Early years

Neil Percival Young was born on November 12, 1945, in Toronto, Ontario, to sportswriter and novelist Scott Young and Edna "Rassy" Young (née Ragland), who had moved to Toronto from their family home in Manitoba to pursue a sport journalism career. Neil spent his early childhood in the Toronto suburb of Pickering and the village of Omemee, northeast of Toronto. The village later established the Youngtown Museum in tribute to Young.^[15]

It was in Pickering that Young fell in love with music. During the mid-fifties, at around the age of ten or eleven, Young was drawn to a variety of musical genres including rock and roll, rockabilly, doo-wop, R&B, country, and western pop. He would listen to pop music on the CHUM radio station,^[16] on his transistor radio^[17] as a boy. Young has stated in interviews that growing up he idolized Elvis Presley and strived to be just like him. When being interviewed by Guitare & Claviers Magazine, Young claims that the life of Presley had inspired some of his most famous songs such as "Hey, Hey, My, My" and "He was the King".^[18] Young would watch Chuck Berry and Little Richard on TV in admiration.^[19] Young states in an interview with McDonough that the groups and artists whom he found most influential in his early years were Elvis Presley,^[20]Fats Domino, The Chantels, The Monotones, Ronnie Self,^[21]The Fleetwoods, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis,^[19]Johnny Cash,^[17] and Gogi Grant.^[20]

Young was diagnosed with diabetes as a child^[22] and a bout of polio at the age of 6 left him with a weakened left side; he still walks with a slight limp.

His parents divorced when Young was 12, and he moved with his mother back to the family home of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where his music career began. Neil and his mother settled into the working class suburb of Fort Rouge where the shy, dry-humoured youth enrolled at Earl Grey Junior High School. It was there that he formed his first band the Jades, and met Ken Koblun, later to join him in the Squires.

While attending Kelvin High School in Winnipeg, he played in several instrumental rock bands. Young's first stable band was called the Squires, with Ken Koblun, Jeff Wuckert and Bill Edmondson on drums, who had a local hit called "The Sultan." Young dropped out of high school^[23] and also played in Fort William (now part of the city of Thunder Bay, Ontario), where they recorded a series of demos produced by a local producer named Ray Dee, whom Young called "the original Briggs."^[24] While there, Young first encountered Stephen Stills. In the 2006 film Heart of Gold Young relates how he used to spend time as a teenager at Falcon Lake, Manitoba where he would endlessly plug coins into the jukebox to hear Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds".

Neil also formed a friendship with musician Randy Bachman. According to Tim Bachman (Randy's younger brother, and former Bachman-Turner Overdrive guitarist), "We knew Neil back in the late 50s, early 60s. In fact Randy used to try and give Neil guitar lessons because Neil couldn't precisely copy the top 40 tunes back then. Neil was Neil and that was it. Randy kicked him out of our house and told him to quit the business, be something else! One year later to the day we received the first Buffalo Springfield album in the mail. On the back in the liner notes was a thank you from Neil to Randy for kicking him out of Winnipeg! He went to San Francisco and the rest is history."

After leaving the Squires, Neil worked folk clubs in Winnipeg, where he first met Joni Mitchell.^[25] Here he wrote some of his earliest and most enduring folk songs such as the classic "Sugar Mountain", about lost youth. Mitchell wrote "The Circle Game" in response.^[26] Winnipeg band The Guess Who (lead guitarist: one Randy Bachman) had a Top 40 Canadian hit with Young's "Flying on the Ground is Wrong," which was Young's first major hit as a song-writer.

In 1965 Young toured Canada as a solo artist. In 1966, while in Toronto, he joined the Rick James-fronted Mynah Birds. The band managed to secure a record deal with the Motown label, but as their first album was being recorded, James was arrested for being AWOL from the Naval Reserve.^[27] After the Mynah Birds disbanded, Young and bass player Bruce Palmer relocated to Los Angeles. Young has admitted in an interview that he was in the United States illegally until receiving a green card in 1970.^[28]