An iconic rock and roll musician who sang such hits as “Get Together,” “Ride the Wind,” and “Sunlight” has died at 83.
Jesse Colin Young passed away on Monday, his publicist, Michael Jensen, confirmed to The New York Times. A cause of death was not specified. Young got his start as the lead singer of the Youngbloods, the proto-rock group which launched in 1965 in New York’s Greenwich Village and stayed together for exactly two decades until they disbanded in 1985.
During his time with Youngbloods, Young crooned one of the most recognizable songs of the ‘60s and indeed all time. The track “Get Together,” written by Dino Valenti under the pseudonym Chet Powers, contains a verse memorable to even those who don’t know the rest of the song: “Come on people now/Smile on your brother/Everybody get together/Try to love one another right now.” The song would go on to be covered by many famous acts of the day, including Jefferson Airplane.
In a 2018 interview, Young said that the lyrics of “Get Together” “are just to die for…To this day, it gives me a thrill to play it.”
The Youngbloods had a limited amount of success on traditional charts, but the band’s contribution to the rock genre is unparalleled. Their late-’60s track “Darkness, Darkness,” a chilly outlier for the poppy, nominally fun-loving band, was a cult hit with other musicians despite not being warmly received upon its initial release. In 2002, nearly 40 years after its release, the song earned Robert Plant a Grammy nomination for Best Male Rock Performance. The song has since been covered by over a dozen artists such as Richie Haven, Mott the Hoople, Screaming Trees, and Anne Wilson.
After leaving Youngbloods, Young went on to a successful solo career. In the mid-1970s, he released the albums Light Shine and Songbird, both of which broke into the Billboard Top 40. Young’s solo work was characterized by a passionate embrace of the natural world and a pioneering experimental streak in his choice of genre. His albums were inspired equally by acid rock, classic jazz and R&B, and jug music, but it was always its own beast.
“Love of the natural world is as much a theme in my music as romantic love,” he said in 2016. “I get more out of walking over the ridgetop in Marin and looking out at the national seashore than any drugs I ever did.”
Young is survived by his son, bassist Tristan Young, who played with his father on his final album, 2019’s Dreamers.
