Journey Through The Past:

Neil Young is the ageless chameleon of rock. In this history of his long and distinguished career, Guitar World traces his evolution from hippie icon to godfather of grunge.

by Marc Weingarten

Midway through Neil Young's 1976 arena tour with his longtime musical cohort Stephen Stills, Young abruptly jumped ship. There had been no warning, no apparent provocation. Young left Stills, his old pal from Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills Nash & Young, high and dry, with nothing but a note for consolation: "Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach. Neil."

A strange story, were it not for the fact that it pretty much typifies the way Neil Young has willfully thwarted his career at every turn. Why else, for instance, would Young follow up Harvest, his biggest selling album, with Time Fades Away, a sloppy, aggressively uncommercial mess of a record? Or spend 10 years flitting from one disparate style to the next so quickly that not even his most ardent fans could keep up? The answers are right there in his records, all 40 of them - for Young, stardom has always taken a back seat to his art. And it is Neil Young's singular art, not record sales or his fans' well-meaning adulation, that has sustained him and kept him going for 30-plus years. He's the accidental rock star, an icon without any discernible image except that of a musical chameleon.

It is a testament to Young's renegade, searching muse that, in addition to writing a handful of definitive air-guitar anthems ("Cinnamon Girl," "Into The Black," "Southern Man") and some of rock's most enduring ballads ("Helpless," "After the Gold Rush," "Heart Of Gold"), he's also penned heinous clunkers like "Kinda Fonda Wanda" and "Ocean Girl." But the missers are just as essential to Young's aesthetic as the hits. His failures are often far more interesting than other artists' successes.

Mistakes also play a key role in Young's guitar playing. By emphasizing instinctual "feel," off-kilter phrasing, and dissonance, Young forever liberated lead guitar from the technoid ghetto and pointed the way for like-minded contemporary players like Pearl Jam's Mike McCready, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, Pavement's Steve Malkmus and Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis.

But it is Young's strange and circuitous musical journey - a journey that has seen him record and play folk, country, rockabilly, new wave and blues - that remains his greatest legacy. The man himself pretty much summed it up in a 1985 interview: "I just hate being labeled. I hate to be stuck in one thing. I just don't want to be anything for very long. I don't know why. I just want to keep moving, keep running, play my guitar," He hasn't stopped moving yet.

EXPECTING TO FLY (1955-1968)

As with so many artists of his generation, Neil Young's discovery of music coincided with the birth of rock and roll. As a hockey fanatic growing up in Winnipeg, Ontario, Young's initial exposure to American popular music came via local radio. "It was about 1955, I guess, when I really became aware of what was going on," Young told an interviewer in 1982. "I knew that I wanted to play, and that I was into it. 'Maybe' by The Chantels, 'Short Fat Fannie' by Larry Williams, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry... those were the first people I heard. The radio was right by my bed; I used to just fall asleep listening to it."

The Squires, Young's first semi-professional band, were modeled after twangy instrumental groups like the Ventures and the Shadows. Young Neil was especially taken with The Shadows' guitarist Hank Marvin, attracted to his pioneering use of the tremolo arm, which would become a trademark of his own technique. The Squires cut one singe for V records, a local Canadian label. "The Sultan," backed with "Aurora." Both songs were highly derivative. Young-penned instrumentals; both stiffed. By 1965, The Squires were no more.

Which suited Young just fine. By that time, he had gotten wind of the epochal folk music explosion then coming out of the States. Inspired by the plainspoken poetry of artists like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, Young abandoned rock and roll completely and began working Toronto's coffee-house circuit. (It was during this time that Young met a fellow Canadian folkie named Joni Mitchell.) Again, Young ran into fierce indifference. "There was a review of one of my shows in a newspaper and it said my songs were all like a cliche," Young recalls. "Toronto was a very humbling experience for me. I just couldn't get anything going."

