Why and How Neil Young Drove a Hearse Across America

On April 11, the newly formed Buffalo Springfield played their very first show together, at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Members Richie Furay, Stephen Stills, Dewey Martin, Neil Young and Bruce Palmer were all local residents by then, but Young and Palmer had gotten to Los Angeles in perhaps one of the most unconventional ways possible: driving all the way from Ontario, Canada in an old hearse.

Just a year prior, Young had been a solo act, playing various places across his native Canada, and it was around this time that he first met Stills. They crossed paths in a venue called the Flamingo, located in what is now part of Thunder Bay, Ontario, and became friends. Around that time, Young’s vehicle of choice was a 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse, affectionately nicknamed Mort.

“We didn’t talk about forming a band together then, but we knew that we wanted to get together later,” Young explained to Free Press in 2016. (A photo of Mort can be seen in the same article.) “I knew he was going back to the States, and I wanted to go to the States, and now I knew a musician in the States.”

Neil Young and the Mynah Birds

In early 1966, Young joined the Mynah Birds, an R&B band out of Toronto fronted by Rick James. A record deal with Motown was secured, but just as work for their first album was getting underway, James was arrested for being AWOL from the Navy Reserve, thus marking the end of the Mynah Birds.

Palmer, a bassist, had also a member of the Mynah Birds. From there, he and Young decided to sell off some band equipment and buy, wildly enough, another hearse, this one a black 1953 Pontiac for the purposes of relocating to Los Angeles. (Mort had broken down by then.)

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So Young and Palmer, along with a couple of other friends, drove the hearse from Toronto to Los Angeles – well over 2,000 miles.

“We were constantly stopped by highway patrolmen who were curious about what this was,” Palmer recalled of the experience to the Free Press. “You have to visualize this. Six hippies — three guys and three girls — with musical instruments, marijuana stuffed into various pockets and crevices, who had crossed an international border.”

Hearse Spotted in Los Angeles

The plan was to reconnect with Stills in, as Young described it to Rolling Stone in 1975, “the Promised Land,” and as luck would have it, that didn’t take very long.

“We were heading up to San Francisco,” Young recalled. “Stephen and Richie Furay, who were in town putting together a band, just happened to be driving around too. Stephen had met me before and remembered I had a hearse. As soon as he saw the Ontario plates, he knew it was me. So they stopped us. I was happy to see f—ing anybody I knew. And it seemed very logical to us that we form a band.”

Palmer, who passed away in 2004, would later recall how serendipitous the circumstances that day were.

“[We] got together in a parking lot,” he said, “and started babbling to each other about what was happening and who was doing it and what could happen and ‘let’s do it’ and ‘this is impossible, what is going on here?’ [Laughs] And that’s initially how we met.”

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Not terribly long after that, the well-traveled hearse met its end.

“It broke down immediately as we were going to visit…I think it was the Byrds’ manager,” Young recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 2014. “We went to their office, then we were driving back to our motel room and the driveshaft fell out on Sunset Boulevard. So that was it for that car. I didn’t have enough money to fix it.”

But what a vehicle it was while it lasted.

“I loved the hearse,” Young said in 1975. “Six people could be getting high in the front and back and nobody would be able to see in because of the curtains. The heater was great. And the tray…the tray was dynamite. You open the side door and the tray whips right out onto the sidewalk. What could be cooler than that? What a way to make your entrance. Pull up to a gig and just wheel out all your stuff on the tray.”

Stills, Young and Palmer’s bandmate in Buffalo Springfield, agreed.

“It’s the greatest band car in the world,” he told NPR in 2005, “because you can fit the drums and everybody in it and it’s got some style.”