Crosby Stills and Nash’s Stephen Stills’ Light Up the Blues autism benefit concert will feature Neil Young, Sheryl Crow and the Heartbreakers playing without late frontman Tom Petty.
As Stills told Rolling Stone, Neil Young encouraged him to continue his Light Up the Blues concert this year. The event will take place this April in Los Angeles.
“He said, ‘Stephen, man, we gotta do Light Up the Blues again,'” Stills recalled. “He said, ‘Look, I’m out of the Bridge School. And now it’s over to you.’ I watched how he did the Bridge School benefits and I got great lessons from it.”
Proceeds from the concert will go to Autism Speaks, an organization dedicated to “promoting solutions across the spectrum and throughout the life span.” Raising funds for autism organizations is extremely important to Stephen and his wife Kristen Stills. Their son Henry was diagnosed with autism when he was 3. He’s now 21 years old.
“The reason we started Light Up the Blues was out of the void of me not having to be micromanaging Henry so much, as he was finally in a good place,” Kristen pointed out. “Stephen and I wanted to give back to families that don’t have time and resources to make their kid’s life a full-time job with lots of overtime.”