About thirty miles back the roads had been sprouting forth like healthy veins just like he’d once described in an old song of his. Then everything tapered off, and now it was one long winding stretch of black tar bounded on both sides by rugged elms and tall, proud oak trees with patches of violets growing wild at the base. He didn’t know where on earth he was, if the truth be known, but he didn’t care. It was somewhere in the high country anyway, because he’d seen a deer sprinting through the slashes of light between the trees while they were driving, and had just told the guy at the wheel of his tour bus to pull over, let him off, and wait up for him a couple of miles further along the road. At first, he’d stepped out to get better acquainted with the lie of the land, and let his senses feast on nature’s bountiful gifts awhile. There were the sounds of wild geese flying westward right above him, while not far away the babbling sound of a small stream was starting to fall within his ear-shot.
But as he walked with that intense purposeful stride of his, back slightly stooped, his wise old owl’s face mostly hidden by a remarkably cheap-looking pair of sunglasses, he was no longer hearing that stuff. Instead, he was tuned into the sound of galloping horses pounding along inside his brain like in an old John Ford movie when the fort’s about to burn down and the cavalry’s thundering hooves are starting to dust up the horizon. Over that, he could also make out a loud raucous guitar twanging out a riff that sounded like it was churning between the chords of G and E minor. There were no lyrics yet, just the image of these unstoppable horses with steam rising off them, ploughing through a dense mist, ridden by gaunt-faced slit-eyed individuals whose features seemed utterly devoid of humanity. Where were they going and where had they just come from? That he still had to figure out.
There was a rustling sound from behind a fallen stump of timber just to his left that startled him. In the distance, he thought he could hear a church bell ringing. Then the rhythm started up again in his head with that guitar riff that kept reminding him of the Rawhide theme as sung by Frankie Laine and his voice of true pioneer grit lighting up the prairie fires and the TV dinners of his youth. And as he heard the voice reverberating through his mind, he cast his mind back to those early mornings back in Omeemee, the place he was first brought up in and the place he wrote ‘Helpless’ about. He’d be walking down a railroad track at age six or seven past a hobo’s shack, strutting along with a little transistor radio jammed to his ear and Frankie Laine’s rich, unflinching voice intoning mellifluously about the wayward wind despatching lost and broken souls to dwell, heads bowed, in just such lowly make-shift accommodations forever to be haunted by the sound of ghostly train whistles.
The road came to a head and then there was a slight bend. Once Young was around it, he could see the bus parked not too far ahead. Those horses and their riders were still waiting to gallop into some kind of story-line but that would all be taken care of just as soon as he got hold of a guitar. It’s like there’s a mighty reservoir of songs that no one’s ever heard up there in heaven and there’s a tap in Neil Young’s brain that’s somehow attached to it. All he has to do is ease his mind into the right gear and something will always come trickling down.
‘Writer’s block? I would never recognize it. I don’t know what it is,’ Neil Young will tell me ardently in Paris only a matter of days and several time-zones from that afore-depicted pastoral trek. ‘See, I’m not trying to write. It just comes out when it comes out. So there is no block! Like, I’m not sitting down, going [frantically], “Oh my God, I’ve got to write a song! I really, really have to . . . Oh my God!” Hey, if I don’t write a song, I don’t record a song. Hell, it just gives me more time to do other things.’
For over thirty years it’s been like that: Neil Young rolling down the road with a song coming alive in his head, a dreaming man endlessly driven to kick-start the creative moment as quickly as possible and then to share his fantasies with a world going at a mere fraction of his natural speed. Try and isolate the one common denominator threading together Young’s stout body of work and you have this image of characters constantly on the move, be they ancient Aztec warriors, motorcycle-riding waitress-divorcees or, most often, guys who are a little paranoid and a little troubled, noble-men-of-destiny types who smoke too much pot and analyse their own feelings too relentlessly, who are always looking out for a genuine soulmate but who are also aware they are way too self-obsessed to give enough of themselves to make any relationship truly work, so there is always this contradiction tugging at their souls like a sort of sadness, giving their outpourings a strange cathartic twinge. Guys, in other words, almost exactly like Neil Young was throughout the sixties and for most of the seventies.
‘I’ve often been singled out for extreme things to happen to in my life,’ he’d calmly observed late in the eighties after nature had played a particularly hideous trick on his family. But it has always been that way for Young, the younger of two sons born to Scott (a well-known Canadian journalist) and Edna (’Rassie’) Young in the early morning of 12 November 1945 in the city of Toronto, Canada. Early photographs portray him as a chubby little infant with hair standing up like a porcupine’s quills and a grin big enough to split his face like a coconut, an early image of himself he’d later recall in song. His joy was not unconfined, however, for at the age of only five he’d become stricken with polio and almost died. Only a few years later, just as he was about to enter his teens, his parents would separate and the whole family split down the middle. ‘Sure, it was pretty traumatic,’ he would later recall to me. ‘But not that traumatic! I knew my dad still loved me and my mom was still there. Actually, it was kind of exciting, now I think about it. It was a change. We’d had ten or twelve years of living together, then my mom went off to live in Winnipeg.
‘Looking back on my childhood now, there’s a sort of glow to my reminiscences. It’s like my memory has blocked out most of the bad stuff. I just remember all those glorious sunny days and good times. You need to have good memories from your past. You never know when you’re going to have to depend on those memories just to see you through a bad patch in your adult life. See, my family were like nomads. We travelled all over the place and I ended up going to eleven or twelve different schools as a result. That’s partly why my education left a lot to be desired. I mean, I dropped out at eleventh grade [laughs]. Success and failure at the same time – that’s the feeling I remember the day I left school for the last time.
‘Originally I wanted to become a farmer. I was planning on going to agricultural college and getting my own farm. I was going to raise chickens at the beginning. Then eventually branch out into a full farm. I started seriously working on this project when I was about ten years of age. I even got the chickens and set up a coop for them. But then something unexpected happened. I heard Elvis Presley for the first time. And then, along with Elvis, I heard Chuck Berry, Ronnie Self, the Chantels and this whole other galaxy of strange bewitching music which you could pick up on radio from transmitters down in the Southern states of America. Also, it was getting played on a Toronto radio station known as CHUM.
‘I started playing musical instruments when I was fourteen. I mastered the ukulele, the banjo – y’know, four-stringed instruments of various kinds. The first thing I learned is that three chords are the basis to a lot of songs . . . It’s a blues-based idea. You start on G, go to C and resolve it all with a D chord. So I learnt how to work those three chords and then got into the thing of working in different keys. I basically just taught myself, figuring out as I went along.’
By the age of sixteen Young had lost all his childhood puppy-fat and measured a long, raw-boned 6 feet 3 inches in height. He had his mother’s piercing eyes and his father’s same shock of abundant black hair. He carried himself with a certain ironic detachment, and it’s tempting to portray him day-dreaming through the windy streets of Winnipeg all scrunched up in his tiny denim jacket and dilapidated jeans as some prototype early ‘slacker’. But Young was no diffident hippie slouch. On the contrary, it was like he was on fire where his music was concerned. He’d already become obsessive about following in the footsteps of perhaps his greatest idol, the melancholy but indefatigable Roy Orbison:
‘This all happened in ’62. I saw him in Winnipeg, saw him all over the place that year. Got to talk with him once outside a gig. He was coming out of his motor-home with his backing band, the Candymen. That had a profound effect on my life. Period. I always loved Roy. I looked up to the way he was, admired the way he handled himself. His aloofness influenced me profoundly . . . His music was always more important than the media. It wasn’t a fashion statement. It wasn’t about being in the right place at the right time making the right moves. That didn’t matter to Roy. Just like it doesn’t matter to me.’
His mother had helped him buy an orange Gretsch guitar and he stalked the streets of Winnipeg brandishing it proudly in a fine white case. At fifteen he began playing guitar with the Esquires, a semi-pro teen band who had got as far as printing up their own business card, which read ‘The Esquires. Instrumental and vocal styling. Fine Music & Entertainment’, but no farther. Then came another brief spell in an outfit known as Stardust, but by the end of 1962 he had his own band going for him – a bunch of interconnected school buddies who called themselves the Squires:
‘We were doing our own stuff – mostly instrumental in the style of an English band called Hank B. Marvin and the Shadows. The big early influences? For me, OK, there was Hank B. Marvin obviously . . . Lonnie Mack – “The Wham of the Memphis Man” – the lead guitarist in the Fireballs . . . his name escapes me but he was just great [George Tomsco] . . . Link Wray . . . “Rumble” . . . Oh, man, Link Wray’s right there on top of the list . . . These guys were the beginning of it all for me. We’re talking about real guitar pioneers. Like, a lot of that surfin’ music was just starting up too and I loved that stuff. The Surfari’s doing “Wipe-out” . . . Then there was “Pipeline” . . . Then there was Dick Dale. He was the funkiest of those players ’cos most of them were a little stiff when they were playing their melodies, but Dick Dale was looser. His stuff had a real swing to it. Like, on “Let’s Go Trippin’” he was all over the place and the beat was real advanced, compared to all the other stuff in that genre.
‘Sometimes we’d throw in some funkier, R’n’B-styled stuff as well. I started singing in ’64 . . . maybe even ’63. First my band was just all instrumental. Then very quickly it became pretty much all vocal. Even before I left Winnipeg in 1965 . . . There were no instrumental by then. By that time I was experimenting with a different kind of music we’d come up with. It was kinda like “folk-rock” but it wasn’t anywhere near as sweet. We took these traditional folk songs – like “Clementine”, “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes”, “Oh Susannah” . . . Then we’d put them in minor keys, add these weird little harmonies and play them with a surf beat.’
