Note: This article was changed to correct a previous version

Neil Young finally has his first Grammy Award, but it's not for his music.

Not overtly, anyway. Obviously, the man's storied singing and songwriting career, now encroaching on its 50th year, has something to do with it. Still, while Young will compete with his peers in a couple of Grammy categories – in "best solo rock vocal performance" for the title track to last year's Fork In The Road album, and "best boxed or special limited edition package" for his gargantuan Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972 set – at the awards ceremony in Los Angeles tomorrow night, the one trophy he'll have going in is for a side of his life he keeps quiet about: his philanthropy.

Young was officially minted as the Recording Academy's "MusiCares Person of the Year" Friday night at a gala dinner in L.A., an event that no doubt had him squirming uncomfortably in his seat. Especially when such fellow musicians as Elton John, John Mellencamp, k.d. lang, Sheryl Crow, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wilco and his old pals Crosby, Stills and Nash got up and started serenading him with his own songs.

He deserves the MusiCares honour, though. His quiet humanitarianism goes way back. He's been a crusader for environmental issues forever, and active with the Cerebral Palsy Foundation since his first son, Zeke, and then his second son, Ben, a quadriplegic, were diagnosed with the disease. He's a frequent donor to the Epilepsy Foundation, too, since both he and his daughter, Amber Jean, have the illness. He co-founded Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp in 1985 to help save humble American family farms facing foreclosure, and still sits on its board of directors. He's also one of the founders of the Bay Area's Bridge School, an organization that assists and educates children with severe physical and/or speech impairments, and stages a famed annual, all-star benefit concert in support of the facility.

Young, of course, doesn't trumpet any of this. But the 64-year-old Toronto and Winnipeg expat doesn't trumpet much of anything about himself. Neil Young, the philanthropist, is just one of the many faces of a genuine rock `n' roll enigma.

Those faces are why so many of us find Young such a compelling figure. So, as a salute to Canada's most fondly regarded musical export, we present a few more:

ICONIC FOLKIE

With his long hair, flannel shirts and acoustic guitar, the sensitive, socially conscious Neil Young who drifted in and out of Buffalo Springfield and CSNY during the late `60s and early `70s was the perfect poster child for hippie-era folk.

His songs, however, really were folk music in another sense, notes author Bob Mersereau, whose 2007 book Top 100 Canadian Albums was "dominated" by Young and topped by 1972's Harvest.

"His music is so understandable," says Mersereau. "You can immediately start your own music life by playing Neil Young songs around the campfire and everybody will love you for it. It's all Bs and As and Ds – it's really easy to play Neil Young songs. "

Adds Nicholas Jennings, author of the Can-rock history Before the Goldrush: "He launched a million Neil wannabes. On every street corner in every major Canadian city in the early `70s, there was a kid in a flannel shirt playing sad songs from Harvest and After the Goldrush. I was one of them. He struck a chord with a generation then, but the difference is he's continued to do that with successive generations."

Calgary rocker Chad VanGaalen, often compared to Young, sums up the appeal: learning a Neil Young song is "a good way to learn rock 'n' roll etiquette."

GUITAR GOD

As we all know, Quiet Neil begat Loud Neil, the rancorous electric noisemaker and Crazy Horse bandleader who answered punk with the seething Rust Never Sleeps in 1979 and foreshadowed `90s grunge with Freedom and Ragged Glory.

It's this Neil, he of the roaring feedback, 20-minute grind-downs and brain-boggling one-note solos, who's enchanted thousands of other guitarists with his intuitive, almost subconscious, playing style.

"Everything sounds broken down, like its going to fall apart any second," says Mike Boyd of local roots `n' roll outfit the Hunting Horns. "Nothing is ever precise, but it sounds perfect. That's exactly how I've always wanted my playing to sound."

