FROM WHEN I SAID GOODBYE to Neil and Pegi in Norman, Oklahoma, late on the night of January 11, we weren’t in touch for a while. By the time Margaret and I flew to London late in the month the early part of the tour, mostly in small halls, was over. Neil was in Nashville to record, Pegi and Ben with him. During a few days off, the tour crew moved east from California. The slight cold or flu that had given Neil the dizzy spell in the Norman concert persisted. The crew had been swept by what seemed to be influenza. It didn’t help to be moving from the heat of Texas to the frost of Colorado and back into the relative comfort of California. In early February when storms piled snow on the eastern seaboard, one storm causing cancellation of Neil’s date in the Philadelphia Spectrum, he played the big arenas – still unable to shake the flu, seeing a doctor every place he stopped. As the concerts moved from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Buffalo, to a wildly enthusiastic concert in Toronto, the decision already had been made not to end the tour after Madison Square Garden late in February as planned, but to go on for another five weeks.
He didn’t make it. A few weeks later, in Louisville, he collapsed.
For two months doctors had been giving him steroids and other medication. In Louisville he tried to sleep in the bus the afternoon of the show, but couldn’t. His hands were sweaty. He had chills, then felt very hot. When he went out onstage and the lights went up, people started crowding around. “It wasn’t any hotter than usual but I needed a wet towel to soak the back of my neck after the second song. So I’m out there with this wet towel around my neck. And I really was weak. At one point I couldn’t both sing and play. I had to sing and stop playing just to finish one song.”
He did get through the first set, but on the way offstage walked right into one of the monitors. “Then somebody grabbed me and supported me and I was mumbling, ‘There’s really something wrong with me.’ I lay down on the floor of the dressing room. When the doctor came, it was the county coroner – it sure gave people quite a start, later, when the county coroner came out on the stage to make an announcement … but that was later. He told me that I was exhausted, and started giving me Gatorade and chemicals to try to get my blood sugar up. But during that time I was on the floor, I remember lying face down on the floor and seeing the carpet very clearly. My eyes were open and I was looking right into the carpet. I couldn’t move. Then it was as if I was seeing the whole scene, myself lying on the carpet, the doctor leaning over me, Pegi with her hand on my back just telling me to stay aware, stay there, everything was going to be okay. Meanwhile, I was up there, up at the ceiling, watching. I could see the whole thing. I’d heard about that but I’d never experienced it. I was like another person in the room. I didn’t feel like I was part of my body.
“But they got me back together and about half an hour, forty-five minutes later, I walked down the stairs out of the dressing room and into the bus. The doctor gave me a Halcyon pill and said he wanted me to take one every night. I took one, that first night, and slept fourteen hours. I didn’t take any more – but for nights after that I had horrible nightmares. Horrible. I thought I’d be all right after a couple of days but it was longer than that. For days back at the ranch I was groggy, walking funny. I kept thinking of what the doctor had told me, ‘You’ve lost everything; you need to get it back.’ It took about three weeks for me to get straight, get back to the point where I could think straight. Then I immediately got back in the groove. Everything was okay.”
He had hated to cancel the Louisville show. “I really don’t like to cancel shows. It’s harmful. It’s never the same after you cancel. The crowd, they just don’t understand, no matter what.”
Neil was right about the harm of a cancellation. While he’d been feeling he was somewhere near the ceiling watching the scene around his prone form in the dressing room, paying customers had been booing, throwing stuff on the stage, some battling security people and the police. They calmed down only when the county coroner appeared, and they did not know until he spoke what his message would be.
I was in London when I heard of the Louisville collapse and cancellation of the last few dates in the tour – I got it in the form of scare rumours from Neil’s fans. At the same time I also had a letter from Astrid saying that Neil was okay. We didn’t have a phone in our Maida Vale flat so when I might have called on impulse, I didn’t, although sometimes I wandered around our spartan quarters or sat in the nearby Truscott Arms, worrying a little and wishing he was sitting there with a pint of Yorkshire bitter, too.
