giving the peace sign while standing at a microphone dressed all in black save for a silver bolo tie.

The casually listener and fan may not be aware that Neil Young is yet another famous musician with disabilities. In 1951 at the age of six, Young contracted polio. Since childhood he's also reportedly had diabetes and epilepsy. In 2005 he had successful surgery for a brain aneurysm. He also has two sons with cerebral palsy and in 1986 he and his wife started the Bridge School in San Francisco, a learning center for disabled children. A 1989 alternative rock compilation album raised money for the school.

So, those are Young's numerous "credentials." Here are some fun details:

His song, "Helpless," is about his experience with childhood polio. Here's a link to a YouTube video of an old stage performance (my guess is early '70s), and here are the lyrics:

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us.

Helpless, helpless, helpless.
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us.

Helpless, helpless, helpless.

From the 2002 Salon review of Shakey: Neil Young's Biography:

Everyone who's heard Young's "Helpless" (which means everyone who's been in earshot of a radio or stereo in the last few decades) knows that he comes from "a town in north Ontario." It was in that town -- Omemee -- that Young, now 56, contracted polio when the virus swept through Canada in 1951. It transformed the pudgy 6-year-old and nearly killed him. "Neil got polio and lost all his girlish curves," Rassy, Young's indomitable mother and a central character in "Shakey," tells McDonough. "Damn near died. Gawd that was awful ... Christ, he looked like hell on the highway. Skin and bones. He never got fat again ... We didn't know if he'd ever walk." When he came home from the hospital "fresh from a disinfectant bath, his black hair in spikes," Young asked the adults, "I didn't die, did I?"

I remember when polio was the terror that stalked the nation, when approaching standing water, say, would earn the harshest of parental rebukes. One of my oldest friends got it in '53 and has been crutching it for half a century; another acquaintance of mine spent most of his 49 years in an iron lung thanks to polio. What an experience like that may do to you -- assuming it doesn't kill you -- is radically alter your perspective and imbue you with a certain bravado and fearlessness, not to mention a sometimes trenchant honesty. Once you've been to hell and back, the things the rest of us find anxiety-inducing -- the scary odds against making it as an artist, for example -- aren't all that scary. Pam Smith, a girlfriend of Young's when he was a teenager, recalls, "Neil was insecure as a person -- I think that's why playing music was so good for him. He had all the confidence in the world in that role."

McDonough's exploration of Young's often tenuous physical state -- he's also epileptic and used to have seizures on stage early in his career -- is one of the more intriguing threads in the book and a key, perhaps, to the singer's sometimes irrational confidence and indefatigable persistence even when those all around him -- Stephen Stills among them -- voiced nothing but discouragement about his abilities.

Musical abilities, that is. Young doesn't have a pretty voice, but everyone knows at least one or two (or dozens) of his songs. Here's a live performance of "Ohio" recorded at Massey Hall (a Toronto theatre) and "Heart of Gold," both stage performances from 1971.

From Neil Young Quotes:

Polio fucked up my body a little bit. The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right. If I close my eyes, my left side, I really don’t know where it is - but over the years I’ve discovered that almost one hundred percent for sure it’s gonna be very close to my right side… probably to the left.

- Neil Young interviewed by Dave Zimmer, BAM, 22nd April 1988

My favorite fun fact about Young: In the late 1990's Young bought the Lionel Toy Train company to delight his son Ben. According to Rolling Stone magazine, much of Young's 1980s musical output reflected his frustration at difficulties communicating with his son Ben who, along with an older brother, has cerebral palsy.


Wiki on the song "Helpless"

An extensive Rolling Stone magazine biography

Neil Young News -- a blog on everything you could possibly want to know about the artist

YouTube video of an October 2007 interview on BBC 2. It features commentary by a guy who was "converted" to the beauty of Young's music at a concert. He discusses Chromes Dreams II and the evolution of Young's work with the artist. If anyone locates the transcript for this, please link to it in comments.

Famous people with polio