There was a band playing in my head and I felt like getting high.
—“After the Gold Rush,” by Neil Young (1970)
The first task the band had taken on when quitting Colin Kerr was to rid themselves completely of their mynah bird costumes, as well as the birds themselves, and to dress instead like Rick’s idols, the Rolling Stones. The only thing they kept was the band’s feathered name.
Then, already aware from their previous forays into Eaton’s that its well-heeled owner, John Craig Eaton, was interested in musical groups, they solicited and received his financial backing and used it to buy more and better equipment. Entrepreneur Eaton loved owning the Mynah Birds and gave them Knute Rockne–like pep talks from time to time. He also didn’t seem to mind when band members would barge into his office and ask him for more money—in fact, he often gave it to them. Occasionally, he even let the group crash at his mansion, in Toronto’s upper-class Bridle Path neighborhood. But Eaton didn’t really want to dirty his hands by getting too deeply involved in the music business, and asked a neighbor of his, Morley Shelman, to actually manage the band.
The Mynah Birds’ final accomplishment was to lure more and better musicians into their lineup. In February 1965 Bruce Palmer, a bass player who later found fame with Buffalo Springfield, joined the group. Shortly thereafter, Rick noticed folksinger Neil Young performing in a Toronto coffeehouse. Rick was impressed that Young had composed his own songs, and that he was accompanying himself with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, à la Bob Dylan. Rick had been thinking that the band needed a folksinger to add to its versatility, so he asked Young to join. Soon Rick and Young became roommates in a Toronto apartment where, according to Jimmy McDonough’s book Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, Young and Rick lived on baked goods that Rick would pilfer from delivery trucks in the wee hours of the morning.
Palmer and Young worked well with Rick, and Young used Eaton’s largesse to buy himself a Rickenbacker six-string electric guitar to replace his old folk-style twelve-string semi-acoustic model. Rick claimed later that he had convinced Young to make this switch, telling him, “Come on, man, forget this acoustic guitar and let’s plug in.” Young was torn between two camps: the rockers, who used electric guitars, and the folkies, who stuck with their acoustic models.
But Rick provided Young with something to help him forget the tensions he was suffering from: poppers. As Young told another of his biographers, John Einarson, he and Rick “used to pop amyl nitrates [sic] before going on stage and walk on just killing ourselves laughing and rolling around from these things.”
On at least one occasion, this habit interfered with Young’s ability to play. At a high school gig, Young jumped off the stage, inadvertently pulling his guitar plug out in the middle of a song. The audience was surprised to see Young play the rest of the song on his silent guitar, apparently still hearing the music playing at full volume via the drugs circulating through his system. Young gave up poppers a short time later.
But most of the duo’s appearances together were terrific. McDonough quotes Comrie Smith, a friend of Young’s, who said she watched what Smith called a “show-stopping” performance by Young and Rick on the song “Hide Away.” She said, “Neil would stop playing lead, do a harp solo, throw the harmonica way up in the air, and Ricky would catch it and continue the solo.”
Levi Ruffin was one of many people in later years who heard Rick’s stories about playing with Neil Young and associating with superstars like Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young but never quite believed what he heard. “Rick used to tell us a pack of lies,” Ruffin notes. One day, however, he and Rick were having lunch “and we were sitting there and here comes Neil Young and he kept calling him Ricky. And they were huggin’ . . . and Rick says, ‘This is Levi Ruffin, and this is fuckin’ Neil Young.’”