Gigless and penniless, Young hooked up with local bass player Bruce Palmer and a flamboyant American singer-guitarist named Ricky James Matthews (who later became funk superstar and convicted felon Rick James), switched gears once again and formed the Mynah Birds, an R&B-flavored rock band. Although the Mynah Birds managed to sign with Motown in 1964 and cut an album's worth of material, none of those recordings ever saw the light of day. Shortly after the band's first and last brush with success, Rick James was busted for draft evasion, and the Mynah Birds were history. Young and Palmer promptly sold the band's equipment and, perhaps out of mourning for the departed Mynah Birds, bought a hearse. In this distinctive vehicle, they drove to Los Angeles in hopes of landing a few local gigs. "I had to leave a lot of friends behind," Young told an interviewer in 1994. "I almost had no conscience, I was so driven to make it."

Young got more than he bargained for when he ran into Stephen Stills and Richie Furay, a couple of local players he'd met in Canada. Recruiting Dewey Martin, an out-of-work drummer who had briefly played with country artists the Dillards, the four promptly formed a band called the Herd. Then fate intervened.

"We were living on Fountain Avenue, in Los Angeles, and workmen were tearing up streets to do resurfacing," Richie Furay told writer Mat Snow in 1994. "They were using these big steamrollers to flatten it all out, and they had a nameplate on the side - just two large words: Buffalo Springfield."

Out went the Herd, stampeded by the cool new name. Young's contributions to Buffalo Springfield's three albums (Buffalo Springfield, Buffalo Springfield Again and Last Time Around), like his solo albums, vary in style, theme and musical texture. Buffalo Springfield's "Burned" and "Flying On The Ground Is Wrong" described bad acid trips, the approach of the two songs certainly going against the prevailing counter-cultural ethos of LSD-enhanced psychedelic bliss. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing," with it's decidedly un-Top-40-like use of metaphor and allegory, served notice that even at this early stage in his career, the nascent songwriter was already pushing the boundaries of his art. The lilting country-rock of "I Am A Child" laid the foundation for Seventies Nashville-cum-L.A. bands like the Eagles and Pure Prairie League, while "Mr. Soul," with its incessantly militant drum pattern and scorching guitar solo, provided the sonic template for Young's subsequent work with Crazy Horse.

Although it appeared on Buffalo Springfield Again, "Expecting To Fly" was really Neil Young's first song as a solo artist; he had temporarily quit the band when the track was recorded. "There were a lot of problems happening with the Springfield," Young told writer Nick Kent. "There were a lot of distractions, too. Groupies. Drugs. I remember being haunted suddenly by this whole obsession with 'How do I fit in here? Do I like this?'" A stately, evocative track featuring a lush orchestral accompaniment arranged by Phil Spector alumnus Jack Nitzsche, "Expecting To Fly" was to be the first of many neo-symphonic excursions Young would embark on during his career.

Buffalo Springfield's third and final album, Last Time Around, was merely an afterthought; the band had split up prior to its release, due in no small part to Young's desire to move on. "Everything started to go too fucking fast." Young recalls. "We were getting the shaft from every angle, and it seemed like we were trying to make it so bad and were getting nowhere." Of course, every member of the Springfield eventually did get somewhere, with other musical partners - Stills with Crosby and Nash, Furay with Springfield clones Poco, and Jim Messina (who replaced Bruce Palmer just after Buffalo Springfield Again) with Kenny Loggins. Only Young ventured out on his own. He would reap the richest musical rewards.

THE LONER (1968-1980)

Had Neil Young chosen the path of least resistance for his solo career, he could have easily cashed in on his Buffalo Springfield credentials and made his first solo album "Mr. Soul Redux." Instead, Young went back into the studio with Nitzsche and recorded Neil Young, a wildly eclectic album that bewildered critics and Springfield loyalists alike. Neil Young had country and classical instrumentals, a lugubrious ballad called "Last Train To Tulsa" that droned on for nearly 10 minutes, a few lovelorn ballads, and "The Loner," a more conventional rocker built around one of Young's great monster riffs.

"That was the farthest thing from my mind, what people would think of it," says Young about his first album. "Songs were coming really fast and I was just grabbing them all and... getting them out." Neil Young was all over the map, made nary an impact commercially, and gave no indication whatsoever of the direction Young as to take with his next album.

