SOMETIMES I AM TEMPTED to write my part of this account as comedy. Maybe I’m doing that without even trying. I never really knew what the hell was going on, even when I was more or less in the middle of it. I didn’t know which girl left Neil because when he got home he picked up his guitar instead of picking up the girl. I don’t know if the main reason he used to go to Billy Talbot’s house in Laurel Canyon was to sing and jam with Billy, Danny Whitten, and Ralph Molina, the musicians who later were to be known as Crazy Horse, but then were part of the Rockets, or to see singer Robin Lane, one of whose close friends was Danny Whitten. Also, some might think it ludicrous that I and my bank overdraft would make the grand gesture of offering economy airfare to Susan and Tia so I could meet my new daughter-in-law, when even incipient rock stars are known to be rolling in money. But I was innocent of such things, as you might have gathered, and I happened to know that Neil didn’t have money to spare then, no matter what he had later. (That year he was buying himself out of his pre-Elliot contract.)
In 1969, the year that Neil’s career really took off, he told me his dates at the Riverboat and I asked him by phone to stay with us, but was not especially surprised when he said that because of his working hours and other things he’d stay at a hotel and would let us know where when he arrived.
But late on the night he flew in, he phoned from the airport.
“I wonder if I could stay with you tonight,” he said.
“Sure.”
“I’ll explain when I get there.”
He’d been hassled by customs. Long hair was regarded very suspiciously at borders in those days. His luggage and instruments and body were searched, which took a couple of hours. Then he was allowed to put his clothes back on and phone me. He was shaken and wanted to be somewhere easy, like in a bed at our place. When his airline cab pulled up outside and I helped him in with his stuff we talked for a while and then went to bed.
In the morning we ate and drank coffee and he told me the details of his battle with the record company over the remix, but he also had more immediate things on his mind. First he wanted to buy a leather jacket. I drove him to a place on Yonge Street just below Bloor. On the way downtown we were stopped at the Inglewood Drive traffic light when he said, “I guess I owe you some money.”
He’d made the one payment on that $400 loan in 1966, the month he worked at Coles. I’d paid the rest, one month at a time.
I said, “You remember the deal?”
He thought a moment. “You mean, that if I paid it back I could always borrow from you again if I needed it?”
“I remember.”
“Well, I don’t think you’re going to need money from me again, so I’d like to leave it as one time when you needed help and I gave it.”
He glanced across at me and smiled. “Okay. Thanks.”
We were driving south on Mount Pleasant when he said, “How long does it take to get a passport?”
I’d wondered from time to time about his original illegal entry into the United States, but assumed it had been fixed up somehow. It hadn’t. “I haven’t been out of the U.S. since then, so it didn’t matter so much, but now I’ll probably be doing more travelling, so I’d better get it cleared up.”
Getting a Canadian passport in those days was usually about a two-week affair. He wouldn’t be in Canada that long – a few days at the Riverboat and another few in Ottawa at Le Hibou. I told him that there were ways to do it faster, but I’d have to check around. At the leather shop, I left him trying on jackets and phoned a friend, Thomas B. O’Neill, a lawyer who as the low-scoring but hardhitting Windy O’Neill had been a professional hockey player back when he weighed 100 pounds less. He had run for office occasionally, supported by us on one occasion when we had a coffee party in our home for him to meet prospective voters in our neighbourhood. By nature he would do anything for a friend even without such campaigning on his behalf.
“I think I can get it through in a day,” he said.
“How, for God’s sake?”
A powerful cabinet minister in the fairly new Liberal government of the time, Pierre Trudeau’s first, was Donald S. Macdonald. Windy had worked in his election campaigns. Windy would have liked to make it in politics as a Member of Parliament, a member of the Ontario legislature, a Toronto alderman. He also would have liked an appointment as a judge. He never was any of those things, but political parties don’t forget people who work for them. “I’ll call Don Macdonald’s office,” he said.