Stephen Stills, a boisterous Southern teenager roughly Young’s age, was passing through Canada as one of a staid folk quintet known as the Company. He would later reminisce about his first encounter with the lanky guitarist and his self-designed surf-rock-folk-punk quartet, the Squires:
‘They’d just come back from Churchill, Ontario, and Neil had written, I think, his first song, and we had a great time running around in his hearse and drinking good strong Canadian beer and being young and having a good time. Neil was seventeen at the time and I was eighteen and he was playing folk-rock before anybody else. He had his Gretsch, a rock and roll band that had just recently turned from playing “Louie Louie” to playing the popular folk songs of the day with electric guitars, drums and bass. It was a funny band ’cos they would go right from “Cotton Fields” to “Farmer John”.
‘I was trying to set up something for Neil and me and in the meantime Neil went to Toronto, fell in with this chick, Vicky Taylor I think her name was, who was a folksinger who convinced Neil that he was Bob Dylan. So Neil broke up the band and decided to be Bob Dylan, and was playing rhythm guitar, you know. He would just go in and play acoustic guitar in coffee houses. He wanted to be Bob Dylan and I wanted to be the Beatles. We were, as I said, very young.’
Young recalls the elements that prompted him to make his first musical metamorphosis a little differently:
‘After I arrived in Toronto I tried to keep my band going and then tried to work with several other bands. But it just never worked out for me there. I could never get anything going in Toronto, never even got one gig with a band. So I moved instead towards acoustic music and immediately became very introspective and musically inward. That’s the beginning of that whole side of my music. See, I’d just come from a place called Thunder Bay, which is between Winnipeg and Toronto. The Squires’d done really well there but couldn’t get a gig to save our lives in Toronto. Got a manager but even he couldn’t find us a gig. All we ever did was practise. So I ended up cruising around by myself on acoustic guitar, playing my songs at coffee houses for a while. I even did some gigs, like in Detroit, just across the border . . . and I was starting to make a living at it. I was by myself, just me and my guitar travelling alone, just showing up at these places. It was quite an experience. The strong image I have now of that period is one of me walking around in the middle of the night in the snow, wondering where to go next! A part of me was thinking, “Wow, this is really out on the edge!” The other part was thinking, “What the fuck do I do now?”
He never stopped moving and there was always a large piece of guitar equipment strapped to his body wherever he roamed. One day in Yorkville, Toronto’s very own appointed beatnik strip, a tall, thin eighteen-year-old musician with a bird-like face and extremely long hair named Bruce Palmer saw Young’s similarly lanky intense exterior sauntering up the street with a large amplifier thrust upon his shoulders and towering above his head, which was bent down as his eyes silently blistered the pavement in front of him with their determined glare. Palmer was so impressed by this intrepid vision he ran up and introduced himself as a fellow player, inviting him to his apartment for that initiatory jam session.
Palmer knew a guy who owned a local club called the Mynah Birds, and so corralled his former band-mates in the now-defunct Swinging Doors to become the Mynah Birds, so as to capitalize on the connection and gain a bit of patronage on the side. They were an odd group, fronted by a mincing black guy called Ricky James Matthews who excelled in over-the-top Mick Jagger impersonations, while to his left onstage Young, who’d lately swapped his first Gretsch for an acoustic twelve-string, would look dour and jangle out these country-tinged lead riffs. It was a goofy combination but it must have worked, as only a matter of weeks after their first gig they were being invited down to cross the border over to Detroit in order to record demos for Tamla-Motown. It was to prove a short but invigorating education for all of them:
‘We ended up signed to Motown – we were the first white rock group to be signed on Motown, for Chrissakes – and when we got into the studio, these session guys at Motown would just suddenly turn up and step in for us all the time when a part wasn’t being learnt quickly enough. That’s how Motown made records! I mean, no one made records by themselves at Motown. Certain people came in and sang right behind you when you were singing your part! Right over your shoulder!! Real loud!!! Plus, they always had their own drummer and the drums were nailed down. I’d never made a record like that before. I was just learning and watching. Whatever they did was fine with me, I just wanted to learn how they made those great records.’
It ended in tears though, and abruptly too, when the Jagger-esque Matthews was suddenly apprehended by the authorities while they were actually laying down tracks in the motor city. It turned out he was a Navy deserter and he had to spend time in jail as a result. As fate would have it, a decade later Matthews would shorten his name to Rick James, affect a distressingly arch funky pimp fop image, connect again with the Motown label and go on to sell millions of records. Neil Young’s fortunes meanwhile lay elsewhere.
By the time he was nineteen Young had experienced almost all the least appealing aspects that life can offer an inexperienced, youthful professional musician. His best friend and partner in the Squires, Ken Koblun, had suffered a nervous breakdown and his lead singer in the Mynah Birds was in jail for draft evasion. His agent was inept and the last manager he’d been involved with had just OD’d, having, unbeknownst to the Mynah Birds, spent all their record advance on heroin. Young was unfit owing to a taxing regime of malnourishment, lousy (sometimes non-existent) accommodation, lack of warmth and sleep, and too much speed. He’d been badly beaten up while hitch-hiking to one gig and had been left unconscious in a ditch miles from nowhere by his attackers. Even his beloved first car, a Buick hearse, had given up the ghost while driving to a gig through a town called Blind River, an incident that would later inspire one of his most popular seventies songs, ‘Long May You Run’. Wherever he turned in Canada, doors shut in his face. He’d had a couple of minor run-ins with the police. And so he decided in the late February of 1966 to sell his few worldly belongings and drive down in his second hearse with bassist Palmer and three or four others to connect with Stephen Stills in the promised land of Los Angeles. The images he saw on the long trip were his first real images of America and have remained vivid in his mind ever since:
‘The thing I remember most about that trip was the roads. I mean, Route 66 was still open then. It hadn’t become a legend. It was still operating as a freeway. There were no Inter-States. We went down on Route 66, ploughed our way through the middle of the country. There were six of us in the car and only one of us – a girl called Jeanine – could drive. No one else had a licence. So I was driving all the time ’cos I was worried she couldn’t drive. The only time I let her drive was when I was so tired I physically couldn’t anymore. Then I’d be laying at the back of the hearse trying to sleep but listening instead obsessively to the transmission [laughs].
‘I remember going through Missouri and seeing the roads change to this kind of cement with yellow lines from this kind of black tar with white lines. I thought, “Wow! I’ve never seen a road like that in my life before.” Then there were the drive-in restaurants. You’d drive into a town for miles up over these hills in the South-West. Then you’d get to the crest and come over and you could see thirty miles away this little road of lights twinkling for miles ’cos everything else was black. Amazing! It was like, you were on the moon or something. Then you’d get into towns and there’d be all these neon lights and court houses, restaurants, truck-stops, bars, casinos, pinball arcades all flashing madly at you. Amazing! It was a really fantastic experience. I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.’
Only a couple of weeks after settling into the Buffalo Springfield and making LA their new home, Bruce Palmer and Neil Young one day found themselves stoned and vacantly standing in a small crowd witnessing a man with a large oval face the colour of raw beetroot demonstrating how a Vegematic could dice up some greens. Palmer duly turned to find his cohort laid out on the ground, his whole body twitching, his eyes glazed and staring vacantly and a thin trail of drool running down the left side of his mouth. Young was in the throes of his first ever epileptic seizure:
‘I think it’s like anything else . . . psychological is part of it, but only a small aspect of what causes epilepsy. See, epilepsy is a real thing, it gets triggered by real situations. It’s all to do with the brain, the firing of electrons in the brain . . . Plus, there’s a misbalance in my body . . . from different things that have happened to me . . . I can feel it all the time . . . See, when your brain gets over-taxed by information coming in, it can suddenly turn physical on you. It just happens. Actually, it’s funny, because a lot of people – and several guitarists that I really admire – have pointed out to me how my guitar playing sometimes sounds like I’m anticipating one of these fits. I know what they mean. It’s real static.’
The condition was to plague his life for the following years. Never knowing when the cursed fits would strike, he was forced to take medication that made him moody, irritable, withdrawn and generally even more dauntingly intense than he was naturally. Of course, he was still fucking himself up as much as he could, smoking dope copiously and taking speed when extra energy and self-confidence were required. He’d been taking acid too and that had freaked the fuck out of him. In fact, taking acid had directly inspired two of his first Springfield songs, ‘Flying on the Ground is Wrong’ and ‘Burned’, both troubled odes to the grief of psychedelic psychosis.
Listening to Young’s first releases via the Springfield, you can cut the discomfort and uprightness in his freakish voice with a blunt pocket knife. In songs like ‘Out of My Mind’, ‘Mr Soul’ and ‘Broken Arrow’ he appears to us as a fractured innocent wandering through a Felliniesque fun-house of rock’n’roll grotesquery like a eunuch in a bordello, simultaneously fascinated by the images he’s subjected to but essentially disconnected from all of it:
‘There were a lot of problems happening with the Springfield. There were a lot of distractions too. Groupies. Drugs. Shit, every time I’d made a record before, being in the studio it was just me, the group and an engineer. Otherwise the place was empty ’cos there was nothing else happening. We’d only had two or three sessions up till then, but they were always focused on what was going on. And when you walked outside you could still think about what you were thinking about when you were inside. In LA though, while you were trying to make a record, just anyone was liable to walk into the studio. Some other band recording down the hall would just turn up out of nowhere, You might be intimidated to meet these guys or anxious to meet them but in a studio you just wished they weren’t there.
‘And then there were all these other people. I’d never seen people like that before. They were always around, giving you grass, trying to sell you hippie clothes . . . I never knew what these people really wanted. And there were so many of ’em ! Not to mention all the women . . . all the clubs, places to go, things to do. I remember being haunted suddenly by this whole obsession with “How do I fit in here?” “Do I like this?” And then came the managers. We had these two guys, Green and Stone, and they were real wheeler-dealers, and suddenly it’s all a business and you don’t know if you’re doing the right thing or not. You keep trying not to do anything too stupid but you have no fuckin’ clue what you’re doing anyway ’cos you’re so young. You started out so happy to actually be making a record. But then the record doesn’t sound like you wanted it to sound and you don’t know why. You start thinking, “Why are these other guys involved? They don’t know how to get what you want. Who’s the boss? Who’s gonna say what’s really right?”
