24

No Matter Where I Go, I Never Hear My Record on the Radio

The Shocking Pinks, Old Ways, and Farm Aid

So how does one follow up a less than well-received album of strange computerized synth-pop?

In the case of the increasingly musical schizophrenic that was Neil Young in the eighties, you take a cue from the Stray Cats and release an album of fifties-flavored rockabilly tracks less than a year later.

Clocking in at less than a half hour of running time in an era when compact disc technology was just beginning to open up new possibilities for the long-form album, Everybody’s Rockin’ is an easy candidate (along with Landing on Water) for being among the worst albums of Neil Young’s career. Apparently the fans thought likewise, given the album’s dismal Billboard chart performance, where it peaked at #46.

With tensions between Young and Geffen Records already running high, there has been no small amount of speculation over the years that Young may have delivered this album to the label out of nothing but spite, after they rejected the early version of his country album Old Ways. The storyline here basically goes that when the label instead asked for the artist to make a “rock-’n’-roll album,” Neil Young simply obliged by quite literally giving them one.

Although Trans may have been perceived as a bad idea by fans (many of whom have since reassessed that position, as detailed in chapter 22 of this book), there is still no doubt that Young’s artistic aim was mostly true (if perhaps somewhat misguided) on that record. While Neil Young’s sanity in releasing Trans may have been in question, his artistic sincerity was most definitely not.

Everybody’s Rockin’, on the other hand, for better or worse, comes off as mostly a rare and frankly arrogant case of pure artistic indulgence. At best, it plays like a sort of bad joke. At worst, it is quite possibly one of the most misguided vanity projects ever put to vinyl by an artist of Neil Young’s stature. Either way, the album seemed like the latest, and most obvious example so far, in the ongoing eighties story of an artist intent on committing career suicide.

Even today, outside of a few bright moments like “Payola Blues,” a biting commentary on the “pay for play” practices that were still secretly happening at many radio stations at the time, and the Crazy Horse leftover “Wonderin’,” the album is barely listenable.

As fun in a goofy sort of way as something like “Kinda Fonda Wanda” might have seemed on paper, it just wasn’t the kind of thing you expected from a “serious artist” like Neil Young. His cover of the Sun Records–period Elvis song “Mystery Train” likewise did him no favors, essentially reducing that classic to a watered-down and overproduced poor man’s karaoke version of the original.

They’re Rockin’ in the White House All Night Long

As if Young wasn’t alienating his fan base enough already with his increasingly odd shifts in artistic direction, the man who once wrote songs like “Ohio” with its “tin soldiers and Nixon coming,” also seemed to be taking a hard and abrupt turn toward the political right.

In addition to a series of interviews championing President Ronald Reagan’s hard-line politics (which would reach their peak during the resurrected country album Old Ways a short time later), Young was even invoking Reagan in the lyrics of Everybody’s Rockin’s title track. This song found Ronnie and Nancy dancing on the White House lawn to Neil Young music that could have just as easily been written for the then hit TV show “Happy Days.”

The only thing missing from the new right-wing politics of born-again redneck Neil Young was an endorsement of the fundamentalist Christian rhetoric of televangelists like the 700 Club’s Pat Robertson and the Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell.

Even so, his live performances of the Everybody’s Rockin’ material with his latest band the Shocking Pinks could be a lot of fun. Dressed in matching pink outfits, and backed by a horn section (which included Ben Keith of all people) and a group of female vocalists (including his wife Pegi) dubbed the Pinkettes, Young debuted this latest musical direction during the otherwise mostly solo American leg of the Trans tour.

Perhaps because they were still largely shell-shocked by the synthesized vocals of the Trans material, when Neil brought out the Shocking Pinks for the surprise encore set, complete with their greased-back hair and pink combs being tossed into the audience, it probably seemed almost like a relief.

This novelty, however, did not translate into record sales.

If a Man Is Making Music, They Ought to Let His Record Play

Some of the material that wound up on Everybody’s Rockin’ had first been recorded for the original Old Ways album, recorded earlier that year in Nashville with producer Elliot Mazer once again at the helm, and with much of the original Harvest crew of musicians (Ben Keith, etc.) back in tow as part of the band.

Although the majority of the album was straight country, the handful of rockabilly-flavored tracks were the only parts of the album the executives at Geffen seemed interested in, once they actually heard the record.

