DURING THE PERIOD WHEN Carrie and Neil were in the process of breaking up, plans were being made for CSNY to get together and record the promised album from their tour. The idea was to do it in Sausalito, a few miles from San Francisco, early in the New Year.
Just before Christmas, Neil and Pegi Morton met for the first time through mutual friends. When she got home from spending Christmas Day with her mother in San Mateo her phone was ringing. “It was Neil to wish me a Merry Christmas.” Neil, feeling more relief than anything at the end of his troubled relationship with Carrie, was in his house at the ranch making Christmas a happy time for Zeke. A couple of days later he and Pegi went out on their first date, with Neil bringing Zeke along as well.
Neil seemed to have come through the mood he’d been in a few months earlier when he wrote me questioning whether the ranch was really the place for him to live. His growing friendship with Pegi helped and had lasting warm overtones for both of them but soon was put on hold. “We both still had a lot of travelling to do,” Neil said.
The recording sessions in Sausalito ended after several weeks when Stills and Nash had an immense argument over a single harmony note. Neil left the studio and never returned. So in February 1975, once again the CSNY members went their various ways – and looking back at all the events of those two months, each ending with Neil on his own again, there is a pattern. Whether it was planned or not, he could not have lived the next two or three productive years as he did, if he had been tied down. By anything. “I’m enjoying the bachelor life,” he said.
Part of this enjoyment was that he was back with a new version of Crazy Horse. By then Danny Whitten’s 1972 heroin death was just a memory. Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot, the survivors, had tried to go on without him. But the band hadn’t been the same with other musicians. Then early in 1975, the Tonight’s The Night album still not released, Frank Sampedro arrived on the scene. He was unheralded, unsought, unsung. A woman friend introduced him to Billy Talbot, who tells what happened next: “I didn’t even know at the time that Frank played guitar, but he was going to Mexico. I felt like going, too, and on that trip we started to play guitar together, acoustic, and I could see how he played. So we got back to my house and Ralph was there. We had the drums set up and George Whitsell had been staying there with his old lady, so George, Ralph, Frank, and I, and anybody who could come around – John Blanton, Van Dyke Parks, whoever – would get together and jam. Then eventually George split with most of his friends, and Ralph, Frank, and I were left and we kept playing together.”
Neil was in Chicago that spring recording for a new country-ish album he was calling Homegrown. At the time he was still battling to have Tonight’s The Night released, but wasn’t getting anywhere so meanwhile was going on with other work, as usual. He called Billy, Ralph, and Ben Keith to Chicago to work on a couple of Homegrown cuts. Billy mentioned Frank Sampedro and asked if he could bring him along. The four of them arrived in Chicago. As soon as they began to play Billy knew a big corner had been turned. He was dazzled. “When Neil and Frank started playing all that heavy guitar stuff, with Ralph on the drums and Ben on the steel and me on bass, I couldn’t even hear the steel any more! They were drowning out everything!” Neil had to go to Nashville with Ben for more recording, but as soon as he got home he brought along some still newer songs to Billy’s house, suddenly more interested than anything else in playing with the new Crazy Horse.
At that point his unpublished work was piling up: Homegrown ready, Tonight’s The Night still on hold, and these new songs destined for a newer album yet. But the record company was interested in something coming out, soon. Homegrown was the main candidate, and was ready on cassette to be played to a group of record people and friends. It happened that Tonight’s The Night in its revised version was on the same tape. “After Homegrown he just let the tape run on and we listened to Tonight’s The Night,” Billy recalls. “I hadn’t heard it since we played it first nearly two years before. Suddenly people started going up to Neil and telling him how great it was, he should put it out, why hadn’t he released it? Frank Sampedro and I were just sitting in a corner listening to all these heavies telling Neil what he should do.” They convinced him. That’s when he shelved Homegrown, and insisted that Tonight’s The Night should come out next.
Homegrown is still shelved, this many years later. Some of the songs have been used in other albums. Homegrown might have been next on the release list, except that the songs Neil had been playing with Crazy Horse sounded so good that he decided to record them as an album, too, called Zuma because at the time, David Briggs had a house in Zuma, California, and he and Neil chose to record there.
Two small footnotes belong in any account of the Zuma album. One is that one day David Briggs looked outside and saw Bob Dylan sitting in the driveway in his van, listening to the music from there. Briggs went out and said, “Come on in!”