In late 1968, during the time that Young was brooding over whether to leave Buffalo Springfield, he could frequently be seen checking out a local Los Angeles bar band called the Rockets. The Rockets were hardly a world-class outfit; drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot had been playing for less than a year, and though guitarist Danny Whitten occasionally wrangled some session work (Young had met him during the recording of Buffalo Springfield), he was no studio slick. And that's exactly what appealed to Young. He loved the Rockets not for their technical proficiency - they had none - but for their instinctual, spontaneous approach to playing. After the fussed-over fastidiousness that had engulfed him during the sessions for his first album, Young was eager to make some no-holds-barred, guitar-driven rock. So in 1969 Young recruited the Rockets, renamed them Crazy Horse, and recorded his second album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

There is a feverish energy to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere that is only hinted at by Young's previous recordings, and it all sprang from a certain guitar transaction made by Young with Jim Messina prior to the Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere session. "When I traded Jim Messina my orange Gretsch for that black guitar... boy, I really scored big," Young told Cameron Crowe. "That's my biggest memory of that time. Great guitar."

That guitar, a 1956 Les Paul, enabled Young to get the spiky, gritty tone that has become his signature. On extended guitar showcases like Everybody Knows' "Cowgirl In The Sand" and "Down By The River," Young, apparently liberated by the sonic possibilities of the Les Paul, unleashes a fire-storm of knotty, minimalist solos while Whitten counter-punches with crafty chordal flourishes. "Cinnamon Girl" contains Young's most transcendent solo - a single, repeating note. On Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Young had stripped his music down to the bare essentials, and the effect was galvanizing.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was an artistic breakthrough, but it took a brief stint with Crosby, Stills and Nash for Young to enter into the mainstream. Although Young and Stephen Stills had engaged in some titanic ego clashes during their days with the Springfield, neither could deny the magic of their previous musical collaborations. So when Stills became a superstar, it only seemed fitting that Young should join the fold. "Steve and I play really well together," Young told Cameron Crowe in 1975. "People can't comprehend that we can both play lead guitar in the band and not fight over it. We have total respect for each other's musicianship. We bring out the best in each other." Young's contributions to CSN&Y's second album, Deja Vu (particularly "Helpless," a bittersweet ballad about his childhood), exposed his music to millions of new converts and paved the way for the success of his next solo album, After The Gold Rush.

HEART OF GOLD

On After The Gold Rush, Young tempered Everybody Knows' guitar squall with elements of folk and country balladry, albeit with a decidedly Young-ian twist. Despite the chiming, tuneful nature of the melodies, there was a pervasive undercurrent of melancholy in Young's lyrics. So while Gold Rush featured ebullient rockers like "When You Dance (I Can Really Love)" and love songs like "I Believe In You," it also had "Southern Man," a powerful anti-bigotry broadside and "Tell Me Why," a sober-minded meditation on mortality. Nonetheless, for Young's followers, it was ultimately the music that mattered. By seamlessly combining winsome acoustic material with raucous guitar rave-ups, Young was able to appeal to fans of both styles, giving him his first Top Ten album.

That brilliant acoustic/electric blend wasn't Young's original idea. He had hoped to make After The Gold Rush an all-electric Crazy Horse collaboration, but scotched the idea when he discovered that Danny Whitten had gotten hooked on heroin while Young had been touring with CSN&Y. "There was no reason," Billy Talbot later recalled. "In those days, people just started shooting right up. Didn't snort nothin'. He just shot some speed, the next day some smack, and from then on he was a junkie."

Following the release of After The Gold Rush, Young suffered a slipped disc, the effects of which would leave him at least partially incapacitated for a couple of years. During his convalescence, Young organized a group of Nashville session musicians dubbed "The Stray Gators" and recorded Harvest. While the new album contained a couple of vitriolic rockers in "Alabama" and "Words," for the most part Young stuck to the shambling, languorous balladry that had made After The Gold Rush a breakthrough success. Not surprisingly, Harvest became the biggest selling album of his career. Both the album and its first single, "Heart Of Gold" (featuring backing vocals by Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor), catapulted to Number One.

With the enormous success of Harvest, Young's transformation from cult artist to big-time rock star was complete. For his first arena tour in 1973, Young decided to draft the Stray Gators and Danny Whitten to accompany him. By this time, however, Whitten was too strung out to even think about music. "We were rehearsing and he just couldn't cut it," Young told Crowe. "He couldn't remember anything. He was too out of it. Too far gone. I had to tell him to go back to LA.... He just said, 'I've got nowhere else to go man. How am I gonna tell my friends?' And he split. That night, the coroner called me from LA and told me he'd OD'd. That fucking blew my mind. I loved Danny. I felt responsible."