One of these executives, Eddie Rosenblatt, went so far as to call the album “too country,” which landed him a particularly special spot on Neil Young’s permanent shit list. But the consensus at Geffen was for Neil Young to go back to the drawing board and expand on the fifties rock-flavored tracks.

So, while rumors persist to this day that Young gave Geffen the Shocking Pinks out of spite (“if they want a rock-’n’-roll record, I’ll give them one”), it is also at least partially true that he delivered Geffen exactly the record they had asked for with Everybody’s Rockin’. In retrospect, this makes David Geffen’s decision to file a lawsuit against his most visible if frustrating artist an even stranger chapter in this already strange story.

Still, that is exactly what David Geffen did. Citing Young’s “failure to deliver Neil Young albums” to the label—and using both Trans and Everybody’s Rockin’ as examples—the basis of the lawsuit against filed in November 1983 is one of the most curious in music history.

By essentially saying that Neil Young was guilty of making records “uncharacteristic of the artist,” Geffen’s suit has to be something of a first in terms of high strangeness in rock’n’ roll legal history. Even when it is placed in the context of the often volatile marriage between rock ’n’ roll’s leftover sixties hippie values and the multimillion-dollar business of corporate commerce that governed the music business even back then, the premise of this legal action is still enough to make you scratch your head in bewilderment.

T-shirt promoting Everybody’s Rockin’, Neil Young’s rockabilly album with the Shocking Pinks.

Courtesy of Tom Therme collection

It was one thing for Bruce Springsteen’s former manager, after being dumped for a rock critic-turned-producer, to use the legal system to keep his one-time charge from recording (which is exactly what Mike Appel did with his suit against Springsteen and Jon Landau after Born to Run).

It was quite another for a record label to sue an artist for delivering albums deemed as simply not being commercial enough for radio or retail. This also coming despite Young’s long history of stubbornly following his own creative muse regardless of any resulting commercial fallout, as well as Geffen’s own initial promise of creative control once his company signed the artist for a million bucks an album. A decision they would later come to regret, by the way …

Not surprisingly, Young and Elliot Roberts filed their own countersuit, and for the next eighteen months, the war was on.

Here Comes the Night, Here Comes the Anger

Although Young would eventually return to his eighties genre-hopping ways by resurrecting his country project Old Ways, he first attempted to make one of those more characteristically rock-’n’-roll “Neil Young albums” desired so badly by his label.

At first, things looked promising.

Calling once again on the Horse, Young played a series of blistering concerts at the Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz that have been described by fans as producing some of the greatest racket Neil had ever made yet with his greatest rock band.

These concerts are documented on the now hard-to-find bootleg Catalytic Reaction (there were also copies of the shows released on a bootleg called Touch the Night, named for one of the new songs premiered there). Great soundboard recordings of a few of these songs, including “Barstool Blues” and “Touch the Night,” can also still be found fairly easily today on the great bootleg boxed set collection A Perfect Echo (see chapter 19 for more on Young’s bootlegs).

Recording sessions for a potential Neil Young and Crazy Horse reunion album did not go nearly as well, however.

Despite the presence of David Briggs back in the producer’s chair, sessions at Broken Arrow, in Los Angeles, and later on at New York’s Record Plant ultimately failed to produce a new record. By most accounts, the biggest problem with the sessions was Neil Young himself. Rather than allowing the Horse to do what they do best, laying down a loosely structured but funky foundation for Young to soar over with Old Black, he reversed his usual lackadaisical recording style and instead seemed to obsess on studio tinkering and other weird details.

The story is best told in Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey. But in a nutshell, Young seemed to be particularly obsessed with getting a big drum sound.

During this period in the eighties, big drums were all the rage in rock music, thanks to records being produced for bands like U2, XTC, and the Police by producers such as Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham. The so-called Phil Collins sound was also very much in vogue, courtesy of that particular drummer’s solo albums and those with his band Genesis. Collins had even gone so far as to bring his big, bombastic drums to records he produced for outside artists such as former Abba vocalist Frida.

The novelty of big drums that overshadowed nearly everything else in their path was one that thankfully wore off once the eighties were finally over.

Young eventually got his big drum sound, recording many of the same songs intended for the original 1984 reunion album with Crazy Horse on Landing on Water, the underwhelming recording he made in 1986 with session musicians including veteran Eagles producer Danny Kortchmar and drummer Steve Jordan. There will be much more on that in the next chapter of this book.

Are You Ready for the Country?

Meanwhile, the musical high strangeness of Young’s “lost decade” continued to grow even stranger.

