NO DOUBT IT IS ONLY A coincidence that this is chapter thirteen, which some people consider an unlucky number. Neil had said before the 1971 solo tour, which ended in Royal Festival Hall, that when he finished it he was going to take a year off from touring. The year had stretched to eighteen months by the autumn of 1972, much of it spent working on his film. But, riding the crest of Harvest, the music industry’s best-selling album that year, he was planning his biggest tour ever, gathering musicians at his ranch for rehearsals, scheduling concerts in sixty-five cities (the last seven in England) in the first three months of 1973. He called it the Time Fades Away tour and chartered a Lockheed Electra to alleviate the difficulties with schedules: into-the-aircraft, out-of-the-aircraft, into-the-limos, into-the-hotel, out-of-the-hotel, into-the-concert-hall, out-of-the-concert-hall (and on to the next place), all the pressures of such a tour. But suddenly the universe was not unfolding for him as it had during the past few years.
This period began with the partial foundering of the Journey Through The Past project. Warners had put some money into the film originally, and the double-album soundtrack was scheduled for release in November. That did happen, but release of the film at the same time did not. To telescope drastically the trials of the next few months, Warners decided to pull out of the film’s distribution. Neil then negotiated full ownership for himself, but the soundtrack album – without the film’s release to help explain it to listeners – was giving Neil his first real roasting from critics. Partly in response to these negative goings-on, Neil wanted to do the Time Fades Away tour so stupendously well that it would not only smother the doubters, but also bolster the faith that he still had, and never lost, in Journey. Zeke was only a few months old, and Carrie, living at the ranch, was being given many good scripts to read but turning them all down, when the musicians for the tour began to gather at the ranch – Ben Keith, Tim Drummond, Ken Buttrey, and Jack Nitzsche. Then Neil made one choice that was to haunt him.
Once After The Gold Rush was in the can in May 1970, Neil had severed connections, except those of friendship, with Crazy Horse, which then had added Nils Lofgren (guitar/ vocals) and Jack Nitzsche (piano) to the core unit of Danny Whitten, Ralph Molina, and Billy Talbot to record an album. But after the album, called Crazy Horse, was released the planned tour to support it had to be cancelled. Whitten, who had written six of the album’s songs, was too wasted from heroin to go on the road. Billy Talbot described Crazy Horse’s next eighteen months as “just fumbling around.” With Whitten no longer the driving force, or even a factor, Crazy Horse brought back George Whitsell from their old Rockets and eventually used another four musicians for two albums in 1972. But in putting together the Time Fades Away tour, Neil, out of his old friendship with Danny Whitten, his tremendous respect for what Danny had been before the junk got him, and the assurances from Whitten and his family that he had kicked his habit, asked him to be one of the group Neil was calling the Stray Gators. Whitten would sing, play lead guitar, and rejoin the world again. The reunion was a disaster. Danny had not kicked his habit. He was no longer even a shadow of the musician he had been. “He just couldn’t keep up,” Neil told me later, sadly. “Once in the middle of one song he slid into another and didn’t even know it. I tried and he tried, but he couldn’t do it any more.”
When he had to tell Danny it was over, Neil gave him some money and a plane ticket back to Los Angeles. That night in L.A. Danny bought himself what turned out to be a fatal overdose. His longtime friend Ralph Molina, who had watched the long flameout from a closer range than most, said of his death, “It was the best thing that could have happened to him at the time.”
Neil was deeply shaken, but if the music stopped every time a junkie overdosed, the world would be a different place and not necessarily better. Still, it caused the first incipient flaw in the band, leaving it under-manned by one, because Neil did not replace Whitten, whose lead guitar he had been counting on. Just as he and Stephen Stills earlier (and in times to come) electrified audiences with the competitiveness of their guitar-playing and singing, taking dead aim at one another and shooting it out with their guitars and voices, Neil had seen Whitten – if he’d been healthy again – supplying that energy.
Yet when the Time Fades Away tour landed in Toronto on a Monday, January 15, 1973, to an 18,000 sellout at Maple Leaf Gardens (which then held 16,400, including standees, for hockey), the tour seemed to be fulfilling Neil’s original intent. It was being called the most successful tour in rock history. The previous night in Buffalo Memorial Auditorium had been another sellout. Even the vision-obscured seats behind the stages were all sold.