Devastated, yet committed to the tour, Young hit the road. But anyone expecting to see a greatest hits revue was in for quite a shock. Whitten's death, combined with Young's disintegrating marriage to actress Carrie Snodgrass and the nightmarish hassles over his first film, Journey Through The Past (Warner Brothers had agreed to release the film, then reneged at the last minute), had driven Young to self-destructive excess. He was now drinking heavily and delivering raucous, tequila-drenched performances - none of which featured a single recognizable song - in a weary, tremulous croak of a voice. "Neil was sort of dribbling out of the side of his mouth on that tour, the mood was so down," recalls longtime manager Elliot Roberts.

Young culled highlights (or low lights, depending on one's point of view) from the tour for Time Fades Away, his follow-up to the platinum-selling Harvest. "I imagine I could've come up with the perfect follow-up" Young told Cameron Crowe. "But it would have been something that everyone was expecting. Nobody expected Time Fades Away, and I'm not sorry I put it out. I'd rather keep changing and lose a lot of people along the way. If that's the price, I'll pay it."

That summer, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young roadie Bruce Berry OD'd, sending Young into a further tailspin. It was the second drug-related death of a close friend in less than a year and in an attempt to somehow come to grips with the twin tragedies, Young holed up in his Topanga Canyon ranch, in Los Angeles, and began frantically writing songs. He then summoned Molina, Talbot, guitarist Nils Lofgren and steel-guitar player Ben Keith to record them.

"What we were doing was playing those guys on their way," Young told Crowe. "I mean, I'm not a junkie and I won't ever try it out to check out what it's like. But we all got high enough, right there on the edge where we felt wide open to the whole mood."

Young and the band recorded nine songs in two drunken nights for what would eventually become Tonight's The Night, considered by many to be one of the most harrowing, emotionally naked and downright spooky albums ever made. "Tonight's The Night is like an OD letter," Young explained. "The whole thing is about life, dope and death." Indeed, Young's scratchy, ravaged voice and the band's barely together playing on anti-drug dirges like "Tired Eyes," "Speaking Out" and "Mellow My Mind" give the album an aura of mournful, wasted despair. Tonight's The Night was so unflinchingly raw, in fact, that Warner Brothers waited almost two years to release it. In the interim, Young made another record with his on-again, off-again collaborator Stephen Stills (the listless Long May You Run) and recorded two solo albums - On The Beach and another, originally entitled Homegrown. The latter, a chronicle of Young's divorce, was highlighted by "Like A Hurricane," an epic, Crazy Horse-powered paean to Snodgrass featuring one of his most coruscating guitar solos. The album was eventually released in 1977 as American Stars And Bars.

Strange, surreal and unremittingly bleak, On The Beach - which featured the anti-air pollution protest song "Vampire Blues" - was Young's most pointedly political statement since "Ohio," the screed against the National Guard killings of four Kent State students, that he had recorded with CSN&Y in 1970. Musically, however, the album's tone was muted and somewhat diffuse.

Not until Young reunited with Crazy Horse for Zuma did he begin to rock out again. Recorded and released in 1975, this was the first official Crazy Horse album since Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and it more than made up for lost time. With new guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampedro on board, Crazy Horse was able to regain the incendiary chemistry that had been lost when Whitten died.

After cranking it up with Zuma, quick-change artist Young returned to the home-spun, laid-back acoustic style of Harvest, with 1978's Comes A Time, an album that resonates with some of Young's most exquisitely beautiful songs. One track, "Lotta Love," became young's first Top Ten hit since "Heart Of Gold," but not until former back-up singer Nicolette Larson covered it.

Just when it seemed as if Young had settled into a comfortably mellow groove, however, he suddenly veered off in a radically different direction. By this time, punk rock was challenging the hegemony of the old rock hierarchy, and Young, alone among his sadly anachronistic contemporaries, embraced the revolution. As he told one interviewer: "As soon as I heard them [rock's old guard] saying, 'God, what the fuck is this... this is going to be over in three months,' I knew it was a sure sign right there that they were going to bite it if they didn't watch out." Emboldened by punk's elemental, back to the basics approach, he recorded Rust Never Sleeps, his best album of the decade.