Turning back to the country sounds of the thought-to-be-scrapped Old Ways album, he returned to the concert stage with yet another new group. The International Harvesters were comprised of a combination of Stray Gators holdovers like Ben Keith and Spooner Oldham, and a more authentically countrified breed of Nashville cats like Cajun fiddler Rufus Thibodeaux and guitarist/vocalist Anthony “Sweet Pea” Crawford.

With traditional rock promoters and fans alike understandably a little gun-shy about just what might constitute a Neil Young concert in 1984, the International Harvesters chose to take their road show out on the country circuit instead.

Playing the sort of honky-tonk joints, cowboy rodeos, and county fairs that were part and parcel of the country music touring business in those days before Garth Brooks and Kenny Chesney were filling stadiums, Young was once again reinventing himself as an artist (even if only for the time being).

In doing so, he also showed less reservation than ever before about completely alienating his traditional fan base. While his new fans in the country music community seemed to at least somewhat embrace his authenticity as a newly born-again country redneck, Young’s increasingly chatty nature with the press had to be rattling some nerves with the hardcores.

In interview after interview, he railed against his former life as a hippie rock star, even going so far as to claim on at least one occasion (and probably more) that he was giving up rock ’n’ roll for good. In one such interview, he somewhat humorously claimed that performing at county fairs beat “playing for a bunch of stoned hippies at the Fillmore.”

Even more disconcerting to some fans was his hard turn to the political right.

In these same interviews, Young all but disowned his past as the sixties hippie who had once written songs like “Ohio.” He was particularly vocal in his embrace of President Ronald Reagan, calling former Democratic President Jimmy Carter a “wimp” who had given away the Panama Canal and praising Reagan’s unapologetic hard-line stance on everything from foreign policy to his union-busting “trickle-down economics.”

Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp relaxing backstage at Farm Aid.

Photo by Kim Reed

For some fans, Young particularly crossed the line when referring to AIDS with a comment about the “faggots behind the counter at the grocery store.”

Although the International Harvesters initially were somewhat lacking in any musical chemistry, and some of the early shows were spotty, the band eventually seemed to come together and produce some memorable shows. Some of the better performances from the period, including countrified reworkings of songs like “Southern Pacific” as well as previously unheard material like “Grey Riders,” were eventually released in 2010 as part of the Archives Performance Series on the album A Treasure.

Original fans who attended some of these concerts may have been wise to tuck their hair up under a stevedore cap. But those who did also got the occasional treat, like the reputedly quite decent versions of “Down by the River” and “Heart of Gold” from Young’s new band of outlaw country pickers.

As we’ve already noted, Young also made a number of new friends within the country music community.

Some of these, like David Allen Coe, opened many of Young’s shows on the country circuit. Others, like Waylon Jennings, scored hits recording their own versions of Neil Young songs from the period like “Are You Ready for the Country.”

Of all these friendships, though, it was Young’s introduction to Willie Nelson that would have the most lasting impact, eventually leading to the yearly Farm Aid benefit concerts that he remains a partner in to this day.

Even so, the ever dwindling base of Neil Young’s original fans had to be wondering what could possibly be next? Even the possibility of an album of Gregorian chants by a converted Buddhist monk named Neil Young, or maybe a gangsta rap album, didn’t seem to be too far out of left field at the time.

MC Shakey, anyone?

It’s Hard to Teach a Dinosaur a New Trick

What eventually did come next was a revamped version of Old Ways, which in contrast to the original album’s more authentic country flavor, offered a watered-down version that also suffered from overproduction (Young was still quite enamored with the new digital technology of the day at the time).

Even a duet with Willie Nelson on the song “Are There Any More Real Cowboys” suffered from a bad case of the overdubbed vocals that Young had once been so vehemently opposed to on his albums.

After Young threatened (yet again) to abandon rock ’n’ roll altogether and “turn into George Jones,” the contentious lawsuit with Geffen Records was also finally settled. In exchange for agreeing to release Old Ways, he promised to deliver one of those more commercially palatable “Neil Young” rock-’n’-roll albums the label had so desperately wanted from their most stubbornly mercurial charge.

The album that Geffen eventually got, 1986’s Landing on Water, as well as a follow-up album with Crazy Horse (1987’s Life) wasn’t exactly the “Harvest II” they had probably imagined.

But the real victory for Geffen came in the deal renegotiated for the remainder of the original contract.

