Neil Young has Winnipeg roots

Imagine what it must have been like for 12-year-old Neil Young to move to Winnipeg with his mum in 1958.

Up to that point, home had been Omemee, Ontario, a pretty village of fewer than 1,000 people in cottage country about an hour north of Toronto.

Both Manitoba natives, his parents had moved east before Neil was born so that his father, Scott Young, could advance in his career as a sports journalist.

A few decades later, his dad would write his own account of a parent's love and regret, and also astonishment as he realized that his child had become an internationally celebrated recording artist. The book is Neil and Me, by Scott Young.

When the marriage ended, Neil and his mother moved to Winnipeg, where they settled at Grey Apartments at the corner of Corydon Avenue and Hugo Street.

Now this is in the middle of trendy Little Italy where most of the apartments have been converted to des-res condos. Back in the day, it was just part of working-class Fort Rouge.

Young Neil was the new kid a few blocks away in grade seven at Earl Grey School, 340 Cockburn Street North. He was said to be quiet and a bit shy, but with the dry sense of humour he is still known for.

In his biography of Neil Young, Shakey, James McDonough asked Neil about what it was like, growing up in Winnipeg, and comes to the conclusion that he was a lonely kid who turned to music for solace after his parents' divorce.

Reading Shakey is like getting to sit down with Neil and ask him everything you've wanted to know, and getting the thoughful, honest answers Neil Young usually sidesteps in interviews.

He's a genius, of course, and that can make him seem aloof -- but not in this book.

You can get a copy of Shakey here.

Earl Grey School looks like among the last places you would ever associate with Neil Young. Built in 1914, it isn’t very inspiring (or inviting from the outside), though it does have large sunny classrooms and a big playground and sports field. “God save our gracious King,” is carved in English above one main entrance and in Latin over the other.

Today it is still a public school, though part of the space has been taken over by a community centre.

Viewing Earl Grey School, you have to wonder what (if anything?) Neil Young learned there.

But he did form his first band, The Jades, while he was in Grade 8, and they would perform in public just once – for a teen dance in early January, 1961 at Crescentwood Community Centre at 1170 Corydon.

If you drop by any Saturday afternoon, you’ll find a typical scene – kids playing video games and floor hockey in the gym, notices about pond hockey, tennis lessons and ringuette and plaques listing the names of volunteers who help out with various sports for kids covering the walls. There is a case with some dusty trophies, but absolutely nothing to indicate that Neil Young, Burton Cummings, Randy Bachman and other legendary musicians got their earliest stage experience here.

Next stop on this Neil Young tour is the high school he dropped out of, Kelvin High School, which occupies the block between Kingsway, Harrow and Stafford Streets. Larger today than it was when Neil was a student, it’s notable because it is here that his second band, The Squires, played in the cafeteria (they also performed at teen dances at Crescentwood Community Centre).

Kelvin still has a no-playing-guitars-in-the-hallways rule. School lore has it that this rule, maybe more of a guideline, is Neil Young's legacy to Kelvin.

In 1963, Neil and his mother moved here, to 1123 Grosvenor, where they rented the upper floor. He was 17.

It’s a pretty house, across the street from an Anglican church, and still divided into two apartments. A few years back, the current upstairs tenants were surprised when a deferential middle-aged man knocked on the door and politely asked if he might see their home. The husband obliged – it seemed the man really only wanted to get a brief look at their daughter’s bedroom.

“Who was that?” the wife asked, after the man had left. The visitor she hadn’t recognized, who only wanted to see the bedroom where the teen-aged Neil Young had lived, played music and wrote the lyrics for an iconic song about lost youth, Sugar Mountain, was Bob Dylan.

The folk club where a teen-aged Neil Young went to see (and where he first met) Joni Mitchell in October, 1965 vanished long ago. The 4th dimension, was once a popular student hang-out at 2000 Pembina, where Pembina Highway meets University Crescent a few blocks from University of Manitoba.

Joni and husband Chuck Mitchell had recently married (she was 21) and they played a one-week engagement at this coffee-house where you paid 25 cents per hour to get in and keep your seat, seven days a week.

Where the 4th dimension once stood is now part of the parking lot for a convenience store/gas station.

Dave, one of the two staffers in the store when I stopped in, told me his real interest is punk and heavy metal. When I said I was looking for the former site of the 4th dimension, he’d never heard of this legendary club, but was interested to learn about the connection to Neil Young, one of his own guitar heros.

“Wow,” he said “I just love that guy…” and I ended up eating the snack I’d stopped in to buy while Dave talked about how much of an influence Neil Young still is on twenty-something musicians like himself, and how much he and his friends like tunes by Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth, two of Young’s more recent bands.

It’s been more than 40 years since Randy Bachman told Neil Young to forget about trying to play the guitar and go find something he was actually good at. (Instead, Young headed to San Francisco and less than a year later mailed Bachman a copy of his first album with Buffalo Springfield, along with a thank-you note).

There is no Manitoba Hall of Fame (though there should be) commemorating either his early years here or his later achievements as singer, songwriter, musician, film director and humanitarian; no statue of him anywhere in town, no museum with a few of his old guitars and harmonicas and maybe a photo of him when he used to tool around the backroads in an old hearse, no plaque on any of these buildings…not much, really, to connect him with this city. Despite this, Winnipeggers still fondly claim Neil Young as a native.

And always will.

Since leaving he has become known world-wide for his moving and deeply personal lyrics, his distinctive tenor voice and two very different guitar-playing styles – acoustic folk and country and electric hard rock. He is also a husband, father and is co-founder of Farm Aid benefit concert and other charities.

A multi-Grammy Award winner, Neil Young is a Canadian and a Winnipegger who has lived in Northern California since the early 1970s.

Recently, he's been back home, promoting his most recent album, Le Noise. It's all new songs and, he says, the solo album he's long wanted to make, recorded live, done in collaboration with another famous Canadian singer and filmmaker, Daniel Lanois.

Just Neil Young and an acoustic guitar, recorded exactly as it sounded, singing songs that are more like memories and secrets whispered to a lifelong friend.

Get Le Noise.

He doesn't rehearse, he told one interviewer, because he believes, "When you do something over and over again, you get technically better but further away from the spiritual source."

Though he was recently back to Winnipeg for two concerts, and we loved his closing ceremonies performance at the Olympics (Vancouver Winter 2010), Neil Young's visits home are all too rare. But when he sings “The Red River still flows through my home town,” in Prairie Wind, we know exactly where he’s fondly remembering.

If you would like to compare his current work with what the very early Neil sounded like, his earliest recordings (made in Winnipeg and Thunder Bay, ON) were re-released on Neil Young’s Archives Remastered in 2009.