Neil Young’s spirit animal

Neil Young has peculiar ears. Not physically peculiar, just the kind that hear things differently. Take music. He’s convinced that music is “dying” because people can no longer hear it the way it’s supposed to be heard. MP3s and CDs compress music into lossy digital blocks, and we only get about 10 percent of what music sounds like when it’s actually played or recorded.

He may be right. His high-tech solution, called PonoMusic, just got in the news as the biggest Kickstarter project yet, raising $6.2 million from public donations for research and development. Many of Young’s friends — Jack White, Eddie Vedder, etc. — have sung the praises of the Pono sound.

Pono is Hawaiian for righteous, pureness, the one. Young’s next target is Apple, which he hopes will make Pono tracks available for download. But while Pono managed to raise $6.2 million, that’s just a drop in the bucket next to what Apple just paid for Beats by Dr. Dre ($3.2 billion), mainly known for its stylish headphones. Does this mean Apple is more interested in snazzy headphones to enhance lossy MP3s, rather than selling the “pureness”? It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Pono was a big running theme in Young’s memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, which came out a few years back. More like an obsession, his other obsession being restoring classic American cars (he promises to write another book about all the cars and dogs he’s owned over a long, music-filled life). Though many would perhaps rather hear detailed accounts of his tours with Buffalo Springfield and CSNY, or even a detailed account of his guitar collection, for now, cars and dogs are what seem to strike Neil Young’s fancy.

And yes, he does own a large stake in Lionel trains, an American company that his investment helped save (mostly for the sake of eccentric hobbyists). Young likes the nuts and bolts of things — the way old tube amps or echo chambers work, which he calls “real magic.” He cares about sound so much, he spent 30 years sifting through his old recordings and demos before releasing the first massive installment of his “Archive” box set. And that only covers from 1966 to 1971.

Waging Heavy Peace introduces us to an avuncular Neil, one with a wry and dry humor, and a certain self-effacement. It begs comparison to the (so far) most exhaustive biography on Young yet, Shakey, by Jimmy McDonough, a book that complies several years of interviews, and one which Young says taught him a valuable lesson: “Don’t hire some sweaty hack to follow you around asking questions for a couple of years.” It’s Young’s obsession with nuts and bolts, perhaps, that makes him dismiss anyone else’s bead on his life.

Waging Heavy Peace lacks the literary sweep of Dylan’s Chronicles, Vol. 1, which routinely bounced from past to present, drawing you into the folk singer’s wide, unfolding tapestry. Dylan is still a weaver of mystery; in Waging Heavy Peace, Young is more like a man trying to settle accounts. As author, he also bounces back and forth between decades, but mostly to set things straight.

Like his relationship with Stephen Stills, which has been thorny at times since their Buffalo Springfield days. (Young famously abandoned Stills during the “Long May You Run” tour with a telegram that read: “Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach. Neil.”) Yet Young is surprisingly upbeat about the possibility of a Springfield reunion, sooner rather than later, still calling Stills his “brother.” (Stills remains unconvinced.)

Young can be coy about what’s still in the pipeline. He’ll talk about rereleasing Human Highway and Journey to the Past, movies he made with his production company Shakey Pictures (“shakey” referring not just to a handheld aesthetic, but to the nickname Young, who has epilepsy, acquired in the ‘60s). He’ll talk about finally releasing “Homegrown,” the album he kept in the vault since ‘75, releasing “Tonight’s the Night” instead, presumably because the latter was more, er, commercial. But Young fans have heard these promises before, many times in the past. Still, they abide.

Young, too, is ruminative on his relationship with Crazy Horse. “Don’t spook the horse” is his mantra. Leading his famously rootsy backing band, Young has fired up some of his greatest tracks and tours. He just doesn’t tell them how to go about creating magic. He describes the Crazy Horse dynamic thus: “When music is your life, there is a key that gets you to the core… Crazy Horse are my window to the cosmic world where the music lives and breathes. I can find myself there and go to the special area of my soul where those songs graze like buffalo. The herd is still there, and the plains are endless. Just getting there is the key, and Crazy Horse is my way of getting there… I dream of playing those long jams and floating over the herd like a condor.” 

So now you know Neil Young’s spirit animal.

Speaking of spirits, Young is surrounded by them, living and dead. He claims animistic belief in a Great Spirit, which is female, and it’s not just hippie jargon; this guy has soared with the condors, after all. Then there are the many spirits who have passed through his life and passed away, like Crazy Horse founder Danny Whitten (died of heroin overdose, 1973), and David Briggs, the enigmatic producer whose imprint is felt on Young’s best albums (Briggs famously abandoned the recording studio while cutting “Tonight’s the Night” in Los Angeles, setting the band up in a local rehearsal space and tearing holes in the studio wall to record from his mobile van instead.) You can’t argue with the results of the Young-Briggs combo, a string of albums from 1970 to 1979 that had “the spook.”

Another collaborator, Jack Nitzsche, died of an OD in 2000, while longtime pedal steel player Ben Keith also passed away recently, causing Neil to vow never again to play the songs they recorded together.

All these people, not to mention his wife Pegi and sons Zeke and Ben, both with cerebral palsy, have passed through Neil Young’s life like spirits. Their voices have become his voice, and Young’s voice still hums like the prairie, if you only have the right ears to hear it.