"It's better to burn out than to fade away," Young warbled on "My My, Hey Hey," the song that opened and closed Rust Never Sleeps. The line was at once a commentary on the creeping complacency that Young felt was rotting rock's old order and a ringing affirmation of the music's new vitality and relevance. As Young saw it, rock was now as much about the Sex Pistols as it was about Elvis ("The King is gone but he's not forgotten / This is the story of Johnny Rotten").

And if the scabrous, new-punk thrash of Rust Never Sleeps tracks like "Powderfinger," "Sedan Delivery" and "Welfare Mothers" was any indication, Young and Crazy Horse weren't about to be written off as obsolete Jurassics any time soon.

After the twin triumphs of Rust Never Sleeps and a subsequent 1979 tour, it was painfully obvious that, among those rockers who had come of age in the Sixties, young was about the only one who still had something meaningful to say or play. He had started the Seventies with a bang and ended them with a sonic boom. In 1979, both Rolling Stone and [New York's] Village Voice voted young the Artist Of The Decade.

SAMPLE AND HOLD (1980-1989)

Even the most hard-core Neil Young fans regard the Eighties as Young's "lost" years, and have trouble reconciling the erratic (and frequently awful) albums of the era with his seminal Seventies output. But to disregard the genre-hopping Young of the Eighties is to not take the full measure of the artist. Neil Young simply has to follow his capricious creative instincts wherever they may lead him, critics and consumers be damned; he wouldn't be Neil Young if it were otherwise. "Neil Young from the early Sixties and early Seventies is like Perry Como," Young told an interviewer in 1982. "That's the way I look at it. If I was still taking it that seriously, I'd be where Crosby, Stills and Nash are today."

After starting out the decade recording Hawks And Doves, an odd and frequently inscrutable amalgam of love songs and populist sloganeering, Young once again teamed up with Crazy Horse for Reactor. An uninspired return to the raunch-and-roll of Rust Never Sleeps, Reactor seemed more like a regression than a step forward. But then things really started getting interesting.

As primal punk mutated into the cold, metallic, keyboard-driven sounds of New Wave, Young followed suit with Trans, an album - his first for Geffen Records - that almost exclusively featured synthesizers and digitally processed guitars and vocals. "This new technology has opened up a whole new thing for me," Young told David Gans in 1982. "This is the most free expression I've been able to have, because it's so technical. I love the machines, and I think the machines are where it's at." Young, rock's unpredictable provocateur, was at it again. But his time, there was a method to his madness.

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN

In 1981, Young's second wife, Pegi, gave birth to a son afflicted with cerebral palsy. Remarkably, Young had now spawned two children with the disease by two different women (ex-wife Carrie Snodgrass had conceived his first son, Zeke). Trans' electronically generated vocals had evolved out of Young's "search for communication with a severely handicapped non-oral person," - his own son.

Wiping the slate clean of any easy-to-grasp musical references, Young alienated all but the most stalwart members of his audience with Trans, particularly when he toured behind the album. Not only did Young dare to play Trans' squonk-pop in its entirety, but he digitized and deconstructed old war-horsed like "Down By The River" and "Mr. Soul" as well.

"The Eighties are here," Young told Rolling Stone. "I've got to just tear down whatever has happened to me and build something new." Although Young actually made that statement in 1988, the sentiment it conveyed was clearly close to his heart from the decade's outset. He's continued to reinvent himself throughout the Eighties, even as his record sales continued to dwindle. Everybody's Rockin', his follow-up to Trans, was a straight-ahead rockabilly album featuring a pompadoured Young on the cover. Old Ways - recorded with a band of country musicians Young dubbed The International Harvesters - was his third neo-Harvest album, as gently pastoral as Trans was harsh and bloodless. All of the aforementioned albums were critically lambasted and sold only a fraction of what Young had been accustomed to.