Dylan: “Oh, I don’t want to be in the way.”
“You won’t be, that’s crazy. Come on in.”
So Dylan came in to listen to one of his disciples.
Second footnote: The Briggs house was so big that it had two electrical circuits. The band was set up at one end of the house, playing into one electrical circuit. Tim Mulligan and David Briggs were at the recording console in the middle of the house, hooked up to the other circuit. Right in the middle of the band playing “Cortez the Killer” the electrical circuit being used for recording blew and the console went dead. The band was playing like hell and Mulligan and Briggs were dashing to find the circuit breaker and get it back on, which they did, after missing one whole verse. When the song was finished, Neil and Crazy Horse came down the hall exclaiming, “Boy, that was a great cut! That was really great!” Congratulating each other. Until Briggs said, “Don’t shoot yourselves, but the power went off and we missed one whole verse.”
Neil said, “Which verse?”
David told him.
Neil: “I never liked that verse anyway.” So they went with the cut as it was, meaning that one verse of what was to be the big song on Zuma never has been recorded, to this day. Others on that album were “Don’t Cry No Tears,” “Danger Bird,” “Pardon My Heart,” “Lookin’ For a Love,” “Barstool Blues,” “Stupid Girl,” “Drive Back,” and “Through My Sails.”
A few months later when Zuma was released (Homegrown bumped again) Neil called Crazy Horse to the ranch, and they started on what Neil called the Northern California Bar Tour, which was when I arrived to stay a couple of weeks that winter. At first these gigs were impulsive, spur-of-the-moment. Neil would call a roadhouse and volunteer to payoff the house band for a night and come in to play. When word got out, the romance grabbed the rock world’s imagination -Neil out playing little bars, staying after to have a few beers and talk with people. The music writers picked it up. Fans caught on and started crowding in. Some papers called it the Rolling Zuma Revue, a takeoff of the huge tour Bob Dylan was doing then, the Rolling Thunder Revue. The nonexistent budget and manner of the thing was such that one night when about twelve of us were having hamburgers and beer at the roadhouse where he was to play, I made the mistake of reaching for the tab – and they let me! That was a night when Zeke, then not yet four, warmed up the early crowd by playing the drums; a night when later three or four of Neil’s neighbours and I stood and drank beer quietly in the parking lot while Zeke slept in the bed in Neil’s camper and we hung around the back of it to make sure that if he wakened he wouldn’t be alone. From outside we listened to the music bulging the walls. The tiny dance floor was so crowded that later when I danced we could hardly move which, given my dancing style, wasn’t so bad.
It seems to me that in some ways the Northern California Bar Tour, as well as a similar attempt at near anonymity more than a year later with the Ducks at Santa Cruz, should be seen not as anomalies, but as much a part of Neil as Carnegie Hall, as the 44,000 in the rain at Varsity Stadium in Toronto, as the 72,000 at Wembley. It’s a little difficult for me to sort this out without sounding as if I’m reading too much into a few isolated events, but when Bobby Hull was widely accepted as the greatest hockey star on earth, I once saw him pick up a stick and play with some kids on an open-air rink, not to show off but to be there, to take it easy, be loose, and none of it for money. Neil is like that, or like Willie Mays slipping into the outfield of a pick-up game, just for the fun of it. Or if John Updike’s character Rabbit in the novel Rabbit Run had been a great basketball star instead of a real good small-timer when (in the novel) he stopped to join a kid’s game in an alley, trying to recapture something, I could relate him to the Neil Young who sometimes tries to recapture some needed feeling by acting as if he’d never had a spotlight on him in his life. So when he walked out, for instance, in a bar at Marshall, California, before fifty people, none of whom had paid to get in – there wasn’t even what they used to call in country concerts a silver collection at the door – he was living out part of himself that perhaps he didn’t want to lose in the rush of big events. That’s why when anything gets to him, like the sheer fun of playing with Crazy Horse again after Frank Sampedro showed up, all his plans are changed so that he can do it.
Rolling Stone, which finally caught up with the Northern California Bar Tour, noted that after the Marshall gig Neil hung around the bar for a few beers, talking easily; the only thing he wouldn’t talk about was where he’d play next; indeed, he might not have known. One thing he did not want was publicity that might turn the next concert into the kind of event that, for the time being, he was purposely turning his back on.
