After the Goldrush

Hey there Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew is spinning that soft piano opener from Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush album and the whole canyon just seems to settle in around the speakers. This tune has always felt like a dream somebody had while staring out a window in Topanga, and the stories that float around it only make the haze thicker. Back in the late sixties Young was living in that canyon and dealing with a stretch of writer’s block that had the record company knocking. Then a copy of a screenplay landed on his table. Actor Dean Stockwell, who lived nearby, had written the thing after coming back from filming with Dennis Hopper in Peru. The script was called After the Gold Rush and it never got made. Universal passed because it was too much of an art project. The story was about the day a giant earthquake hit Topanga Canyon and a wave of water wiped out the whole hippie scene. Stockwell said the gold rush created California and the film was about the day California was supposed to slide into the ocean. Young read it, the block cracked open, and he wrote the entire album in about three weeks. He later said the title track was written to go along with the main character as he carried the Tree of Life through the canyon to the ocean. The song itself moves through three different times. One verse feels like a Robin Hood scene with knights and peasants. Another has Young lying in a burned-out basement while a band plays in his head and he feels like getting high. The last verse sends certain people off on ships with silver seeds while others get left behind as the air turns yellow and red. Young has called it an environmental song and talked about that time-travel thread that runs through a lot of his writing. When he looks out a window the first thing he sees is how the place looked a hundred years ago. He once told a crowd the lyrics came after a dream. Years later Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt were getting ready to cover the song for their Trio II album and they called Young to ask what it was really about. He said he had no idea. Parton thought that was funny and figured it might be the Second Coming or aliens or both. The screenplay itself got lost along the way so nobody can check the exact lines against the lyrics anymore, but Stockwell said the connection was artistic rather than direct dialogue. Young recorded a lot of the album in his basement in Topanga with Nils Lofgren, who was still a teenager then, sitting in on piano and guitar. The whole thing captured that audio verite feel Young loved, with people talking and dogs barking in the background. He has said the album painted the spirit of Topanga Canyon and that after it was done he left the house. The song still gets played acoustic in quiet rooms and electric when the Horse is rolling, and every version keeps that strange forward-looking sadness.

The man who wrote it started out a long way from any California canyon. Neil Young was born in Toronto in 1945. His parents split and he moved with his mother to Winnipeg. As a kid he dealt with polio, epilepsy and diabetes, and for a while he could not walk. Once he got past the worst of it he picked up a plastic ukulele and worked his way through better ukuleles, a banjo ukulele and finally a guitar. In high school he formed instrumental bands that chased the sound of the Shadows. One of them, the Squires, played community halls and schools across Manitoba and even scored a local hit called The Sultan. He dropped out of school to chase music full time, playing coffeehouses and clubs first with the band and then as a solo act. Around that stretch he crossed paths with Joni Mitchell and with Stephen Stills. He also joined a band called the Mynah Birds that had Rick James on bass. Motown signed them and they started cutting tracks, but the deal fell apart when James got arrested for being AWOL from the Navy Reserve. Young and bassist Bruce Palmer packed what they had into Young’s black Pontiac hearse and drove to Los Angeles looking for the next thing. On Sunset Boulevard they spotted Stills and Richie Furay in traffic. The four of them pulled into a supermarket parking lot, talked it over, added drummer Dewey Martin, and Buffalo Springfield was born. The band lasted only a couple of years but it put Young’s high voice and his fuzztone guitar out where people could hear them. After the Springfield split he cut his first solo album, then hooked up with Crazy Horse for Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Not long after that he stepped into Crosby, Stills and Nash for the Déjà Vu sessions and the big tours. Through all of it he kept writing songs that refused to sit still in one style. The same restless streak that sent him south in a hearse later took him through country records, electronic experiments, grunge collaborations and quiet acoustic sets. The early struggles with health, the high-school bands, the Motown near-miss and the hearse ride all sit underneath the later catalog the way the old piano sits under the opening chords of After the Gold Rush.

If you want to dig deeper into the archives and the stories that keep surfacing from those years, the official home is over at the Neil Young Archives. The X account that carries the archive updates is Neil Young Archives on X. Longtime fans still gather at places like the HyperRust pages, which have been collecting lyrics, discographies and road stories for years. The Zoo Crew will keep the needle on this one a little longer for the Freaks who remember the canyon nights and the ones who are just now finding the silver seeds. You can always catch more of the freeform spins and the deep cuts over at THE ZOO.