Neil Young – “Music just takes you wherever you want to go”
I wish we had a huge endowment so that it would keep on going and everything, if it ever comes to the point where I can’t sustain it myself. But, aside from that, I really don’t have any worries about it. It’s run by great people, and we’ve got a really good organization. And we’ve gone through a lot of changes getting it as together as it is now. And I feel really good about it.
And the kids are all great. We have alumni now. One of the first kids that came to the school recently graduated from university….So we’re very proud of her. And we have other ones coming up that are going to do that, too. But they’re all successes, you know. They’re not all going to graduate from university, but in varying degrees, we’ve made their lives a lot better. And we’ve supplied an alternative to what was the existing method of dealing with this part of the school system.
ND: So much of Prairie Wind is about family relationships. You sang about your father on “Far From Home”. And on the title song, “Prairie Wind”, you look back. You say, “Trying to remember what Daddy said/Before too much time took away his head.” Your father, Scott Young, was a wonderful writer who passed away in June. Did he influence you to be a writer?
NY: Well, you know, he was writing all the time. He would tell me, “If you can’t write, you’ve got to sit down and write anyway. Whatever comes out is OK. Don’t worry about it. Just write. And some days, when you don’t think you’ve got anything on your mind, you’ll be surprised what’s on your mind. Just don’t think about it. Don’t judge it. Don’t worry about it. Just do it.”
ND: Did he instill in you a love of open plains and the environment?
NY: Both of my parents did that. My granddaddy was from South Carolina, and he moved up to Canada. And he spoke with a heavy drawl. And he was a great old guy. He used to go duck hunting with my mom and dad, and then he’d come back and my mom would cook the ducks and, make them with the wild grains, with the wild rice. And we’d have roast duck with wild rice. They’d come back and maybe have 50 birds or something. It would get us through the winter — a couple of times a month, we’d have a big, you know, roast duck dinner and everything. It was really cool.
And there were a lot of pictures of my dad in Sports Illustrated magazine with my grandpa. They did articles on duck hunting in Northern Manitoba. And it really was like, you know, they go out there hunting for the birds and if you went at the right time, you actually couldn’t see the sun, there were so many birds in the sky. I mean, it just was black when they’d all take off at once. It got dark.
That’s how many birds there used to be. Now, where are they? What’s going on? You know, there’s too many signs. Our leaders need to realize that there are big signs. Not the dollar signs. They need to take a look around and see what we’re doing to the planet and what’s going on.
I know there’s a lot of people just shaking their heads, because I might sound like a tree-hugger or something. You can put a label on a person like me, an environmentally-conscious person, and dismiss it. It’s an easy thing to do. A lot of people are taking the easy route. But there’s a price to pay for that. All you have to do is remember what your grandparents said and what they talked about and look around and see what we’ve got now and wonder, you know, what are you going to tell your kids? And what are their kids going to remember from what you said when you’re their granddaddy? What have you got left? What are they going to have left? I mean, we really have to be careful here.
I’m trying to do the best I can to eliminate that, in my own way. And guys like Willie are trying to do it. We’re just doing what we do. But the politicians in this country, I mean, especially the group we’ve got now — I know that a lot of them are decent people and everything, but they just don’t see this. They just don’t see it. They don’t appear to understand that there’s a balance of nature that needs to be maintained. Things like destroying the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, which, to dig these holes and take this blood out of the earth, this old dead stuff — if we only use what’s in Alaska and we didn’t use anything else, it would only last us six months. So that’s really a shortsighted thing, to do that.
But, you know, it helps the big oil companies and everything. And the whole thing is just a rolling ball. And it’s a big rolling ball. So somebody’s got to, you know, stand up and get squashed. Maybe a lot of people have to get squashed before we can slow it down.
ND: You have a song on Prairie Wind called “This Old Guitar”, with Emmylou Harris; some lovely harmonies. You were playing a Martin last night that belonged to Hank Williams at the Ryman. That was unbelievable. And you acquired it here in Nashville years ago?
NY: Yeah. A friend of mine, Grant Boatwright, put me together with this fellow, Tut Taylor. He had an old collection of guitars, and I went down there and there it was. He took it out of the back and brought it out and I bought it. And I couldn’t believe that I could buy it. But I did, and now I have it. And, you know, I’ve got it for a while. And I’m taking care of it.