Neil Young FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Iconic and Mercurial Rocker

Hawks and Doves, Re-ac-tor, and a Kid Named Ben

In order to get into any serious discussion of Neil Young’s music in the eighties—a period most often referred to by Neil-phytes as either the Geffen years or, perhaps more appropriately, as Neil Young’s lost decade—one also has to consider the overall state of rock music at the time.

As anyone who has ever worked in the business will tell you, the music industry goes through down cycles about every ten years or so. These same precipitous periods of declining record sales almost always seem to happen like clockwork toward the end of any given decade, and are just as often accompanied by a slew of flash-in-the-pan, pop-oriented, one-hit-wonder type acts. In the seventies, it was guys like Christopher Cross and of course all the disco groups; in the eighties it was Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, and New Kids on the Block; in the nineties it was N’Sync, the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and so on.

Okay, maybe Britney has enjoyed a longer shelf life than the others, but you get the idea.

The biggest difference in these cycles as they exist now compared to previous decades, is that the industry (and the way it conducts its business) has been fundamentally changed by the emergence of the Internet. The disposable teen pop acts of today (Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, and so forth) also don’t seem to be going away as quickly as they did before.

Anyway, that’s another story best saved for another book.

What happened in the early eighties to break this cycle was the emergence of Music Television (MTV). As a medium, MTV created an entirely new avenue for marketing music through the use of music videos. Since there was also a relative shortage of actual music videos to play (at least at first), this also opened things up for an entire new generation of artists who normally might not find themselves welcomed so warmly on the still highly formatized and strictly controlled playlists of eighties music radio.

While it could be argued convincingly that all this did was create yet another new glut of one-hit wonders (anybody remember Kajagoogoo? Missing Persons? Wall of Voodoo?), it also served to break down some of the barriers that had gone up around the music industry like a great wall, especially during the disco and punk eras of the late seventies. In doing so, MTV opened a lot of doors for bands that might not have otherwise found a viable medium to get their music heard.

Picture sleeve for the triangle-shaped single for “Southern Pacific” from the brutally abrasive Re-ac-tor album. Neil’s perception that Reprise could have done more to market the album was one of many factors leading to his departure from the label.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

However, this refreshing new climate of musical openness only ran skin-deep.

For one thing, MTV didn’t become truly color-blind until around the time Michael Jackson released Thriller. Music fans mostly also continued to cluster themselves around their own personal genre preferences, just as they had done in the late seventies.

At San Bernardino’s US Festival in 1983, for example, each of the three days of music offered by promoter Steve Wozniak of Apple Computers were slotted according to specific genre.

“New Wave Day” featured acts like the Clash, Men at Work, and the Stray Cats, while “Heavy Metal Day” was made up entirely of hair bands like Van Halen, Judas Priest, and the Scorpions. Could you imagine such musical divisions existing at, say the 1969 Woodstock festival—where maybe one day you would get the folkies like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Country Joe, and Joan Baez, and on the other you’d get the heavy rock of Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and the Who?

Not likely, but then again the late sixties were a far different time.

No matter how much you tried to hide it, the divisions of the seventies were still very much a part of the rock-’n’-roll landscape in the early eighties. They just did a much better job of sweeping them under the proverbial rug.

But for those artists who had enough foresight to see the marketing potential of music video, the eighties proved to be a goldmine. Interestingly enough, among those who were ahead of the curve in that department were a surprising number of classic rock acts from the sixties and seventies. Paul McCartney, David Bowie, and the Rolling Stones were among those who jumped on the music video bandwagon early in the game. Prog-rockers Yes and Genesis soon followed suit, as did Bruce Springsteen (who, up until the time of his 1984 blockbuster Born in the U.S.A., had consciously avoided using music videos to promote his work).

Send Me a Cheeseburger and a New Rolling Stone

Neil Young on the other hand, was a bit of a Johnny-Come-Lately when it came to music video.

