What I Learned While Staring at Neil Young’s Flannel Shirts

This article originally appeared on this site.

On a recent Monday, I had the curious experience of standing in a large, sunlit room filled with a bunch of Neil Young’s stuff. I caressed the gray woven poncho with rainbow stripes that Young wore to Book Expo America in 2012 (he was there to speak with the punk singer Patti Smith about his memoir, “Waging Heavy Peace”). I touched the original bridge of his 1957 Gretsch 6130 Roundup pumpkin-orange electric guitar. I admired a trio of bolo ties featuring polished turquoise stones, and noted the size (XL) of a plaid flannel shirt by the coveted streetwear company Supreme. I took a careful note of how a pair of button-fly Levi’s had gone ragged at the knees. I poked and stared at crystal flutes, a 1929 RCA theremin, a blue lapidary globe, a set of Taylor Made R9 golf clubs, a guitar shaped like the Budweiser logo (with the phrase “This Bud’s For You!” inlaid on the head), an antique Chester-Pollard football arcade game, and a painted wooden desk chair with the daunting inscription, “If you Rest . . . You Rust.” (Young, for his part, has done neither: he released “The Visitor,” his thirty-ninth album, last week.)

I’ll admit that there’s a dizzying allure to nosing through another person’s belongings and alighting upon random conclusions—brazenly surmising something about an artist’s life by squinting at the scratches on a turntable base or the dents on a harmonica. This is especially tempting with Young, who is not inscrutable, exactly—he recently launched a huge online archive, which includes all of his recorded music from 1963 on—but is known for being curt if not temperamental in interviews, and is willing to simply hang up on a reporter if he’s had enough chitchat for the day. In 2014, forty-five years after the fact, he expressed deep and lingering irritation about the proximity of the cameramen onstage at Woodstock, telling Howard Stern, “They didn’t have to be right there on the stage. They’re cameras, hello! Use zoom, dickhead.”

The narratives offered by objects are usually faulty—no one has ever said that used microphone preamplifiers are a window to the soul—but these pieces can nonetheless feel intimate and revelatory as we behold them, as if there were ghosts to be coaxed from these machines. Besides, actually knowing (and being known to) another consciousness can be exhausting. Who among us has not wanted to give up and say, “Christ, just look at my paperbacks”? Neil Young never unwrapped his VHS copy of “Mastering the Theremin.” Sometimes, we all bite off more than we can chew.

Julien’s Auctions, a Los Angeles-based auction house that specializes in celebrity estates (it has also sold off artifacts from Muhammad Ali, Bette Midler, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Lady Gaga, Banksy, Cher, Michael Jackson, U2, Jimi Hendrix, Barbara Streisand, Frank Sinatra, and others) is unloading a selection of Young’s possessions on Saturday. During my visit to its West Hollywood showroom, Martin Nolan, the company’s executive director, walked me through a preview of the items. “He’s a traditional, salt-of-the-earth-type of guy,” Nolan said when I asked him what there was to learn about Young from the lot. “It’s in his music, his aura, his plaid shirts.”

Also included are more than two hundred and thirty items from Young’s renowned collection of antique Lionel trains. Young’s ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains is known for its elaborately appointed track layouts; when David Carr visited Young’s “train barn,” in 2012, he wrote, “It was hard not to be charmed by the remarkable execution of a deep obsession.” In the early nineteen-nineties, Young started a company called Lion Tech, which creates toys featuring special controls for handicapped children. “I developed a model-train control system for Lionel, and the sound system. I basically made this for my kid, for my son Ben, who’s in a wheelchair and uses a switch to run this thing,” he told David Letterman, in 2012. (Ben has cerebral palsy.)

Young described the experience of operating the trains as a balm for them both: “It’s just relaxing,” he said. A portion of the proceeds from Saturday’s auction will benefit the Bridge School, a nonprofit organization based in Hillsborough, California, which helps develop new systems to educate children with severe speech or physical impairments.

As we circled the gallery, Nolan told me that they were receiving registrations for the auction from unusual places, rural places—“not New York City, but upstate New York.” Young was precise and exacting about the train descriptions in the auction catalogue, in part because he knew that specialty collectors who had little to no interest in his musical career would want to bid for those. “He wanted to make sure we were getting it right,” Nolan said. “He didn’t worry at all about the guitars and the equipment. But he said, ‘I want to be involved with the trains. Collectors of trains are fanatical, and they’ll want the right information.’ ”

Two train pieces, in particular, were expected to fetch high prices. The first, a custom-painted Commodore Vanderbilt Hudson 4-6-4 locomotive, was used as part of a travelling display during Young’s stint on the H.O.R.D.E. tour, a summer rock festival, in 1997. “The paint is best described as rainbow-colored, with fluffy clouds, birds, and stars added to the mix,” the catalogue reads. It’s a whimsical little thing—the sort of train you might board to some glowing alternative reality, where the sun is always shining and there are endless jars of gumdrops on offer. (It’s expected to sell for between twelve and fifteen thousand dollars.) Young is also selling a prototype of Lionel’s 773 New York Central Hudson locomotive, from 1946, which he acquired from the Lionel archives. It comes with a typewritten sheet from Young, explaining “some of the details of this locomotive.” Julien’s has estimated its worth at between ten and twenty thousand dollars.

Along with several other pieces of analog recording equipment, Young is getting rid of an EMT 140 stereo echo chamber, from 1957. It’s a plain-looking wooden enclosure—eight feet long and four feet high—that contains a large piece of sheet metal suspended from a steel frame (when you feed an electric guitar into it, it creates authentic reverb, which is valuable in any small studio, where the construction of an actual echo chamber would be impossible). Metaphorically, the EMT 140 is tough to resist. It allows for a note or melody to ring, linger—to outlive the motion or impulse that created it. It allows us to believe, momentarily, that our songs might go on forever.

While I stared intently at it, Nolan described the process of curating the auction as both collaborative and cathartic for Young. “This was hard for him,” he said. “It was hard letting go—especially of the trains. He didn’t really have a hard time with the equipment or the guitars, but the trains were hard. He’s had many back-and-forths, emotional ups and downs.” And such is the purest validation of the metaphysical worth of stuff—decluttering is virtuous, sure, but ridding ourselves of material histories can feel like dismantling our own skeletons, bone by bone. It makes it easier for us to disappear from the world.

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