‘I mean, Stills was the boss, more or less. Except, y’know [smiles] . . . there were a lot of my songs in there! He had more songs though and therefore did more of his songs live than I did of mine. Jesus, Buffalo Springfield was a great band but the real core of the group was the three Canadians. See, there were three Canadians in the Buffalo Springfield – me, Bruce Palmer and the drummer Dewey Martin – as well as two Americans. And we played in such a way that the three of us were basically huddled together behind while Stills and Furay were always out front. ’Cos we’d get so into the groove of the thing, that’s all we really cared about. But when we got into the studio, the groove just wasn’t the same. And we couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t get it. Oh, man, this was the major frustration for me as a young musician, it fucked me up so much. See, it took me all the time it took to make all these Buffalo Springfield records and almost all my first album to figure out I had to go back to the way I’d started back in Winnipeg, back in Thunder Bay when I was recorded live, in order to get my sound just right. Buffalo Springfield should have been recorded live – from the very beginning. The vocals always had to be overdubbed. Our producers made us do the new thing in the studio, laying down a track and then singing. That’s why the Buffalo Springfield records don’t sound right. All the records were great failures as far as I’m concerned.’
It was all up and down, up and down with the Buffalo Springfield. There was Richie Furay, who was basically a sweet guy and a real pro – he had a way of tip-toeing across the stage with feet turned inward which got the girls screaming – and Dewey Martin was a straight-arrow sort too, but the rest . . .! Young was always getting too intense and freaking out about something. And Stills was just this punk blow-hard with an ego the size of Alaska and an offensively belligerent way of taking control of almost any given situation. Some years later he would admit as much to an interviewer: ‘You gotta dig that part of my upbringing in the South was very militaristic. I was in this military school and being taught how to be an officer. Anyway, a lot of the ways I relate to situations like that are to simply take command. Because someone has to. Because that is the only thing that will work, and of course somebody like Neil or Bruce is instantly going to rebel. So there was chaos.’ Then there was Palmer, who was just getting more and more out there, with the dope and all. He even started to resemble one of those large wooden Indians placed in front of saloons for cowboys to strike matches on. In late ’67 he’d got busted during a police raid on the Buffalo Springfield’s appartment when Eric Clapton happened to be visiting the place. The abrupt arrival of the force’s finest through the front door instantly propelled Young into yet another of his epileptic convulsions. In early 1968 Young would suffer an even worse attack while actually playing on stage with the Springfield.
‘Looking back on it now, I’m not sure what happened because now, when it happens, I can control it. I don’t know whether I just couldn’t control it or whether there just weren’t too many new things happening to me. Whatever it was, I’d just get this feeling inside of me and I’d just go . . . Bam!’
He left the Springfield for good in May ’68. Too many ego stand-offs with Stills. Too many ‘weasels in the woodwork’. That’s how Young now referred to the group’s managers who had them contractually over a barrel, with precious little financial return forthcoming. Elliot Roberts, an ambitious young agent with bohemian leanings, had latched on to Young and was trying to take control of his affairs just as he was leaving the group. It wasn’t always easy, as he would later recall in David Crosby’s autobiography:
‘When David Crosby was telling me about the Springfield breaking up, he said I should definitely get Neil: he was the one. Even though David replaced Neil in the Springfield for about ten minutes at Monterey, Neil was irreplaceable. He brought intensity to the party that no one else could muster because he was so much more serious than anyone else. It was all life and death to Neil. For example, before CSN&Y, on this lousy bus tour with the Byrds, the Turtles and Buffalo Springfield, the last gig the Springfield did together, we checked into a hotel next to a Pitch V Putt golf course, Neil had a fever on the ride down on the bus and I love golf, so after we checked in the guys all went up to their rooms and I went to the golf course to drive a few. When I got back, Neil fired me. I said, “What for?” and he said, “This is serious, man. This ain’t no golf match. This ain’t no tourney. This ain’t no party. This is serious shit. You should have been in your room waiting for us to call, figuring out something, plotting, planning, figuring out my life, figuring out my career, not playing golf.” He hired me the next day and then he fired me again later and rehired me; it was that intense.’
Getting his music out and getting it right was all life and death to Neil Young. To look at him, you’d have thought he was just another stumble-bum stoner concerned with nothing more pressing that the rolling of his next doobie, but his mind fixated incessantly on writing more and better songs and pushing his ragged frame and pot-addled consciousness to the very extremities of their capabilities. It’s like he’d always had this vision. Now he was having the chance to make it come real.
At the same time, he was supposed to have been ‘sweet’ on a young folksinger called Robin Lane and had even moved in with her for a time. But, as much as he would moon over her when they were apart and write aching love songs in her image that would end up gracing his first solo album, when they were together he’d somehow more often than not end up reaching out for his guitar instead of reaching out for her. The guy he could best relate to and his closest ally at that time was this funny-looking little mad professor-type called Jack Nitzsche, this obsessive nutcase whose talents as an arranger had farther illuminated many of Phil Spector’s seminal productions. He’d played piano on several Rolling Stones sessions too, and now he was doing the same, as well as arranging the charts, for Neil Young’s first solo sessions. There was a third party along for the ride as well: another crazy man with exquisite taste that Young had met after being knocked out by the car he was driving, called David Briggs. Somehow he’d talked his way into becoming Young’s producer. Warner Bros., his new home as a recording artist, had come up with this exciting new improvised sound gizmo and were going to use Young’s début album to try it out on the public. One of the first reporters ever to interview Young, a fellow from the LA press, found him sitting on the veranda of his house in Topanga, the one he’d bought with the advance Elliot Roberts had secured from Warners, and described his mood thus:
‘He is nervous about the album, as nervous as if it were the first time he’d been in a studio. During the interview he worries about a single, about the sequence of the songs on the album, and about the mix – the relationship of instruments and vocals. He plays it and is alternately proud and fretful, wanting it to be the best he could possibly do, thinking first that it is, then that it isn’t, then that it is, and so on.’ Twenty-four years later Neil Young would feel more than justified about those initial anxieties:
‘Well, the album itself was great. But then they put this new process on the original mixes called CSG and it just fackin’ killed it. CSG was this new-fangled bullshit process that literally squashed the sound so the music sounded the same in mono and stereo. In other words, it just screwed everything up. Anyway the record company decided to try out this piece of shit idea on my record, my very first record, so . . . [trails off, eyes blazing. Plus it was me and Jack basically, and it was all overdubs. I was still struck trying to see if that bullshit approach would work.’
Elliot Roberts would often shake his head when he got to referring to his client’s unnerving predilection for consorting with ‘strange impossible’ personalities. Nitzsche and Briggs conformed to this description in their own unique ways, but they were more eccentrics than the flat-out crazies and the walking-wounded types that Young seemed particularly drawn to. One of the latter group had to be this soulful loser with the sad junkie eyes called Danny Whitten, whose group, the Rockets, Young had initially infiltrated not long after joining the Buffalo Springfield, mostly in order to get closer to Robin Lane, who’d originally been bass-player Billy Talbot’s girlfriend. Of the former group – well, Neil sometimes liked to hang out with Dennis Wilson, the volatile and somewhat confused drummer for the Beach Boys, after they’d spent some time together in early ’68 on a package tour. Soon enough, the drummer would invite Young to meet a very special acquaintance of his, a guitar-strumming maniac he referred to only as the ‘Wizard’ and Young too would briefly fall under Charles Manson’s wayward spell:
‘I first met Charlie with Dennis Wilson over at Dennis’s house. A lot of pretty well-known musicians around LA knew him too, though they’d probably deny it now. But fuck, why deny it? He was potentially a poet, that guy. The girls were around, too. [Linda] Kasabian and the other one [Patricia Krenwinkel] – they were always there. They’d be right there on the couch with me, singing a song. They were always around. And Charlie’d talk to me all the time about how he’d been in jail so much that there was no longer any difference between being in or out of jail. He said, “You’re in jail, no matter what side of the bars you’re on. It’s like Hadrian’s Wall OK . . . Every wall has two reasons for existing.” So, Charlie . . . what side of the fence was he really on? Who knows? He certainly didn’t. And that’s what a lot of his songs were about. There was a purpose to what he was doing.
‘Listen, he was great. He was unreal. He was really, really good. Scary. Put him with a band that was as free as he was . . . see, that was the problem right there. No one was ever going to catch up with Charlie Manson ’cos he’d make up the songs as he went along. Every song was different. And they were all good. They were all simple . . . He’d just play a couple of chords and keep on going. The words just kept on coming out. Listen, I actually went to Mo Ostin [head of Warner Bros.] and suggested that they sign him. I referred him. I said, “There’s this guy, Charlie Manson, he plays these unique songs and he should be on Warner Bros, records.” I mean, if he’d had a band like Dylan had on “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, then . . . But he was never gonna get that band, because there was just something about him that stopped anybody from being around him for long. I was always glad to get out because he was too intense. He was one of these guys that wouldn’t let you off the hook. I was always thinking, “What’s he gonna do next? I’d better get out this guy’s way before he explodes.” So I did.’
Soon after these encounters had tapered off, Young rather impulsively married a willowy Californian woman with waist-length blonde hair named Susan Acevedo and moved both her and her seven-year-old daughter by a former marriage into his house on stilts, built right on the side of Topanga Canyon and filled with candles, skin rugs, a recording studio sound system, a dog called Winnipeg and half a dozen Persian kittens: ‘Well, I thought that would help, I guess,’ he would later confide. ‘I thought that would ground me out. I’ve never been what you’d call a run-around kind of guy with the opposite sex. I was looking for some kind of stability, for sure. I was looking to get a grip [on my life].’
At the exact same time he also created another flat-out rock group for him to front, Crazy Horse, from Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, guitarist, bassist and drummer respectively from the aforementioned Rockets: ‘Crazy Horse . . . the original group all came from New York. They used to hang out on street-corners and sing doo-wop songs when they were kids. They were pretty tough guys, as you might well imagine. That’s what made them real tough-sounding musicians.’