Neil had the necessary photos taken that day. He and I went to Windy’s office to fill out the forms. Windy signed all the places where someone respectable (postmaster, police chief, ordained minister, or whatever) was supposed to vouch for the applicant. The next day Neil had his passport. He was impressed.
The Riverboat that night was the first place I had heard Neil play and sing as a professional. I can see it still: a dim little place with a small stage a few inches off the floor, nearby booths holding the offspring of friends who used to visit us twenty years earlier at the Lake of Bays. Some had known Neil since they were babies. Some were a little hostile to me. The story had got around that he and I were at odds because I hadn’t rushed to help with the $600 for that bleeping amplifier of long ago. And he had this amazing presence. When he spoke, played, and sang, there wasn’t another sound in the place. After his first set someone came to me and said, “Neil wants you to come up to his dressing room.” I followed up a narrow flight of stairs and onto a sort of outdoor walkway. A teenage girl was waiting there in the half-dark.
“I knew Neil in Fort William,” she said earnestly. “Will you tell him I’m out here?”
Inside, the room was about six by eight, with one or two straight chairs. A news photographer took a picture of us, Neil’s arm around my shoulder, both smiling straight into the camera, the first photo taken of us together for ten years. The girl came in and Neil did remember her, and after a minute or two she left.
We saw one another only a couple of times more before he left for Ottawa. He was busy catching up with old friends and I was busy as well, but also didn’t want to be a constant figure hanging around in the background like a faithful old retainer. Because of my part in breaking up our family I found it difficult to push myself forward uninvited. Perhaps because of that, I missed early opportunities to bring my relationship with Neil back fully to what it was as a memory, in my mind. For whatever reason, I was not at the Riverboat every night. I was not always hanging around when he surfaced at his hotel in the morning. Scarcely an hour went by that I wasn’t thinking about him, but also I was helping to edit my Soviet hockey documentary, great haste being dictated by the fact that at the time a Soviet team was in Canada for exhibition games in Winnipeg. We had agreed to show a Soviet representative a rough cut of the show, to check our facts. I flew out with the rough cut and screened it in a Winnipeg motel room for my Moscow connection, Andrei Starovoitov of the USSR hockey committee, and the big and affable V. Kaluzhny of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, who acted as interpreter. They liked it, so that was that. Meanwhile, Neil had left for Ottawa.
Soon after, I decided to make a drastic change in my life. I had become tired after twelve years of writing columns, usually six a week, for The Globe and Mail and Globe Magazine. The editor, Dic Doyle, knew my feeling. Many of my columns in the previous few years had been engaged with both federal and provincial politics. When there was an opening in the Globe’s Ottawa bureau I asked for it and was accepted. I moved to Ottawa almost immediately. Astrid stayed to rent our house in Toronto. She would follow me in a few months with young Astrid and Deirdre, at the end of the school year. We met each weekend at our then recently bought country place near Omemee, a hundred acres with our new house finished just enough to be livable. So at a time when I might have been on the phone to Neil once a week or so, I was living in a furnished apartment in Ottawa, having a bad bout of influenza, and at the same time writing the first of two books I was to do (thirteen years apart) with Punch Imlach, then recently fired (for the first of two times) as coach and general manager of Toronto Maple Leafs. That spring also the Queen’s Canadian representative, Governor General Roland Michener, undertook a major tour of the Canadian Arctic. I was sent along to cover it, flying usually in small aircraft, from one Inuit settlement to another, landing on the ice at Rankin Inlet, Eskimo Point, and dozens of other outposts until eventually we reached the northern community of Resolute, and flew from there to Alert, the world’s most northerly permanent settlement, about 500 miles from the North Pole.
