Canadian folk-rock icon Neil Young has lived his life intensely devoted to doing exactly what he wants to do, where he wants to do it, which is a fairly straightforward explanation for some of his greater eccentricities, which include (quite literally) combining his property and home and music life to make barn monitors, roofs made out of records, and other unique features of Broken Arrow Ranch.
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Young bought his ranch, which sits south of San Francisco, in the early 1970s, using the natural expanse as an oasis away from his busy life as a musician. Other times, Young brought the music to the ranch in rather surprising ways.
Neil Young Combined Property and Music More Than Once
Having some semblance of a home studio is a fairly common practice for any musician, even those without record labels and chart-topping hits to brag about. So, when Graham Nash visited his long-time friend and bandmate at his property on Broken Arrow Ranch, he expected a trip to Young’s studio. “He asked me if I wanted to hear his new album, Harvest, and I said, ‘Sure, let’s go into the studio and listen,” Nash recalled during a 2013 Fresh Air interview. “That’s not what Neil had in mind.”
“He said, ‘Get into the rowboat,’” Nash continued. “I said, ‘Get into the rowboat?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go out into the middle of the lake. Now, I think he’s got a little cassette player with him or a little, you know, early digital format player. So, I’m thinking I’m going to wear headphones and listen in the relative peace in the middle of Neil’s lake. Oh, no. He has his entire house as the left speaker and his entire barn as the right speaker. I heard Harvest coming out of these two incredibly large speakers louder than hell.”
Young’s producer, Elliot Mazer, was at the ranch while Young played Harvest back through two building-slash-monitors for Nash. The Hollies founder recounted Mazer walking to the edge of the lake and hollering toward Young to ask how it sounded. “I swear to God, Neil Young shouted back, ‘More barn!’”
How Bunk Records Turned Into Roof Shingles At Broken Arrow Ranch
In another testament to how dedicated Neil Young is to creating and analyzing his artwork however he sees fit, the “Old Man” singer once used bunk vinyl records to shingle the roof of a building on the Broken Arrow Ranch. The album in question was Comes a Time from 1978, 200,000 of which had already been shipped to Italy and Japan by Neil Young’s record label, Reprise, when the musician discovered the vinyl mixes weren’t the same as the original session tape.
In his memoir, Neil and Me, Young’s father, Scott Young, explained how his son told Reprise Records the albums were his fault and he needed to buy them back immediately before they hit stores. “They told him it would cost $200,000 [roughly $986,000 today], at one dollar per album plus shipping. He said he would pay that. ‘I don’t like throwing money around,’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t going to have this album circulating around the world in bad quality.’ ‘How do you make sure they won’t get out sometime?’ He showed me. Each case of albums had been fired at with a rifle, piercing each record and making it unusable.”
For whatever it’s worth, Neil Young said in a 2014 Rolling Stone interview that he never shot the albums. “I made a barn roof out of them,” he explained. “I used them as shingles.”
Of course, with overlapping shingles potentially hiding any rogue bullet holes, both stories could technically be true. And in either case, the anecdote is a hilariously quirky example of the off-the-beaten-path way Neil Young lives his life.
Photo by Reprise Records/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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