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Readers of this site's support has been instrumental in helping The Bridge School thrive as a leader in the field of augmentative and alternative communication for nearly four decades. To show The Bridge School's gratitude, they have offered us early VIP access.
There is an array of Bridge memorabilia including posters, programs and shirts.
"All the young dudes carry the news": David Bowie and Neil Young
David Bowie: Berlin,
2002
From our TW post back in 2011, here's an absolute mesmerizingly amazing cover by David Bowie of Neil
Young's song "I've Been Waiting For You", live in concert in Berlin,
2002 on YouTube.
On the 2002 album Heathen Bowie covers Young's song "I've Been
Waiting For You". Incidentally, the riotous guitar treatment is by Dave
Grohl of Foo Fighters and former Nirvana drummer.
David Bowie -- the Man Who Fell To Earth -- wrote "Kooks" after listening to Neil Young's "After The Goldrush". Bowie
performed Kooks at a BBC session on 3 June 1971 - three days after his
son Zowie's birth.
"I'd been listening to a Neil Young album and they phoned
through and said that my wife had a baby on Sunday morning, and I wrote
this one about the baby," he told the studio audience [BBC.com].
In an article on David Bowie in The Kansas City Star By TIMOTHY FINN (May. 09, 2004) on artistic relevance, musical innovation and why he is still a rebel:
Bowie: "When things go bad,
I've always looked to my peers and, in a way, my musical mentors to see
what they've done in similar situations. Neil Young and Bob Dylan have
done similar things: They have both made a few disastrous albums, but
they always end up coming back to the point of what they started in the
first place. You've got to go back to what you were doing when you were
rooting around with experimentation,ideas that are going to work for me, not my audience."
“My first impression of David Bowie as he walked
through the front door of our home for the annual BBQ fiesta that
traditionally kicks off the Bridge School Benefit Concert weekend was
how slight he was. His music and his persona were so large that I was
struck by the contrast.
As I approached him and his band to welcome them to our home and to
thank them for coming to play for our kids, the next thing that stays in
my memory is what an absolute gentleman he was. He was an enormously
talented yet humble man who was content to just hang out with the kids
and other guests who were attending that night’s party.
I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet him, to
welcome him into my home and to have him grace the stage over that
weekend in 1996 to offer his unique and innovative talent for our
organization.
He was an original in every senses of the word. On behalf of all of us
who have been associated with Bridge School, I offer our sincere and
heartfelt sympathies and wishes for peace to his many close and dear
loved ones.
A couple of weeks ago, Neil Young Archives announced that 2 new Bridge School concerts have been added for rental streaming at MovieTone | NYA.
Previously, the concerts, such as the 1988 and 1989 concerts, were available on demand for a 24 hour period. That period has now been extended to a 48 hour window, with proceeds going to Bridge School.
Here is the Comment of the Moment by Ian (The Metamorphic Rocker):
I was recently watching the film "The Man who Fell to Earth" (1976), which stars Bowie as an alien undercover on earth as a businessman trying to get water back to his home planet where his people are dying from a drought.
Toward the end of the movie, Bowie's character releases an album titled "The Visitor", hoping the wife he left behind on another planet will one day hear his music "on the radio". Gave my a smile, to say the least.
"Like visitors from space, it's hard to find a place to blend in and go unrecognized." And the late Nicolas Roeg, who directed he Bowie movie, had an idiosyncratic visual style--much of it based on non-linear and associative thinking-inspired editing--that chimes well with Neil's description of "war inside pictures in my brain". Sequences of the film involve Bowie's character watching banks of TVs tuned to different channels--does this remind you of anyone?--while imploring all the people on the screens to get out of his head and leave him alone. It seems Newton, Bowie's character, has some form of alien telepathy that acts like a psychic Midas Touch throughout the movie, putting him into mental contact with people to whom he has only tangential connections.
Roeg's use of montage and fragmented inter-cutting, in turn, become an expression of this fractured and overwhelmed mental state. Imagine being directly, intimately, vividly hooked into every person, every bit of data the outside world throws at you on a daily basis. That's "The Man who Fell to Earth" and also, I would argue, what NY and other artists probably feel like at times. "How you change, how you change, and how you rearrange, everything that touches me." But I digress.
There are non-linear and fragmented aspects of Neil's songwriting that don't get discussed too often, but I believe Neil has obliquely mentioned that his songs tend to jump around in time and space: After the Gold Rush and Trans Am are two, far-flung examples that come to mind. But for me, Without Rings (quoted above) and AYP?'s title song are the two that may come the closest to directly grappling with the tenuous, organically-shaped, fever-dream stimulation of a creative mind. No Hidden Path is up there as well, and in fact the entire CDII album is so idiosyncratically and quintessentially Neil (as I know his work), I'd like to write an entire post about it some time.
Thanks, thrasher, for inspiring this little stream of consciousness (for lack of better term) on my part. I guess my theme is the receptive state of the artistic or creative brain. Call it the Muse or "your brain on art"--it can be something of a drug, the dizzying (over)saturation of ideas, emotion, and sensation producing a natural high, perhaps paradoxically akin to the radical shutting off of intellectual and sensory faculties that's the aspiration of transcendental meditation. "Nothing" is just as titillating to the neural pathways as feeling/hearing/seeing everything at once, because both states represent sensory extremes that can be simultaneously frightening yet somehow enticing, sort of like how all the information on a TV screen--if you could look closely enough--breaks down into millions of tiny dots of color and noise. Nothing and everything are the same quantity viewed from different perspectives, because nothing is anything until the "pictures in our brain" pull it into focus.