I phoned Neil when we got back to Canada. No answer. I called David Cline. “He’s fine,” David said. “When he got here from Louisville he rested for a couple of weeks, doing nothing, and then he was back in shape, writing songs full speed, getting some musicians in to record. He had a good run. Just about got a new album in the can. He’s calling it Old Ways – for now, anyway. Then he took off in the Ragland for a while.”
A couple of weeks later I asked Neil, “When is Old Ways coming out?”
He dragged out, “Well-l-l, it isn’t, right now. I got into writing some newer songs in the old 1950s rock style, a lotta fun. We recorded them and some others from that period and put that into an album. We had the record people up and played both Old Ways and the newer one, Everybody’s Rockin’, which is about as far removed from the Trans kind of sound as it’s possible to get. Anyway, we’re putting out Everybody’s Rockin’ first. Old Ways will make it, later.”
He told me he soon would take to the road again, starting on the first of July, breaking for a few weeks in August and then going on until New York around October 1.
They opened in Wichita July 1, travelled for a month, played Vancouver on July 31 and travelled homeward on August 1. The next day Pegi and Neil woke in their own bedroom on the ranch. It was their fifth wedding anniversary. The break in the tour had been planned that way, so they could be in their own house, in control of their own time, five years after the first day of their marriage.
Their July dates had been far from my home – Wichita; Kansas City; Omaha; Minneapolis; East Troy, Wisconsin; Peoria; Memphis; Tulsa; Dallas; Houston; San Antonio; Las Cruces, New Mexico; Tempe, Arizona; Laguna Hills, California; Sacramento; Seattle; Vancouver. When the tour resumed late in August the dates were better for me. Besides, I like my own place in the summer, with kids visiting, seeing my Omemee area friends, going to my desk in the cool basement where I write a few hours a day. Instead of what I once had done, cut and hauled my own wood for the furnace and fireplace, I hired some help. I had my rituals, ten lengths per morning in the pool while the tea steeped; tea on the deck with The Globe and Mail or, Margaret’s addiction, the London Sunday Times. Congratulating God on the fine summer. Still, I started getting a little itchy when I looked at some of the tour dates – Saratoga Springs on September 4, Buffalo and Pittsburgh later the same week, other places only a day’s drive away. But I felt like company this time. I asked Margaret but she had some deadlines to meet. A friend of mine, Dave Toms, a television producer in his thirties, lit up like a Christmas tree when I invited him along. When Neil’s Trans album came out the winter before, Dave had written to me in London that when he listened to it the first time he hadn’t felt such awe since the first time, in the 1960s, he heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. A few months later when Dave played Everybody’s Rockin’ the first time, he laughed all the way through it. For a few years he’d been a rock musician himself, until he got tired of being broke and hungry all the time.
I decided that I’d be ready for a break about mid-September. We’d drive to Dayton, Ohio, around the seventeenth. That was the plan, but it didn’t work that way. I got itchier. I looked at Neil’s schedule again. I know that when I have an instinct to do something I should do it. A week before the Dayton date there’d be a concert at Pine Knob, north of Detroit, and the next night at Lansing, an easy drive away. Two concerts would be fine. We’d come home in midweek. Again, it didn’t work that way.
My system for visiting Neil on the road has both good points and drawbacks. We don’t plan ahead much. I like it that way. I don’t like my every minute scheduled for me any more than he does. So any plans we make are on the spur of the moment. A good point is that I always know where his bus will be parked (unless, as sometimes happens, for mechanical or other reasons it goes somewhere else). A mild drawback is that when I find the bus with no sign of life I don’t know whether he’s been asleep for forty-five minutes or eight hours – as when Dave and I drove into the big shopping plaza parking lot near the Somerset Inn on Big Beaver Road at Troy, Michigan, about ten that morning. Neil’s bus and the two others for crew and musicians were parked and quiet. I knew that Neil would be on his bus, all others in the hotel. I knew that they had had a long haul from their previous date in West Virginia, but I didn’t know when they had arrived. Neither did the hotel desk. Tour manager Glen Palmer had a room, but I wouldn’t rouse him at ten in the morning (a good decision, he told me later, as he’d got to bed at six A.M.).
