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Gleaning Gold: Neil Young’s Harvest Turns 40

Shortly after becoming the owner of Broken Arrow, a 1,500-acre ranch located in the hills south of San Francisco, Young penned “Old Man,” inspired by the Louis Avila, the caretaker of the ranch.

In the first line, he sings, “Old man, look at my life. I’m a lot like you are.” Given Young’s age and his place in Toronto’s social stratum—his mother, Rassy, a TV presenter; his father, Scott, a celebrated sports journalist—the comparison seems forced.

In fact, for quite some time, Young’s father was under the assumption that the song was about him—something he addressed in his book Neil and Me (2009):

n March of 1972, I took my family for a month in Florida, and was there just after Neil’s new album, Harvest, was released and went straight to the top of the charts within two weeks. Every time I turned on my car radio in Florida, I heard “Heart of Gold,”the first single released from that album. Then, almost as often I would hear another from that album,“Old Man.” Well, sure, “Old Man pleased me a great deal. In Florida and back in Canada during the many months while “Old Man” was well up on the charts, people would mention it to me as if I were some sort of co-proprietor, at which I would just nod and smile like Mona Lisa. Never question a compliment is my motto. “Old Man” was also such a nice change from some of the songs whose accusatory gist I had applied to myself years earlier.”

A few months later, Neil was in Toronto and the father and son met up. After a walk, Neil said to the elder Young:

“[There’s] something I should clarify,” his father recalls his son telling him. “You know that song, ‘Old Man?’”

“Yeah, I love it.”

“It’s not about you,” Young told him. “I know a lot of people think it is. But it’s about Louis, the man who lives on the ranch and looks after things for me—the cattle and the buffalo and the food and all that. A wonderful guy.”

So at the end, what binds Neil Young with Louis Avila—his aging caretaker—and not to his father? The need for love—the underlying premise of this entire album that was released on Valentine’s Day in 1972.

In the second verse, he sings, “Old Man, take a look at my life. I’m a lot like you are/ I need someone to love me the whole day through/ Oh, one look in my eyes and you can tell that’s true.”

It was as if the 18 months that it took to record the album—a process hampered by Young injuring his back while trying to move a piece of wood at Broken Arrow—allowed him to be as contemplative and as transparent as he ever had. To use those hooded slate blue eyes as a portal into his psyche, instead of as dual weapons capable of pinning hapless listeners to the wall. Was it the pain pills that he was forced to take that caused him to drop his guard, or was it something else all together?

“I was in and out of hospitals for the two years between After The Gold Rush and Harvest, ” he revealed in 1975. “I recorded most of Harvest in a brace. That’s a lot of reason it’s such a mellow album. I couldn’t physically play an electric guitar.”

Perhaps the confined, broken body set something free in him. Maybe that’s what allowed him to publicly declare his affection and issue a cautionary tale—more a naked plea—to Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, when he penned “Needle and the Damage Done.” True prophesy is embedded in the anxious words and sharp rhythmic breaks. Although Whitten would live for another nine months and four days after the release of the album, Young knew that he had already lost him.

It wasn’t only Whitten’s death that unsettled Young; Harvest represented a loss of much greater magnitude. Suddenly the success of the album—which topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic—thrust him into superstardom, even eclipsing CSN’s fame. He claimed to reporters that having a chart-topping single made him feel “empty.”

“I tried to stay away from the success as much as possible,” Young told Cameron Crowe in 1979. “And being laid up in bed gave me a lot of time to think about what had happened. I thought the popularity was good, but I also knew that something else was dying.”

Dramatic? Perhaps. Dark? Certainly. But my heroes have always been dark, and Neil Young is probably the darkest of them all—even when back lit by a Harvest moon.