Billy Talbot – somehow he and Young had made up over the little matter of Robin Lane’s romantic loyalties – was like a little fire-cracker, always bursting with a mischievous energy. Molina was more laid back: he preferred to sit back and soak things up with more detached eyes. Whitten, the leader, was tough physically but his doped-out, dirty blonde-haired exterior housed another of those fatal fragile hearts that had recently been broken – by a sixteen-year-old girl, no less – forcing its owner to feel compelled to sponge up the void with copious shots of heroin:
‘Danny Whitten was the leader, and first of all he was a great singer. He kind of reminded me of Richard Manuel of the Band . . . That kind of feel. It was a wonderful voice for me to sing against. Plus, he was a great guitar player. And I could play with him and it felt wonderful. Frankly, there are very few people who can really do that for me. But he could. Until his drug problem got the better of him.’
They certainly weren’t the greatest musicians in the world but they played in such an instinctive and primordial way that, when enough pot had been communally smoked and the beat had settled down into a thick swampy groove that managed to sound simultaneously plodding and exhilarating well, then, that’s when things always started getting good and giddy and Young could feel he was starting to strike at the very mother-lode of his creative abilities.
While Young and David Briggs were putting Crazy Horse through their paces in five freewheeling studio sessions that would result in the album Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, released in mid-’69 only a matter of months after his ill-starred debut, his old sparring partner Stephen Stills was finishing off the first album he was making with fellow egomaniac ex-Byrd, David Crosby, and their mellower Mancunian ‘soul brother’, ex-Hollie, Graham Nash. Maybe it was because the Beatles were winding down for good in 1969 and the whole sprawling youth culture trip was after a new errant band of self-absorbed minstrels to fill the void with more uplifting ‘let’s keep the faith’ musical bromides and more witless radical posturing. Anyway, CS&N and their début release caught on like wildfire during the summer of 1969, by which time Neil Young had been somehow also recruited on to the musical board of directors, making it suddenly CSN&Y:
‘Well, Stephen came up to my house and asked me to join the group. I thought about it and said, “Maybe.” Then they weren’t sure they wanted to put my name in with theirs . . . I told them, “No way.” So then, after my name was included, I thought, “Shit. Well, sure, I’ll do this. But only as long as I can do my own thing with Crazy Horse at the same time.” So I did both of ’em.
‘See, the way I used to work then – this would be the summer of 1969 we’re talking about now – I’d usually go in and record with Crazy Horse at Sunset Sound Studios every morning. Then I’d go to CSN&Y rehearsal in the afternoon through to the evening. Then I’d go home, crash out, get up the next morning and do the same routine all over again. That’s when “I Believe in You”, “O Lonesome Me”, “Wondering” . . . a couple of others on After the Goldrush – all those songs were conceived there and recorded there. That’s where I first cut “Helpless”, by the way, and the only reason the Crazy Horse version didn’t come out is because the engineer didn’t record the perfect take, so . . . bam, that was lost.’
The truth be known, he rarely felt comfortable in the company of the other three. Nash was a sweet guy who wanted to make the best of everything, but Crosby and Stills were already too coked-up all the time (they’d even toyed initially with naming the group ‘the Frozen Noses’, for God’s sake) and the egos and petty irritabilities were already flying around backstage the night of their first gig proper in the windy city of Chicago. One of them was always picking on the other for copping out in some way. ‘You preach one thing in your lyrics but it’s another thing in real life’ verbal knife-fights were being staged constantly. The second gig they played crystallized their impact and turned them into overnight icons. It was a performance at the Woodstock festival which would have the general public for ever more linking the self-styled ‘super-group’ and the three-day music and mud-fest together in their collective mind. A year later there was even a three-hour film and CSN&Y’s hyperactive hot-shot of a business manager David Geffen had managed to make them the central act of the whole peace-and-love circus even though they’d originally been thirteenth on the bill:
‘I would not allow them to use the footage of Crosby, Stills and Nash in the movie unless they used [fellow client] Joni Mitchell’s song with CSN&Y singing it as the theme of the movie. That’s how that happened. The producers were simply going to give me what I wanted or that was it. And since I represented a lot of important acts on Warner Bros., Atlantic and Elektra, they just weren’t going to fuck with me.’
There were two amazing aspects to this coalition. The first was that CNS&Y had actually played so badly and sung so out of tune at Woodstock, they’d had to go back in the studio and over-dub new parts for the consequent film sequence and soundtrack album selections of their performance. The second was that, just prior to taking the stage at Woodstock, Neil Young had kicked up a huge fuss about not being filmed or even mentioned at an event that would arguably do more than any other single stroke of luck to catapult both him and his cohorts to the very summit of superstardom:
‘Listen, if you look through every frame of the movie, I’m not in the film. I even made ’em change our introduction. If you listen to the introduction by Crosby Stills Nash and Young on the Woodstock soundtrack, it’s been edited down and juggled around so it sounds like [funny voice] “Crosby . . . Stills . . . Nash . . . [laughs].” ’Cos they had to cut my name out. If you listen out for it, it’s actually pretty funny. But that’s the way it was. Why? Because I didn’t want to be filmed, that’s why. ’Cos I was playing, that’s why. And I didn’t want a fuckin’ guy standing in front of me with a camera. We were pretty bad at Woodstock. Nothing jelled, not for me anyway. We were riding on our popularity, that’s what it was. Just cresting along.’
After a mind-bogglingly successful first CSN&Y tour of America, Young stuck around San Francisco to help the increasingly volatile quartet record their second release, although technically their first as now it was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. In the middle of the sessions Crosby’s girlfriend, Christine Hinton, was killed in an automobile accident during the fall of ’69 and that sent him spinning off into a drug-sodden void of intense grieving that lent a tragic edge to the endless nerve-frazzling sessions. Nash would find himself bursting into tears from a combination of the frustrations that were keeping all four so distant from each other and the drugs that once seemed to bring them so close together. Stills, after a whole year of cocaine and mass adulation, was becoming more physically aggressive about asserting his musical leadership upon the rest, but only Young was actually coming up with the kind of timeless songs that CSN&Y would quickly need in order to substantiate their ecstatic following. First, he gave them his most sublime meditation on childhood memory, ‘Helpless’, for the album that became known as Déjà Vu; then, spurred by the shootings of four students at Kent State University in May 1970, he pulled together the increasingly disparate elements of the group to record a song written about the incident, entitled ‘Ohio’, that remains their most incendiary performance. But by this time Graham Nash had run off with a young woman Stephen Stills had had serious romantic designs on, so that was the end of CSN&Y right there for several years.
By that time, though, Young couldn’t have cared less. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere was already platinum, and he’d augmented Crazy Horse with Jack Nitzsche’s honky-tonk piano playing, so he took off on a tour, recording each date for a projected live album of new songs. The music that was made during these shows, which later resurfaced on bootleg tapes, remains some of the most exciting of Young’s whole career, yet Young vetoed the idea of releasing the material and, owing to his alarm at Whitten’s deteriorating condition from heroin abuse, went so far as to sack Crazy Horse at the end of the tour, hoping that this would shock the dazed guitarist into quitting the drug. It didn’t. Not long after he gave the Horse their marching orders, a song called ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’ would unflinchingly document the doomed Whitten’s slow, sure decline:
‘Then it was the end of a great band, that’s what it was. See, people always compare Crazy Horse with CSN&Y . . . that’s wrong. You should compare Crazy Horse with Buffalo Springfield and, if you do, you’ll find that it’s like the Beatles and the Stones. That’s the difference. But when Danny was gone, Crazy Horse was just like the Stones without Keith Richards. That’s the way I looked at it. And it’s never been the same since.’
Still, nothing has ever seemed to slow down Young for too long and he quickly rebounded in the early autumn of 1970 with After the Goldrush, his third solo album. The title track was a fairly straight depiction of a weird movie script written by the actor Dean Stockwell ‘about the day of the great earthquake in Topanga Canyon when a great wave of water flooded the place’. The rest was divided between the Sunset Sound recordings made the previous year with Crazy Horse and a bunch of tracks recorded in his home and produced once again by David Briggs. By the time the record was released Young had left his wife, even though a picture of them together backstage at some gig made up the main photograph for the album packaging. He’d also outgrown the Topanga house he recorded it in and was moving to a 140-acre ranch he’d just bought (with cash) in San Mateo just outside San Francisco.
Whenever he stopped briefly and allowed himself to glance back over the past two years, Young had much to occupy his thoughts. He was aghast at how many of his dearest colleagues were becoming hopeless burn-outs, and it wasn’t just Whitten, although he was certainly the furthest gone. Heroin had also infiltrated the CSN&Y camp, and even members of the rhythm section and road crew were falling like flies under its influence. Meanwhile, the omnipresent cocaine seemed to be turning almost everyone Young came into contact with into a twitching wreck. Young liked to use cocaine himself sometimes, but he always made sure he never let the sensation overwhelm him like it evidently had with these other guys. To top it all, one night Young had walked off stage in the fall of ’69, having partaken in all these ultra-positive CSN&Y-type vibrations, to be presented with a photograph of some demented-looking hippie stooge that took up almost all of the first page of a prominent daily paper:
‘See, when it first came out that there’d been this horrible murder and the guy’s name was Charles Manson, I never put it all together with this other guy Charlie that I’d known. Until one day a mutual acquaintance said something that triggered it off. He said, “Y’know, Charles Manson, the mass murderer – that’s the Charlie we both used to know.” And I thought, “Oh, shit, so that was Charlie!” [Smiles.]’
