Neil Young with the Santa Monica Flyers

Looking back at the blockbuster success of "Heart of Gold," the mellow country-rock tune that became his first number one single and only Billboard Top 40 hit in 1971, Neil Young remarked that the song "put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch." Young wrote this passage for the liner notes of Decade, a double-disc compilation that documented the first part of his career, ten years that took him from the pioneering Los Angeles rock & roll band Buffalo Springfield, through his emergence as a lone folk-rock troubadour and his ...