HE HAD BEEN ON HIS RANCH about five years the first time I went to see him there. He’d asked me a couple of times but the distances were great and he had his life and I mine, so usually I saw him only when he was on tour and came to Toronto. In the middle 1970s he asked me again. Pegi was only on the edge of his consciousness then, their marriage three years away, and he was living a bachelor life after a brief marriage to Susan Acevedo in the late 1960s and an early 1970s relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, which was almost as brief but in 1972 did produce their son Zeke, my first grandson. Maybe I had sounded down in a letter, or maybe he just wanted to be in closer contact again, because he called and said, “Any chance you can get out here for a while?”
The evening I arrived in San Francisco he was recording, so he sent a friend to meet me. We drove south into San Mateo County then turned off on the dark and narrow forest road into Neil’s property. A few miles later I could see two distant tiny lights puncturing the surrounding night and then we were pulling up at the kitchen door of Neil’s modest old house. When the engine stopped I could hear a piano playing, and when I walked in and he left the piano and embraced me I could feel his thinness and the thoughts flashed of the roly-poly little boy he had been and then the gangling youth and now this man.
We hadn’t seen one another for more than a year, and we had a beer or two and talked while he showed me around. It didn’t take long. In the tiny, and only, bedroom his bed was set on a pedestal, close enough to a big pot-bellied woodstove that he could feed it without getting out of bed. Everything was well used and comfortable. The washstand outside his bedroom door held a porcelain basin old enough that it had no drain but was on a swivel that allowed it to be flipped over for emptying into a pail below. The living room had an old dining table and chairs, two pianos, a rocking chair, other old-fashioned furniture and lamps. In an hour or two, at bedtime, he took me into a room he’d added to the original house to hold speakers, turntables, and stereo equipment. A single bed stood in the middle of the floor. “Zeke’ll be here tomorrow and this is his room,” he said. “But you use it tonight.” At the time Zeke, then three, was living in Los Angeles with Carrie but visited Neil often.
When I wakened early, Neil was still asleep. I roamed outside in the nearly total country silence of the sunny morning. By his house, set among great oaks, was a pond dotted with mallards, geese, coots, and other water birds. When I walked down the lane towards the low-slung verandahed house of his farm manager a hundred yards away, dogs barked. Barns and other well-worn farm buildings and corrals stood beyond. Bison grazed on steep slopes nearby, and I could also see herds of shaggy Highland cattle; he’d been trying to cross-breed them to get either the world’s shaggiest buffalo or humped cattle, depending on the roll of the genes. A little later, after Neil made breakfast, we got my bags and he drove me across the ranch on a narrow winding road through giant redwoods and onto a 700-acre spread he’d bought not long before because it abutted his original 140 acres. Not letting someone else buy it was privacy insurance. Soon we swung left past some small houses and into a glen of towering redwoods through which a fast stream ran. At the bottom of the glen beside the stream was a sprawling white ranch house where coffee was on and people were moving around – Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot, and Frank Sampedro of Neil’s band, Crazy Horse, and a few others including a young woman who normally worked as a Playboy bunny, the friend of a friend of Neil’s not there at the moment. A slim and lively American girl in her early twenties, Ellen Talbot, married to roadie John Talbot, lived nearby in what was called the Little Red House and, since everyone there was expected to pull weight, cooked and cleaned and shopped for the floating population, now including me, that lived in the ranch house. When I went shopping with Ellen in and old pick-up later she asked me if I had heard of a writer named William Saroyan. I said he was one of the heroes of my boyhood. “He’s my uncle Willie,” she said.
The next day I began a daily ritual, often thinking how different this place was from most common conceptions of a rock star’s life. I sometimes cooked. I spent a lot of time with Zeke, a cheerful fair-haired little boy who limped along in a leg brace because of the effects of cerebral palsy. Neil would feed him breakfast and bring him to the recording studio set in another redwood clearing. There, Neil also had build a large outdoor stage that he used to plan stage positions when he was preparing for the road.
When the musicians were deeply into it and Zeke got restless, we’d walk up for a swim in Neil’s pool on a hill behind his house. If Zeke tired of walking in his brace and said “Carry me, Grandpa,” I’d take him on my shoulders. Neil said, “You two remind me of when Granddad came to stay with us in Omemee. I never let him out of my sight.” I had almost forgotten that long-ago visit of my father’s but it gave extra meaning to now.
At night, after dinner at the ranch house, Neil and the others often would sit in the kitchen on wooden chairs, playing and singing a little. “Try this,” Neil would say, or someone else would say, and the music would go on for a few intricate or simple passages and then they’d break and discuss and go on. It was an easy and unhurried kind of life.