Of course, while those he felt the most drawn to were busy losing themselves down their own haphazard highways, Young’s road ahead seemed paved with gold and limitless possibilities. But that didn’t make him feel any better, either:
‘All I knew was that things were happening really fast for me and that I had a lot of music that I had to get out of me. But, all the time, my biggest problem was always in figuring out how in hell to make the fuckin’ records sound right! That was really my only concern. I wasn’t concerned about my so-called image. For me, an image becomes meaningless inasmuch as it’s always temporary. See, I’ve gone off on that tangent again, because you asked me about the image and all that. I just couldn’t relate to all that side of things because, all that time, I was focused on trying to make the music sound half-way decent. I mean, here I was with all this sudden success, all these fuckin’ people loving me and looking at me like I’m something special and yet I couldn’t really give it to ’em in return! I wasn’t making a sound that I enjoyed or that I thought was representative of what I was hearing in my head! I was almost thinking, “Oh man, this is happening too soon for me. Maybe I’m really a hype.”’
And then he had to slow right down for most of ’71. He’d been lifting heavy slabs of polished walnut in order to decorate a room in his new ranch and the activity had put his back out:
‘Well, my spinal column was literally disintegrating and I had to lay in bed for months prior to recording that album. And I’d met an actress named Carrie Snodgrass, who I quickly ended up living with. We had my first son together, a beautiful little boy called Zeke. So those things were very prominent. That was the content, if you like, but the musical feel of Harvest had nothing to do with either one of them. Somehow I just wanted to get really laid-back. Harvest was me saying, “OK, folks, I can do all those other things, play out on the edge, go nuts and do ‘Ohio’ and ‘Southern Man’. OK. Fine. But later for that.” I was saying, “OK, let’s just get really, really mellow and peaceful. Let’s make music that’s just as intense as the electric stuff but which comes from a completely different, more loving place.”’
Harvest was released in the early months of 1972 and sold up a storm. Everywhere you’d turn that year, Young’s baleful little-boy-lost voice riding on a rolling country groove and crooning about searching for a heart of gold – ‘And I’m getting old!’ – would be assaulting your senses, whether it was leaping from either AM or FM radio or out of your dope dealer’s stereo speakers. One such recipient was Bob Dylan, Neil Young’s quintessential hero, then in the final years of his self-initiated period of seclusion from a public who still wanted to worship him as a god and a prophet when all he’d really become at that point was a nervous family man and a semi-retired songwriter lost in the unsettling fog of creative inertia. He’d actually tried to deflate his myth by releasing unspeakably bad records like Self-Portrait but it somehow only grew bigger, and now he was stuck in Phoenix, Arizona, standing by helplessly as Neil Young stepped into his own fucking shadow. Listening to his plaintive Canuck wail that season made Dylan feel extra-spooky:
‘The only time it bothered me that someone sounded like me was when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about ’72, and the big song at the time was “Heart of Gold”. I used to hate it when it came on the radio. I always liked Neil Young, but it bothered me every time I listened to “Heart of Gold”. I think it was up at number one for a long time, and I’d say, “Shit, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.” There I was, stuck out in the desert someplace, having to cool out for a while. New York was a heavy place. Woodstock was worse, people living in trees outside my house, fans trying to batter down my door, cars following me up dark mountain roads. I needed to lay back for a while, forget about things, myself included, and I’d get so far away and turn on the radio and there I am, but it’s not me. It seemed to me somebody else had taken my thing and had run away with it, you know, and I never got over it. Maybe tomorrow.’
But while Dylan moped, Young was out and about again, filming his first ambitious under-conceived mess of a film. An obscure autobiographical thing called Journey through the Past, clearly inspired by Fellini (Young also claims Godard as a guiding influence in his movie-making), it documented his dreams and more memorable acid hallucinations (masked horsemen riding along a beach in pursuit of Young was a particularly favoured sequence) and the incredibly stoned pomposity and self-importance of Crosby, Stills and Nash among many other diverse and unconnected themes. What was most surprising about it when you finally saw it was just how little it really told you about Neil Young, apart from the fact that he was hopelessly self-obsessed and smoked far too much pot to make proper sense sometimes.
In ’73 his back was fully recovered so he returned to the road, but the tour was jinxed even before the first date had been played. Young had gathered together a fine band, including Jack Nitzsche back on the ivories, but during rehearsals he missed Danny Whitten’s presence in his music so much he asked him to join the group as second guitarist. Young’s offer was to have terminally tragic consequences, for Whitten was in no fit state to play what was required of him. During rehearsals it quickly dawned on Young that continuing drug abuse had finally eaten away all Whitten’s natural talent.
‘He just couldn’t keep up,’ Young would later reminisce. ‘Once in the middle of one song he’d slip into another and didn’t even know it. I tried and tried but he just couldn’t do it anymore.’ After several days of witnessing this fiasco Young simply let him go, giving him the air fare back to LA and some extra cash to tide him over. Later that night he received a phone call telling him that Whitten was dead from a self-administered overdose.
There were other problems on the tour itself, including musicians threatening to leave over money and Young losing his voice. He pieced together a live album of new songs from the tour but it sounded nervous and abrasive most of the time, and Young seemed to have suddenly become openly cynical in his lyrics about the freewheeling hippie doctrines he’d once been associated with via CSN&Y’s supposed rapport with the counter-culture. ‘You can make it on your own time?/Laid-back and laughing? Oh no!’ he’d admonished during the album’s grand finale. It was just his way of letting the culture know that the upcoming seventies were going to be very, very hard indeed, that all that sixties sweet-talk no longer applied to what lay ahead, and that it was time, for him at least, to get to grips with the dark, deadly undertow of the Aquarian age. His next project made the stomach-churning guitar crunch and cloudy sentiments of Time Fades Away seem like a romp through the park. Still haunted by Whitten’s memory, Young felt compelled to regroup with the remaining members of Crazy Horse and record some kind of tribute to his passing. While sessions were being booked, Young was informed of another drug death close to home:
‘Bruce Berry was the brother of Jan Berry of Jan and Dean who did “Surf City” and all those surf hits from the early sixties. He was a roadie for CSN&Y, Stephen’s guitar roadie. He was just a really cool guy, always around, part of the scene. Then all of a sudden, he’s not right anymore. Then he’s selling other people’s guitars . . . That’s when you know there is a major drug problem going down. Guitars disappearing and he’s one of the crew and he’s telling us all this bullshit . . . Then he died.’
Young quickly pulled together a bunch of bleak, sinister-sounding odes to the on-going drug culture and recorded them in a series of sessions which involved all the musicians drinking and drugging themselves into near-oblivion. There was a ghostly tribute to Berry entitled ‘Tonight’s the Night’, a couple of numbers that referred ironically to Young’s own sodden condition (’Borrowed Song’, ‘Roll Another Number’) and, most chilling of all, the matter-of-fact recounting of a mass murder during a drug deal over an electric grave-yard waltz otherwise known as ‘Tired Eyes’. Everyone thought he’d taken the incident from some random newspaper report. In fact, the guy who’d done the killing was yet another of Young’s strange, impossible running buddies:
‘That actually happened to a friend of mine. My friend was the guy who shot the other guys [laughs]. He’s doing OK now. He’s already been to jail and come back. He wasn’t gone for that long, either. It was just one of those deals that turned bad. He didn’t have any choice really. The lyric is just a straight narrative account of what happened.’
Needless to say, Warner Bros, and Elliot Roberts were more than a little disturbed by Young’s ‘new direction’. Time Fades Away had sold abysmally in relation to the platinum bonanza reaped by its predecessor, Harvest, and the Journey through the Past movie had not been greeted favourably by either critics or fans. The record label compelled Young to put his uncomfortably raw mix of Tonights the Night – the title he’d chosen for the album he’d fashioned from those raucous sessions – on the back-burner. But Roberts couldn’t prevent Young from going out to tour the Tonights the Night material around Europe in a series of breath-taking performances that found the singer-songwriter more determined than ever to destroy all traces of his old ‘sensitive’ downbeat-guy persona:
‘That tour was so much fun. We were just testing the boundaries, seeing how people would react. We were consciously trying to make the whole thing much less serious. I mean, if the audience were serious when they came to those concerts about me being some “rock god” or “prophet” or something, that show would really fiickin’ straighten ’em out [laughs]! We just wanted to be as sleazy as possible. We were basically saying, “This is total bullshit, you might as well be gambling and eating while you’re listening to this music.” That was the motto of the show. “Everything’s cheaper than it looks . . . Welcome to Miami Beach, everything’s cheaper than it looks [laughs]”’
Upon his return to the States at the end of 1973 Young secluded himself in his newly purchased Malibu house and continued to preoccupy his mind with gloomy thoughts. He was drying out from a lengthy drink-and-drugs binge precipitated by the Tonights the Night sessions and continued throughout the subsequent tour, but a deeper angst was daily growing from the fact that he was fast finding he had little in common with the woman who’d borne his beloved only child and who was now living back on his San Mateo ranch. So Young did what he did best: he brooded and wrote songs obsessively trying to accurately reflect what was going on in his soul. A number of these ended up on the down-beat On the Beach album released in mid-’74. Both the title track and cover shot both portray him standing stoned on his beach, staring out at the sea but seeing only his own problems looming back at him, while just beyond the horizon the whole glorious counter-culture he’d once been so taken with was slowly sinking under the weight of its own selfishness and inherent apathy. It’s one of his best albums but it’s evidently not one he’s particularly comfortable with these days:
‘Oh, that was a pretty dark album as well. It was obscure too. I remember writing and recording those songs just before the break-up of my relationship with Carrie . . . Actually it was just at the very beginning of that.’
By the time On the Beach was out in the shops, Young was back filling the stadiums, standing tall alongside his old cronies Crosby, Stills and Nash. He travelled separately from the rest of the group, avoiding the bitching and back-biting that still went on between them as much as possible:
‘That ’74 tour was really the swan-song of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young for me. I remember when we started the tour and I wanted to play one of my On the Beach songs, “Revolution Blues”, which I wrote about Charles Manson. And Crosby and the rest . . . Man, they didn’t know if they wanted to stand on the same stage as me when I was doin’ it! I was goin’, “It’s just a fuckin’ song. What’s the big deal? It’s about the culture. It’s about what’s really happening.” See, that’s why I always went for Crazy Horse over CSN&Y. We tried to record a third album live with CSN&Y in ’74 . . . but the problem simply was they didn’t have enough material to make a third album apart from me. They ended up doing seven of my new songs on that tour and, if we’d released a live album of that tour, there’d have been seven of mine and one each from the other three! They had no more new songs! That’s why I wouldn’t let them put it out. ’Cos I didn’t want it to be the Neil Young show with CS&N in support . . . Fuck that! That’s not what I wanted from working with that group, ever.
