It was David Crosby who said it, and he didn’t soften the blow. “She’s a purely poisonous predator. ” Three words, basically. Poisonous.
Predator. That was his take when Neil Young started dating Daryl Hannah, right after his 36-year marriage fell apart. For six decades, Neil Young has burned everything to the ground just to see what the ashes look like. That’s how the people closest to him describe it.
Fans saw the gentle hippy with the flowing hair and the sad songs. The people inside his life saw a relentless force, a man who left broken hearts, scorched-earth feuds, lawsuits, and strange cult encounters behind him wherever he went. That story starts long before the music, though, in a Toronto snowstorm, where Neil’s parents got trapped in a tiny apartment and he was conceived. Nine months later, on November 12th, 1945, he arrived at Toronto General Hospital.
His parents were opposites in every way. His mother, Rassy, was fearless, volatile, and raised in comfort. His father, Scott, was handsome, charming, and from the wrong side of the tracks. They were in love back then, but it wouldn’t last, because they fought over everything, including how to raise Neil and his older brother, Bob.
A family friend named June Colwood often visited, and she said Neil’s parents were too wrapped up in themselves and their crumbling marriage to notice their children at all. The five-year-old boy was basically invisible in his own home. 1951, Neil woke up feverish and groaning in pain. His parents raced him the 145-kilometer drive from Omemee to Toronto, with the little boy wearing a surgical mask and clutching a toy train, silent in the back seat.
Doctors confirmed it was polio. In the pre-vaccine era, that was devastating news. They rushed him into tests, spinal taps, and strict isolation. Six agonizing days passed while his family went home to quarantine and stew in their fears.
Neil forced himself forward with small, stumbling steps through a longand frightening recovery. Music became his refuge, and at 13, his parents gave him a cheap plastic ukulele for Christmas. After 19 tempestuous years, Neil’s parents split. His mother and 14-year-old Neil moved to Winnipeg, and music stopped being a pastime and became an obsession.
By age 20, he was already touring Canada’s coffee houses as a solo act, until he met Bruce Palmer on a Toronto street in 1966. Palmer invited him to join a rock band called The Mynah Birds, and they crackled with chemistry. Onstage, Young would drop his guitar and start a raging harmonica solo, toss it in the air, and Rick James would catch it without missing a beat. Offstage, they shared a Toronto apartment, broke musicians who sometimes ate because James swiped bakery deliveries before dawn.
James also kept Young supplied with something far more dangerous, amphetamines. The Mynah Birds scored a record deal with Motown Records, and they were living the dream. Then, right as they started recording, authorities barged into the studio and busted Rick James for being AWOL from the US Navy. The band splintered.
Young and Palmer pawned their gear, bought a hearse, and barreled toward Los Angeles, where Young ran into Stephen Stills,and they formed the folk-rock powerhouse Buffalo Springfield. But just as the band gained momentum, Young started collapsing without warning. At one gig, he bolted off stage mid-song, and Stills chased him into the parking lot where Young lay across the hood of a Corvette, thrashing uncontrollably. A nurse thrust her fingers into his mouth to stop him swallowing his tongue.
He was later diagnosed with epilepsy, kept private until a 1975 interview. Young’s brushes with danger weren’t over. He was birthday twins with Charles Manson, and they were also pals, introduced by Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson in 1968. At the time, Manson was just another musician, raw and unpredictable, and Young found him fascinating.
They hung out at Dennis Wilson’s Sunset Boulevard house, where Manson made up songs on the spot as Young played along. Young even gifted him a motorcycle and tried to get him a record deal, telling Warner Brothers, “This guy is unbelievable. ” Young was right, but not in the way he thought, because within months, Manson would become the Helter Skelter cult leader responsible for horrors that shocked the world. In 1968, Young married his first wife, Susan Acevedo, 12 years his senior.
Friends described her as tough, brilliant, strong-willed, and overpowering. Acevedo ran a tight ship at home, put Young on a healthy diet to manage his epilepsy,and banned his mother from visiting. The marriage lasted just two years. After Buffalo Springfield split, Young didn’t pause.
He started Crazy Horse,and in 1969, they recorded Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere in just two weeks, with Young writing Cinnamon Girl, Cowgirl in the Sand, and Down by the River while bedridden with a 102-degree fever. His career took off: that album, then Déjà Vu with Crosby, Stills & Nash, then his solo After the Gold Rush. Neil Young was never a people-pleaser,and he didn’t shy away from hot takes. In 1970, after seeing shocking images from Kent State, where the National Guard opened fire on student protesters, Young retreated to the woods with his guitar.
Just an hour later, he emerged with Ohio, one of music’s most enduring protest anthems. That was the first sign that activism would become part of his DNA. His success put a strain on his marriage, but he didn’t stay single for long. After watching the 1970 film Diary of a Mad Housewife, he fell hard for Carrie Snodgress, the titular housewife.