For Young’s final two records with Geffen, his advance of a million dollars per album was cut in half (to $500,000). Neil Young also delivered his Lucky Thirteen collection of songs and outtakes from the Geffen years to the label for free. The album was released several years later in 1993, following Young’s early nineties artistic and commercial comeback with the albums Freedom and Ragged Glory.

Where the Cattle Graze and an Old Grey Barn Still Stands

In July 1985, Young took his newest incarnation of the International Harvesters to the stage at the massive Live Aid show organized by Bob Geldof to benefit African hunger relief efforts.

The historic concert was telecast worldwide by MTV to an audience estimated at the time to be in the billions. The less-than-stellar TV production is more memorable today for its endless mid-song interruptions by babbling MTV “vee-jays” and its lecturing pleas for donations by irritating celebrities like Sally Field than it is for the music itself.

Even so, the Live Aid concert was the biggest event of its kind since Woodstock. Only this time around, it took place on two continents, with concerts in England and in America in Philadelphia. Performer Phil Collins managed to make appearances at both concerts in the same day, jumping the two continents by flying aboard the Concorde. The cause was also conceived as something far more real than the idealistic “three days of peace, love and music” of the legendary 1969 hippie fest at Woodstock.

Young’s two sets that day—with the Harvesters and with a reunited for the event Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young—were hardly memorable on a day that also included the cream of the era’s superstar rock-’n’-roll talent. CSN&Y’s set was particularly horrendous.

More than that, though, Young’s two sets were easy to miss considering the rest of the mind-boggling lineup of talent assembled. From Madonna to Dylan, from Queen to Run-DMC, everyone who was anyone in rock and pop music played a set at Live Aid that day. There were reunions by heavy metal bands ranging from Black Sabbath to Led Zeppelin. There were once-in-a-lifetime pairings like the one between Mick Jagger and David Bowie. And there were also historic, career-making performances like the one turned in that day by an up-and-coming Irish band called U2.

But Live Aid also served as the genesis for another event, one whose seed was born out of a comment made by Bob Dylan during his performance at the mega concert. When Dylan said that it would be nice to see some of the millions generated to benefit starving Africans set aside to help the American farmers who are such a crucial part of the world’s food chain, Neil Young was an artist in attendance who stood up and took notice.

Although Farm Aid is widely perceived as the brainchild of Willie Nelson—and rightfully so—Young’s involvement in the annual benefit concerts for American farmers is no less significant.

It was Young who first discussed the idea of Farm Aid with Nelson—following Dylan’s comments at Live Aid—and he hasn’t missed an appearance at a single Farm Aid concert in the nearly thirty years since the first one was held at the University of Illinois in 1985.

Dave Matthews and Neil Young in the Farm Aid press tent.

Photo by Mary Andrews

Along with Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Dave Matthews, Neil Young also sits on Farm Aid’s board of directors to this day. The concerts themselves occur on a mostly annual basis, with the venues ranging over the years from Ames, Iowa, to Auburn, Washington. The musical entertainment at these shows over the years has also been strictly top shelf, including a broad mix of mostly rock and country artists.

In addition to the expected annual performances from Mellencamp, Matthews, Nelson, and Neil Young, Live Aid has presented a diverse range of artists ranging from John Conlee to Jerry Lee Lewis to Wilco to Norah Jones. Dylan himself has also performed, honoring his original commitment to the cause from his original comments made at 1985’s Live Aid concert.

The shows also break tradition from most major rock concerts in the form of their concession stands, which always feature organic food products grown and produced locally by farmers.

But some of the most memorable moments of the Farm Aid shows over the years have been provided by Neil Young, and they haven’t always been exclusively musical ones. At the very first Farm Aid show in Illinois, he read an impassioned letter to then President Reagan from the stage—appealing to the “America first” values that he probably still believed Reagan represented at the time—by not turning a blind eye to the plight of the American farmer. The same letter was later published as a full-page ad in USA Today, paid for by Young himself.

A few years later at the Farm Aid concert in Ames, Iowa, he had some pointed words for the administration of then newly elected Democratic President Bill Clinton, and in particular for Vice President Al Gore and Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy for not coming to show their support.

Not long afterwards, Willie Nelson and a group of American farmers were granted a private meeting with Espy.

One final footnote here.

When Neil Young broached the idea of releasing a five-song E.P. of new material to benefit Farm Aid to his good friends at Geffen Records, it was predictably rejected.