I don’t fit in with iTunes, thank God, admits Neil Young

Neil Young remains a hippie, railing against big business and genetically modified food.

Neil Young’s latest release, Earth, is the world’s first 98-minute, single-track protest album.

A journey through Los Angeles reverberates with the music of Neil Young. In 1966, after driving a hearse from his native Ontario, Young bumped into Stephen Stills on Sunset Boulevard and formed the folk rockers Buffalo Springfield. Three years later he was making sweet harmonies in nearby Laurel Canyon with Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Head to the arid scrubs of ­Topanga Canyon and After the Gold Rush, the 1970 album Young recorded in the basement of his off-grid home up there, comes to mind. Cruise past Zuma Beach in Malibu and you’re thinking of Zuma, his album of 1975. And in 1974 Young addressed the dark side of the California dream on Revolution Blues, about his former neighbour Charles Manson.

Now we’re in the Malibu Hills ranch house belonging to Elliot Roberts, Young’s manager, and Young is explaining how he has just made the world’s first 98-minute, single-track protest album.

“There has never been a record like Earth before,” says Young, settling into a chair by the fireplace. With his plaid shirt, shoulder-length grey hair and whiskery sideburns, Young looks much the same hippie rocker he has always been, but with an expression that looks as if he has been told to go to bed without supper.

“Earth doesn’t fit on iTunes and I don’t care. In fact, I’m pleased, because that means it doesn’t follow with what some computer company has decided musicians can and can’t do. I don’t need that. I’m doing what I do. And what I do doesn’t fit with them, and thank God.”

Even by Young’s ornery and unpredictable standards, Earth is quite a statement. On the face of it, the album is simply a collection of live recordings culled from a tour in 2015 with his latest backing band, Promise of the Real. However, by featuring the most politically motivated songs from his 50-year career and linking them via animal calls and traffic noises, Young has made a continuous piece of music that takes potshots at GM food companies, bankers, digital music distributors, the oil industry and pretty much every corporate entity getting his goat.

“I’m not scared to name names,” he says, giving me an angry, defiant stare. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

Young has always sung protest songs. His anti-racism anthem, Southern Man, and Ohio, written in 1970 in response to the Kent State shootings, are fan favourites. Yet he has gone into overdrive with Earth, possibly bolstered by his relationship with actress and fellow eco-activist Daryl Hannah.

In 2015 he released The Monsanto Years, an album dedicated to his anger at the GM seed company he believes is destroying American farming in the name of profit. Monsanto responded by accusing Young of “misinformation”. I offer the agrochemical corporation’s argument that GM crops are a step towards fighting world poverty.

Young: “Bullshit. Those people are taking seeds, which used to be gifts from God, and making it so we can’t have them any more. Monsanto modifies a seed, says, ‘We own this seed, and if it happens to blow on to your property we’re going to sue you if you’re not paying us our royalty.’ They’re trying to beat down nature. But nature will come back and f. king kill them. Nature will survive. It’s just a question of whether human beings will.”

In 2014 Young spoke out against plans for an oil pipeline to run through Alberta in his native Canada by comparing the oil town of Fort McMurray — which, with cruel irony, was devastated by wildfires during the time of our interview — to Hiroshima. The people of Fort McMurray were not happy. The local radio station banned his music. The Canadian politician Ken Hughes called the comment “deeply offensive” and suggested that Young should stick to singing about love. Young responded by writing a song called People Want to Hear About Love.

“It’s an ongoing attitude that has nothing to do with anything and it shows ignorance,” he says. “We’ve been up against it for a long time and we ignore it. I’ve got more right than you to sing what’s on my mind. If someone else is inhibited, they haven’t given themselves the right to speak up. They can do whatever they want to do — and so can I.”

He says that in 1974, on Vampire Blues, he was singing about the dangers of oil production. “Back then people thought it was kind of cute when I sang about vampires sucking blood from the earth. Now we’re understanding the issue of oil, the impact extracting it has on the planet.”

