“That’s how he found himself in it, which coincided beautifully with what I had in mind. “It relates to the screenplay in an artistic way, not directly, in dialogue or anything,” says Stockwell, who Young invited to watch the sessions. “The song was written to go along with the story ,” Young reflected in Waging Heavy Peace, “and the main character, as he carried the Tree of Life through Topanga Canyon to the ocean.” ‘ There was a band playing in my head,’ Young responds wearily, ‘ and I felt like getting high.’ In the final verse those chosen take humanity’s ‘ silver seed’ into space while others are left behind, as the world dies. In the deeply evocative second, Young is ‘ lying in a burned-out basement’ when the sun suddenly rips through the night.

The first is a medieval panorama of knights and peasants. Its three verses set out contrasting scenes. Young sings alone at the piano for its first two minutes, after which he’s joined by session player Bill Peterson’s mournful flugelhorn. But the album’s true centrepiece was its title track. Southern Man would become After The Gold Rush’s most infamous song after Lynyrd wrote Sweet Home Alabama in response to it. Neil didn’t mind rehearsing a bit, but we didn’t belabour stuff.” We did it in this little studio, with a little side control room that David Briggs managed the sound on, with a remote truck out in the driveway. “I was an eighteen-year-old who was with these twenty-three, twenty-four-year-old people, and it was all overwhelming to me,” Lofgren recalls. There was barely space in the cramped room for CSN&Y bassist Greg Reeves, Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina, Young and his newest recruit, teenage guitarist Nils Lofgren. After early sessions in Hollywood’s Sunset Studios, most of it was recorded in the lead-lined basement of his house in the Canyon. The After The Gold Rush album was recorded between legs of Crosby, Stills Nash & Young’s massive 1970 US tour, and immediately after Young’s shows that March with the grungier Crazy Horse. Undeterred, Young went ahead with the music. But the execs were having enough trouble with Hopper, and ran a mile from the chaotic hippie utopia.

Stockwell brought producers from the company Hopper was contracted to, Universal, to Topanga, introducing them to potential local cast-members such as Janis Joplin, and Young, who was keen to write the soundtrack. Young in 1970, he would write the After The Gold Rush album in the space of three weeks (Image credit: Getty Images)

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