In Toronto I watched Neil as he sang the opening three songs, seated centrestage playing his old twelve-string from the Mynah Birds days, easing into the program that he always constructs so carefully. After the opening acoustic songs he brought in Ben Keith on steel guitar, Tim Drummond on bass, Jack Nitzsche on piano, and Ken Buttrey on drums, but stayed with the songs that his fans had come to expect from him. After that, the second half of the show was a shock. I thought at the time it might be only me being deafened, but the next day critic Peter Goddard called it “unbelievable, brutally loud, soaring rock ’n’ roll.” So whatever the fans had expected, crowding down by subway or from a hundred miles away by chartered buses, they got it: from the soft acoustic sound at the start to the deafening assault of the later music featuring Neil’s blistering guitar solos.
The tour was moving to Ottawa to play Tuesday night and Montreal Thursday. The chartered Electra was waiting at Toronto International. Carrie’s parents (her father a partner in a big Buick dealership) had flown in from Chicago. After the concert, Astrid and I joined Neil, Carrie, and her parents for a one A.M. dinner that Neil had arranged in the dining room of their suite at the Inn on the Park Hotel. Zeke, just over five months old, a smiling baby, was brought out to meet us all and then put back to sleep in the middle of a big bed, in a nest of bolsters and pillows. It was close to three when we got home, with plans that Neil, Carrie, and Zeke would come to our place before they left for Ottawa. For hours the next day we sat before the living-room fire as Zeke played or napped on a blanket at our feet. The conversation was easy and general, their lives and ours. Neil sat on the floor with his back against a chair and his long legs crossed in a way he has, heels tucked under his thighs, elbows on his knees. For him, it must be comfortable – he can sit like that for hours.
Those early concerts were the best of the tour for Neil. He’d started out knowing that nodes in his throat – small protuberances that aren’t bothersome unless they are goaded into it (Bing Crosby had them, but didn’t goad them) – might have to be removed eventually if he treated them badly. He did have an extra singing load because he had not replaced Whitten, who would have been singing as well as playing lead guitar. Then came trouble of a different kind. When gate receipts began breaking records for all tours, even those by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, members of his travelling outfit wanted more money. He felt let down. “They’d agreed,” he said, “and they were highly paid, at that point probably the highest-paid musicians on the road. They still wanted more money. Everybody! The road manager quit halfway through the thing because of money. It was like the first time anybody had been close to the kind of money that we were making and it really affected a lot of people. It wouldn’t have bothered me except that to me the band, without Danny Whitten, wasn’t making it. All of this coming on top of Danny dying just before we went on the road, the Time Fades Away tour was a frustrating event for me.”
He met the money demands but rapport was badly damaged – and was a factor in February when Ken Buttrey, one of Nashville’s finest studio men on drums, said politely that he just hadn’t realized the tour would be so stressful, and left. He was replaced by John Barbata, who had played drums with CSNY.
It was then, in the last third of the tour, that the final blow came. Neil’s throat became big trouble: “If I wanted to sing at all I had to sing real loud. Otherwise I didn’t have any control. It even hurt to talk.” Sometimes for days he didn’t talk. This increased his own and the others’ sense of alienation.
Only a few of the critics sensed something was wrong. The public knew little of all this, or cared. Gold Rush in 1970, Harvest in early ’72, had demonstrated where Neil stood with the fans. Few of them cared how Neil sang as long as they could understand the words, and they didn’t care whether the other guys got paid in money or beaver pelts. Because of the long haul, the worn tempers, the damage to Neil’s voice, the concert changed as it went along but it never stopped selling out. In March Linda Ronstadt joined to open with forty minutes or so of her lively songs. Later in the month, the tour was scheduled for San Francisco’s Winterland. The fans there line up before every good concert to rush for the seats closest to the stage. Normally this line would begin to form in early or mid-afternoon. For Neil, the line was there at nine A.M. That audience got something extra as well. David Crosby and Graham Nash joined in mid-concert and remained for the rest of the tour, playing guitar and giving Neil vocal support. The next night, a Saturday, the tour went to Anaheim Convention Center (sold out), on Sunday to the Inglewood Forum (sold out), and on Monday to Long Beach Arena (sold out). Four concerts in four nights. Neil was now taking a few belts from critics for the trouble he was having with his voice. And soon he was in Oakland (sold out) where he made a controversially abrupt exit. He quit right in the middle of singing “Southern Man,” put down his guitar, mumbled that he couldn’t play any more “because of what’s going on out there,” stalked off the stage, and went home. This was not explained at the time in the U.S. music press, either because Neil refused to talk about it, or nobody could find him later to ask the question. But he did explain, eventually.
