The Mynah Birds

It seems impossible to believe, but it really happened: for a short time in early 1966, Rick James and Neil Young were in the same band. The group, called The Mynah Birds, also included bassist Bruce Palmer, who, with Young, would go on to Buffalo Springfield shortly after The Mynah Birds split. It is difficult to determine exactly what The Mynah Birds might have sounded like, though, because although they did an album's worth of material for Motown, nothing from those sessions has ever been released.



The Mynah Birds were a group on the Toronto scene that had been around for a while before Young was asked to join by Palmer in January 1966. Young had been struggling to establish himself as a solo singer/songwriter for some months without success, and was glad to join the band if only for steady work. Initially Young's role in the group was not major, as they did none of his songs; he described it, in John Einarson's 1992 book Neil Young: The Canadian Years: Don't Be Denied, as "a Rolling Stones kind of R&B thing." Rick James, then known as Ricky James Matthews, was the singer and frontman of the band and Young has remembered that he and James wrote some songs together.

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