When he found out she was appearing in a play in LA, he got a roadie to drop off a note backstage: “Call Neil Young. ” Snodgress later said she didn’t know Neil Young from Neil Diamond, but her roommate set her straight. Their first date was unconventional. She arrived at the Chateau Marmont to find Young stranded in bed with crippling back pain from an accident while renovating his ranch.
The next day, he was in the hospital, but Snodgress didn’t run. She showed up unfazed, even though Young was wearing an old-fashioned lace-up brace with metal bars digging into his hips. She said, “My choice was being an actress or nurse, so Neil was right up my alley. I fell in love with Neil’s pain.
” That setback soon became a creative pivot. Unable to stand and shred his guitar, Young had no choice but to slow down,,and from that fragile state came Harvest in 1972, a chart-topping smash and his best-selling album ever. But success unsettled him. He wrote that Harvest put him in the middle of the road, and that traveling there soon became a bore, so he headed for the ditch.
It was a path he would choose over and over again. Meanwhile, much of the strain at home fell to Snodgress,and the cracks were already beginning to show. Fresh off Harvest,, Young planned a massive tour with the Stray Gators joined by Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten. At rehearsals, Whitten’s addiction made one thing clear: he could barely function.
Young sent him home. That same night, the coroner called from Los Angeles. Danny Whitten had overdosed. Neil later said, “I loved Danny.
I felt responsible. ” The arena tour that followed was a blur of booze, substances, and bad decisions. Young was raw, restless,,and far from faithful. He’d already written Motion Pictures, a breakup song about ending it with Susan before he even found out about her own affairs.
Life imitated art, and this dark period spawned what fans later called the Ditch Trilogy. In 1974, Young met Peggi, a waitress living in a tent with her dog. By 1978, they had two kids: Ben, born with cerebral palsy,and Amber Jean, who has epilepsy like her father. Rather than retreating,,they founded the Bridge School for children with verbal and physical disabilities,and funded it with yearly star-studded benefit concerts.
By the early 1980s, Young was flooring the gas and making U-turns in every direction. He blindsided fans with Trans, a synth-heavy album packed with robotic vocals, partly inspired by efforts to communicate with his nonverbal son, Ben. Then he veered into a stripped-down 25-minute rockabilly album. Geffen Records was livid and actually sued him for making music unrepresentative of himself.
Young doubled down, shifted next into country,and made deeply controversial remarks about AIDS,and praised Ronald Reagan. For the man who once wrote Ohio, the shift was jarring. Neil Young had been flooding speakers with distortion, feedback,,and raw emotion long before Seattle made grunge famous. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain admired him so much that he quoted one of his lyrics in his farewell note before ending his life: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.
” Young had been trying to contact Cobain just a few days beforehand,,and the loss hit him hard. A haunted Young poured his grief into music, unaware that his own brush with fate lay on the horizon, because Neil Young had already survived polio, epilepsy,,and a wrecked spine, but this one nearly took him out for good. After feeling something like broken glass in his eye, doctors delivered shocking news: he had a brain aneurysm that had been sitting there quietly for years. They needed to operate immediately.
Just two days after surgery, doctors cleared him for a walk. Half a block into the streets of New York, his body betrayed him. The artery surgeons had used suddenly burst. Before collapsing, Young noticed one thing: his shoe was filling with blood.
Things were dicey, but he survived,,and the message landed: he knew he had to slow down, but his heart clearly didn’t get the memo,
For decades, Neil and Peggi Young seemed unshakable. They weathered fame, illness, activism,,and parenthood together, all while helping others through the Bridge School. So when Young filed for divorce in 2014, after 36 years of marriage, it sent shockwaves through the music world. Almost immediately, he turned heads when he started dating actress and activist Daryl Hannah.
Old friends weren’t impressed. David Crosby called her a purely poisonous predator, but the couple bonded over activism and the environment. They quietly married in 2018,,and Hannah traded Malibu for a rustic cottage near Young’s childhood home in Omemee. In 2019, Peggi died after a battle with cancer.
Neil, as always, kept moving forward. It’s no surprise that the guy who wrote “Keep on Rocking in the Free World” was not afraid to take on big tech while in his 70s, pulling his music from Spotify over pandemic misinformation,and then from Amazon Music because of Jeff Bezos’s ties to the US government. While others chased streams, Young stuck to his principles, even though it cost him millions. Whether it’s protest songs that shook a generation, 35-minute feedback and noise odysseys, romantic yearnings that hit like a gut punch, or just nine minutes of chanting about God mashed potatoes in’t got no T-bone, he never plays it safe.
As one wise fan put it:“It’s Neil. It’s a groove. Don’t overthink it.
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