Like many other performers, Neil Young has a website and a youtube channel.  Both are worth a visit.

When I was 11 or 12 years old, my father put a tiny, old, black-and-white television in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother.  I suspect he did so to keep us out of the living room on Saturday afternoons, thus freeing up the t.v. there to serve as a delivery system for his baseball addiction.  We didn't actually use the set during the day very often, (we were rarely home until after the sun went down, even when the weather was miserable) but at night it became a conduit to the world.  Without our parents' watchful eyes, we were able to tune in to all kinds of things we'd never seen before.

Even during those pre-cable (at least in my town) days, we found some revelatory programming for a couple of pre-teen boys.  Saturday Night Live (with its original cast) was one show that impressed us mightily.  Another was The Midnight Special, which aired on Friday nights at, you guessed it, midnight (no, my parents didn't know we were up at that hour; they were either sound asleep or not home yet).  In spite of being named after a great old blues tune, The Midnight Special mainly focused on live or lip-synched performances of the mainstream hits of the day, along with the occasional promotional clip (soon to be known as videos).  We got lots of Andy Gibb, Dr. Hook, and Olivia Newton John.  In just a year or two, these performers would all strike me as impossibly lame, but at the time I was impressed.

Then, one night, the show's announcer, Wolfman Jack introduced the above video and evrything changed for me.  I'd never heard music like this before, but it made sense to me in a way that very little had before.  This was no three minute pop song like I was hearing on the top forty radio station I favored at that time.  Nor was it the kind of working man's ode we were getting from the country stations my parents loved.  I didn't know what this was.

It seemed to go on forever, but I didn't want it to stop.  The lyrics alluded to a whole world of mystery that I wanted to be part of.  The singer's voice was honest and confident and direct, even though he didn't sound anything like the "good" singing I'd been taught to admire.  Heck, the guy even dressed like me - no satin disco pants or tie-dyed hippy weirdness here, just flannel and denim.

But it was the guitar that really caught my attention.  That guitar solo was not only intense, but it seemed insane to me in the best possible way.  All my life I had suspected that there was more to life than either following or breaking rules, that there was chaos lurking beyond the fringes of the orderly world of birth-school-work-death that my parents and teachers were imposing on me.  I just didn't have any proof - until I saw this.

Here was a guy who not only played his instrument like it really mattered, but he didn't seem to care at all about the rules of what good music was supposed to sound like.  He didn't even seem to have a plan or care about where his soloes were going.  He was making it up as he went along.  I didn't know you could do that!  He took his big rock-star-guitar-solo moment and turned it inside out.  He deglamorized it and bent the both the notes and the rules to make his music entirely his own.  In doing so, he showed me that there was another way to think.  Another way to live.  I put my KISS and Bee Gees records away the next day, changed the station on the radio and began to become my own person.

It seems like a ridiculous claim to make for a guitar solo, but I was just a kid and I already loved music.  And here was music that seemed to not just pay lip service to rebellion, but to enact it.  What could be better?  Over the years I discovered other great rock bands, learned about jazz, and immersed myself in pre-commodified punk (before it moved to the mall and became just another product), but I never forgot about Neil Young.  I found people in books (both characters and authors) and films and down the street whose lives enacted that guitar solo in hundreds of different ways, but they just confirmed and expanded what he had already showed me that night.  He was the first and in many ways the boldest, the bravest.

It's this courage that I admire to this day.  It was courage I saw in that guitar solo; I just didn't have the words for it at the time.  It is his courage in being entirely himself (even when it meant leaving his friends behind or taking unpopular political stands or deliberately challenging his fans or changing his music entirely to avoid becoming stale) that has continued to inspire me and has encouraged me to think and act for myself, even when my ideas ran counter to those of my friends, employers, teachers, and even my spouse.  If Neil Young can become a millionaire Rock Star while searching (more on this searching quality in a leter post) for notes he knows don't exist, then I don't have to play it safe either.

That's why my role model for this project is Neil Young.