This is surprising on a number of levels. Young was usually first among his class to spot a new trend (like he did with punk rock) and get solidly behind it. Young also had a long, if not always completely successful, history of exploring the marriage between music and video. His experiments with rock and film already included both great successes like Rust Never Sleeps and some equally spectacular flops like Journey Through the Past and Human Highway. He even had his own film company in Shakey Pictures.

Even so, by the time Young finally decided to involve himself more fully in the art of music video (for his very new wavish 1982 album Trans), his new record company refused to give him a budget to make one. But we’ll get to all of that in due course.

If music video seemed to be rather curiously off his radar as the eighties began, it was only because Young had much more weighty and personal concerns on his mind.

I Am a Child

After closing out the long, strange, and often artistically experimental trip that had been the seventies with the stunning return to critical and commercial form of Rust Never Sleeps, Young seemed to completely disappear off the map during the early years of the eighties—and no one (at least in the public arena) could figure out exactly why.

There continued to be records, of course.

But there were no concert tours at all in between the triumph of Rust and the rather strange return to a higher profile that came with 1982’s Trans. For those who followed Neil Young’s public life closely at the time, it would have been easy to just figure that after his failed relationships with Susan Acevedo and Carrie Snodgress, Neil had at long last found the mate he had so long sought in Pegi Morton (which he indeed had). Perhaps he was simply enjoying the benefits of marital bliss after so many years of being wedded first and foremost to his career.

But, as anyone who has ever been around him will almost certainly attest, this is simply not the way that Neil Young operates. There were clearly other factors at play here, even if they were unbeknownst to the general public.

In essence, he more or less quit the rigors of the “album, tour, album, tour” grind of the music business for the first few years of the eighties in order to devote time to his new son Ben, who was born in 1978. But this was no mere case of “house husbandry,” along the same lines as John Lennon’s final years on this earth with Yoko.

To say Ben Young was a “special needs” child would be a huge understatement.

Neil Young had already dealt with cerebral palsy once, when his first son (with Carrie Snodgress) Zeke was diagnosed with the disease. As it turned out, Neil and Pegi’s son Ben had a much more severe form of the debilitating ailment, which rendered him not only physically handicapped, but verbally as well. Ben’s cerebral palsy was of a much more serious nature, which was compounded by the fact that he was born both spastic and non-oral.

One can debate whether or not this crisis only strengthened the bond between then newlyweds Neil and Pegi Young, to cement that rarest of entertainment business relationships that continues to this day (which it does). But what is clear now—though it was largely unknown at the time—is that the health and welfare of their son became priority number one for the couple back then.

Still, Young did continue to work, at least as best as he could.

But there were no more marathon dusk-to-dawn recording sessions powered by tequila, honey slides, or anything else of the sort. Young’s time in the recording studio had to be slotted in to fit the often eighteen hours a day he spent in a series of (at least initially) mostly failed therapy sessions in search of a communications breakthrough for Ben.

Neil and Pegi would eventually find their ultimate solution in the Bridge School, an organization that both continue to actively support to this day. Pegi sits on their board of directors, while Neil’s annual benefit shows for the organization help bring home the bacon.

At the time all of this was going down, the situation with Ben was unknown to all but a very small, tight-knit circle of friends and family. Even the brass at Young’s label Warner Brothers had no idea of what was happening, as he performed a juggling act between long, repetitive, and monotonous therapy for his son while squeezing in time to record. With this new schedule, his preferred routine of recording sessions with odd hours, often coinciding with the full moon, were likewise put on hold.

The actual triangle-shaped “Southern Pacific” vinyl single from Re-ac-tor.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

Although the Moon Isn’t Full, He Still Feels the Pull

Although the critical rub on Neil’s first few post–Rust Never Sleeps albums made during the eighties as being minor efforts in his overall canon is mostly justified, what we know now about the circumstances behind them puts a lot of things into a more proper perspective.

