I wondered how Neil Young would have responded when I read these words by Dave Marsh many years ago in the 1980 edition of the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (p. 404): “Young has mastered Dylan’s greatest trick, the art of self mythology… Neil Young has scripted his own myth boldly, in the song selection and liner notes to a succession of retrospective albums. The most important of these, the three-record anthology called Decade, represents nothing less than his claim to be considered the preeminent American rock performer of his generation.”

Thirty-two years later, Young has responded in this year’s Waging Heavy Peace (pp. 222-223): “A writer accused me of building my archives just to further my own legend, whatever that is. I hope you don’t believe that. What a shallow existence that would be! I remember reading that article saying that about me. It pissed me off. It’s my life, and I am a collector… The fact that I want to create a chronological history of my recordings and supporting work is proof positive that I am an incurable collector, confronted with an amazingly detailed array of creations that I have painstakingly rat-holed over the years.”

I’ll share a personal quandary with you. When the notion of God as a father figure in space first found its way to me, I never once thought about this personage as someone with a white beard and robe. I thought of Him in the cosmic, clean-cut image of a specific record in my earthly father’s record collection – Pat Williams’s Think. This conception has proven to be a complex one for me over the years and I may yet attempt to unravel it. It makes me wonder whether one’s first distinct visual conception of God is a key factor in one’s future religious behavior.  Yes, kinda makes you think.

Pat Williams – “Think” (1968)