Neil Young has a special relationship with cars and trucks.
And, in his new book Special Deluxe, the Canadian-born musician offers an anthology of every vehicle he’s had. The book is named for the timeworn 1950 Plymouth Special Deluxe Young has maintained for decades.
In his lyrical and rambling narrative, he talks about the highs and lows of vehicle ownership. He rhapsodizes eloquently about the joys some have given him, and waxes with melancholy nostalgia about those that have let him down – or, more poignantly, the cars that he feels he has let down.
In a chapter two-thirds of the way through the book, Young wrote, “…the 1959 (Cadillac) Eldorado is still not fixed.”
We learn that sometime in the mid-1970s a utilitarian Volkswagen collided with the old luxury car. Nicknamed Nanu, the Eldorado was an important car for Young. He said it was what he’d aspired to as a teenager while honing his craft as a singer-songwriter during his years living and playing in Winnipeg.
He continued, “When the accident happened I decided to get it completely restored to museum quality and hired Jon McKeig to work on it. It is still in a warehouse in pieces, many of them painted, and the car is not as prepared for completion as it should be.
“It is unfinished. Unresolved. I haven’t given up on it, but a lot of things have changed. The unfinished cars mean something. They represent broken dreams, lost loves and abandoned ideas.
“That is the sad part. Dealing with that reality is something everyone has to do.”
Long before that chapter, however, Young starts at the beginning. We learn about his time in Omemee, Ont., and the drives the family took in their 1948 Monarch business coupe past mills and bogs out into the country.
Later, when the family moved to Toronto, Young recalled a DeSoto Firedome or a Dodge Adventurer – he’s not sure which, but the car certainly impressed him.
“The car was like a rocket ship. I was already obsessed with cars. The designs were fascinating to me. The power was interesting, but it was the styling that really caught my eye.”
At 11, Young got a plastic ukulele for his birthday, and his dad showed him a few chords. His musical interest was piqued, and he spent hours learning to play.
Special Deluxe is, at times, a personal memoir. Young moved several times during his childhood, and said he was always the new kid at school. He is candid about his time in the hospital fighting polio, about the friendships he made, and about the eventual break-up of his family.
And every event, it seems, is wrapped in the metal of a car. For example, when his dad takes Young out and hints to him he might not be coming home again, it’s the yellow Triumph TR3 that anchors the memory.
After the break-up, Young and his mom moved to Winnipeg and he formed a band called the Squires. Needing a large vehicle to haul their gear and travel to gigs, Young bought a 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse that he nicknamed Mort.
This car eventually died an ignominious death at the side of the road as Young made his way to Toronto to pursue his musical dreams. He took the loss quite hard.
“For a while I made up this whole story about how I pushed Mort over a cliff. I actually believed it myself, but it was all fantasy. What really happened was even worse. Abandonment. Dreams die hard. That old funeral coach/rock and roll delivery truck full of memories took a lot of me with it.”
Famously, it is Mort the hearse Young is singing about in his song “Long May You Run”.
From this point forward, Special Deluxe is populated mostly by the cars Young purchased as “rewards” for achieving certain musical milestones with the Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Crazy Horse, as a solo artist and with many other musicians.
The start of every chapter features a whimsical colour drawing of a vehicle, penned by Young himself.
At close to 400 pages, it’s near the end of the tome that Young starts to discuss how guilty he feels about driving fossil-fueled vehicles.
“…I woke up one day and was a dinosaur. Looking at my huge collection of gas-guzzlers, I realized that I was in love with something that needed to be replaced, something that had become obsolete. I had turned to biodiesel but I knew there was a lot more I could do.”
That’s when he introduces Lincvolt, a 1959 Lincoln Continental that, with the help of several others, was eventually powered by a Ford four-cylinder biomass-fueled (waste byproduct) generator that recharged batteries to feed electric motors. He drove it across the U.S., up to Fort McMurray, Alberta, and down to Washington, D.C., where he spoke about the importance of biomass fuels and his concerns for the environment.
Special Deluxe is an epic ride with Young at the wheel.
Greg Williams is a member of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC). Have a column tip? Contact him at 403-287-1067, gregwilliams@shaw.ca, or visit gregwilliams.ca.
