As a child, Young moved with his mother to Winnipeg, Canada, after she divorced his father, a well-known sports journalist. He played in several
 high school rock bands, including the Esquires, the Stardusters, and the Squires. He also began hanging out in local folk clubs, where he met
Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell. Mitchell wrote "The Circle Game" for Young after hearing his "Sugar  Mountain." In the mid-Sixties Young moved to Toronto, where he began performing solo. In 1966 he  and bassist Bruce Palmer joined the Mynah Birds; after that fizzled, he and Palmer
drove to Los Angeles in Young’s Pontiac hearse. Young and Palmer ran into Stills and another mutual friend, Richie Furay, out west and formed Buffalo Springfield, one of the most important of the new folk-country-rock bands, which recorded songs of Young’s including "Broken Arrow" and "Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing." But friction developed: Young quit the band, only to rejoin and quit again, and in May 1968, after recording three albums, the band split up.

    Young acquired Joni Mitchell’s manager, Elliot Roberts, and released his debut solo LP in January 1969, coproduced by Jack Nitzsche. Around the
 same time Young began jamming with a band called the Rockets.  Renamed Crazy Horse, the band -- drummer Ralph Molina, bassist Billy Talbot, and guitarist Danny Whitten -- backed Young on  Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (#34, 1969),  recorded in two weeks. The album includes three of  Young’s most famous songs: "Cinnamon Girl," "Down by the River," and "Cowgirl in the Sand," which, Young later said, were all written in one day while he was stricken with the flu. The album went gold, and later, platinum, but Young decided to split his time between Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills and Nash, which he joined in June. In March 1970 his presence was first felt on SN&Y’s DeJa Vu.

    Young’s third solo, the gold After the Gold Rush (#8, 1970), included Crazy Horse and 17-year-old guitarist Nils Lofgren. The album yielded the single "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" (#33, 1970), and that plus the CSN&Y album put the spotlight on Young. Harvest (#1, 1972), with the #1 single "Heart of Gold," made the singer/songwriter a superstar.

    By the release of its live album, Four Way Street, in spring 1971, CSN&Y had broken up. In 1972 Young made a cinema verite film, Journey Through the Past; it and its soundtrack were panned by critics. In June l975
Young released an album recorded two years earlier, Tonight’s the Night (#25). The album’s  dark tone reflected Young’s emotional upheaval
 following the drug deaths of Crazy Horse’s Danny Whitten in 1972 and CSN&Y roadie Bruce Berry in 1973. In November Young released the
harder-rocking Zuma (#25), an emotionally intense work that included the sweeping "Cortez the Killer." Crazy Horse now included Talbot, Molina, and Frank Sampedro (rhythm guitar). In 1976 Young recorded  Long May You Run (#26) with Stills, which went gold; he and Stills embarked on a tour, but Young left halfway through.

     In fall 1978 Young did an arena tour called Rust Never Sleeps. He played old and new music, performing half the show by himself on piano or
guitar, and the other half with Crazy Horse, amid giant mockups of micro- phones and speakers.  Reaction to Young’s seeming change in direction
was swift and loud. In June 1979 he released Rust Never Sleeps (#8) with songs previewed on the tour, including "Out of the Blue,"  dedicated to Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols.  The album also featured "Sedan Delivery" and  "Powderfinger," which Young had once offered to Lynyrd Skynyrd, though they didn’t record them.   In November 1979 Young released the gold  Live Rust LP (#15), culled from the fall 1978 shows  and the soundtrack to a film of the tour (directed by Young) entitled Rust Never Sleeps.

    The Eighties was a particularly strange and erratic decade for Young, even by his own unpredictable  standards. Right before presidential election week 1980, he issued Hawks & Doves (#30), an enigmatic state- of-the-union address, with one side of odd  acoustic pieces and the other of rickety country songs. Exactly one year later he released Re•ac•tor
(#27), an all-hard-rock LP, which, despite its title,  seemed to have little to do with nuclear power. In 1982 he moved to Geffen and released Trans (#19), which introduced what Young called "Neil 2" he fed his voice through a computerized vocoder and sang songs like "Sample and Hold." He toured arenas as a solo performer when the album was released,
singing his most-requested songs, covering  "backstage" action on a large video screen, and  singing along with his vocoderized video image on  songs from Trans.

     Young’s wandering got more extreme with Everybody’s Rockin’, a rockabilly-style album recorded and performed with a group he dubbed the Shocking Pinks, and his work started sliding down the charts. Old Ways was a country record with  guest spots by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Landing on Water combined new-wave-like synthesizers with standard rock songs.  In 1987, after appearing with his old cohorts in CSN at a Greenpeace benefit, Young rejoined the group briefly for the 1988 CSN&Y album, American Dream (#16, 1989).

    Except for 1989’s Freedom, none of Young’s Eighties albums was particularly well received beyond the artist’s loyal core audience, though
 some -- such as Trans -- had captured critics’  interest. Many wrote off his Eighties period as typical Neil Young flakiness. But there were events
in Young’s personal life that shed light on his increased eccentricity. In 1978 his second son, Ben, was born to his wife, Pegi, with cerebral palsy (in 1972, Young’s first son, Zeke, was born to his then-companion, actress Carrie Snodgress, with a  milder version of the disorder). Later, in a 1992
interview with the New York Times, Young said his Eighties output had reflected his frustration with not being able to communicate with Ben: "Trans signified the end of one sound and era and the beginning of another era, where I was indecipherable and no one could understand what I was saying."

    Young’s extramusical activities during the Eighties were as unpredictable as the albums. In 1984,  he spoke out in favor of Ronald Reagan. He also participated in the 1985 Live Aid benefit and helped organize the subsequent Farm Aid concerts. In 1986 Young and his wife
started the Bridge School in San Francisco, a learning center for handicapped children with  problems communicating. In 1989 a group of
alternative rockers including Sonic Youth, Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr contributed to The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young whose proceeds went to the school. (Young also organized annual benefit concerts for the school, at which a wide range of artists perform  each year.)

     Hailed by a new generation of postpunk musicians  as the Granddaddy of Grunge, Young had a major comeback beginning in 1989 with Freedom (#35),  his highest charter since Trans; he introduced its  single, "Rockin’ in the Free World," in an unbridled, transcendent 1989 performance on Saturday Night  Live. Young then regrouped Crazy Horse for Ragged
 Glory (#31,1990), a raucous, critically lauded album.  With raw, feedback- and distortion-drenched hard rock, the album proved the extent of Young’s influence on younger alternative-rock bands such as  Dinosaur Jr and Soul Asylum. In 1991 he embraced that new generation of bands by taking noise-rockers Sonic Youth and Social Distortion on the road; the tour was documented on Weld (whose 35-minute instrumental companion Arc featured extended, noisy feedback jams).

     Harvest Moon (#16, 1992), found Young doing his  acoustic/folk songs again. A sequel to Harvest, it was his biggest seller in 13 years. In 1992 Young appeared at the 50th birthday celebration for Bob Dylan, covering Dylan’s "Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues" and "All Along the Watchtower." Released in 1993, Lucky Thirteen compiles Young’s Geffen material, and Unplugged documents his live, acoustic performances following the release of Harvest Moon.

    In 1994 Young contributed the haunting title song to Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia, which was nominated for an Oscar. He also released Sleeps  with Angels (#9, 1994), his strongest, most consistent, and critically lauded album since Rust Never Sleeps. After performing with Pearl Jam  several times, in 1995 Young collaborated with the  group on the album Mirror Ball, released to rave  reviews in mid-1995.