Old Ways was Young's most user-friendly release since Rust Never Sleeps, but Geffen, weary of Young's abrupt stylistic detours and sagging commercial fortunes, thought otherwise. Shortly after he delivered the album, Geffen sued Young for making 'unrepresentative music.' "I handed in [Old Ways] and they sued me," Young told Bill Flanagan in 1985. "They said, 'We don't know what you're doing. We're scared! We want Neil Young!' That was confusing to me because I thought I was Neil Young. But it turns out that when I do certain thing, I'm not Neil Young."

Frustrated and bogged down by the $3 million lawsuit, Young recorded two more albums for Geffen before returning to Warner Brothers. Although they look and sound like more conventional "Neil Young" albums, Landing On Water and Life were really corporate concessions made expressly to appease Geffen and release Young from his contract.

"It was the worst period of my working life," Young told writer Greg Kot in 1990. "I felt I was being manipulated and I began manipulating back. It was all so anti-creative. Making music became a hassle."

Back at Warner Brothers, Young was once again free to make records as he saw fit. Controversy continued to dog him, however. The 1987 release This Note's For You was yet another genre exercise, with Young fronting a big brassy blues band called The Blue Notes. But it was a video for the title song, not the album, that ruffled powerful feathers this time.

The Julien Temple-directed clip, a stinging commentary on the increasingly cozy relationship between rock stars and corporate sponsors, featured, among other commercial parodies, a send-up of the infamous Michael Jackson "hair-on-fire" Pepsi ad. Not too surprisingly, MTV, fearful of insulting its own sponsors, banned the video. When Young offered to re-edit the video and delete the bogus commercials, MTV still refused to air it.

"It's sort of like dealing with spineless twerps," Young told Rolling Stone at the time. He got the last laugh, however, when the clip, mock commercials and all, won MTV's Best Video Of The Year award. Young was back in the public eye, but his comeback had only just begun.

RAGGED GLORY (1989-95)

By 1989, the thunderous sound of Young and Crazy Horse had influenced a new generation of artists who had been weaned on their older brothers and sisters' worn copies of Decade, the 1976 three-album retrospective of Young's career. Guitar-driven bands such as Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and the Pixies - all of whom appeared on a 1989 Neil Young tribute album called The Bridge - were hailing Young as the forefather of alternative music. But instead of graciously accepting his elder statesman status, Young proclaimed he "wasn't ready to be embalmed yet," and came roaring back with renewed fervor.

Freedom, Young's triumphant 1989 return to form, combined anthem-rock ("Rockin' In The Free World") and acerbic social commentary ("Crime In The City") with anarchic noise-rock ("On Broadway," "Eldorado") just as effectively as Rust Never Sleeps had done ten years previously. Freedom promptly became Young's best-selling album in a decade and started him on the road to an artistic and commercial rebirth.

1990's Ragged Glory paired Young with Crazy Horse for the first time in five years. A primal, snarling showcase for rock's ultimate garage band, the album featured some of Young's most impassioned, caterwauling guitar playing in eons. The release of the raging, infernal Ragged Glory also coincided with the emergence of grunge, a Seattle-based sub-genre whose best practitioners - Nirvana and Pearl Jam, in particular - credited Young with pioneering grunge's sound (loud, crunchy guitars) and style (flannel shirts, ripped jeans). After a decade of musical fits and starts, Young - the newly christened "Godfather of Grunge" - was back where he belonged, playing with the band that had spurred him to his greatest triumphs.

"I can't do this with anyone else," Young told Stephen Holden, referring to his longtime cohorts in Crazy Horse. "I don't think of my guitar solos as guitar solos, because when we play we're like a big band jamming and taking long rides together." With the one-two punch of Freedom and the platinum-selling Ragged Glory, it was indisputably clear that Young was once again a musical force to be reckoned with.

Since Freedom revived Young's career, this timeless, ageless iconoclast has been anything but complacent. The Nineties have already seen him explore elegiac country (Harvest Moon), return to the meditative, ramshackle ugliness of the Tonight's The Night era (Sleeps With Angels) and kick-out-the jams grunge (Mirror Ball). In between those projects, Young has toured with Booker T and the MG's, stolen the show at Bob Dylan's 30th anniversary concert, earned an Academy Award nomination (for his musical contribution to the film Philadelphia) and been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. What's next? There's been talk of a massive, multi-CD retrospective of his career and an autobiography, but don't hold your breath. If history is any indication, not even Young knows where he's headed.