Kelvin High School, Winnipeg — where Neil Young formed the Squires

Neil Young moved to Winnipeg with his mother Rassy after his parents separated around 1960, settling in the River Heights neighbourhood and attending Kelvin High School on Kingsway Avenue. He arrived as a shy teenager from small-town Ontario who had recently become obsessed with the guitar, and Kelvin was the environment in which he transformed that obsession into a working band. The Squires — formed at Kelvin with fellow students — played instrumental surf rock in the manner of the Shadows and the Ventures, touring community halls and recreation centres across Manitoba and briefly into Ontario before Young left for Toronto and then California.

The Squires were earnest and limited by Young's own later assessment, but they were the laboratory. He learned to perform in front of audiences in those Manitoba halls, learned the particular social contract of a band playing for people who had other things they could be doing, learned the difference between playing in a bedroom and playing in a room. By the time he left Winnipeg in 1965 for Toronto — heading for the Yorkville folk scene that was absorbing singer-songwriters from across the country — the foundation was in place. The Squires never released a record of consequence, but Young credits the Winnipeg years as the period in which he learned what performing actually was.

Kelvin High School continues to operate at 155 Kingsway Avenue in River Heights. Young is its most internationally famous graduate. The school's River Heights neighbourhood is unchanged in basic character from the early 1960s, and the Winnipeg geography — the flat prairie landscape, the brutal winters, the particular quality of isolation that comes from being far from everywhere that matters — informs Young's music in ways that his California years never fully displaced.