A musician on a mission
Neil Young’s anti-Big Oil message optimistic about alternative fuels
He hates the oilsands, but he loves cars. He hates Big Oil, but he loves big engines. And this year, with a new album and a newly released book about his lifelong love for the dozens of vehicles he’s owned, Neil Young is Toronto Star Wheels’ Newsmaker of the Year.
“I’ve had a lot of cars and I bought cars as rewards for projects that I did . . . They were all old cars so they already had a history. And the designs reflected the culture of the time,” he told the Star’s Ben Rayner in an interview this year. But he added: “Cars are a very guilty part of what’s happening to the planet and a big part of what’s happening to the planet.”
Last year, he famously compared Alberta’s oilsands region to Hiroshima’s atomic bomb wasteland, and then in January, he donated all the proceeds from four Canadian concerts to a First Nations group fighting the oilsands’ expansion.
Since then, his message has stuck as a thorn in the side of the oil industry. Love him or hate him — and some radio stations in Alberta banned his music — he still puts much of his money where his mouth is by driving his enormous electric-converted 1959 Lincoln Continental whenever he can.
Young spent much of 2014 completing his new book, Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars, which explains his reasoning at length.
It also tells many good stories about the cars he’s owned, all of them bought used and all of them interesting.
Before becoming famous, the teenage Canadian rocker from Omemee, Ont. toured the Prairies with his band in a1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse named “Mort,” which was the subject of his later song “Long May You Run.” Mort was huge, he writes in Special Deluxe, “with very large back doors, and rollers for the coffins to roll in and out of the velvet-upholstered back.”
“Perfect for our equipment!” Young thought at the time.
When he left for Los Angeles in 1966, he drove another hearse, a 1953 Pontiac. He found fame and fortune in California with the band Buffalo Springfield and hasn’t slowed down since.
His new book is a chronicle of his experiences as told by the memories his cars invoke, everything from a Mini and a Citroen 2CV to a Corvette and a Hummer H1. Throughout it, he details the fuel consumption and the exhaust emissions of the vehicles. His family’s 1951 road trip to Florida in their new Monarch sedan, for example, spewed about 1,296 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere each way; that Route 66 drive to L.A. in the hearse would have emitted 4,900 pounds of CO2.
Eventually, in 2003, a friend of his daughter’s called him a hypocrite for being an environmentalist who drove such gas-guzzlers, and the accusation stuck. He resolved to find alternatives.
Young experimented with water-gas and fuel-vapourizing before settling on biofuel and electricity. He understood the importance of setting an example: “I began dedicating myself more to the task of raising awareness,” he writes, “which is pretty much the only thing a celebrity can do.”
In 2007, he decided to turn his biggest gas-guzzler, a 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible, into a plug-in electric car, with an on-board range-extending generator powered by biofuel. It has not been an easy task and he’s reportedly sunk more than a million dollars of his own money into the project.
Last year, he drove the huge Lincoln, named Miss Pegi for his wife of nearly 40 years, with whom he recently separated, from California to northern Al- berta and on to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness of alternative fuels. The road trip succeeded in garnering attention, both good and bad.
In the fall, he sang at a concert that protested the Keystone XL pipeline, and he continues to spread his anti-Big Oil message whenever he can.
It’s an optimistic message, though. “I have seen the changes over the years,” he writes. “Things are not the same now. They are losing the beat. I am doing what I can to hold on to it, preserve it. I didn’t know the damage I was doing with my cars; neither did anyone else, but now I do.”
His message is not against cars, which he loves passionately, but against the fuel that powers them. For playing concerts in January, writing a book and spreading his message through the year, and for actively promoting alternative fuel — while never forgetting that cars are really cool — Neil Young is Wheels’ Newsmaker of 2014.
Freelance writer Mark Richardson is a former editor of Toronto Star Wheels and contributes regularly. For more Toronto Star automotive coverage, go to thestar.com/autos. To reach Wheels editor Norris McDonald: nmcdonald@thestar.ca.