AGELESS

Neil Young’s music has always touched me. Yet Robert Hilburn’s profile (“After the Gold Rush,” July 9) revealed a side of him which touched me in a different way. Young’s devotion to his family and to the cause of the severely handicapped showed a very warm, caring human being. His practical advice about not focusing on the past and, at the same time, not forgetting it was an example of a simple truth. And his last thought on fleeting fame and his wife’s awards-show attire showed his down-to-earth realism and humor.

Neil Young shows, as did Mozart, Bach, Gershwin and so many others, that truly great music is timeless. Buffalo Springfield’s jazzy “Everydays” sounds as great today as it did in ’67. So let’s not dismiss any great art or artist simply because it was created before we were born.

RON TOIGO

Vista

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In answer to Hilburn’s rhetorical quiz, Neil Young is still around basically because he won’t go away.

If I’d had any doubts that Hilburn couldn’t tell which end of an electric guitar gets plugged in, they vanished completely when he compared Young’s playing to Jimi Hendrix’s “guitar-driven assault.”

Gifted as he is (or was) at song writing, Young is easily one of the lamest electric guitarists ever recorded, and only a self-absorbed non-musician (like Hilburn) would even think of making such a pointless comparison.

BOB LOZA

Burbank

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Hilburn is amazed that a 49-year-old is “the hippest man in rock.” Well, Hilburn could say the same about himself. As a 37-year-old Neil Young fan, I’ve been reading his articles since I was a teen-ager. He has kept up with the best of them, never forgetting rock ‘n’ roll’s roots but always open to new sounds, from punk to Pearl Jam.

Who could have imagined a time in such a trendy, rebellious, youth-dominated art form when the hippest critic in rock must be well into his 40s? Good for him, and good for the L.A. Times for appreciating the fact that both Hilburn and Young are only getting better with age.

LORI BAKER SCHENA

Valencia