Neil Young’s most mysterious song has its beginnings in the wilds of Peru in 1969, where an out-of-control Dennis Hopper was directing The Last Movie, his follow-up to Easy Rider. With Hopper was his friend Dean Stockwell, a minor child and teen star of the 1940s and 50s, later famous for the 90s time-travel TV hit Quantum Leap.
“In Peru, Dennis very strongly urged me to write a screenplay,” Stockwell recalled, “and he would get it produced. I came back home to Topanga Canyon [in the mountains outside LA] and wrote After The Gold Rush. 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.”
