WHEN I’M WITH PEOPLE, I usually have trouble showing my emotions in situations that plainly call for emotions to be shown. When I am alone, I walk out to my deck on a summer morning when the sky and trees and birds and the long green valley stretching southeastward are glitteringly perfect and shout, “You’ve done it again, God!” and the echo comes back from McCamus’s sugar bush a mile across the valley, “… done it again, God!” But in public moments of life’s high dramas, I’m different, like the Friday night of December 4, 1970, when Neil played Carnegie Hall for the first time. Just when everyone was expecting to see tears as big as light bulbs rolling down my cheeks, all my rockets were going off inside, unseen. To the innocent bystander I looked as if I was auditioning for a role as a graven image, or a cigar-store white man.
Jack Nicholson (whose most recent movie at that ancient time was Five Easy Pieces) rushed backstage after the concert and up to Neil exclaiming, “You sold out Carnegie Hall, man. You sold out!” Then, introduced to me and seeing me apparently calm, he clasped my upper arms and expostulated, “You don’t seem to understand what an achievement this is for your son!”
“I do!” I exclaimed. (How does an habitually poker-faced guy defend himself against such an accusation?) “I do!”
“People work their whole lives to get to Carnegie Hall. Neil comes here and, boom!”
“I know! I know!”
But people whose art depends on their emotions being in full view do not understand. I could not tell Nicholson of a walk I’d taken on that cold and raw afternoon. (I would have had to yell and, in the confusion, maybe not finish.) Neil had called a few weeks earlier to tell me about the Carnegie Hall booking and say, “I thought maybe you’d like to come. I can’t tell you what a big deal this is for me.” He called his mother in Florida with the same message. He told his brother Bob, “You have to be good at Carnegie Hall. The money you make there isn’t important. I’d do it for nothing – it’s playing Carnegie Hall, that’s the important thing.” When Astrid and I flew in a few hours before the concert it was my first experience of one part of the rock world: being met at the airport by a limousine hired by Neil, and taken to the hotel suite he’d booked for us. Around four or five that afternoon I left Astrid in the hotel and said I was going to walk around a little. Back in the happy days when our family was unfractured, safe and sound in Omemee, Rassy and I used to go to New York fairly often when I would be seeing editors who bought my short stories. We would stay at Jack Dempsey’s old Great Northern Hotel, not far from Carnegie Hall, so I knew the district. Carnegie Hall had a magic for me. In the late 1930s I had read everything I could find in Down Beat magazine, Variety, and the New York papers on the first Benny Goodman concert there, the historic breakthrough of swing music into that sanctum sanctorum of great musicians. While I was thinking of that and trying to match it with Neil playing there I came to a full stop in front of a tall poster that read: TONIGHT. NEIL YOUNG, FOLK SINGER. Across it was a sticker: SOLD OUT. I walked past slowly and turned and walked past again. I couldn’t get enough of it. My mind was full of images of years ago. As I walked away I wiped at tears and muttered to myself aloud, “What the hell happened?”
There was one other element of those moments. I knew Rassy was in the city, too, up from her home in Florida. I would have liked to see her then, just for the moments when we might have touched, and remembered what the best part of our marriage had been. In my heightened state of emotion anything seemed possible and I looked closely at every woman approaching or walking away, half-expecting to see her, but did not. And I didn’t see her at the concert, either, because when the first concert was announced a few weeks earlier, it had sold out in twenty-five minutes. A second concert seemed called for, but Saturday afternoon and evening were already booked. So the second concert was scheduled for midnight on Saturday. That sold out, too. Neil (I imagine with at least an inner grin) assigned first-concert tickets to Astrid and me, second-concert tickets to Rassy, so that never the twain should meet.
Astrid and I dined after my walk and then walked up the street from our hotel through the crowds outside Carnegie Hall who were imploring passers-by for tickets. One young man offered me a hundred dollars each for our five-dollar seats.
Inside, it was the classic youth scene of the time: blue jeans patched, tight sweaters over young bosoms. We sat, I guess, like visitors from another world. But once the place was dark, we all could see this dark form approaching the front of the stage and then the spotlight came on him: tall and thin, blue jeans, checked shirt, work boots, dark straight hair to his shoulders or beyond, two acoustic guitars on a rack beside a plain wooden chair, a concert piano at his left. Moving gingerly as if his back was bothering him. No music to play except the songs in his head, all his own.
He sings in a way that twists my heart. It is a strange feeling to be on one’s feet participating and then watching quietly a standing ovation for one’s own son, as happened several times to me that night. It was all new to my experience, but when I thought of certain incidents later there was some connection with the old feeling Neil had about Buffalo Springfield: that the people who loved them really owned part of them and had a right to assert that ownership. Once he introduced a new song as being one that he would do in a week or so for a Johnny Cash show in Nashville, and there was a single loud argumentative voice from the audience, “Why? Why with Cash, man?” When he played a piano introduction, people applauded as if they knew from the opening notes which song was to follow. After about the third time this happened he stopped after a few bars and said, “Y’know, about these piano intros – I don’t play so good. They’re all the same intro…. I just wanted to let you know that I know.” Laughter. Applause. Once he was applauded for rolling up his sleeve.
Maybe as part of his near-reverence for this hall where he was playing, he didn’t hesitate to instruct the audience on manners. At the end of each song there would be shouted (or screamed) requests for this song or that. He told the audience to hold it, “You don’t think I’d come to Carnegie Hall without planning? You’re going to get all the songs you want to hear.”
In the mob scene backstage, Neil waved at what looked for the moment like a jam-packed cocktail party (without the drinks), everybody talking at once, and suggested that we meet the next day for brunch. “Better make it in your hotel suite. It’ll be quieter. Nobody will know where to find me.”
Six of us met about noon in our suite: Astrid, Elliot Roberts, Bob, a friend of his, Neil, and me. We had a couple of easy hours although it was difficult for Neil to get comfortable because of the back brace he was wearing, which explained the careful way he’d moved onstage the night before. A few weeks earlier at the ranch he’d been lifting heavy slabs of polished walnut to fasten them to a wall. On one lift suddenly his back hurt. Before that he’d had some back trouble but had ignored it. “Once I simply couldn’t move when I tried to move. I’d also had some trouble getting out of my car, but without any particular pain. But after the back started to hurt, when I was in the car I couldn’t get out. When I was driving I couldn’t get my left foot to go up to use the clutch or the brake. I had to lift the foot up with my hand. I could push down but I couldn’t lift up. So I phoned my doctor in L.A. because I knew something must be wrong.” He laughed. “I can take a hint, you know.”
The doctor sent him immediately to hospital and into traction. An operation probably would be necessary, the doctor said, but meanwhile Neil could make his condition bearable, and fulfil his Carnegie Hall date, if he wore a back brace, got the hotel to supply a special bed, and was careful.
When they left, Astrid and I checked out and took a flight home. I can’t even remember reading any reviews at the time, but that Carnegie Hall triumph is still mentioned in magazines and books and newspaper pieces about his career. What the concert did for me was bring me to realize fully for the first time that just as my boyhood dream had been to be Evelyn Waugh or John Dos Passos or John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway, many of today’s kids want to be Neil Young. I look back on that night of December 4, 1970, as one of the great emotional experiences of my life.