{"id":135983,"date":"2025-10-21T11:59:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T11:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/135983\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T11:59:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T11:59:10","slug":"after-the-gold-rush-by-neil-young-the-story-behind-the-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/135983\/","title":{"rendered":"After The Gold Rush by Neil Young: The Story Behind The Song"},"content":{"rendered":"

Neil Young<\/a>\u2019s most mysterious song has its beginnings in the wilds of Peru in 1969, where an out-of-control Dennis Hopper was directing The Last Movie, his follow-up to Easy Rider. With Hopper was his friend Dean Stockwell, a minor child and teen star of the 1940s and 50s, later famous for the 90s time-travel TV hit Quantum Leap.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Peru, Dennis very strongly urged me to write a screenplay,\u201d Stockwell recalled, \u201cand he would get it produced. I came back home to Topanga Canyon [in the mountains outside LA] and wrote After The Gold Rush. Neil was living in Topanga then too, and a copy of it somehow got to him. He had had writer\u2019s block for months, and his record company was after him. And after he read this screenplay, he wrote the After The Gold Rush album in three weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Stockwell\u2019s screenplay is long lost. Young\u2019s biographer Jimmy McDonough was told that it was \u201can end-of-the-world movie\u201d, which ended with a tidal wave crashing towards its hero as he stood in the parking lot of the Topanga hippies\u2019 favourite hang-out, the Corral, whose regulars included Young and Joni Mitchell<\/a>. Stockwell\u2019s friend Russ Tamblyn was set to play a rocker recluse living in a castle, and wild-haired local artist George Herms was meant to haul a \u201ctree of life\u201d, like Christ with his crucifix, across the Canyon.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a linear, regular storytelling kind of film,\u201d Stockwell explained. \u201cReally what was in my mind was that the gold rush in effect created California. And the film took place on the day California was supposed to go into the ocean. So that\u2019s what happened after the gold rush.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI read the screenplay and kept it around for a while,\u201d Young wrote in his 2012 autobiography Waging Heavy Peace. \u201cI was writing a lot of songs at the time, and some of them seemed like they would fit right in with the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"Neil\n<\/p>\n

Neil Young in 1970. He would write the After The Gold Rush album in the space of three weeks (Image credit: Dick Barnatt\/Redferns)<\/p>\n

Stockwell brought producers from the company Hopper was contracted to, Universal, to Topanga, introducing them to potential local cast members such as Janis Joplin<\/a>, and Young, who was keen to write the soundtrack. But the execs were having enough trouble with Hopper, and ran a mile from the chaotic hippie utopia.<\/p>\n

Undeterred, Young went ahead with the music. The After The Gold Rush album was recorded between legs of Crosby, Stills Nash & Young\u2019s massive 1970 US tour, and immediately after Young\u2019s shows that March with the grungier Crazy Horse. After early sessions in Hollywood\u2019s Sunset Studios, most of it was recorded in the lead-lined basement of his house in the Canyon. There was barely space in the cramped room for CSN&Y bassist Greg Reeves, Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina, Young and his newest recruit, teenage guitarist Nils Lofgren.<\/p>\n

Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!<\/p>\n

\u201cI was an eighteen-year-old who was with these twenty-three, twenty-four-year-old people, and it was all overwhelming to me,\u201d Lofgren recalled \u201cI was the kid who tagged along. We did it in this little studio, with a little side control room that [producer] David Briggs managed the sound on, with a remote truck out in the driveway. Neil didn\u2019t mind rehearsing a bit, but we didn\u2019t belabour stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Southern Man would become After The Gold Rush\u2019s most infamous song after Lynyrd Skynyrd<\/a> wrote Sweet Home Alabama<\/a> in response to it. But the album\u2019s true centrepiece was its title track. Young sings alone at the piano for its first two minutes, after which he\u2019s joined by session player Bill Peterson\u2019s mournful flugelhorn.<\/p>\n

Its three verses set out contrasting scenes. The first is a medieval panorama of knights and peasants. In the deeply evocative second, Young is \u2018lying in a burned-out basement\u2019 when the sun suddenly rips through the night. \u2018There was a band playing in my head,\u2019 Young responds wearily, \u2018and I felt like getting high.\u2019 In the final verse those chosen take humanity\u2019s \u2018silver seed\u2019 into space while others are left behind, as the world dies.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

\u201cThe song was written to go along with the story [of the film],\u201d Young reflected in Waging Heavy Peace, \u201cand the main character, as he carried the Tree of Life through Topanga Canyon to the ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt relates to the screenplay in an artistic way, not directly, in dialogue or anything,\u201d said Stockwell, who Young invited to watch the sessions. \u201cThat\u2019s how he found himself in it, which coincided beautifully with what I had in mind. Neil\u2019s rush of writing then has something to do with the film \u2013 with the exception of Southern Man. If you could calculate the amount of human energy that goes into the making of one of his songs, you would have a really fucking high number, man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNeil never told me what the song was about,\u201d Lofgren said. \u201cI\u2019d love to bend his ear about it. It\u2019s like it\u2019s all our own fantasies, as we hear the words. But look, man, I was standing there in the control room, looking through the glass watching him play that thing on the old upright piano, and it\u2019s still on the road with him. We took it on the Trans tour and I got to play it a lot, and at some of the Bridge School benefits too. It\u2019s a very historic piano, certainly in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter The Gold Rush is an environmental song,\u201d Young said, trying to finally nail its meaning for McDonough. \u201cI recognise in it now this thread that goes through a lotta my songs that\u2019s this time-travel thing\u2026 When I look out the window, the first thing that comes to my mind is the way this place looked a hundred years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rolling Stone ripped the album apart at the time of its release in 1970. But it would be the first of Young\u2019s solo albums to hit the US Top 10, paving the way for its chart-topping follow-up, Harvest.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd even then, though I had the album,\u201d Stockwell reflects ruefully, \u201cI still couldn\u2019t get that screenplay produced.\u201d<\/p>\n

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 199, published in June 2014. Dean Stockwell died in 2021.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Neil Young\u2019s most mysterious song has its beginnings in the wilds of Peru in 1969, where an out-of-control…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[18,117,19,17,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-135983","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-music"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}