It might be just my imagination but I think that Neil is looser, more relaxed, when he is playing in England. He seems to talk more to English audiences, take them more into his confidence. That walkout in Oakland, catching everybody by surprise, was in the spring of 1973. Six or seven months later at the Rainbow in London, a house seating about 3,000, he did explain. In Britain and elsewhere in Europe, bootleg tapes of every concert are available, some of high quality. During a research trip ten years later, in 1983, I became friendly with Paul Makos, then head of an organization called the Neil Young Appreciation Society. The NYAS publishes what must be the most literate and well-produced magazine in the genre, called Broken Arrow, of such high quality that although Neil has no recognized fan clubs in North America, the NYAS in Britain (and with members in many countries including the U.S.) has been more or less anointed; it corresponds with his agents, gets details of tours in advance, gift albums to be used as prizes in competitions, excellent concert seats for members, and so on.
PauI Makos is in his late twenties. His late father, a Polish navy man, served with the British after Poland fell in 1940. With the help of his Scottish mother, Paul had two shoe-repair shops in Glasgow and lived with his wife and children in a pleasant row house in a nearby suburb. One night chatting in his living room, Paul told me he had a tape of a 1973 concert at the Rainbow in London that explained the Oakland incident six or seven months earlier and 7,000 miles away!
“Want to hear it?” Paul asked.
“Sure.”
The part of the tape in question opens with a little harmonica music. There are insistent calls from the audience for “Southern Man.” Then Neil speaks (this is unedited, leaving in all the y’knows):
“I could tell you a story about ‘Southern Man.’ It was at the Oakland Coliseum and I was playing away, you know, having a pretty mediocre time actually. (Audience laughs.) It wasn’t that hot, you know, stop number 58 on the Time Fades Away tour, we were all tired, you know, and the band wasn’t right in the first place, just one of those things, you know…. By the time we got there, ‘Southern Man,’ you know, everybody, every time, everywhere, would yell ‘Southern Man!’ Southern Man! And I can dig it, you know, uh, nice, but you know, I sang it with Crosby, Stills and Nash, I sang it by myself, and I sang it with these other guys and by then I was starting to feel like a Wurlitzer, you know (audience and Neil laugh), uh, even though I believe the song, where I was at when I wrote it, you know. Anyway I was singing away, ‘Southern Man, better keep your head, don’t forget what your good book said,’ and this guy in the front row, he was about as far away as you are from me, he jumped up and yelled, ‘Right on! Right on! I love it!’ He felt really good, I could tell. And all of a sudden, you know, a black cop just walked up to him, you know, and he just crunched him! I just took my guitar out and put it on the ground and got in the car and went home, you know. A lot of those people in Oakland couldn’t understand it because they couldn’t see from the other end, you know, just thought I’d freaked out or something, you know, but ever since I’ve never sung that song, you know, I don’t know why. I sang it a lot, you know, I sang it every night for a long time and I really … that’s the story … I couldn’t do it, I don’t feel it right now.”
Voice from audience: “Don’t do it!”
Harmonica over laughter and a confusion of shouts.
At the end of Time Fades Away, there was some cleaning up to do. He cancelled the U.K. dates he had planned on the grounds that his throat was bothering him too much to face even another few concerts. But there was doubtless a supporting element. In a few days, Journey Through The Past would have its first public showing at the U.S. Film Festival in Dallas. Neil wanted to be there. As it turned out, Journey’s reception in Dallas foretold its future fairly accurately.
Although Neil wasn’t expected to attend, Dallas papers called it an indication of the power of his name that Journey’s two showings on April 8 drew the biggest crowds of the week.
When the film began and Neil’s name appeared on the screen, the audience burst into spontaneous, sustained applause.
At the end, the applause was much more restrained.
Neil had watched the film and listened to the response in the privacy of the projectionist’s booth and apparently was not fazed by what he heard. When he walked quickly down the aisle to the front, the audience reacted with surprise and enthusiasm. He sat on the edge of the stage, dangling his legs, and for half an hour the audience fired questions. He said that the film had cost about $350,000 to make. He’d started it in Topanga, playing around with a new movie camera, and at first had thought he’d blow up some of his home movies into something to show the neighbours. “It grew over the years,” he said.