I parked beside the bus, looking for signs of movement inside. Saw none. When privacy is intended, every heavy and impenetrable window blind is fully extended, as it was then. When the thick drapes behind the driver’s seat are pulled together, even if someone is up moving around in the forward quarters, galley-cum-living-room, it is unseen. This closed-up stance told me Neil might or might not be on the bus, but that Pegi and Ben definitely weren’t. Ben wakens as early as any other little boy. I didn’t knock. Not a hard decision. I thought of taping a note to the door, but didn’t. At the Somerset Inn’s desk I left a message for Glen Palmer to pass to Neil that we were around and would see him later, we were heading for Pine Knob.
The concert stage at Pine Knob, thirty-odd miles north of Detroit, was spawned by rock music. There are dozens of concert bowls more or less like it across North America and Europe. Basically it’s an amphitheatre with a partial roof. The few thousand covered seats slope down to a stage fully equipped for all the electronic and mechanical requirements of the modern rock concert. Beyond the covered seats the bowl itself extends in all directions up steep grassy slopes. In such bowls, if there are 5,000 covered seats (some have more) there will be room for 10,000 or 12,000 (or more) customers on the grass. They bring coolers and picnic baskets and – in cool or wet weather – groundsheets, parkas, umbrellas. These bowls are in the countryside, usually not even in the suburbs, but right out where if you were not growing crowds at thirteen dollars or so a ticket you’d be growing corn, grain, cotton, or whatever the local agriculture ran to. At Pine Knob there is not even a gas station within a mile of the main gate, let alone a village or store.
When we arrived about noon, eight hours before the concert, my 1973 Olds Cutlass was one of only four or five cars, all in a clump near the gate. Empty parking lots stretched for nearly half a mile around. Security would tighten as the day went on, but at that moment it consisted of two young men throwing a Frisbee back and forth at the main gate. Down the steep pavement that led to access doors behind the stage, I could see the parked semis. When we walked down there we found that much of the sets and equipment already had been unloaded.
In the next two or three hours we had coffee from a backstage table laid out with platters of Danishes and doughnuts, and talked awhile with Tim Foster, stage manager, and Tim Mulligan, vice-president sound. Then we took coffee into the rows of empty seats and watched the set go up, a sight that always fascinates me. Meri Took, an Australian who with his girlfriend Deborah Vincent were sole survivors in this crew from the Trans tour crew of Europe a year earlier, was carrying joints and elbows and lengths of metal scaffolding aloft and fitting them into place at the rear of the stage. Meri climbed like a second-storey man. Deborah, strong and lean in shorts, was checking electrical connections to one of the recording consoles out front. Lyle Centola, the production manager, was supervising as giant speakers were lined up in groups of three, then raised five or six feet so another group of three could be attached. The process was repeated with three more until there was a bank of them on each side of the stage. Every man in the crew was strong, wiry or powerfully built. Mark Fetter, the lighting man, was dealing with power cables running everywhere, including back to Tim Mulligan’s vast and intricate sound console set in the middle of the covered seats. A big crate was moved into place at stage right under the supervision of Tim Foster, the crew treating it as carefully as if it contained fine crystal. One side was unbolted to reveal Neil’s grand piano standing on end. With extreme care eight men standing shoulder to shoulder began to bring it down, one of them Tim Foster, murmuring instructions as the piano was lowered gently to its legs. A quiet man at stage left began tuning an old upright piano there. A chandelier above the grand piano flickered briefly in a test to show that it was hooked up.
