Steve Jobs rudely snubbed Neil Young’s peace offering

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Photo: Wikipedia
Neil Young. Photo: Wikipedia

Steve Jobs didn’t like Neil Young.

That much is evident from an excerpt from Becoming Steve Jobs, a highly anticipated book on the late Apple co-founder that comes out Tuesday. Jobs’ hatred for Young was so strong that he even refused a peace offering from the multi-Grammy-winner.

Neil Young has been very publicly against the MP3 and digital music market for years. The singer-songwriter’s crusade to get the music industry back to the olden days, when people cared about sound fidelity and record labels controlled an artist’s future, has altogether failed. His mission ultimately culminated with the PonoPlayer, an expensive and poorly reviewed music player for audiophiles that finally came out earlier this year.

“Steve Jobs as a pioneer of digital music, and his legacy is tremendous,” Young said in an early 2012 interview a few months after Jobs died. “But when he went home, he listened to vinyl. And you’ve got to believe that if he’d lived long enough, he would have done what I’m trying to do.”

Although Young had claimed that he Jobs were working on a high-quality iPod, Jobs apparently thought very little of Young.

In Becoming Steve Jobs, it’s revealed that Young offered Jobs a remastered vinyl set of all his albums to make amends for any negative things he had said about the iTunes business. Here’s what Jobs said when he was told over the phone about the grand gesture:

“Fuck Neil Young,” he snapped, “and fuck his records. You keep them.”

To quote a Neil Young song, “Doesn’t mean that much to me to mean that much to you.”

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