A Revisionist's History: What Neil Young Did for Dad

Growing up, my dad always insisted he liked Neil Young. He even would sing a line or two: “I was lying in a burned out basement, with a full moon over my head. . . .” (I still have no clue what that means, but since just about everything else he sang involved illicit drugs, I have a general idea.) At any rate, Dad “claimed” he loved Neil Young, but I knew better.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love old Neil as much as—probably more than—the next man. More than once, I’ve put my good name on the line in his defense. To bolster my position, I have it on good authority from a Mormon Bishop that Young could have beat Jimmy Page hands down. That’s all the authority I need.

As much as I love Young’s music, it’s a well-acknowledged fact that his real skill was with the guitar. This is why songs like “Cortez the Killer” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” have such timeless appeal as evidenced by the rise in alt-country. In my unlearned opinion, it is also why songs like “After the Goldrush” have lost a little of their stature in the Neil Young field of greats.

So when I tell you that the one Neil Young song my father sang more than any other was “After the Goldrush” (followed up closely by “Old Man” both of which lack the signature Neil Young riffs), you immediately understand one thing about my father. He resonated with Young on a much deeper level than vocal aptitude.

I’m told that one summer during my father’s late teens he guided Kayaks on a remote section of the Salmon River in Central Idaho. By his own admission the Moody Blues formed much of the soundtrack for that summer on the river. Now, I don’t know about you, but even with the most generous and accommodating ear, I could never stomach “Knights in White Satin.” The music literally nauseated me every time. If he would have listened to the lyrics, perhaps he would have felt the same way. But he didn’t have to listen, he was kayaking and separated from home and responsibility by vast expanses of sage brush.


My point is this, we all hear lousy music at one point or another. Sometimes, depending on what we are doing when the garbage comes blaring out of tinny speakers, we develop a taste for it simply because it reminds us of good times.

For my father, Young, the Moody Blues and the Beatles’ Sergaent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had the effect of conjuring up the heroic images of his youth. And in a way, they conjured up the same images for me; because even though our relationship during my teen years was fairly close, these songs allowed us to connect with each other on level to which words alone refused to carry us. We formed a sort of brotherhood listening to all the rock and roll my father knew in the 60’s. And I was ok with that.


Most Saturdays would find my father and I working—for at least part of the day—beneath the flickering fluorescent lighting of my father’s garage. Without ever really “teaching” me, it was there I learned how to do many manly tasks mostly involving dirt bikes. His portfolio of manly skills seemed to have no bounds. And while he taught, Bob Marley would sing his redemption songs about buffalo soldiers in the back ground. (Marley was my contribution to the discography.)

There was one thing my father attempted to teach me that never really stuck. I never learned to ski. My stomach still lurches (the way it does when peering into a pool from the edge of a high drive) every time I think about my pathetic attempts to snow plow.

Of my father’s many skills, the one that stands in greatest relief against the backdrop of his many accomplishments was his mastery of all things mechanical. He could safely command the helm of any motorized vehicle under and through any conditions. He once taught me how to navigate quick sand with a motorcycle in Southern Utah.

My Junior year in high school my father resolved to make one final attempt to instruct me in the art of skiing. He decided take my sisters and me to 49° North, a local resort just east of Chewelah, Washington. This one winter, he decided that we would take the Dodge Dart to the ski hill.

The Dodge was our family’s second car during my high school years. Demonstrating all the vanity of youth, I was a bit ashamed the first few months I drove it to school. Surprisingly, over time I managed to produce some genuine feelings of gratitude and appreciation for the car. Now some 20 years later, I recognize that—as far as high school cars go—the Dart was as good as it gets.

We had the 1973 Swinger, two-door model clothed in baby blue with an intact black-vinyl roof. Once waxed and Armor-All’ed, the Swinger shone. It had no rust or dints. The marine-blue, vinyled-clad interior could transport six belted high school boys in comfort and style. And the cavernous maw of a trunk could easily swallow two full-size mountain bikes. It was, by nearly all accounts, an eye-grabber. On more than one occasion, men approached my father offering to buy the car.

The Swinger had only two flaws of which I was aware. The first, it was rear-wheel drive. Second, it had only a single speaker linked to an AM radio.

In spite of all the things it shared with Eden, Spokane could not boast of mild winters. It didn’t help that my school and my home were located on opposite ends of Spokane’s fabulous “South Hill.” As a result, once the first snow fell, you could safely expect to commune with that snow until late March. Just contemplating the drive home from school would cause the muscles around my abdomen to slowly constrict leading to momentary lapses of judgment. Curiously, no one ever seemed to notice a the difference.