A few weeks after I got back from the Arctic there was another crisis. I had offered the Imlach book, a hot item in hockey-obsessed Canada, to the Globe for excerpting. It had not been picked up. But two other Toronto newspapers, the Telegram and the Star, bid for it. The Telegram with the better offer got first serial rights. The Globe then invoked a clause in the American Newspaper Guild contract that said an employee could not work for any publication in direct competition. I was torn. The money involved for serial rights and syndication was $9,200 – normally not enough to change one’s life over, but half was Imlach’s and I felt there was a principle involved. Only a week or two after the Globe had moved my furniture into the four-bedroom house I had rented in Ottawa, this dispute came to a head. John Bassett, the Telegram’s publisher, sometimes a go-for-the-jugular man but not in this case, phoned to say that he would let me out of our agreement if I wished; “You’ve been at the Globe a long time. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you ending your association there.” But I felt that the Globe was being unfair, because it had had first refusal. When I said that, he asked me to join the Telegram. Those are the facts, although later it was put about that I had simply succumbed to a rich offer to move to the Telegram along with the book excerpts. Bassett did give me $12,000 a year more than the Globe had been paying, but the basic dispute was my feeling that the Globe had blown it and was trying to recover at my expense. Anyway, a month after the Globe had paid to move my family and furniture to Ottawa, the Telegram paid the same movers to bring us back. Our Toronto house had been rented; we had to rent another – ah, it was all very tiresome, but it was done, and with a couple of weeks to go before starting at the Telegram we packed the family Chrysler and drove west to visit relations on the prairies.
All this had taken place six months or so after Neil had played those coffee houses in Toronto and Ottawa. We didn’t see one another or talk much, beyond bare-bones details. During that time, Neil was making some of the most important moves of his life. But it was September before I began to catch up.
Once a few years later Neil told an interviewer that when he said one thing today, he meant it today, but the answer might be quite different tomorrow. “Okay, we’ll interview you tomorrow,” the interviewer said. In the summer of 1968 when he was in Topanga writing songs and working towards his first album, he’d spoken strongly on behalf of going it alone, not being part of a group. Obviously, that couldn’t be taken quite literally – he meant he didn’t want to be tied to any one group any more. Working with other musicians in a looser arrangement was part of his life. On his first album, he was joined in this song or that by five other musicians, George Grantham, Jim Messina, Jack Nitzsche, Dr. John, and Ry Cooder. The album was well reviewed, but no blockbuster. His coffee-house crowds in Toronto and Ottawa were good, but he and Elliot still joke about the poster for Neil’s appearance at the Bitter End in New York. Neil: “Super poster! Bigger than the crowd.” Elliot had sold Neil to doubting engagers with a one-two punch; he’d had to promise that if they would take Neil, he would send the then better-known Joni Mitchell on the same route soon after. Like a sports deal, for future considerations.
After Neil returned home from Canada, he sat in from time to time with the Rockets at the Whiskey au Go Go on Sunset Boulevard. One day when he was home with a bad cold he wrote three songs, “Cinnamon Girl,” “Down by the River,” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” – and thought they’d go great with Whitten, Talbot, and Molina from the Rockets, who also included at that time Leon Whitsell on guitar and vocals, George Whitsell the same, and Bobby Notkoff on violin. The Rockets were no green hands. They had released an album in March 1968, on the White Whale label, featuring all their own compositions, including four songs by Danny Whitten, one by Talbot/Molina, four by Leon Whitsell, and one by George Whitsell. Nevertheless, Whitten, Talbot, and Molina agreed to record with Neil and then go back to the Rockets. But things didn’t turn out as they had planned. The recording session was so good that the three Rockets became Crazy Horse, and the remaining three musicians went on to other things.
Neil and Crazy Horse liked one another. They fitted. In the instant way of the rock world then and now, when something seems to work you don’t wait around – you go out and use it while it’s hot. They went on a nationwide tour of small halls as Neil Young and Crazy Horse. There was incipient difficulty because Danny Whitten was using heroin, but it hadn’t yet got him as badly as it was going to. By the time Neil and Crazy Horse came back from the tour, Neil’s songs (and some by the others) were well honed. They rang up David Briggs and talked about a recording session. But this one was different. David: “I think all the thought and work that Neil and I put into his first album, going from studio to studio, just made him tired to think about. I mean, for him it had really dragged on – he’s a really immediate guy, as we all know. I remember after that, he said, ‘Boy, I don’t want to do that again, I want to get a band together and make band music and go in and do it.’”