~Through the keyhole in an open door.
Thanks as always Meta Rocker! It's been awhile since we saw "The Man who Fell to Earth". Probably last saw a rep cinema back in the 80's?
"The Man who Fell to Earth" (1976) D: Nicolas Roeg
To your points here on Neil as time traveler. Your timing is impeccable as we're trying to complete a rather major TW post paralleling many of the themes here with Bowie, Nicolas Roeg, Neil and time travel.
As sort of a tangential preview on that, you may recall some our analysis on this last year on Zuma: Time Traveling with Neil Young which keyed off this 'graf:
In 1975, when Rolling Stone writer Cameron Crowe asked Neil Young about his forthcoming album, Young said “I think I’ll call it My Old Neighborhood. Either that or Ride My Llama.” That album would be released as Zuma in November of that same year, and as Young says in the interview, “It’s weird. I’ve got all these songs about Peru, the Aztecs, and the Incas. Time travel stuff.”
Well, not to get too far out -- or too far gone more than usual -- here's a few of our various ramblings on Neil Young and time travel for your general amusement:
“My first impression of David Bowie as he walked through the front door of our home for the annual BBQ fiesta that traditionally kicks off the Bridge School Benefit Concert weekend was how slight he was. His music and his persona were so large that I was struck by the contrast.
As I approached him and his band to welcome them to our home and to thank them for coming to play for our kids, the next thing that stays in my memory is what an absolute gentleman he was. He was an enormously talented yet humble man who was content to just hang out with the kids and other guests who were attending that night’s party.
I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet him, to welcome him into my home and to have him grace the stage over that weekend in 1996 to offer his unique and innovative talent for our organization.
He was an original in every senses of the word. On behalf of all of us who have been associated with Bridge School, I offer our sincere and heartfelt sympathies and wishes for peace to his many close and dear loved ones.
Elton John's Tribute to Pegi Young - January 19, 2019
Elton John paid tribute speech to the late Pegi Young while in concert on the Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour at SAP Center in San Jose, CA on January 19, 2019.
Song performed "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" (see comments below)
Neil Young has published an official statement on Pegi Young on NYA.
The message contain the lyrics to his song "Such A Woman" -- written for his wife Pegi -- from the 1992 album "Harvest Moon".
There has been a tremendous outpouring of grief and love over the news of the relatively sudden death of Pegi at age 66 on New Year's Day. Messages and comments began to flood here into Thrasher's Wheat immediately as the news began to spread among friends and fans who shared their heartfelt thoughts on the shock and memories.
Neil, Pegi, Ben & Amber Young
Willie Nelson's ranch, 1984
Photo by Joel Bernstein
Pegi will be missed by so many who knew of her as a tireless advocate for special needs kids.
As a co-founder of the Bridge School in Mountain View, California, Pegi Young's vision changed the lives of children worldwide. In a statement, Bridge School said: "We will do our best to continue her mission. Please keep us and her family in your thoughts and prayers as we keep the dream alive."
The Bridge concerts will be Pegi's enduring legacy as the Bridge School and the annual Benefit Concerts brought so much joy to so many children, their parents and teachers.
In memory of Pegi and her work, we here at Thrasher's Wheat have made a contribution to the The Bridge School to help further their mission of improving the lives of young people who need "support in finding a voice of their own." That comes through the use of alternative communications, including pictures, gestures and pointing, or computer technology, for young people without ordinary speech or an ability to write and press computer keys.
Bridge Kids
So consider donating to The Bridge School in Pegi's memory, as "your charitable donation makes a significant difference in the level of support we are able to provide to children and their families locally, nationally and globally," the school states on its website.
Teaching Bridge Kids
In addition to Pegi's Bridge School work, she was also a good friend to Farm Aid: "an inspiring, talented artist and an incredibly kind, considerate human."
Pegi Young: "I came into the game late in life, according to some rulebook.
I’ve been able to continue recording, and I’m quite pleased that I’ve been able to carve out this time in my life to do this. When I went into the studio to make my first solo record [Pegi Young, 2007], I’d been doing backgrounds and some professional stuff with Neil. But I was very shy and not at all self-confident about my ability to carve out a career for myself. Even in the later years, when people asked why I didn’t do this earlier, I didn’t know how, first of all, but I did not have the confidence.
I was terribly shy and I still am, but when I get onstage I let my other side come out."
“Be authentic, be true, sing what’s in your heart. It’s not about making it perfect, it’s about letting it be real, sometimes raw and flawed, as long as it’s true.”
~~ Pegi Young, 2016
Pegi Young
Bridge Parents Present Roses for Pegi's 25 Years of Support @
Those standing ovations at the end of each night's Bridge School Benefit Concert we'll always remember. You have been a tireless advocate for kids with special needs. We saw and felt the love at the Bridge concerts we attended over the decades and feel very blessed to have been part of those special moments with you and the large extended Young Family.
The Bridge School Concerts 
>> Pre-Order on Amazon.com << 
Human Highway
Concert Review of the Moment
This Land is My Land
FREEDOM In A New Year
*Thanks Neil!*
![[EFC Blue Ribbon - Free Speech Online]](http://www.thrasherswheat.org/gifs/free-speech.gif)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Neil Young
Pardon My Heart
"We're The Ones 
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