‘Actually, after that tour we tried one more time to record together at the Record Plant in LA. I walked in and . . . almost immediately everybody got too drugged out and they were all fighting all the time. So, one time, I was driving to the studio and I just knew it was going to be a drag so I just turned around and went home. And stayed home, as far as that project was concerned.’
By the end of the year, CSN&Y were gone from his life and so was Carrie Snodgrass. Their final parting provoked a period of even darker brooding for Young, who felt particularly guilty about not being able to provide a solid family unit for his young partially crippled son. A collection of songs directly relating to the break-up that he’d composed and recorded under the title of Homegrown was deemed too depressing for release, even by Young’s standards, so the singer-songwriter retaliated by pressing for the release of Tonight’s the Night once more. Warner Bros, relented in early 1975, by which time he’d reunited with Crazy Horse, who’d found one ‘Pancho’ Sampedro to cover for Danny Whitten’s old guitar role. The fruits of their jamming throughout the early part of 1975 were streamlined into a vibrant, sometimes even upbeat collection of songs that were recorded and released under the title of Zuma. Starting with a spirited version of one of his first ever compositions from back in Thunder Bay, ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’, it continued on by portraying the singer as alternatively a swinging bachelor cautiously up for grabs (’Looking for a Love’, ‘Barstool Blues’) and a tortured soul deeply wounded by the failure of his most recent relationship. There were also a couple of new meaningless rockers, a strange splurge of rock’n’roll spleen entitled ‘Stupid Girl’ rumoured to be aimed at Young’s Canadian singing-songwriting soul sister Joni Mitchell, and a remarkable fantasy about the explorer Cortez recorded in a live take that also managed to capture extracts of his electric guitar playing at its incandescent peak. Yet even in the midst of this moody meditation on the taming of ancient civilizations, he couldn’t prevent himself from inexplicably referring back to his angst over leaving Snodgrass:
‘Zuma’s a good one. I was a single man again so there was that feeling going on. American Stars ’n’ Bars is like that too. There was certainly cause for a celebration as I had just gotten back with Crazy Horse. Danny’s death changed the dynamics of Crazy Horse. But not the overall feeling of what we were about. We still remember, but – it’s a band. Especially when I look at Ralph [Molina] and Billy [Talbot], when I’m playing with them. We go back a long way and there’s never going to be a replacement for those guys. And when I feel like playing that kind of music, those are the guys I like to play it with. So many rock’n’roll musicians are out there trying to do something unique – the biggest thing in their way is how much they know. Crazy Horse is not about technical expertise.’
The whole album was recorded in David Briggs’s house in Zuma, California, and one night, while Young and the rest were recording, the producer happened to peer out of his front window and see a suspicious-looking stranger with beard and curly hair in an anonymous-looking van parked directly in his driveway, listening intently to the music being played inside. It turned out to be Bob Dylan, fresh from recording his own raw depiction of a marriage gone sour in the form of his greatest album of the seventies, Blood on the Tracks, furtively checking out his nearest rival.
Young toured with the Horse after that, as well as later putting in some time with the Ducks, a tough bar-band managed by a close friend. He released another fairly upbeat collection, American Stars ’n’ Bars, which further projected his single-man status with much rambunctious country-rock and one of his most outstanding meditations on the overwhelming force of romantic infatuation at first bud, ‘Like a Hurricane’. During the sessions, he started dating one of his back-up singers, Nicolette Larson, and the two became an item for a while. Young was still with her when he went to Nashville to record an attempted return to the easy listening country-rock format of Harvest that he first entitled Gone with the Wind before changing it to Comes a Time. Every note sounded polished and there wasn’t a single decibel of loud electric guitar to be heard in the mix, but there was still a chilly edge to Young’s intense romantic advances in ‘Look Out for My Love’. The record also contains his most moving rumination on the ties still binding him to Carrie Snodgrass and little Zeke, a piece of country autobiography every bit as naked and plaintive as any of Hank Williams’s finest rolls over the coals of heartache, a song called ‘Already One’.
But even before Comes a Time was out on sale, Young was finished with being mellow and reflective and back to being bold and abrasive and holding up the rear with Crazy Horse. Young had heard about punk rock, realized quite correctly that it was basically the kind of racket he and Crazy Horse had been making all along and gathered together a clutch of his noisiest rockers. ‘Sedam Delivery’ and the remarkable ‘Powder-finger’ were two songs he’d first written in the early seventies when punk was still a fifties slang term for a feisty juvenile delinquent, then tried to get them recorded by Lynyrd Skynyrd, an ill-starred Southern boogie band renowned for putting Young down by name in the lyrics of their biggest hit, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. ‘Out of the Blue’ – a tense reflection on the fall of Elvis and the rise of Johnny Rotten – forwarded the theory that in rock’n’roll ‘it’s better to burn out than fade away’, sentiments that would haunt him profoundly in later years. And there were some radiant acoustic songs on board, principally ‘The Thrasher’, a magnificent testament to Young’s thirst for continual change in which his old colleagues Crosby, Stills and Nash are portrayed as ‘Just dead weight to me/Better down the road without that load.’
Rust Never Sleeps, the album that collected together these remarkable songs, proved to be arguably the finest of his career to date and, as it was released in early 1979 and had presaged a number of other records of almost equal merit, most of the prestige rock critics got together and awarded Young the title of ‘Artist of the Seventies’ in both Village Voice and Rolling Stone. At almost exactly the same time he’d married a lovely Californian girl called Pegi Morton who’d grown up living in the area next to his ranch and who was already expecting his second child, a little boy they called Ben, who arrived in November 1978. As the final months of those bountiful seventies scurried by, Young should have felt like he was truly on top of the world. But he didn’t feel blessed; no, instead, he felt cursed, cursed with a fatal trick-gene that now caused him to be the father of a spastic, quadriplegic, non-oral new-born baby by one woman, when his first child Zeke, by another woman, had been born with slight cerebral palsy.
‘It was too big a picture,’ Young reminisced to a journalist from the Village Voicemany years later. ‘Too big. Pegi’s heartbroken, we’re both shocked. I couldn’t believe it. There were two different mothers. It couldn’t have happened twice. I remember looking at the sky, looking for a sign, wondering, “What the fuck is going on? Why are the kids in this situation? What the hell caused this? What did I do? There must be something wrong with me.” So I made up my mind I was gonna take care of Pegi, take care of the kids. We were gonna go on, we weren’t gonna be selfish. That’s what I was gonna do, and I wasn’t going to hurt. And if you shut yourself off and say, “This isn’t going to hurt me,” you can’t shut it down without shutting it down totally. I closed myself down so much that I was making it, doing great with surviving – but my soul was completely encased. I didn’t even consider that I would need a soul to play my music, that when I shut the door on pain, I shut the door on my music. That’s what I did. And that’s how people get old.’
Young’s domestic upheavals in the eighties seeped into his music-making, throwing his music a curve it never got to bounce back from until the very end of the decade. Many of the songs on the unspectacular Hawks And Doves are almost private assertions regarding enlarged family responsibility. The dizzyingly brash and repetitive Reactor was conceived to accompany a gruelling therapy programme he committed his child to undertaking (’The programme is driving, implacable, repetitive,’ he was quoted as saying at the time. ‘And so is Reactor.’) Reactor’s failure in the marketplace compelled him to stomp off Reprise records, where he’d remained since 1969 and the release of his first album, signing instead with the Geffen label. This only precipitated further nightmares for Young. His first album for the label – Trans – made no sense to anyone. Apart from Young, that is, who’d fashioned an unintelligible sci-fi rock opera about computers directly inspired by his own son’s inability to communicate. (‘Trans is about communication, about not getting through. And that’s what my son is. You gotta realize – you can’t understand the words on Trans and I can’t understand my son’s words. So feel that!’)
After that Young just seemed to get weirder and weirder for a time. A subsequent foray into country music was shunned by Geffen, who wanted more rock’n’roll. So Young quite vindictively gave the label Everybody’s Rockin, a make-weight and generally pointless fifties rockabilly pastiche, before returning to the country field and inhabiting a Reagan-supporting ‘good ole boy’ cartoon of a persona that would finally cause David Geffen himself to slap him with a three-million-dollar lawsuit for continuing to make ‘unrepresentative’ music. An album of crusty mainstream Nashville country, Old Ways, duly appeared, however, and this coincided with Young – now in his forties – doing a number of interviews in which, betwixt voicing a disturbingly pro-Reagan bias, he stated that playing full-tilt rock’n’roll was pretty much all a thing of the past for him now (’Rock’n’roll is like a drug . . . I don’t want to do it all the time ’cos it’ll kill me’).
However, these sentiments didn’t hinder him from next recording a loud electric rock album – Landing on Water – which featured several promising songs left still-born by ill-conceived arrangements and production. Sensing this, Young next relocated with good old Crazy Horse, and a passable album in the seventies vein, Life, resulted from the collaboration. Young celebrated the end of his fractious Geffen tenure by touring extensively with Crazy Horse while at the same time filming a documentary of the event. The tour was frustrating for Young however – Crazy Horse bass-player Billy Talbot was suffering from a drinking problem, and as Young would later claim, ‘I would do the song, lay it out and they wouldn’t be able to remember the arrangement . . . There’s gotta be a memory-retention problem.’ Consequently there was considerable ugly friction spilling over into the documentary footage which Young edited together, entitling the results Muddy Track.
