The story of how Neil Young came to write one of his best-loved songs begins with a severe case of writer’s block. In 1969, the singer-songwriter was hauled up in a house in Topanga, California, where he had been trying to write material for his upcoming third album. Ideas were coming in dribs and drabs, but there was nothing solid for Young to grasp on to, no central concept or theme that might hold everything together.
A few thousand miles south of Topanga, in Peru, Dennis Hopper was directing The Last Movie, his follow-up to Easy Rider.
(Excerpt from Rolling Stone - Faroutmagazine)
When they were down there, Hopper asked him to write a screenplay. “I was going to write a movie that was personal, a Jungian self-discovery of the gnosis,” Stockwell told Neil Young biographer Jimmy McDonough. “It involves the Kabbalah, it involved a lot of arcane stuff.”
“Neil was living in Topanga then too, and a copy of it somehow got to him. He had had writer’s block for months, and his record company was after him. And after he read this screenplay, he wrote the After The Gold Rush album in three weeks.”
“I read the screenplay and kept it around for a while,” Young wrote in his 2012 autobiography Waging Heavy Peace. “I was writing a lot of songs at the time, and some of them seemed like they would fit right in with the story.”
He called the movie After the Gold Rush. The script is lost, but some details of the plot were recounted to McDonough by Shannon Forbes, an ex-girlfriend of Neil Young producer David Briggs. “It was sort of an end-of-the-world movie,” she said. “At the very end, the hero is standing in the Corral parking lot watching this huge wave come and this house is surfing along, and as the house comes at him, he turns the knob — and that’s the end of the movie.”
Young read the screenplay and decided to create a soundtrack for it. And had the movie come out, lyrics like “I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying/In the yellow haze of the sun” and “Flyin’ Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun” would have fit with the story quite nicely. The only problem was that Universal was less than impressed by Stockwell’s “Jungian self-discovery” movie and he was forced to abandon it. But Young had written a song too haunting and beautiful to abandon along with it, and he made it the title track of his next solo album.
About a decade later, Young and Stockwell were finally able to team up for a movie when they made Human Highway together. Much like After the Gold Rush, it’s about mankind facing the end of the world. And this one actually got made, even if it was far goofier (and featured a lot more scenes with Devo) than anything Stockwell imagined for After the Gold Rush.
“Dean was a great old friend,” Young wrote on the Neil Young Archives after learning about his death. “He was a true artist of many hands. I am so fortunate to have known Dean, whose screenplay After the Gold Rush was the reason I made that record and wrote many of the songs for the film. Rest in peace my fellow traveler.”
