This is rather long, but I think everyone should find it interesting, besides I live in downtown MR Central and I like it…

Despite anguish and illness, the legendary musician Neil Young says…
“I Just Keep Going” By Lisa Birnbach – Published: February 19, 2006

Neil Young remembers the morning last March when he was shaving in a New York hotel room and suddenly experienced an excruciating pain. “It felt like a shard of glass dividing my vision into two parts,” he says. “Pretty soon everything on the left started vibrating, and it scared me.” He rushed to a doctor, who found a brain aneurysm. Young needed emergency surgery to implant tiny platinum coils in his brain.

Most people would respond to that devastating diagnosis with rage or tears. But the reedy-voiced singer had a different reaction. He flew down to Nashville and retreated to a hotel room, where he spent the four days before surgery in a creative spasm of songwriting. Young explains it this way: “I kind of just said, ‘OK, now you have a brain hemorrhage, and now you’re different than you were a few minutes ago, but I can still do what I did and just keep going.'”

Young, 60, has indeed kept going through years of illness, tragedy and loss. The legendary musician, known for his stints with the rock bands Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, once titled a song “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” But he has faced situations that would break anyone’s heart almost every day of his life.

Born in Canada, Young was just 6 years old when he was stricken with polio and had to learn to walk again. His parents, Rassy and Scott, divorced when he was 13. Then, in his 20s, Young began suffering from epileptic seizures. At least one struck when he was onstage, in the midst of a performance. Now the rocker’s easy dismissal of these travails seems almost too tranquil.

“The aneurysm, polio, epilepsy–all those things are just part of the landscape,” he says.

Tragically, his two sons suffer from even more devastating disabilities. Young has been married to wife Pegi for 27 years, and the family lives what should be an idyllic life on a remote and rambling ranch in northern California. But, in a painful twist of fate, his first child, Zeke, 33 (with actress Carrie Snodgress), was born with cerebral palsy, as was his second son, Ben, 27, who is both quadriplegic and mostly nonverbal. Daughter Amber, 21, is a healthy college student.

With a life marked by these setbacks, how does Young manage to stay calm and even-keeled? “Everybody’s life is hard,” he says. “You look at life, and it’s not a cakewalk. Things happen, and you’ve got to be able to bounce back.”

Forty years of music success have given Young the resources to face his problems pragmatically. He stood behind Pegi when she started the Bridge School in Hillsborough, Calif., for students with severe physical and speech impairments. Pegi, who often sings backup vocals for her husband, was executive director of the school for six years. The annual fund-raising concerts have included headliners like Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam and Paul McCartney.

Adding to Young’s anguish was the death last June of his father, after years of illness. “I loved my dad, and my dad loved me,” Young says. “I got the writing gene from him. He was a sportswriter. He wrote novels, a lot of books.”

His father also gave Young his first instrument, a ukulele, when the boy was just 8. By the time he was 18, Young had performed in coffeehouses around Canada and been part of a band called the Mynah Birds with the late funk singer Rick James. Wanting a wider audience, Young moved to the United States and drove cross-country in, of all things, a hearse. He ended up in Los Angeles and connected with Stephen Stills, who became his longtime bandmate. He also cut a solo album and became famous for his performance at Woodstock. As a quarter of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, he moves in and out of that band–a unique relationship in rock ‘n’ roll.

Young has released dozens of albums in various styles, but perhaps none was completed as quickly as his latest CD, Prairie Wind. Eight of the songs were written and recorded in that week when he faced surgery and feared death. He coped with his fears by making music with friends.

“When I got this medical thing, I thought I’d just go to the studio and be the happiest,” he says. “Pegi was with me, and we talked about what guys we could get together to play.”

Young’s new music is infused, understandably, with reflections on mortality. He tells me that he didn’t plan to use the lyrics to say goodbye to people; the music just came to him in a rush of inspiration. Movie director Jonathan Demme (best known for The Silence of the Lambs) has turned the CD into a concert film called Neil Young: Heart of Gold.

“The songs are about family, love and relationships,” says Young. “We were doing this so our grandchildren would know who we were and what we cared about. All of these songs are just about life.”

The movie features Young performing at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, onetime home of the Grand Ole Opry. Though the scraggly haired Young was once known for his anti-establishment songs, he insists, “I’m not a Johnny-come-lately who wants to play country music for a few days and then go and do something else. That’s not the feeling here. I feel secure in being who I am and paying tribute to the great artists who came before me.”

Modest and refusing to seek sympathy, Young jokes that he didn’t want to promote his CD on an “Aneurysm World Tour.” In fact, leaving the hospital after surgery, he thought of keeping the whole story to himself. But two days later, a complication left him bleeding and unconscious on the street–and his secret was out.

Did that incident, finally, make him pause? “Obviously I have a different perspective on life now,” he says. “Anything could happen.” Knowing that, Young wrote deeply emotional songs in Prairie Wind that remind us time is short, and we should appreciate the life we have. In “Falling Off the Face of the Earth,” he gives simple words of gratitude: “I just want to thank you/For all the things you’ve done/I’m thinking about you/I just want to send my love.”