So this time, with Crazy Horse, they tried a couple of studios and found one that really worked. Except for a couple of things at one other studio, the whole album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was recorded in one place. That also was when Neil first started experimenting with singing live to tracks (recording words and music simultaneously) – which back in the old days was the way records were made; it was the way Ray Charles made records and Little Richard and people of that generation, people of Neil’s earliest musical roots. By then Neil had developed confidence in his voice, his ability to sing, to the point that he wanted to go in and play his guitar and sing his music and record both at the same time. They did some songs that way, but not all at this first try. Some background vocals were recorded separately and some of his vocals were also recut, but it was no longer a matter of course that he would lay down music tracks first and later do the vocals.
David and Neil were getting to know one another very well. The long friendship and recording relationship that lasted through many more albums had its foundation then, at least partly because Neil likes an edge in people and David was not the world’s easiest person to get along with. Another of David’s close friends once told me, “David and I have a friendship that ranges from him being so tough on me once that I had tears in my eyes, right from that to hugging each other like brothers when something went well.” But with Neil, David had made up his mind: “The thing that really struck me the most about him during that time and subsequently was like this – he was such a great writer of moody ballads that everyone’s perception of him as a person was totally different from what the guy is really like. You analyze his songs and everybody thinks, here’s this brooding, melancholy guy, this tortured, inner-looking person. But from the first minute I knew him, I saw him as a prankster and a joker, a happy-go-lucky guy who loved to hang out and have fun; really a brilliant writer who could sit down and put himself in a context and write about a subject that has nothing to do with his real personality. I mean, he’s got his share of torments but they certainly never apply to his dealings one on one with normal people. In my life of working with artists, I’ve never met anybody like him. He’ll sit down and talk, he doesn’t care if you’re a bartender or a mechanic, he’ll talk to you straight up, no condescending, just be a really open guy. It’s always a shock to people.”
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was released in May 1969. If anybody had been counting, that made three albums in less than a year that Neil had out working for him – Last Time Around with Buffalo Springfield, put together by Jim Messina with some help from Richie Furay after the group broke up; Neil Young, his first solo album; and what was seen later as his big breakthrough album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
But, and it is a big but, at the time when he first recorded with Crazy Horse Neil had been married to Susan for only a few months but hadn’t been home much. When he was home, anyone visiting was charmed by the atmosphere. A good writer, Marci McDonald, described his home atmosphere glowingly for a Toronto Star piece in February 1969:
He’s created a world of his own in this incredible house on stilts high on the side of the canyon, a world filled with the things that make him happy: Spanish-American antiques and exotic skin rugs that glow rich with age in the candlelight, art made by a friend, a recording studio sound system, a half-husky dog named Winnipeg and a half-dozen Persian pedigree cats. There is, too, a sunny blonde named Susan with hair that flows down to her waist, and an equally sunny seven-year-old daughter, Tia.
When the interview is over, friends drop by, including David Briggs (who lives down the hill). Neil perches on a chair with a cat. Susan lights more candles, then spreads a fantastic table, mountains of ham and sweet potatoes and small sweet peas, washed down by mugs of cider and warm talk and easy laughter, with a sort of glow over everything as she curls at his feet, her hair shining in the candlelight, Tia playing in pyjamas with her doll.
There’s a good feeling in Neil Young’s mountainside refuge, and it’s broken only by the occasional howl from a coyote prowling the rocks outside after one of his cats. Even in the shelter of Topanga Canyon, there are the coyotes.
Bob spent a little time with Neil at the house in Topanga Canyon early that summer. He didn’t know Susan well enough to make any judgement as to how they were getting on, but found Neil in good shape, writing songs, “and just being Neil as I knew him, fun, witty, full of ideas, really good to be with.” Neil enjoyed his stepdaughter Tia; he’s always been good with kids. He really liked his house but he’d been so long calling his own shots that if he wanted to go out, he went out for a day or a week or whatever. This caused friction.