Hawks and Doves, released late in 1980 is rightfully considered one of the lower points in Neil’s long career. Divided equally between acoustic and more country-flavored electric songs, the album feels more than anything else like a collection of leftovers, similar in many ways to 1977’s American Stars and Bars.

And in fact, many of the songs are drawn from the very same sessions (for the unreleased Harvest sequel Homegrown) that made up Stars and Bars. The problem with Hawks and Doves is that it lacks any of the sort of true stando ut tracks like “Will to Love” or “Like a Hurricane” that made Stars and Bars such a keeper.

Indeed, the most noteworthy thing one can say about Hawks and Doves is that it marked the beginning of Neil Young’s embrace of the 1980s Reagan era, along with its accompanying right-wing Republican politics, in tracks like “Union Man.” The song mostly takes it shots at the musicians union. But it was also an early hint at the newly conservative, flag-waving redneck Neil Young that would reach its full apex a few years later during his country phase with the album Old Ways. Listening to both albums today, one can really begin to see the stylistic bridge between the two (there is also a less obvious but still very real connection to the folk-pop of Harvest and Comes a Time).

If nothing else, Hawks and Doves seemed like a strange way to follow up the blockbuster that was Rust Never Sleeps, as well as an abrupt about-face from that album’s embrace of things like the musical revolution that was punk rock at the time. But in retrospect, and especially knowing what we do now about what was happening in his personal life at the time, it almost makes sense.

Almost.

Got Mashed Potato, Ain’t Got No T-Bone

Say whatever you will about Neil Young’s next album, his reunion with Crazy Horse on the hard-rock, minimalist Re-ac-tor. As one of his loudest records, Re-ac-tor pales somewhat in comparison to Rust Never Sleeps and some of his latter-day hard-rock albums like Mirror Ball, or even Living with War. But for sheer volume and ballsy audacity, it ranks right up there with his best electric assaults with Crazy Horse.

Coming after the weird and somewhat directionless mishmash that was Hawks and Doves, in some respects Re-ac-tor couldn’t have come along at a better time. If nothing else, this was evidence that Young still knew how to turn the amps to eleven and let the shit rip with Crazy Horse and the ever-trusty Old Black. The songs themselves, however, represented some of the most mind-numbingly repetitive music he had ever written, an apparent reaction to the experimental, repetitive speech therapies Neil and Pegi had been trying out at the time to treat their son Ben.

As far as traditional songs go, there really aren’t any on Re-ac-tor to speak of. At least, there are none of the sort that you’ll be humming along with in your head, after an initial listen. In some ways, Re-ac-tor sounds like nothing more than an excuse for Neil Young to make a lot of noise with Crazy Horse, unbridled by such mundane concerns as actual melody or songcraft. But there are at least three songs from the album that stand out.

“Southern Pacific” begins with the lonesome whistle of a locomotive train, before chugging its way into a monster riff that most definitely maintains “the spook” for the rest of the way through. As the closest thing to a perfectly constructed actual “song” on the entire album, the chunky-sounding, rhythmic power chording is probably the nearest that Neil Young and Crazy Horse have ever gotten to actually fitting into the tight pocket of a funk groove. The song has rarely been played live since its inclusion on Re-ac-tor, but did become something of a standout during Young’s country shows with the International Harvesters during the Old Ways period a few years later.

Somewhere in heaven, I suspect that Neil’s old running partner in the Mynah Birds, Rick James, has this tight-ass, greasy little jam on his i-Pod. The other two most significant songs from Re-ac-tor are much more minimalist in nature.

“T-Bone” takes up close to ten minutes of this already very short record, and does little more than repeat the refrain of “got mashed potato, ain’t got no T-Bone” over and over again, amidst walls of howling feedback and noise. These days, it’s common knowledge amongst the Neil-phytes that the repetitive nature of this track represents Young’s own frustration over the equally monotonous therapy his son Ben was receiving when the song was first recorded.