It was mid-afternoon before Neil’s bus rolled in, Paul Williamson driving. He told me Neil was up there somewhere just back from golf with Anthony Crawford, whom I hadn’t met then – one of the singing trio Neil called the Redwood Boys. Neil strolled down the hill with Anthony, a slim and intense man in his twenties who (he later told me) had switched while still in high school from being a miler (a 4:21 mile when he was fifteen years old) to being a singer. Neil and I hugged and Neil said, “Hey, Anthony, meet my dad.” After a minute or two Anthony went to the musicians’ bus. Neil said, “Come on in,” and I followed him into his bus where Don Perri, Paul Williamson’s backup, was standing in the galley filling a big saucepan with mince beef.
“Spaghetti sauce,” Neil said, looking at it. “Great!”
Perri: “We’re out of spaghetti, tomatoes, and stuff. I’ll have to go and get what I need.”
Neil said, “Send a runner.” The promoter supplies cars and drivers for errands.
Perri also had a large serving spoon full of finely crushed garlic, which Neil made into a garlic sandwich. He bit into it, smiling. “Anybody comes over the edge of the stage, I’ll just blow on him. Ever eat garlic sandwiches?”
I laughed. “No.”
“I’ve got a little tickle in my throat. Garlic is amazing. Kills anything.”
The night before, Dave Toms and I had stayed in Windsor, across the river from Detroit, with my brother, Bob, and his wife, Merle, Neil’s closest aunt and uncle in his babyhood and early boyhood in Toronto. They’d helped him with food and shelter long ago when he’d been playing in Detroit around the time of the Motown recording, but hadn’t seen him since. They’d asked me to line up something. “We don’t want just a few minutes either – we want to really see him,” Merle commanded. I was supposed to let them know whether to come to Pine Knob or Lansing. When I started to mention this Neil broke in, “Yeah! I phoned Uncle Bob and told them to come here. We’ll get together after the concert. They’re coming.”
In a little while I went to find Dave Toms and bring him down to meet Neil. As we talked, Glen Palmer came in. Glen, strongly built, dark-haired, has an air about him that is vaguely military: neat shirt, knee socks, neat shorts, clean shoes. Neil said, “Oh, my uncle and aunt are coming tonight so I’m going to stick around after the concert to visit with them.”
Glen: “So no quick takeoff? That changes?”
Then Newell Alexander, the ultra-sincere Dan Clear of the preconcert and intermission video shows, arrived through the open bus door in a sweat suit. “Ready for the walk, Neil?” he asked.
“Yeah. Right now.” Neil asked if I’d like to come along.
It’s part of his attempt to stay healthy. Usually he walks four or five miles a day, but this day had played golf so would only do about two more. I said I’d hang around watching the setting up.
When Dave and I sat down again, still the only ones in the rows of seats, the preliminary sound check began.
“Gimme Neil’s banjo!” Tim Mulligan called from his console.
On the stage, Larry Cragg, assistant stage manager, played a few licks on the banjo. The amplified sound rolled up the hill. Some early arrivals and people from the beer kiosks and food bars beyond the top rim of the bowl ran into sight at the top of the bowl to see who was playing.
“Now the guitar!” called Tim.
Joel Bernstein did a good imitation of Neil’s guitar work, singing a little.
“Okay.”
Neil came out about five. There were others with him: the Redwood Boys and the 1950s-style group Neil was calling the Shocking Pinks – Ben Keith, Tim Drummond, Karl Himmel. Most of the sound check was fairly perfunctory, but then there was a long jamming session on a new song Neil had been working on, one in the Everybody’s Rockin’ mode, with Neil playing some very hot guitar, Ben Keith on alto saxophone, Vito Toledo (the stage name for a Nashville lawyer named Craig Hayes) on baritone sax, Tim Drummond on an old upright string bass, the Redwood Boys singing into one microphone except when one of them, Larry Byrom, was playing trumpet or piano. In a new song, “Get Gone,” Anthony Crawford and Neil sang chin to chin, Anthony giving Neil the same kind of work-out that he used to get playing guitar against Steve Stills. That part was as good as any concert.