Comments at the time from people in the film industry were guardedly in favour. “Neil’s touch is great, as it is in his music,” said Lou Adler, himself a star of several rock movies, but added that he would be more interested in Neil’s next tries at the film medium. Bob Porter in the Dallas Times Herald, while calling Journey “simplistic … probably of value primarily to those searching souls looking for a view of the outside world from inside the hectic, confused and confusing world of rock music,” went on to say: “Young expressed the determination to do other films. He is artist enough that he may grow with that.” Producer Fred Underhill later told film writer Janelle Ellis, “It’s a conscious attempt not to do a music film, a performance film. He ventured into fantasy and did fictional sequences. But it also has his music and some historical context for it, from TV films of Buffalo Springfield through today.” Pause. “I keep asking Neil what it’s about, too.”
The bottom line really is something that Neil said to me once, “Once in a while I like to do something that has a chance of failing.”
When he released the film later that year I took young Astrid to see it in Toronto. The theatre was almost empty. There was great cinematography, music, and images that made it as mysterious in its way as some of Neil’s songs. His ideas were presented in the film through a character, the Graduate, played by Richard Lee Patterson. Once, in cap and gown, he is beaten senseless, dropped off in the middle of a desert and begins to wander through sequences in which the threats to his rights are represented as the church, the military, and big business. One scene shows Neil in a junkyard under a freeway, sitting in a 1957 Buick, opening his lunchbox, and talking about unnecessary waste in the way we live, and one simple way to allay part of that: “Like, man, you know, rebuilding old cars instead of manufacturing new ones.” There was a long scene of a junkie fixing up (Neil had seen such scenes, backstage at concerts), shots of Jesus freaks in Hollywood putting the word on Neil, and a re-creation of a recurring dream he had: twelve men wearing black hoods riding black horses in a cavalry charge towards a man in a pick-up truck.
It was, in the end, more of a cult item than anything else. In some university communities it was popular, playing for weeks at the Orson Welles Theater in the Cambridge-Boston student area. The movie is still around, shown here and there at film clubs and elsewhere. In a way it heralded Neil’s incipient urge to leave the safe middle-of-the-road, which he felt he had been tending towards in Harvest, and heading for the ditch. He didn’t dive into the ditch at once, but rather sidled toward it, as could be seen by his fragmented spring and summer.
The appearance of Crosby and Nash in Time Fades Away’s last few concerts had heralded an attempted reunion of CSNY. But after a month or so of playing and recording at his ranch and Hawaii, Neil decided to pull out. He didn’t want to start another cycle of recording up to a finished CSNY album and then touring to support it. He and Carrie were in trouble. When he said once that they hadn’t lasted much longer than Buffalo Springfield overall, the “overall” was intended to mean from beginning to end, less absences by one or the other. Once Carrie spent several months in Hawaii. Neil was gone for months at a time, sometimes touring, sometimes hanging out with friends, without Carrie. When he wrote the song “Motion Pictures” in the summer of 1973 he was in an L.A. motel a one-hour flight from home, where he hadn’t been for two months. (“Motion pictures on my TV screen, now home away from home and I’m livin’ in between.”) He was groping for a new direction, pulled home occasionally mainly to see Zeke. For all these reasons he was having heavy trouble putting together a recording of the Time Fades Away tour. He decided to use all live cuts, and put it out knowing that in the long run it was going to be his most nervous record. “It makes you feel uneasy to listen to it. The only redeeming factor was that it truly reflected where I was at. It was a chapter that I wish hadn’t been written, but I knew I had to get it out because I knew it represented something. So let it go! Get it out there. Some people like that about it, the ones who can tell the difference. Some people have come up to me and said, ‘Time Fades Away – I love that record.’ All I can do is look at them. But (laugh) not many have said that to me.”
At that time he had not seen David Briggs for the two years during which Harvest had been put together, Journey Through The Past released, and Time Fades Away faded into uneasy memory. David had spent those years in Canada. With backing from a member of Montreal’s high-finance Webster family, David operated a recording studio in Toronto while living north of the city in the Mono Mills-Orangeville area. He counselled his backer not to get in deep, if at all, on a rock festival called Strawberry Fields, but it went ahead anyway, lost $750,000 and change, and the recording studio was one of the casualties.
David moved back to California and rented a house a few miles from Neil’s ranch. “One day in the summer of 1973 there was a knock on my door. I opened it and there was Neil. He said, ‘Hey, I was just on my way to a CSNY session and I just don’t feel like going there. Let’s go make some rock ’n’ roll.’ So we packed our bags and came down to L.A., and wound up with the Tonight’s The Night album.”