Neil Young

:For the former Canadian politician see Neil Young (politician)

Trivia

• The piano Young played on After the Goldrush was later purchased by Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett and used on the album Daisies of the Galaxy.
• Young's hobbies include collecting model trains (he has an extensive "train barn" on his Northern California ranch), collecting and restoring classic automobiles, and attending San Jose Sharks hockey games with his son, Ben Young.
• Young's full birth name is reportedly Neil Percival Kenneth Robert Ragland Young. In the opening of the documentary Year of the Horse, Young identifies himself as Neil Percival Young.
• Young owns a 101-foot wooden schooner, built in 1913, the W.N. Ragland, which he named after his grandfather, Bill Ragland.
• Police knocked out one of Young's teeth when they assaulted him in the aftermath of one of the notorious Sunset Strip riots of 1967. Comparison of modern concert footage with Buffalo Springfield footage shows that Young has had extensive dental work in the intervening years. In an interview in Rolling Stone magazine in the early 1970s, another band member stated his belief that Young's epilepsy was at least partly an outcome of police battery.
• When filming the motion-picture The Last Waltz, Young appeared on stage with one nostril clearly filled with cocaine. Band leader Robbie Robertson later had to pay several thousand dollars for the cocaine to be rotoscoped out of the film, lest rock audiences be "offended." Robertson called it "the most expensive cocaine I've ever bought." When asked about the incident many years later, Young replied, "I'm not proud of that."
• Young's tour buses operate on biodiesel. He also owns a Hummer that has been modified to operate on the alternative fuel. Said Young about the latter vehicle in the 2005 Time article, "I love it when people yell at me that about the environment... and then I tell them that I'm burning 90% cleaner than them."
• Crazy Horse guitarist Poncho Sampedro was amazed when he first toured Japan with Young in the mid-1970s: their plane was met at Tokyo airport by masses of Japanese youth, all of whom had their straight hair parted down the middle, all of whom were wearing flannel shirts and patched jeans just like their hero, all of whom were welcoming the band with chants of "Neileru, Neileru!"
• Young wrote the song Ohio after David Crosby gave him the Life cover with pictures from the infamous Kent State shootings in 1970.