You could accuse Young of hypocrisy here. His 2014 memoir, Special Deluxe, is a tribute to his lifelong love affair with cars, and as a globetrotting rock star his carbon footprint will be far higher than that of the average person. However, it turns out that he made the half-hour drive to Elliot Roberts’s house from his own home in the Malibu hills in his LincVolt, a battery-powered 1959 Lincoln Continental that runs on ethanol and which he built (with the help of a team of experts).

“This is the future,” says Young of his car. “It only takes 10 per cent of the population to get behind something and the rest will follow. Unfortunately a lot of people in America are holding on to the past, which means that eight years from now they’ll say, ‘Well, that was a big f. k-up.’”

He’s referring to Donald Trump’s increasingly successful bid for the White House. The Republican presidential candidate used Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World as his campaign soundtrack. Young was not pleased.

“He’s insane, but so was Hitler,” says Young, on the possibility of Trump becoming the next president of the US. “There’s not much difference to them when you look at what Trump is saying. He’s got this far because America is reaping what it has sown. They have lived through reality TV and they’re so wrapped up in that shit that Trump might actually be president. He’s a product of the Republican party preying on people’s ignorance for so long, they created a monster. I couldn’t stop him from using Rockin’ in the Free World, but he doesn’t have my permission, so I just say, ‘He never asked me and I’m behind Bernie Sanders.’ He called me a hypocrite, but I don’t care. He can call me whatever he wants.”

He responded to the huge success in 1971 of his mellow, introspective folk-rock classic Harvest by following it up with On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night, two of the darkest albums of his career. In Bristol in 1975 he performed Tonight’s the Night in its entirety, four times in a row. He says it was one of the best gigs he has played. In 1983 David Geffen of Geffen Records became so frustrated by Young’s about-turns that he sued him for making albums that were “unrepresentative” of himself.

You have to wonder if he is deliberately trying to annoy people. “I couldn’t care less what people think, or whether a record is a hit or not,” he says. “I have no idea where I’m going. There is no plan, and that’s why it’s all over the map. I just have confidence in the ideas when they come. Other people can think about my songs, analyse the hell out of them, mark them down in their books but I won’t. The key is not to think. Thinking is death.’’

This has proved a source of great frustration for Young’s fellow musicians. Crazy Horse, his intermittent backing band since 1968, have spent almost five decades waiting for his call. Crosby, Stills & Nash have been joined and abandoned by him several times. Why does he keep hooking up with bands only to leave them?

“Same thing,” he says. “I wake up in the morning and know what I want to do. Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Crazy Horse are great bands and I loved playing with every one, but I didn’t sign up for life with any of them.”

Perhaps the song on Earth that best represents Young is Hippie Dream. “Just because it’s over for you doesn’t mean it’s over for me,” he sings, and you feel he means it. The question is whether the hippie dream will live on at Desert Trip, in Palm Springs, California, this October at which Young will perform alongside Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Bob Dylan and Roger Waters. At Woodstock tickets were $US18 and it became a free festival after a last-minute location change. At Desert Trip, which sold out in less than three hours, single-day passes started at $US199 ($268). Rolling Stone reported that artist fees are upwards of $7 million a set.

“People pay enough money to musicians and they’ll play,” says Young. “They’ve decided to put a bunch of them all in one place, and that’s fine. I’m actually the junior member of the group. I’m the youngest.” Young is 70.

Will he hang around to see the other acts? “No, I won’t stay,” says Young, who rarely books into hotels while on tour, preferring to hang out on his tour bus, which comes equipped with its own gym. “I’ll do the gig, but I’ve seen all the other acts and I really don’t need to see them in that situation.”

The difference in cost between Woodstock and Desert Trip seems to illustrate how much has changed in the 47 years between them, how rock has gone from being countercultural to a pillar of the entertainment industry.

“I don’t know if things have changed,” Young says. “But I’ve noticed, as time passes, that the more free we are with the music, the happier people are, because they’ve heard the hits. They have seen it all before. There’s nothing more boring than song after song, all about the same things, all with the same poses. You have to be able to close your eyes and go somewhere.”

Then he says: “When people listen to Earth they feel so good, they fall asleep.”

The Times