This element of privacy surfaced rather remarkably in another way about the time of the Northern California Bar Tour. Monte Stern, then twenty-three, heir to the Sears-Roebuck fortune, had leased a 600-acre ranch in the mountains of San Mateo County, a few miles from Neil’s ranch. Stern spent a year trying to win over county officials and neighbours to the idea of outdoor rock concerts being held on his ranch. He ran into opposition but the idea was still alive until the day Neil, in old Levi’s and two layers of lumberjack shirts, turned up uninvited at a meeting of the San Mateo County Planning Commission. He’d been stirred into action by an artist’s depiction circulated by the Stern group of what the area would look like with a rock festival on it; it showed a couple of thousand people sitting around a beautiful stage on a hillside while kids ran around with balloons.
He asked to speak. “First of all,” he said, “I’m just speaking for myself, but this is my home. I’ve been to more pop festivals than anybody in this room and this one is not safe. There’s no proper access in and out on these narrow roads we have, nothing that could handle an emergency. If everybody leaves because of a fire, how are the fire trucks going to get in? What about medical facilities? What if somebody has some bad acid or everybody starts panicking, ODing and dying? How are you going to get help in there?” When he finished, the vote was thumbs down, all the way. The promoters gave indignant interviews, asking how Neil, who made a fair living as a rock star, could speak that way? One lawyer told Rolling Stone he didn’t know how he could listen to “Sugar Mountain” properly any more, after hearing Neil speak as he had.
That incident made him an honoured citizen of San Mateo County a lot faster than if he’d just paid his taxes and gone his own way. A couple of years later one of the directors of the San Mateo Historical Society, Louise Buell, called him up to say she was retiring. She asked if Neil would come on the society’s board of directors in her position, representing the county’s coastal area. Because he liked and respected Louise Buell he told her he would think about it. But he tries to avoid publicity, which would be difficult to avoid in such a role. He attended one meeting but did not continue; not his line of work.
That spring of 1976 after the Northern California Bar Tour warm-ups he took Crazy Horse to Japan early in March and then on to Oslo March 15 to open a hugely successful tour that ended with four concerts at London’s Hammersmith Odeon and one at the Apollo Theatre in Glasgow. At the time, a summer tour of the U.S. with Crazy Horse had been pencilled into his schedule, but anyone familiar with Neil could have seen a change coming.
He’d been playing with Crazy Horse almost a year then, steadily. But the previous summer, 1975, after he’d had an operation to remove the nodes in his throat, he had played with Stephen Stills a few times more or less extemporaneously – drop-ins. Stephen’s career had been in the doldrums since the last CSNY tour. Early in 1976, Steve and Neil flew to Miami to begin work on an album. As studio sessions went on, Neil had an idea that it might be turned into a CSNY project. In California, Crosby and Nash dropped what they were doing and flew to Miami, but after a few weeks had to go back to the west coast to meet the deadline for an album they’d been working on. That, in effect, provided a gap in the CSNY reunion idea. The gap widened into a gulf.
Neil and Steve went back to their original idea of a Stills-Young album called Long May You Run, then toured along the route originally intended for Neil and Crazy Horse. After each concert they would get into separate buses – Neil his own tour bus and Stephen into another tour bus that he was renting from Neil. Travelling apart, which Neil had done originally in the 1974 CSNY tour, was now his standard practice. It allowed him to be alone for a while before going onstage again.
Some nights, like one in Cleveland, their music was great. The next night in Cincinnati was almost as good. Stephen has said since that he’d never played better than he did in that tour. But no one except the principals in the tour knew what was really going on. After three more concerts, in Pittsburgh, Greensboro, and Charlotte, it ended abruptly. Neil treads carefully, trying not to hurt feelings when he explains that, overall, the tour was hard to deal with. “I was having a pretty good time, but the reviews were playing us against each other. Stephen was reading the reviews. I was trying not to read the reviews. But even the headlines were … well, like, ‘Young’s hot, Stills not.’ Then Stephen started thinking that other people on the tour were against him, trying to make him look bad to the audience. It just got real personal. Stephen did some things on stage, yelling at people and stuff, that I just didn’t want to be part of. I made the decision to leave after the Charlotte concert: he’d been yelling onstage and there’d been a big fight afterwards. Not Stephen and me, Stephen and others. We were supposed to be in Atlanta the next night. Out on the highway I stopped, and David Cline and I sent telegrams to everyone involved. (The one to Stephen read, “Some things that start spontaneously end spontaneously.”) Then I got back on my bus and dropped off onto a side road and made a big turn. One sign said Atlanta, where the concert was to be, and another said Memphis. I turned onto the one to Memphis. Then I got on an airplane and went to L.A. and stayed there for a couple of days to cool out. It was not a pleasant experience.”