Uglier still was the friction Young next had to face after committing himself to a second album as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. It had started with a promise he’d made during a 1984 radio interview, when he’d vowed to record again with Crosby, Stills and Nash if David Crosby succeeded in conquering his now fabled addiction to free-base cocaine. Three years later Crosby had achieved just that and Young was left with no alternative but to deliver on his word. Suddenly, his former manager and current bitter enemy David Geffen was phoning up Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic’s elegant head man, demanding 50 per cent of the action if the musician he’d just been suing was involved, screaming down the line, ‘Crosby, Stills and Nash are old fat farts! The only one with any talent is Neil Young! I can’t believe we’re arguing about this!’ However, there was a bigger problem looming, as the addiction that almost destroyed Crosby had now turned its grip on Stephen Stills. By the end of the sessions – which took place in Young’s own ranch house studio – Stills was unnerving everybody with his deranged mush-mouthed behaviour. Guns and free-base equipment were often visible around him, but what was even more disturbing was his deluded insistence about having served in Vietnam when everybody around him had to keep reminding him gently that he’d in fact been playing in the Buffalo Springfield at the time he was claiming to have been on special manoeuvres, killing ‘gooks’.
Even though during the recording he’d once remarked disgustedly that the album be entitled Songs for Balding Base-Heads, Young still tried to make the best of things. But even an emotive ballad he’d written for all the dispossessed families of the Reagan era, ‘This Old House’, couldn’t disguise the fact that, as Geffen had so acidly put it, Young was the only one in the quartet left with any talent now.
The CSN&Y reunion did have one providential aspect though, in that witnessing his old Buffalo Springfield sparring partner in such a wretched condition soon spurred Young on to pen one of his most powerful rockers ever, ‘Cocaine Eyes’, a withering indictment of drug paralysis that clearly pointed the finger at Stills and his hateful ego. ‘Do I think that cocaine destroyed CSN&Y? Absolutely. Cocaine and ego. Shit, all you need is one and if the other comes around, then it’s like an explosion happens.’
Perhaps it was because ‘Cocaine Eyes’ was just too wounding in its portrayal of Stills, but Young, after recording the number as well as four others in a blazing session held in New York’s Times Square and using just a bassist, a drummer and his devastating electric guitar-playing, released the results on a limited-edition EP available only in Japan. ‘Eldorado’ – that was its title – thus enjoyed a somewhat limited exposure, but wherever it got played as an import release it became clear to those among Young’s core following that something had come alive again right at the heart of his creative spirit.
He’d been doing his chameleon act in ’88, playing this funky old blues guitarist fronting the Bluenotes, a band with a big, brash horn section, and had managed a freak hit of sorts with the anti-’rock-stars-playing-corporate-kiss-arses’ invective of ‘This Note’s for You’. However, even Young himself seemed somewhat nonplussed by its success: ‘I remember writing it in my bus, turning to my driver and saying, “Jesus Christ, this must be the most idiotic fucking song I’ve ever written.” I [Pause.] still can’t believe that such a dumb little song could have helped resuscitate my career the way it did.’
I’d first met him a year later, in the late autumn of 1989, after he’d compiled and made available an album called Freedom containing three ‘Eldorado’ cuts, a bunch of mellower items from Young’s archives and a great surging instant classic called ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, ‘part anthem, part protest song about democracy and what’s going on every day in the streets of America’ that even managed to connect briefly with a moment of sweeping world change when it became an unofficial soundtrack item for the demolishing of the Berlin Wall. Young was back in the creative vanguard again but he still seemed most taken with dark visions of humanity. He didn’t feel so good about all this glasnost, for example. ‘This is like the Bible,’ he muttered gravely at one point, referring to the relaxing of the grip of communism across the East. ‘This is a Biblical thing that’s going down right now, you understand. And I’m just saying here and now that it’s . . . all . . . completely out of control . . . The drugs are gonna be all over the streets of Europe. We’ve got a lot to deal with here, but it’s probably . . . too late!’ The only other issue that caused him more consternation was the subject of him ‘coming back’ after his years in the creative wilderness.
When he heard the word ‘comeback’ associated with his name, his wise old owl’s face would turn suddenly gaunt and foreboding. His eyes would snake out and his hands would stab themselves into the ample pockets of an extraordinary calf-length medicine man coat he was wearing, an artefact of clothing so unsettling to the eye it looked as though Young must have won it off some ill-attired Red Indian wino during a friendly card game. Then he would address the topic with a hard bark to his voice:
‘All these reviewers writing stuff about my comeback! . . . Listen, I don’t have to come back ’cos I’ve never been gone! They write stuff like, “Oh, this year Neil Young’s OK again.” Fuck them, I don’t need them to tell me if I’m OK or not! As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always been OK! I just can’t associate with anyone or anything involved in a comeback right now. Well, sure, I can associate with Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. Both their recent albums are great. But with us three, you’ve got to understand – it’s a big time in our lives right now. We’ve come through, we’ve survived intact and we’re still creatively focused. But I can’t – and I won’t – relate myself to the Who or the Stones or the Jefferson Airplane. Not in the nineties! No way. And I used to love all those bands, particularly the Stones. Only somewhere along the line they lost it for me. And then what happened in 1989 with those mega-tours – that is not what I love. That was nothing more than a remembrance, a swansong. The music the Stones and Who play now has got nothing whatsoever to do with rock’n’roll. Spiritually it’s all Perry Como.
‘But, I never went away! I just did other things. But I didn’t go away, OK! I’m not like some sixties band coming back to take advantage of some wave of bullshit nostalgia. I mean, I’m someone who’s always tried systematically to destroy the very basis of my record-buying public. My whole career is based on systematic destruction! For years and years! See, that’s what keeps me alive. You destroy what you did before and you’re free to carry on. So I’ve been busy destroying all these things.’ He starts to laugh now, in that weird ironic croak of his. ‘And now . . . Now I’m just fine!’
Later he would talk about this dream he’d just had in which he’d encountered these miraculous songs he’d never heard before and how he was currently obsessed with getting those songs out of his dreams and down on tape; whatever the consequences:
‘I feel I’m moving in the flow of something that is easier for me now. My music has taken me to a place now where I’m not fighting things anymore. Through most of the eighties I didn’t want my innermost feelings about life and everything to come out. Back then I had a lot of dark thoughts weighing on my mind, tied into experiences that happened in my immediate family. Things happened to me over those years I had no possible reason or way or capacity to expect to explain. At the same time, this inner voice has always dictated exactly what I have to do, but sometimes I’d wake up in the morning and I’d be given my orders, “OK, Neil, today you’re going to make this kind of music.” And I’d think, “Oh my God . . . OK I want to do this, I have to do this, but not too many people are going to like it!” But I’d still go ahead ’cos I’d want to hear it anyway.’
The following fall he had those songs he’d be dreaming about nailed down, with a rejuvenated Crazy Horse sending the recording console arrows flying into the red each full-moon-lit night the quartet would convene at Young’s ranch to play. Released in 1990, when the very idea of rock’n’roll seemed ever so slightly bankrupt and devoid of creative potential, the album really was something to behold. Certainly, there was no one else – young or old – capable of competing with it in terms of sounding so wild, wilful and true. The Horse now swung harder and longer than the Rolling Stones had for eons, but the real breakthrough still lay with Young, who fashioned a remarkable collection of songs mostly focused on facing up to the daunting responsibilities of leading a productive and loving life and then scorched them to ribbons with guitar-playing so hyper and abandoned it recalled the sensation of witnessing some buzz-saw-wielding maniac let loose in a rain forest. But there was something else to the feel of Ragged Glory, something truly remarkable. For no longer was Young’s most physical electric music powered by a spirit of taut anger. It had been replaced by a force somehow guided by a mixture of joy and exhilaration. ‘You’ve got love to burn/You’ve got to take a chance on love,’ Young would admonish on one track, before joining the Horse to lose himself in a throbbing jam every bit as ecstatic and spiritual as one of John Coltrane’s classic extrapolations with his own mighty quartet.
‘I’m just a part of Crazy Horse. It’s never me and Crazy Horse – no matter what it says on the album sleeves – it’s Crazy Horse. When there’s a guitar solo of mine on a Crazy Horse record, it’s not a guitar solo, it’s an instrumental. It just doesn’t happen without them. You hear me play with other people, my whole psychedelic side just doesn’t happen because nobody but Crazy Horse can really bring it out of me.’
I next spoke to Young a year later, after he’d just finished mixing down two CDs’ worth of live recordings from the US Ragged Glory tour he’d subsequently undertaken with Crazy Horse, a series of dates that had coincided with America beginning its Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. As a result, most of the music had a genuinely cataclysmic edge to it, with Young and his cronies orchestrating long feed-back finales at the end of most selections that sounded just like a series of horrendous bombs ripping a large building slowly to its foundations:
‘The war, the tour and this record are all one thing in my mind. You can’t separate them. The whole thing was a sign of the times and the record is also very much a reflection of the audience we were playing to. Everyone in the States was so emotionally involved in the Gulf War. We could see and hear it every night, on people’s faces, on the TV, on the telephone . . . Each night the audience would be full of “Support Our Troops” stickers, yellow ribbons and peace symbols . . . At one show there was a lady there, maybe twenty-five years old, with two kids, and she was crying through the whole show. So something was really happening with her. She’d come just to try and relate to something she could understand. She wanted to make real contact with me and my music. It was this kind of emotional explosiveness that was the real catalyst for the music you hear on Weld.’
He also claimed to be almost through working on his next studio release, a tender acoustic foray brought on after Young’s hearing had suffered temporary damage as a result of playing at the excessive volumes required for the Ragged Glory tour’s sonic firestorms.
‘I may do a little more work but basically it’s finished. See, after completing Arc, I didn’t want to do any more of that loud stuff. It would have been like flying into the sun. I feel just like a moth sometimes. It’s like someone just turned the light bulb off in time. This next one’s very, very quiet, so quiet you can really get up close to it. There’s nothing angry or violent about this new music. It’s about relationships and feelings. There’s a lot of love in it. But it’s still very focused and intense. It certainly sounds like the sequel to Harvest. I have no problem with that, though. I’m not backing away from that side of me anymore.