Not having acquired my father’s skill for snow driving at that age, I became adept at waving cars past me while my rear tires spun harmoniously on the ice. Eventually, I discovered passable routes from school to home, but not before developing a healthy respect for ice, hills and the limited efficacy of rear-wheel drive.

Naturally, my father’s decision to take the Dodge gave me pause. My father, Southeast Idaho’s finest son and master of all things mechanical, was an inveterate winter driver. He feared no hill, no matter how icy or how deep the snow. The fact that 49 Degrees was located on a huge, ice-encrusted mountain and that the Dodge self-motated using only the rear wheels interested him about as much as what Mr. Young actually meant by the phrase “burned-out basement.” It didn’t.

Dad’s approach to handling this first flaw with the Dart was to throw two tubes of sand, like oversized hot dogs, and a cement block or two in the trunk, close the lid firmly, and forget about it. Then, with reverse rake in full effect, we exited the drive way and headed north.



For any well-adjusted teenage boy, rear wheel drive is a fact to be accepted and dealt with like a man. After all, what doesn’t kill you gives you bragging rights with other teenage boys. The Dart’s second flaw, however, was an entirely different beast. It was a badge of shame, an unsightly boil on the Dart’s otherwise unblemished, if aged skin. The Dart’s AM radio and single, raspy in-dash speaker simply couldn’t accommodate the demands of a teen’s proverbial security blanket: “cool music.”

My choice in tunes consisted of the unenviable pick between Gospel or the kind of non-English music for which I would develop a taste a few years later in Guatemala. Fortunately, my father was a kind man. He managed to rummage up a FM adaptor from my uncle Jim in California. And soon enough, I found myself developing a taste for Classic Rock.

A few days prior to our departure, we came to a startling realization. Since it was a cinch we weren’t going to discuss our “feelings” during the hour-and-a-half drive to the mountain, nothing but the fickle tastes of some radio DJ stood between my father, me, and the gruesome possibility of silence. This wouldn’t do. We needed a fall-back position in the event of such a disaster.

As luck would have it, that Jolly Old Elf had only the week before brought me my very first CD boom box. Allow me to offer some historical context. The early 90’s were happy bucolic days as the world shook off the tethers of cassette-based music. With CD’s, overnight, it became possible to skip over all those filler songs that separated the gems from the dross. All you had to do was press those fancy little forward arrows, and the player would skip to the next track. Like magic. You could even press a repeat button and enjoy a “hands free” voyage into mind-numbing redundancy. There we stood on a precipice (before the free-fall into napster, 99 cent songs, and mp3’s) and we could see on the horizon the end of a dark era.


And with this dawning came the solution to our immediate threat. We reasoned that if we could bring the boom box with us, even if 98.9 KKZX, the local classic rock station, played an entire hour of Aerosmith, we could turn on the boom box and avoid saying even a word. The only problem was that we didn’t have a way of powering the boom box. Now, to be sure, we could have purchased a prodigious amount of d-cell, lead-acid batteries and neatly cleared that hurdle. But in my father’s home we lived in the shadow of a complete moratorium on all “non-essential” purchases. Genetically, that same moratorium has mysterious found its way into my own home.

There we were, stuck at a terrible impasse, when all of a sudden my father’s sheer mechanical genius came riding to the rescue. (As events will later show, it could not have been divine inspiration.) “What if,” he posited, “we were to wire a car charger adapter to the battery leads in the back of the boom box?” Not understanding a lick of electrical engineering, but wanting desperately to avoid any separation from the opiate of the teenage masses, I agreed.

With the help of a soldering gun, a little splicing, and three pounds of electricians tape, we soon were listening to Old Neil’s sonorous voice serenading the dashboard from the front seat of the dart. Success. With the exception of a fish-tail or two, the drive to Chewelah and beyond passed uneventfully.

Over the years the sting of embarrassment that accompanied my best approximations at skiing has diminished. The little I learned that day about managing skis and poles has also dissolved and passed like smoke through my ears and into the ether. But I will never forget staring out the passenger window into the falling snow and gray light. In the car, the heater purred soothingly beneath the dash, the turquoise-blue light from the dashboard illuminated my father’s face, and Neil Young sang “Heart of Gold.” That experience is etched into my mind.

Post Script: Chrysler built the Dodge Dart back before people ran electronic gadgetry in their cars. In those days, the Big Three never included regulators on the cigarette lighters to govern power surges coming off the engine. One blissful day, the following summer, dad and I were heading West on I-90 with the dirt bikes in tow. The summer sun had scorched the sky to a brassy white. Below the dash torrents of warm air poured through the vents. One minute Neil was with us there in the backseat lamenting “the dead in Ohio” and the next he was gone.