Pegi Young, co-founder of Bridge School dies
Singer, songwriter and activist Pegi Young, who cofounded the Bridge School in Northern California for severely disabled students and their families with her ex-husband, rock musician Neil Young, and went on to help create the annual fundraising concerts that became one of pop music’s most respected benefit shows, died Tuesday after a year-long fight with cancer. She was 66.
Her death was announced Tuesday on her official Facebook page.
For most of her 36-year marriage to Neil Young, Pegi devoted much of her time and energy to raising their two children, Ben and Amber Jean. In particular, after Ben was diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy, she could not find a school that could provide the kind of services they wanted for their son, which led her to co-found the Bridge School.
To help fund and sustain it, Neil headlined annual Bridge School benefit shows that attracted a Who’s Who of rock, pop, country, folk, R&B and hiphop artists year in and year out.
In recent years, however, Pegi, who had sometimes sung backup for her husband, began devoting more attention to her own musical endeavors, and in 2007, at age 55, she released her debut album, “Pegi Young.”
Her fifth album, “Raw,” was issued in 2017 and it largely tracked the brutal emotions she experienced with the breakup of her marriage after Neil Young filed for divorce in 2014. He had telegraphed their troubled relationship on his 2010 album “Le Noise,” in the song “Love and War,” when he sang “The saddest thing in the whole wide world is to break the heart of your lover/I made a mistake and I did it again and we struggle to recover.”
He started a new relationship with actress and activist Daryl Hannah, whom he married last year. Pegi Young kept the Northern California ranch they’d shared since the late 1970s and Neil Young moved back to Southern California. In the wake of their split, the Bridge School benefit concerts went on hiatus.
“At the time I wrote [’Raw’], my life had been turned upside down,” she told The Times when the album was released. “I didn’t want to mince words .... ‘Rollercoaster’ would be the operative word.
“In the immediate aftermath of the separation I just wrote and wrote and wrote,” she said. “And wrote and wrote and wrote. Thank God I had that as an outlet.”
Other song titles carried the theme through: “A Thousand Tears,” “Trying To Live My Life Without You” and “Too Little, Too Late.”
She teamed with some of Neil Young’s longtime collaborators, including steel guitarist Ben Keith, who died in 2010, and bassist Rick Rosas, who died in 2014.
During a show she played in Los Angeles a few months after the divorce filing, she told an audience at The Mint, “What do you do when you get dumped after 36 years? You just start over.”