‘It’s so obvious this next record is Harvest 2. When you hear it you’ll think, “Damn he’s finally made that follow-up to Harvest. All of twenty years later!” [Laughs] “When’s the next Harvest coming out?” Farmers have been asking me that for years [laughs]. “We all need a good bountiful harvest, Neil.” Whether it’s better or worse is not for me to say. I wouldn’t put it out if I didn’t like it. But by the time that record hits the streets, I can guarantee you I’ll be into something completely different. So it doesn’t bother me what people’ll say about the record because I’ll be preoccupied with the next project. That’s the groove I like to be in.’
The last time I saw him, in Paris in the late autumn of 1992, Harvest Moon had just hit the shops and was selling up a firestorm of its own. Yet while his new release promoted his soft folky side, a whole new generation had simultaneously started dressing exactly like Neil Young in flannel shirts and rancid old jeans festooned with patches and playing stoned, wilfully eccentric electric rock’n’roll music in bands that seemed mostly to relocate themselves over in Seattle. They called their stuff ‘grunge’, but it sure sounded like Neil Young to Neil Young. He caught some of these young cats on MTV when he had occasion to watch it and he quietly marvelled at the unavoidable fact that, after thirty years as the most carelessly dressed musician in all of rock’n’roll, his stumble-bum’s wardrobe suddenly made him a major fashion symbol for his elder son’s own sartorially challenged generation. ‘This fashion stuff . . . It’s a little too rich for me,’ Young remarked drily to no one in particular. ‘I only hope they don’t take my old flannel shirts after I die and stick ’em behind glass in some Hard Rock Café!’
The day before our encounter he’d been thousands of miles away in New York, mingling with a mostly older generation of music lovers when he’d put in a special appearance at ‘Bob-Aid’, his own wry term for the Bob Dylan thirtieth anniversary bash that Sony had hosted for the venerable old icon of contemporary song-craft at Madison Square Garden. Old members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had been there, dressed in their chic Armani jackets, swapping tales, wizened folkies like Tommy Maken and hardy old survivors like the great Johnny Cash bonded easily, while a small gaggle of newcomers like Seattle’s Pearl Jam looked on saucer-eyed, their jaws slack with amazement at being in the same room with so many of their childhood heroes. Dylan himself chose to see the show via a small television located in his touring bus, which was parked just outside the gig itself. At the show’s climax he’d sauntered out into the vast hall, lost within the motions of his own mystique and performed two mesmerizing acoustic selections. His performance was one of three musical peaks, it was generally noted. The second involved Lou Reed grappling manfully with the epic but little-known ‘Foot of Pride’ – even though he’d had to recite most of the lyrics from written prompts laid out on a music stand. The third was Young, who arrived hot on the heels of Sinead O’Connor and her calamitous reception and duly tore the place apart as, with Booker T. & the MGs backing him up, he crashed into gritty extended amp-ups of both ‘All along the Watchtower’ and ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’:
‘I said to Steve Cropper just before we played the first note, “Listen, Steve, we can just do what the hell we want. If we want to play each one for fifteen minutes, we play it for fifteen minutes! I don’t have an arrangement as such. Whatever happens is cool by me. If I don’t sing a verse and start playing a solo, don’t worry, it’s OK.” See, I chose those songs because I could play them exactly the way I’d play a song with Crazy Horse. I was real nervous before “Bob-Fest” last night. I mean, a 200-million potential viewing audience – what the fuck! I was nervous. Last night in the dressing-room . . . See, when too many people get in the room, I get light-headed. I start feeling like too much is going on. So I go to the bathroom and just sing vocal scales in the shower. It opens up my voice, so I’ll give a better performance, and it centres me, just listening to these musical scales resonating. I’m breathing deeply and the whole thing becomes some sort of an Indian trip. But, also, in its finest hour, it’s the perfect excuse for leaving any situation around a show. [Smiles.]’
As the nineties got under way it became increasingly clear that Dylan, Reed and Young were now well and truly the three leading lights out of their aged but unbroken generation of mythic rockers. Dylan was there because he was Dylan and because he was still out there performing, even though quite frankly most of the time he appeared to be lost in some deep bewildering mental fog that mostly overwhelmed both his creative instincts and his more objective logical faculties. Sometimes it also seemed like he’d become utterly cynical in his rapport with the rest of the world. He’d walk around in public, his face hidden behind a hooded T-shirt and ski-mask. It had always been difficult to pin Dylan down in the sixties and the seventies, but more recently he seemed to become a mystery even to himself. Why, for example, did he keep touring the world over and over again on a never-ending treadmill of dazed one-nighters? ‘I’ve tried to get away from working but I never could,’ he’d admitted during the mid-eighties. ‘I wouldn’t know what else to do. I would be lost’ He complained constantly about how he hated his fans thinking they knew him and treating him like their long-lost friend’. He’d long ago separated from his wife Sara and was now rumoured to have a longtime companion’ called Carole Childs, but there were a lot of other women passing through as well. It’s lonely where I am,’ Dylan had once remarked during his drugged-out dandy phase back in ’66. More than twenty-five years later, little appears to have changed.
Reed was another case altogether. Like Dylan, he’d done his great early work in the sixties, although he’d achieved it as composer for the largely under-appreciated Velvet Underground. He actually became successful in the seventies but muddled thinking from drug abuse had propelled him to create an image for himself as some slightly phoney degenerate street reptile. By the end of the seventies – and several frustrating albums later – he married a New York woman, Sylvia Morales, swore off drinking and drugging, and determined to refocus himself creatively. After that he made some fine rejoicings in the early eighties, principally with the splendid Blue Mask album and the later, jauntier, New Sensations, featuring the fabulously inane hit single ‘I Love You Suzanne’. And then, like Young, Reed experienced some kind of creative breakthrough towards the end of the eighties which moved his work on to a whole new plateau. New York had some dazzling poetry going for it as Reed stealthily eased himself into the role of Swiftian social critic of all-American heartlessness and bigotry. The follow-up, Songs for Drella – a duet with former Velvet Underground eminence John Cale – mourned the passing of mentor Andy Warhol eloquently, and the album after that, Magic and Loss, movingly wove its entire theme around the deaths by cancer of two of Reed’s dearest friends. Reed still maintains a long-standing reputation for being weird and difficult, particularly with the press, but his often icy exterior had clearly thawed out enough by 1993 to undertake a Velvets reunion tour, summoning performances from his former comrades, each of them now in his or her fifties, that often dwarfed even the muffled intensity of the recorded originals.
But let’s be honest, Neil Young was currently doing better than both of them because, unlike Dylan, he was still 100 per cent focused on all the creative aspects of his art, and unlike Reed, Young didn’t just appeal to the art-rock crowd. He had the old beer-drinking guys with their little grey-haired pig-tails, and the young punkers with their back-to-front baseball caps and ‘grunge’ fixations. He still had the stoners and the loners, shy young souls who felt unattractive and rootless. But he also now had the families who respected what he’d achieved as a married man who’d committed so much of his energies to rearing his gravely disadvantaged child. Indeed, Young himself had finally come through the darkest of dark tunnels, beaten back all his most hateful impulses and let his heart brim over with the soothing balm of forgiveness: ‘Something just opened up inside me,’ he’d say softly to himself. ‘I don’t know what it is but I can feel it every day now. I don’t take anything for granted anymore. For example, I’ve just begun to feel really for all my old bands, be they Crazy Horse, the Stray Gators, the International Harvesters and the Blue Notes, not to mention Crosby, Stills and Nash, for how they’ve been able to help me . . . I can just go from one to another and they’re quite used to me doing this now. I know of no other musician who’s afforded the luxury of such a huge musical support network that will help me do what I feel I have to do. Rather than worrying about moving away and leaving them behind and not knowing how to deal with saying goodbye, I deal with it now. I try to be as understandable and easy-going as possible.’
He’d even written an open letter of a song on Harvest Moon, called ‘One of These Days’, thanking them all for making his music sound so good over the years. Still, Young couldn’t help but wonder just how many of his old musical buddies were still receptive enough to be touched by the lyric’s sentiments. One of the Blue Notes had just died. Dallas Taylor, CSN&Y’s first drummer, was waiting for a liver transplant, because he’d wiped his own one out from too much drink and drugs. There was Stills himself, still floundering around in his own deluded ego-bubble. And then – worst of all – there was the grisly case of Rick James, better known to Young as Ricky James Matthews, the outlandish black Jagger impersonator he’d played with when both were members of the ill-fated Mynah Birds back in 1965. James had finally lost all control from free-basing cocaine constantly and had ended up kidnapping two separate women, raping and torturing them with the aid of his equally demented girlfriend. Young would just shake his head quietly when he pondered the fates of those lost souls, for he knew how closely he had come in the past to getting permanently side-tracked down the haphazard highway of hedonistic blow-out.
‘And I was very lucky indeed to be able to get out of that state too. I don’t know what saved me. I think IVe just had an uncanny ability to escape. There’s no magic to it, but it’s like a little light goes on. And when the light goes on, I leave. I just have to get creative about why I’m going. See, I see my best art as one magical accident after another. I try not to edit anything and to record each song real quickly and then move on to the next bunch . . . See, I don’t see change as a curse. It’s just part of my make-up. It’s the structure. Without change the whole thing will just fall apart. I’m not just talking about rock’n’roll here. I’m talking about my life. I’ve got to keep moving somewhere. I’ve written some of my best songs on the move, driving on a long journey, scribbling lyrics on cigarette packets while steering. I like that style, though I tend to get pulled over a lot by traffic cops for driving erratically [laughs]. They just pop into my head, these songs and ideas, while I’m driving along, and when I get home I move over to the typewriter and sometimes what comes out is good and sometimes it isn’t. . . But it never stops.
‘In a sense, it’s all about running away. I’ve been running all my life. Where I’m going . . . Who the fuck knows? But that’s not the point. The point is just to see how long you can keep going strong. And right now there is no end. The way I feel now, I can keep going for a long time.’