Meanwhile, the old Buffalo Springfield had scattered – and the one landing most squarely on his feet was Stephen Stills. David Crosby had been kicked out of the Byrds in 1967 because he’d done some playing with other groups. Stills spent a few months in the summer of 1968, supported by his income from the three Springfield albums put out by Atlantic Records, looking for something else. He and Crosby were fooling around on some songs one day at a friend’s house when Graham Nash of the Hollies dropped in to sing with them. “Willie [Nash’s nickname] tried to join in a couple of songs,” Stills said later. “When he did, David and I just looked at each other; it was one of those moments.” That’s how Crosby, Stills and Nash was born. Nash gave the Hollies a month’s notice and the new trio rehearsed in London, then flew to L.A. and recorded their phenomenally successful first album called Crosby, Stills & Nash, released a few weeks before Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. But they hadn’t toured together, and cutting an album in a studio calls for much different elements than touring. Stills explained to the other two that for touring they’d need a lead guitar, somebody who could make the show come alive on stage in the format he had planned: first set acoustic and second set rock ’n’ roll.
Stephen, a recollection:
“They said, ‘Far out! But who do you want on lead?’
“‘Neil Young.’
“‘What? We’ve got enough problems deciding whose songs we’re going to do already!’”
They were against it all the way, argued long and hard, but Stephen is a very difficult man to deny.
Neil: “It was that June of 1969 when their album was just out and going like hell, that Stephen came to the house one day and tapped on the door. He wanted me to play with them, not as a member of the group, but to be introduced as sort of a walk-on guest, in other words, a backup. Maybe that’s something he’d used as a compromise with the other two. I told him if I was going to play with them, I wanted my name on it.”
Steve: “Aw, c’mon, everybody’ll know who you are, man.” Neil: “Nothing doing, man.”
That’s how the “and Young” was added to Crosby, Stills, Nash. Within a month they were in Chicago (not in New York, as some accounts have it) to begin their first long and successful tour. Their second stop was Woodstock. That mighty festival pulled half a million fans from across North America to a tent-strewn, trampled field in upstate New York. The event stands, and always will, as an historic moment in rock history. Every group that was anybody was there. To the musicians, it was a fantastic blur – the announcements about bad acid, warnings, instructions, medical tents where doctors looked after people on bad trips, nudity, loving, fighting, listening to group after group boom forth from the raised stand while it all was recorded and filmed.
One of Neil’s memories of Woodstock is of the helicopter flight in to a small, nearly deserted airfield near the site. A few other musicians were waiting around there as well. That is where Neil first met Jimi Hendrix, whom he later called the greatest electric guitar player who ever lived. For a while that afternoon Neil and Jimi liberated a pick-up truck and drove around together in it.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young appeared as thirteenth group on the Woodstock bill, and in some accounts were rated the top act of that remarkable gathering of rock stars. The first Crosby, Stills and Nash album was well on its way to winning a Grammy award for best new group of that year. Neil’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was a national hit. Putting the two elements together was the most crowd-catching event of that autumn. The fact that Neil was staying with his Crazy Horse association, recording with them, keeping that road open, sometimes didn’t sit well with Crosby, Stills and Nash, but actually set the tone for what the group soon was to become – a loose federation that would come together and fall apart several times in the next few years. In interviews, Neil tended to differentiate between the two groups on his own terms: with CSNY, he felt he didn’t have a big load to carry; he played an instrument, sang a few songs, but didn’t feel any heavy responsibility. About Crazy Horse he had a different idea: “With Crazy Horse I’m trying to make records that are not necessarily hits, but which people will listen to for a long time.” Which has been true; some of his lifetime standards date from that period, never high on the charts and sometimes not on the charts at all, but he still plays them more than a decade later. A sampling of these includes “Cinnamon Girl,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” “Dance Dance Dance,” “Down by the River,” “Expecting To Fly,” “Here We Are in the Years,” “I Am a Child,” “The Last Trip to Tulsa,” “Mr. Soul,” “The Old Laughing Lady,” “Sugar Mountain,” “Wonderin’,” “Helpless,” “Tell Me Why” (“Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself, when you’re old enough to repay but young enough to sell”), “After the Gold Rush,” “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” “Southern Man,” “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” “Birds,” “Ohio.” All those songs had been written by the end of 1970.