Elliot handled the upset promoters, telling them Neil was cancelling his part of the concert, but would give them right of first refusal the next time he travelled their way. If they wanted money, damages, they would be paid. If they wanted to give refunds to ticket-holders, Neil would pay the expenses involved in administering the refunds; he wanted everything taken care of with the least discomfort to the people who bought the tickets.
A couple of months later when the Stills-Young album Long May You Run was released, to largely indifferent reviews, Neil was touring again with Crazy Horse and Stephen was on the road as well. At that time Neil and I had another of our chance meetings.
I’d heard about his tour bus first in the winter of 1975–76 when I spent some time with him, the time he’d told me that it was my life, too, you know. One day he’d told me what he didn’t like about the road – the hotels, the airline schedules that often made him go short on sleep. “I think I’ve got the answer: a tour bus that’s as close to home as a bus can be.”
In Boston a few months later, going by cab from the Boston airport on business of my own (a seminar on the effects of television on children, part of the research for a government-appointed Ontario Royal Commission of which I was a member), I said to the driver, “What’s happening in music around here right now?” I knew Neil had been in New York a few nights before with Crazy Horse, but didn’t know their tour schedule.
“Plenty doing!” the driver said. “Steve Stills was here last night, and Neil Young is coming in for two concerts tomorrow night.”
The driver rattled on about Neil, with a few interjections from me that indicated I’d heard the name before.
“You a Neil Young fan?” he asked finally.
I hesitated a minute and then said, “I’m his father.” I don’t do that often, but the driver was excited enough about Neil that I owed it. That made for lively conversation on the way in, during which he mainly ignored the road and kept looking back at me to make sure I wasn’t kidding. “Gee, wait’ll I tell my wife!” he kept saying. At the Hyatt he only reluctantly took my money for the trip.
From my room I phoned Lookout Management in Los Angeles and left a message with the answering service. The next day Neil was on the phone, sounding upbeat, enthusiastic.
“How about coming over this afternoon?” he said.
“Where are you?”
“Well, the band is in the Copley Plaza and I’m in my bus parked outside the main entrance.” He laughed. “Don’t think you can miss it.”
The cab driver was very impressed by the carved wooden sides and the two old auto chassis, a Hudson and a Studebaker, set into the roof as skylights.
I tapped on the curbside door. Neil opened it. He had coffee on. While traffic flowed around the bus like a river around a rock, he took me back to show me the bedroom area, spacious and comfortable; the electric piano amidships, baths, showers, power sunroofs on the auto chassis forward and aft, the compact yacht-like galley with refrigerator and freezer and microwave oven that ranged along one side of the forward area, across from the padded benches and table. A curtain could shut off the driver from the living quarters. When the coffee was ready we sat at the polished redwood table. We were fairly well caught up an hour or so later when Elliot Roberts came in.
“How about dinner?” Elliot asked. “The hotel dining room is big on neckties.”
“Let’s eat here,” Neil said. “We got anything?”
“Sure. A manager can do anything,” Elliot claimed. He broiled minced beef patties and made baked potatoes in the microwave. The five o’clock traffic was bumper to bumper around us by then. The security guard outside parried questions and would-be visitors. We ate. I had a beer. A little after six the band came out of the hotel. We all loaded into a chauffeured limousine – Elliot and Neil; quiet Ralph Molina, volatile Billy Talbot, husky dark Frank Sampedro, and me. In a big and bare dressing room below the Music Hall Theater backstage area was food and drink and the aroma of a joint or two, as well as a joking easiness that I came to know later as what goes with a good tour in progress, the bugs ironed out. They were doing two concerts that night. I stayed for the first one in the wildly enthusiastic crowd and then went to a much quieter group at Harvard where we ate cheese and drank wine and solemnly discussed such matters as how many murders the average child would see in an average week of watching television.