One morning he came along through the redwoods in his pick-up and said he was driving over to see a friend and would I like to come along. We headed off the ranch over miles of winding narrow road and were chatting idly when I happened to mention the number of times I was approached by television, radio, magazine, or newspaper people either to talk or to write about him. They couldn’t get to him so they would try to do it through me. I imagine they thought of me as a proud father who would be happy to bask in reflected fame and let little tidbits of his life drop. I turned them all down because in most aspects of his life Neil stays away from media and tries to keep his offstage life private. Obviously such approaches were attempts to pierce his privacy through me. As a writer myself I know the techniques, and even invented some of them. So apart from a profoundly impressed column I wrote about his first Carnegie Hall concert and a few other newspaper mentions, I had consciously avoided exploiting our relationship. The only exploitation had been unconscious: the extra credence given my writing by some people, especially those younger than I am, on the grounds that anyone who was Neil Young’s father couldn’t be all bad. Anyway, I told him that, despite my rejection of these advances, sometimes I was tempted to write about our original family relationship for my own purposes, to help me figure some things out, to come face to face with myself and my part in breaking up our home.
We were driving on a hillside road, with scrub slanting up steeply at one side and dropping off sharply on the other. He thought for a moment or two, then glanced at me sideways and said, “Well, it’s your life too, you know, Daddy.”
That day when I listened to him telling me what was plainly a fact – that it was my life too, you know – I did nothing about it. It was five years, in the summer of 1980, after his marriage to Pegi and the birth of their son Ben, before I finally decided to go ahead with my version of our earlier life and hard times. What triggered it, really, was that in letters a few days apart, Reader’s Digest and Toronto Life (a big glossy regional magazine) both asked me to write about Neil. Toronto Life’s offer of unlimited space attracted me. It was something the Digest, by its very nature, was not likely to match. Anyway I thought Toronto Life was more suited to the kind of account I was beginning to think about (i.e., not exactly inspirational). I didn’t want to be cramped for space or confined in direction while trying to beat my way through some kind of truth about myself and the way I had affected the lives of Rassy, my first wife, and our sons, Bob and Neil.
In many ways the next few days were painful and yet also joyous and liberating. I would write about an event, a feeling, a crisis, maybe one of the darker things I’d done, in terms I had been using for years more or less superficially whenever I felt obliged to explain this or that about my first marriage. Then I would read it and think, goddamn it, that’s not true, or at least not precisely true. I would revise. I would go and walk in the woods to rest and remember, and come back and write. I sometimes drove to Omemee (population 750) to buy a paper or a bottle of rum. Passing the big red brick house on the main street where we’d lived, made love, been sick, whatever, I would remember a lot of good times and some bad. Crossing the old Mill Bridge I thought of Neil fishing there when he was only four or five, Bob skating and playing hockey on the mill pond in winter, the gradual dissolution of what had been love into tears (sometimes mine) of despair. Then I would drive home and try to make each line count for truth. I wrote from early morning to late at night for three days as if a dam had broken.
The result was very instructive to me. In addition to showing me a good deal about myself that I had not always faced before, the account told me that all I really knew of Neil was his first nearly fourteen years before his mother and I split. I knew little about his next four years when he was in Winnipeg with his mother and I rarely saw him. There had been a good few months in 1965 that we had spent together when he was nineteen, turning twenty, and trying without success to make it as a musician in Toronto. But I knew very little in a first-hand way of his life after 1966 when he and bassist Bruce Palmer sold everything they had and (in Neil’s phrase) “some things we didn’t have,” and with a few friends headed for California. In an incredibly short time after that he was a name everywhere rock music is played. Five-dollar seats were scalped for a hundred dollars when he sold out Carnegie Hall. Twenty-thousand-seat arenas weren’t big enough to hold the people who wanted in. All albums sold in hundreds of thousands around the world, some in millions. Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times at various times called him the dominant figure in pop music. And now it was 1980 and he was known from Tokyo to Oslo and was still my son, and Rassy’s.
I sent him a copy of what I had written. He telephoned me a few days later. He and Pegi had read it in bed the night before. He said, “We laughed and we cried. There are so many things in there that I never knew before.” What child does know the inner life of his parents? I began to think of finding out about the areas of his life I had not been a part of, and about writing this book. I will spare you an exact accounting of the times I went to bed thinking I would do it, then woke in the middle of the night thinking, “Are you crazy?” Yet I felt that even the millions of words that have been written about him have not been able to touch what I have a particular knowledge of.