For “Shots,” the other standout track from this record, Young first began to explore the altered sound effects he got from the synclavier—a device he would later use to much greater effect on his infamous 1982 album Trans. For the Re-ac-tor track “Shots,” he uses the device to simulate the sounds of rapid machine gun fire.

But as is the case with Hawks and Doves and Old Ways, there is in fact a clear bridge from Re-ac-tor to Trans that extends far beyond Young’s mere first use of electronic gadgetry.

For one thing, the influence of Ben Young is all over this record, just as he is on Trans—although it would take some fans a few decades to actually see the connection.

I Put in My Time, Now I’m Left to Roll, Down the Long Decline

There is an earlier chapter in this book that talks about Neil Young’s biggest commercial flops, and when it came down to a coin toss between Re-ac-tor and Hawks and Doves over which album to include on that list, the latter won. But make no mistake, Re-ac-tor also stiffed big, climbing only three positions higher than Hawks and Doves to make a rather dismal #27 showing on the Billboard chart.

When Re-ac-tor flopped, though, it cost Young more than just a few lost record sales and the accompanying bruised artist’s ego. The album’s poor chart performance, combined with Young’s decision to keep his family crisis with Ben a secret from nearly everyone (including, most significantly, his record company), played a key role in ending a long and successful partnership with his label, Reprise.

For more than a decade, the relationship between Young and the Warner Brothers–distributed label had been a mostly satisfying, mutually beneficial one. By most accounts, executives like Mo Ostin also catered to Young’s every whim, from last-second changes on his albums over titles and sequencing (Comes a Time), to pulling album releases altogether (Homegrown). The demands could also sometimes be as ridiculous as they were financially unwise. When Young once asked Mo to park his trailer on a western set on the Warner Brothers movie studios backlot (in order to sit out an earthquake predicted by a local psychic), for example, Ostin didn’t so much as bat an eye.

A later picture sleeve for the “Southern Pacific” single from Re-ac-tor.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

But in the end, the divorce between Neil Young and Reprise came about as the result of the same sort of communication breakdown that dissolves a lot of marriages. Because of the critical situation with his son Ben, and the fact that finding an answer required so much of his time, Young was unable to tour the record or even to promote it with the usual press interviews and promotions at music retail and album rock stations.

The fact that Young kept his family situation such a closely guarded secret at the time probably didn’t help matters. But the communication gap between label, management, and artist soon grew into a chasm wider than the Grand Canyon.

From Young’s (and by extension, manager Elliot Roberts’s) perspective, the label simply wasn’t doing enough to promote Re-ac-tor. From the label’s point of view, it was probably equally true that a certain level of frustration had to exist over trying to market a decidedly noncommercial album without the active help of the artist who made it.

There are most likely several events that contributed to Neil Young eventually leaving Warner/Reprise (a decision he would come to regret later). One of the songs on Re-ac-tor, “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze,” has even been long rumored to be a dig at Ostin and fellow Warner executive Joe Smith—which, if true, would seem to lend some credence to tensions already being there long before that album.

But by most accounts, the proverbial last straw that broke the artist’s back was when the label was reluctant to bankroll a promotional, triangle-shaped single from Re-ac-tor matching the album’s striking red and black triangle art.

After turning down a lucrative offer to defect to RCA, Young and Elliot Roberts decided to go with David Geffen, who both of them had previous dealings with. The newly launched Geffen Records was the talk of the industry at the time, signing up everyone from Donna Summer and Peter Gabriel to Elton John and John Lennon. Young was guaranteed a million dollars per album and complete creative control over everything from the music itself to budgets and promotion.

However, on the latter part of this agreement, it became apparent almost immediately that Geffen would not be keeping his word. But then again, how could anyone expect Geffen to continue to hand out a million dollars per record for an artist who seemed to have (once again) become hell-bent on committing career suicide with another series of, to put it as delicately as possible, “strange” records?