I realize here that names don’t mean much when you don’t know the people. Some went way back in Neil’s life, others he had met only a few months earlier. Tim Drummond and Ben Keith I’d met years earlier, I’m not entirely sure when, but it seems to me that when you know where they and Karl Himmel and the Redwood Boys come from, and why, it tells more about rock music than the wild crowds, the rushes for the stage, the adulation of the fans; maybe helps illuminate from a different vantage point the deep feeling this all-American music inspires.
Tim Drummond is a cheerful, medium-sized man in his early forties. When he was a kid in Canton, Illinois, he used to hang around after-hours clubs in nearby Peoria. One night, he says, laughing, he “saw a guy playing guitar, and the way the girls looked at him. So I went home and bought a guitar.” Six months later he was playing guitar in a pick-up band. “One day a guy called me and said his bass player was gone, he needed a bass. ‘Can you play bass?’ I said, ‘Can I call you back?’ I ran down to the corner music store and took a bass from the rack and tried it. Then I ran back home and called the guy and said, ‘Yeah, I can play bass.’” But like thousands of other hopefuls, he couldn’t make a living at it then. He was working on a railroad gang laying ties when Conway Twitty, needing a fill-in bass player fast, called him. Tim spent three weeks that time in London, Ontario. “That was when I got a taste of what that echelon of music was like. I decided that unless I was good enough to play on that level, I’d do something else.” He went back home and found a factory job and was working there when Conway called him again, this time with a permanent offer.
Later, touring with James Brown, Tim was the only white in the group. They travelled far and wide, including to Vietnam, where once they were under fire. When he got back he was sick of touring and decided to settle down in Nashville, where he had lots of sessions in recording studios.
One day early in 1971, a couple of months after Neil played Carnegie Hall, Tim was walking down a street when a friend of his, a photographer, called to him, “Hey, Timmy, Neil Young’s over in the studio! Come and meet him.” That afternoon after he and Neil played a little, Neil said, “Would you like to come back tonight and play?” Tim did, and was surprised to find James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt there with Neil, as well. They recorded “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man” that night, both to become big singles from the best-selling album Harvest. “I sort of liked the guy,” Tim told me, meaning Neil, relating all this backstage one night. “I told Neil I’d go out with him if he wished, anytime.” Now when Neil is putting bands together, Tim is often there. When Neil got the idea for the Shocking Pinks, he told Tim he’d be playing string bass. Tim hadn’t played that for twenty years, but was playing it now.
Ben Keith is tall, over six feet. His nickname is King. He has a kindly face with a lot of miles on it, and when I met him this time I remembered that long ago Nils Lofgren, describing Jack Nitzsche as difficult to work with, said that in contrast Ben Keith was beautiful, quiet, easygoing, “just one of those guys you like to be around.” He was born in 1937 in Fort Riley, Kansas, and lived later in Alvaton, Kentucky. His father was an army officer with a talent for invention – he’d helped develop the famous Jeep, had helped design improvements for tank turrets, and in some things, such as when rock music came along, he was like a lot of parents of the time: he hated the noise and thought this music was corrupting the youth of America.
When Ben was fifteen, he bought a guitar for seven dollars. His father disapproved. Ben played so much that he injured a finger, damaging the bone. When it had to be operated on, he couldn’t play normal guitar. But he’d seen people play what then were called Hawaiian guitars, sliding a smooth piece of steel up and down the strings. He found out how to tune his guitar for that method of playing. Then he bummed an empty lipstick tube from his sister to use as the steel. That’s when he started becoming one of the best pedal steel men in the business.
One night backstage I was talking to Karl Himmel, to me the most intense of the Shocking Pinks. He’d been playing drums since he was seven, thirty years earlier. “And dancing,” he said. “Not step-dancing or that country stuff, but like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly. I dunno, I guess this business was in the cards for me from when I was a kid.” He was born in Houma, Louisiana. “My grandmother, even, was in vaudeville. My mother was a good big-band singer, Dorothy Menville, back when the big bands were really big, on radio.”
Another with the Shocking Pinks, playing horn, singing, and doing a cigar-chomping role as a gangstertype named Vito Toledo on a video part of the Shocking Pinks show, Nashville lawyer Craig Hayes is tall, burly, polite, affable, and not really a cigar-smoker. He grew up in Washington, D.C., across from Griffiths Stadium playing music and becoming a sports nut. As we got to know one another (he knew I’d been a sports-writer) he told me that as a kid he religiously read the sports column of a man I knew, one of the best in the business, Shirley Povich. Craig is lawyer to Ben and Tim. “When they were coming out on this tour and asked me to come along, I just said sure. I needed a break. I’d been working too hard. I love this.”
Larry Byrom, thirty-four, and Rick Palombi, twenty-eight, were Anthony Crawford’s cohorts with the Redwood Boys. Larry was born in Alabama and played lead guitar with Steppenwolf when he was only nineteen or twenty. In Nashville he is mainly a guitarist, but sings and also plays hot piano. “I never wanted to be anything but a musician,” he said. Rick started playing and singing when he was in fourth grade in Detroit. Still, for a while, he wanted to be a scientist. He laughingly referred to his haircut as a “tour haircut” and said his family – now living in Toledo – kidded him about it: long sides, crewcut on top. Like Anthony Crawford, he is under contract to a music publisher in Nashville, which pays him a weekly retainer, enough to eat on. When the tour reached Dayton a week after I arrived, Rick would have his own cheering section – his mother and sisters down from Toledo to see their boy.
At Pine Knob when the sound check finished with that rousing new-song rehearsal, Anthony and Neil duelling with their voices at one mike, the stage suddenly was deserted for dinner break in a room behind stage right. Dave and I climbed up the hill and down the other side into the beer-and-food area, bought beer and burritos. We ate at a little table, watching early arrivals do the same while clustered around a small sunken area where two youths played and sang. Then we decided we should watch the gate for Neil’s Uncle Bob and Aunt Merle. We didn’t want them standing there baffled, not knowing where to turn. We never did see them, but our watch near the battery of turnstiles at the entrance area had its value.
As the crowds began to stream in we could see what a remarkable mixture of people made up Neil’s audience: hippie-type women, some with babies strapped to their backs; young men in exaggerated combat outfits with tight pants and high well-polished boots; new wave purple-haired kids, probably Trans fans; Vietnam veterans with an air of indefinable something that set them apart; one family that obviously was three generations – a couple of teenage girls, their parents, and a grandmother. The majority were casually dressed young Americans, from jeans-and-jackets to trendies. But the question was, who else, except probably Bob Dylan, could bring all these contrasts together in one place?
Entering the gate, each person carrying a cooler would lift the lid unbidden for the contents check. No liquor could be brought in. Huge bins on wheels stood nearby and there was intermittent crashing as bottles full, half full, or almost empty were taken from their owners and tossed into the bins. Men and women alike stood, legs straddled, as the gate men frisked their legs and bodies for hidden bottles. Nobody protested. They knew the rules. The ones who were caught trying to bring in liquor took its seizure with apparent equanimity. The only one who argued was a man with a camera. He pointed to the sign over the gate that listed forbidden objects and complained that only movie cameras were forbidden. But he had to leave his camera outside.