There is no doubt on earth that the fifteen months or so after Woodstock in the summer of 1969 transformed Neil’s career. His marriage was one of the casualties. From this distance it seems plain that neither Susan nor Neil was to blame. He was twenty-three and she about thirty when they married. To oversimplify drastically, Neil obviously was not ready to handle both that marriage and the demands his career forced on him (and which he accepted willingly, with enthusiasm, headlong). Susan was strong in her own right. She probably believed more in Neil than she did that he would suddenly be snatched from her by his work. Anyway, their troubles began that early, and grew.
When Neil was away so much, Susan filled part of her time with her friends. The Topanga house that he had wanted so much as a refuge was not that. Nobody’s fault, really, but solitude had always been part of his nature. For a brief time it had seemed not as important as the warmth and support of marriage, but I had from Neil later some kind of terse explanation. “It got so that every time I came home to Topanga, the house was full of people I didn’t even know.” That may be as much of an explanation as anyone is likely to get.
After going on from Woodstock to finish that tour with CSNY, he was on the coast again for a short time. In November he and Crazy Horse played at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. He changed gears and went with CSNY later that month into a short U.S. tour that ended late in December and then moved to Europe in January 1970, playing Royal Albert Hall in London and dates in Denmark and Sweden. Neil flew back for a tour with Crazy Horse and Jack Nitzsche starting in February. That one included widely hailed dates at Fillmore East in New York and the Music Hall Theatre in Boston. Susan travelled with Neil on that tour in what must be seen, in retrospect, as something like a last try to make the marriage work. Newspaper reporters are not privy to everything that goes on, of course, but when she was mentioned it was as the background of an interview, or coming in from shopping, getting about equal billing with his D’Angelico guitar, or his sheepskin coat. Treating beautiful young women as a mere part of the scenery is not uncharacteristic of the rock world and many other parts of the entertainment industry. The chroniclers are used to beautiful women or handsome men as the consorts of the stars. It takes someone of great character (I think now of Neil’s wife, Pegi) to deal with the culture shock of being treated like a picture on the wall once the two people of the marriage step outside of their home circle of friends.
From time to time as all this went on, CSNY spent many long hours in studios putting together the album Déjà vu. One, perhaps mythical, statistic is that the group spent 800 hours in the studio recording that album. Neil’s sardonic comment later: “Ten eighty-hour days.” When it was released in April, Déjà vu had a staggering $2,000,000 in advance orders before the first copy was passed across a record-store counter. Someone noted at the time that within eight or nine months after Woodstock, CSNY was now playing more music, making more records and more money, than any of the twelve groups that had appeared before them on the Woodstock bill. The high being ridden was not only as a group. On May 4, student demonstrations at Kent State University ended with the tragic shooting of four students by U.S. National Guardsmen. When Neil’s angry song about the incident, “Ohio,” was released a matter of days later the song had a vast national protest appeal – and met an immediate angry official response. Many radio stations banned it from air play. Vice President Spiro Agnew, not naming Neil but obviously aiming at him, denounced rock music as being anti-U.S.