Indie guitarist Luke Doucet echoes the sentiment. "I spent thousands of hours learning how to play `well.' I learned how to play slide in any key, how to play 16th-note quadruplets at lightening speed, how to hear a slippery country lick and immediately replicate it, how to play the pedal steel. I learned to cop solos, verbatim and up to speed, by Mark Knopfler, Brian Setzer, Mark Ribot, Chet Atkins and many others. All of these things so I could communicate transparently and passionately through the guitar.

"Neil can do none of the above and yet his musicality and the flow of expression, unobstructed and unaided, communicate so transparently and so passionately as to defy reason. He has managed to clear all of the impediments from his mind, like a master yogi. The man must meditate like Buddha."

TECHNOPHILE

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Contrary to his homespun sound and image, Young has historically exhibited a keen interest in new gadgets, technology and cool inventions in general.

He's been an early adopter of everything from eight-track recorders to modern digital studio gear. He loves model trains enough to own part of the Lionel company. The robotic Vocoder voices on Trans grew out of his experiments in electronic communication with his paralyzed son. He helped develop an entire interactive, multimedia software platform – dubbed the "Shakey Platform," after his filmmaking alias, Bernard Shakey – so the Archives series would work the way he wanted, allowing his fans online access to a vast, ever-expanding collection of photos, videos, audio interviews and printed documents offered to complement the music as one listens to the box sets. His environmentally themed Greendale tour in 2004 was powered entirely by biodiesel.

Lately, Young's inventing obsession has turned to creating the perfect, zero-emissions vehicle – one that's still sized large enough to satisfy the demand for, as he puts it, "a big, American car." To this end, he's started the LincVolt project, which thus far has seen him and a team of researchers convert his beloved 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible into a hybrid vehicle that will, they hope, eventually require no fuel or oil at all.

CRANK

To love Neil Young is to occasionally be baffled, even angered, by Neil Young.

It's hard to think of a musician of his stature who has as consistently refused to play to expectations. He followed up the smash success of Harvest with three of his darkest records ever – Time Fades Away, On the Beach and Tonight's the Night – dubbed the "Ditch" trilogy because at the time Young said he'd rather "drive for the ditch" than stay in the "middle of the road" where Harvest had taken him. His random '80s experiments in rockabilly, country, synth-pop, blues and other styles resulted in albums so unsuccessful that he was sued by Geffen Records for not sounding like himself.

On the Greendale tour, he and Crazy Horse played a bare minimum of hits while members of Young's family and crew acted out a bizarre environmental pantomime onstage. In 2006, disgusted that no younger musicians were publicly coming out against the Iraq war, he rushed out a Bush-bashing screed called Living With War highlighted by the tune "Let's Impeach the President." Then he joined CSNY on the road for the Freedom of Speech tour, playing virtually nothing but protest songs and sparking near-riots in some cities.

"It's an absolute refusal to bend," says Mersereau. "You cannot move this man. He will do whatever he wants. He'll be politically charged when he feels, he'll go against the flow when he feels. He's the ultimate rock 'n' roll symbol for defiance and attitude, and for artistic pursuits."

ROLE MODEL

Not surprisingly, Young's unwavering commitment to whatever whim he's feeling in the here and now, and his willingness to sometimes screw up in public, has made him a best-case scenario for artists looking to build musical careers of their own in his wake. Jennings even goes so far as to call him a "moral compass" for idealistic artists coming up behind him.

He's certainly the ideal model, agrees writer Jason Schneider, author of Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music from Hank Snow to the Band.

"I think for Canadians especially, he's always embodied everything musicians here want: the best of both worlds," says Schneider. "He conquered America, more or less on his own terms, and was able to preserve his formative years there through his ranch, his toy trains, and every other wild idea he's ever had. I think that's basically what everyone wants, to be able to indulge any creative impulse we get and have people admire us for it."

Exactly, says VanGaalen: "He's gone about his musical career in the way he wanted to. For better or worse, he seems to have done it in his own way. He got away with what he got away with, with very little compromise. Whether playing with a band or working solo he always seems to have had a vision. There is no compulsion to attach him to any particular label. He's always just been Neil Young."

Read more about: