Neil Young was born in Toronto on November 12, 1945. The singer, guitarist and songwriter helped form Buffalo Springfield before building a solo career that made room for both extended guitar performances with Crazy Horse and the quieter songs on Harvest. His choice of collaborators helped give those different sides of his writing their shape.
Young’s early musical life took root in Winnipeg, where he played with the Squires and recorded “The Sultan” and “Aurora” in 1963. Toronto brought another connection: the Mynah Birds, whose lineup included bassist Bruce Palmer. That group recorded for Motown, but its material went unreleased at the time. Young and Palmer headed to Los Angeles in 1966, where they joined Stephen Stills and Richie Furay in the group that became Buffalo Springfield.
Young’s contributions soon stretched beyond the sound of a guitar band playing together. On the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again, he wrote and sang “Mr. Soul” and worked with arranger Jack Nitzsche on “Expecting to Fly.” As rock historian Ed Ward noted in a 2001 Fresh Air retrospective, Young was the only Buffalo Springfield member on the latter recording. The contrast is striking: the same songwriter could lead a compact rock song and then work outside his band’s lineup to give another composition an entirely different setting.
Buffalo Springfield broke up in 1968. Young’s next important partnership grew from the Rockets, the group whose guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina became the core of Crazy Horse. Together they recorded Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, released in 1969. Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” ran about three minutes; “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” stretched past nine and ten minutes respectively. Those running times suggest how much space he was willing to give the guitar. A concise song and an extended performance could belong on the same record without either having to set the rules for the other.
A different group of players helped shape Harvest. During a visit to Nashville in early 1971, Young recorded at Quadrafonic Sound Studios with producer Elliot Mazer. For “Heart of Gold,” the ensemble included steel guitarist Ben Keith, and Young asked for the studio setup to be rearranged so he could sit near the drums. The performance began with the musicians playing together.
“We did one or two takes,” Mazer recalled in his 2001 account for Mix. Once they had the master, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor added harmonies while sitting on a couch in the control room. Mazer estimated that the entire recording took less than two hours. Young’s request to sit near the drums and the small number of takes put the emphasis on the players responding to one another. The resulting “Heart of Gold” appeared on Harvest in 1972.
Young returned to that circle of collaborators for Harvest Moon in 1992. The Stray Gators supplied the instrumental backing, while Ronstadt and Taylor were among the returning harmony singers. Keith’s pedal steel again had a place alongside Young’s voice and guitar. Young wrote and sang the title song and played acoustic guitar, with Ronstadt adding backing vocals. The collaboration had grown beyond Keith’s original role in those Nashville sessions: he and Young co-produced Harvest Moon.
