Goodbye Neil Young

“It’s better to burn out than it is to rust” Neil Young

What a year! Learning to live without Bonnie, another grandchild, starting a new business, it seems like enough to last a decade not a year.

Winter and the end of the calendar year is a time of reflection. What I’ve been thinking about on my morning runs while plugged into my iPod is what music did I listen to during this tumultuous time?

Last winter while sitting on an empty building and an empty soul I was listening to a lot of Neil Young. I’m sure most of you know Neil either through his early Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, and Crazy Horse years or since then as a solo performer.

Neil was a good listen for me. For those who don’t know his music let’s just say he can take a normally happy-go-lucky person and make them clinically depressed. Or he can take a clinically depressed person and make them suicidal – enter Kurt Cobain.

As I was lying under the porch licking my wounds Neil would wallow down there with me. His “Homegrown”, “Rust Never Sleeps” and “Sleeps with Angels” albums were perfect companions for that long, cold winter and provided ample reason to shake that third martini.

Come spring it was time to make the “get busy living or get busy dying” decision and decide whether or not to go forward with the wine bar idea, get my fat ass back into shape and reunite myself with the person that looked back at me in the mirror each morning.

As I committed to each of these I found Neil to be a burden. For one thing he was hard to run with. I’m not very swift to begin with, the last thing I needed was to lug around heavy metal melancholy. I found the Eagles, a mix of 60’s tunes, and Jimmy Buffett much better company.

As the bar materialized, my running and diet parlayed into some significant weight loss and my outlook on life improved my distance from Neil increased until I realized that until I sat down to write this entry that I hadn’t thought of him, much less listened to him, in several months.

It’s kind of the same thing in the business world. You align yourself with people that are necessary depending on time and circumstance. Sometimes they become partners and allies that last over several careers. Sometimes they are only a part of your circle for a project or an assignment. Sometimes you wake up and realize that they, like Neil, have too much baggage and they’re slowing you down. Tough calls to make sometimes and it doesn’t mean they didn’t play an important role at the time.

Just like Neil did for me last winter.