#Past gold rush narrator movie#
#Past gold rush narrator series#

Before the verse is over, however, the healthy sun blowing on the breeze is contrasted by what the narrator sees when he looks out his window: Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s. In the first verse, he sets up a gleaming scene of Arthurian pageantry, replete with archers, knights, and majestic horns. The easiest way to understand Young’s narrative in the song is to divide the three verses into past, present, and future.

#Past gold rush narrator movie#

Stockwell’s movie was never filmed, but the script made enough of an impression on Young that he wrote a few songs based on it, including “After the Gold Rush.” But even then, the proposed story of the movie seems to have only been a jumping-off point to let Young’s imagination go wild. The script was apparently a sci-fi cautionary tale that had to do with the final hours of California before it was engulfed by the ocean (a scenario also imagined by Warren Zevon in his “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.”) Stockwell’s suggestion that the screenplay inspired the entire album seems a bit unlikely, since songs like “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and “Southern Man” have little to do with what this movie was going to entail.

And after he read this screenplay, he wrote the After the Gold Rush album in three weeks.” He had had writer’s block for months, and his record company was after him. Neil was living in Topanga then too, and a copy of it somehow got to him. I came back home to Topanga Canyon and wrote After the Gold Rush. “In Peru, Dennis very strongly urged me to write a screenplay, and he would get it produced. Hopper figures into the tale of “After the Gold Rush,” as Stockwell, who passed away in 2021, explained in a 2016 interview with Classic Rock: Stockwell also had a memorable part in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which co-starred his longtime friend Dennis Hopper.

#Past gold rush narrator series#

Young encountered a touch of writer’s block at some point in 1969, which is where Dean Stockwell, who enjoyed a long acting career and found fame with the beloved sci-fi series Quantum Leap. What Is the Meaning of “After the Gold Rush”? And it was a three-verse, chorusless song inspired by an unproduced screenplay that ended up being the album’s title song and affecting, if somewhat baffling, centerpiece. Young had already begun writing material for the album before the CSNY record was released. It meant that his next release, which would arrive just a few months after Déjà Vu in September 1970, would be a far more momentous event than his previous solo records. Although he mostly ceded the spotlight, and the big hits (“Our House” and “Teach Your Children”) from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s 1970 album Déjà vu came from Nash’s pen, Young nonetheless took part in a chart-topping album in the US. His level of exposure massively increased when he joined up with David Crosby, Stephen Stills (his former bandmate in Buffalo Springfield), and Graham Nash, who had already released a smash album as a trio in 1969. That band soared and crashed within a span of just a few years, leaving Young enough time to release two solo albums in 1969, the second of which, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, featured him recording for the first time with longtime collaborators Crazy Horse and, with classics like “Cowgirl in the Sand,” “Cinnamon Girl,” and “Down by the River,” established him as a leading light of the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement. Young had already established himself as a force in the world of rock and roll by 1970, only about three years or so after the Canada native gained his first wide renown as a member of Buffalo Springfield. Let’s try to answer all the questions about “After the Gold Rush.” What does it mean? How we can tell what it means when its author has admitted he’s not so sure himself? And what the heck does the guy who played Al on Quantum Leap have to do with it all? Read on to find out. Many have found beauty and solace in this track, even while they scratched their heads at Young’s somber pronouncements.