This 1976 Neil Young Track Was an Elegy for His First Car, Which Makes Sense, Given Its Make and Model

Music has long been a vehicle for memorializing the dead. But leave it to Neil Young to turn this age-old tradition into something more remarkable by using his music as a memorial for a vehicle that used to transport the dead.

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How the Folk Icon Found His First Car, Mortimer Hearsebug

In the early 1960s, the still-green musician was gathering all the supplies for a traveling band: the musical know-how, the gear, the players. He was only missing one thing: a car to put the traveling in “traveling band.” So, Neil Young’s mother lent her son the money to buy his first vehicle: a 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse, complete with blue broadloom carpeting, black curtains, and gold tassels. The car was as functional as it was striking, Young later explained to Cameron Crowe.

“You open the side door, and the tray whips right out onto the sidewalk. What could be cooler than that?” Young remembered. “What a way to make your entrance. Pull up to the gig and just wheel out all your stuff on the tray.”

Young only got a few years’ worth out of his repurposed hearse, which he named Mortimer Hearsebug. While driving outside of Ironbridge, Ontario, with his band, the transmission fell out of the vehicle. “I don’t know why, but we were killing ourselves laughing,” Young said later. “Here was my car. My whole life was in this car, falling apart on the road, and we’re rolling around laughing.”

Neil Young Wrote This 1976 Track as an Elegy to Mort

As anyone who has been on the road with a band can attest, sometimes in those moments of sheer, chaotic despair, there’s nothing to do but laugh. Neil Young managed to roll his Buick hearse, nicknamed Mort, to a nearby mechanic. But the shop wasn’t able to save the transmission. Without the funds to replace it, that was the end of Young’s first vehicle. As a musician, though, Young was able to give new life to Mortimer Hearsebug through the title track to a 1976 collaborative album he recorded with CSNY and Buffalo Springfield bandmate Stephen Stills. 

“Long May You Run” is an empowering, I-wish-you-the-best kind of track. And while it sounds like it could be about another human upon first listen, it’s easy to see Young’s messages to Mort once you start looking for them. “Long may you run, long may you run / although these changes have come / with your chrome heart shining in the sun / Long may you run.” Young even references the moment Mort broke down, though he changed the year. “It was back in Blind River in 1962, when I last saw you alive.” In reality, it was 1965.

After the shop declared the hearse a loss, Young sent a postcard to his mother from Blind River. “Dear Rassy. Please cancel the insurance as Mort is dead.”

Photo by Dick Barnatt/Redferns