All this time, settled into my new job as sports editor of the Telegram, we were in touch, if at all, in sporadic letters (by me) and phone calls (by him), as Neil was finishing his tour with Crazy Horse and trying to cope with Danny Whitten’s deepening involvement with heroin. Neil and the others were back in L.A. recording his most important album yet, After The Gold Rush, when Neil decided Whitten’s addiction was intolerable. Neil’s sudden announcement on May 24, with the album partly completed, that he was not going to record again with Crazy Horse caught a lot of people, including, quite possibly, Neil himself, by surprise. There is some possibility that he fired the whole band in an attempt to shock Whitten off his road to disaster. Then unable to find full replacements, Neil hired Molina back to handle the drums, and made a phone call that deserves at least a footnote in rock history. In the previous year in Washington, D.C., a youngster named Nils Lofgren, who was sixteen at the time, appeared in the Crazy Horse dressing room to give an impassioned account of how good he was, and if they ever needed anybody, etc. At which time Neil handed him a guitar. He could play. He also could sing, and had a lot of skill as an accordionist. During the hiatus after firing Crazy Horse and hiring Molina back, Lofgren got a telephone call from Neil, which after the opening routine went like this:
Neil: “I want you to come out here to L.A. and play on the sessions for this album I’m doing, After The Gold Rush. Can you do it?”
Lofgren: “Well, sure, but why not Whitten?”
Neil: “I don’t want you to play guitar. I want you to play piano.”
Lofgren, laughing: “Look! I don’t play piano!”
As Lofgren related the story, at this point Neil just said, “You can play piano,” and hung up the phone.
David Briggs remembers Lofgren arriving at Neil’s Topanga house, where the album was being recorded right on the premises. “I’ll never forget this brash kid, I think he hitchhiked at least from the airport, walking up Neil’s drive with his guitar under his arm and knocking on the door. He comes in and sits right down and starts playing.” A keyboard player for the group called Spirit let him go to his house and practise piano for a couple of days and nights. Then he was ready. “Neil was right about the piano,” Lofgren said later. “He knew I played accordion and the right hand work is the same, so all I had to do was get my left hand together. He wanted a plain, simple style – and it worked.”
But maybe the most remarkable feature of those final days of Neil and Susan’s marriage was the way that soon-to-be-famous album was put together in their home. David Briggs: “It was a very inspired record done under the worst possible conditions. You can hear dogs barking outside if you listen real close. When you do something that fast, under those conditions, you know, you think – it’s the old value system – how can it be so good if rehearsing and recording and even some of the writing only took a few days? A lot of those songs were written right on the spot. Neil would sit upstairs in the living room working on a song and then we’d all go downstairs to the basement and turn on the tapes and away we’d go.”
When the album came out with the entire back cover a photo of the seat of Neil’s artistically patched jeans, one of the credits read: “PATCHES: Susan Young.”
All this happened in May and early June of 1970. Déjà vu was topping the charts. CSNY was heading out on tour. The other three had had a three-month lay-off while Neil was touring with Crazy Horse, battling Whitten’s heroin addiction, doing After The Gold Rush. Only a few days later Neil was on the road again, CSNY billed as “the highest paid group in the world.” Their live double album called 4 Way Street was recorded on that tour for autumn release.
Somewhere in there, while with CSNY in San Francisco, a road manager named Leo Mikoda told Neil enthusiastically about a ranch for sale in nearby San Mateo County, a few dozen miles past the San Francisco airport. He took Neil out to look at the hilly, remote property. It was smallish, 140 acres. Neil loved it. Back in Topanga, he told Susan about the ranch. They drove up there together in an old car a couple of times and looked around the ranch and talked about it. Neil decided he would buy. But a short time later, home again in Topanga, he and Susan had their final parting. Neil moved into the Chateau Marmont Hotel while he waited for the ranch purchase papers to be made final. It was a measure of another side of his life at the time that he paid cash for the ranch, $340,000. “I know now that I was crazy to pay cash,” he told me a few years later. “I could have paid the down payment and invested the rest. But I just poured all my money into it so that I knew it could never be taken away from me. I was going good right then but I didn’t know how long that would last, didn’t feel secure, so I just went for it.” The Topanga house had doubled or tripled in value by then but eventually he sold it to a friend for what he had paid for it.