Near concert time Bob and Merle still had not shown. As the crowd gathered in the cool evening we went to our seats. Dan Clear was seen from time to time on the screen, with interviews and deadpan advice – such as telling people to “get down” if there was a nuclear attack during the concert. Near the end of his pre-concert video show, he always said that now they’ll go to a camera in Neil’s dressing room. “And here he is being fitted with his wireless microphone!” he announces as the screen shows a roadie wrapping a hundred feet of heavy-duty extension cord around Neil’s neck. When Dan got to that point, and we knew that in two or three minutes the concert would begin, we were figuring Uncle Bob and Aunt Merle just hadn’t made it. Then there on the screen was Neil, in a chair, Merle bending over him laughing and talking, while in the doorway Bob was reaching out and plucking at her sleeve, saying once in a while, “Come on, Merlie, we’ve gotta get out of here, he’s busy.” They didn’t know they were on camera. Merle still didn’t know it a few minutes later when Glen Palmer had them ushered down to sit beside us. Merle is a dear friend of mine from our teenage days in Winnipeg, before she met my brother, and she speaks her mind in a real auntie-like way. After all, she has known Neil since he was in diapers.
“What were you saying to him?” I asked her.
“I just told him I was glad he got his hair cut, but why did he have to play so loud?” she said, and then stuck her fingers in her ears as the first crashing bars came through the amplifiers and Neil began to sing “Comes a Time.” She says she can hear the words better with her fingers in her ears. She spent the whole concert that way.
It was an interesting concert for many reasons. One was that Neil had rarely played better. His guitar work on “Down by the River” was stunning. Same on “Don’t Be Denied” and “Ohio.” But something was bothering him. It’s something that bothers many artists. The people who would like to be in the front row, hanging on every word, hammering the stage, shouting in ecstasy, people who would rather starve to death or die of thirst than give up such a favoured place, aren’t always there. Often the front seats are apportioned according to one form or another of favouritism to friends of the management. The ones who did have these prime seats were moving in and out a lot buying beer and food. Like a baseball crowd. Once Neil stopped and looked at two empty seats in the front row and read the numbers aloud: “One-oh-three and one-eleven, you’re late!” (Joni Mitchell in Toronto a few days earlier looked at her concert’s front rows and said, “I hope there aren’t any freebies in these front rows – this is where the people who really want to hear, and pay for it, should be.”)
When the concert came near its end, to the point where all through July and the last week of August and this far into September, Neil had sung “Sugar Mountain” and then introduced his 1950s rock segment with the Shocking Pinks, the Redwood Boys, and the dancing Pinkettes, he didn’t. He simply left the stage, came back for an encore, and that was it. The crowd booed. He didn’t come back. They booed more. But it was over.
When Bob and Merle and I made our way through the crowd back to the bus a few minutes later, a writer from Variety touched my arm and said, “Do you know why he cancelled the last part of the show?” I didn’t. Inside the bus Neil was slumped back on one of the settees with a long-necked bottle of beer, talking to Astrid. She had come by train from Toronto to Windsor. Glen Palmer had sent a car to bring her and a friend the rest of the way. Neil hugged Bob and Merle and then sank back down again. The shortened concert obviously was on his mind. He burst out, “That crowd just didn’t deserve the Shocking Pinks! I dunno, I guess I’ll get criticized, but I just have to follow my instincts.”
As we talked, Glen Palmer appeared behind my brother and said, “There’s a music writer here from the Detroit Free Press, a friend of mine. He’d like to see you. I told him that wasn’t possible, but that I’d ask if you had any comment on the concert tonight.”
It was the gentlest possible way of giving Neil a chance to explain his cancellation of the Pinks – or to say anything else he wanted, even to give an excuse, if he wished, that he wasn’t feeling well, or whatever. All of us waited for his answer.
“No, there’s really nothing I want to say,” he said. “Just tell him I hope he enjoyed the concert.”
A little later in more private circumstances, he had a harsher word for the Pine Knob crowd, prefacing it by saying that he knew there were people out there he would have liked to play more for – but the total of the response … “Well,” he said, “you don’t put your best horse out on a gravel track, do you?”
Why did Pine Knob seem like such a gravel track to Neil that night? One opinion was that the enthusiasm from the thousands up on the grass simply wasn’t getting back downhill. Otherwise, anyone’s guess is as good as mine. There is never a provision on tickets or advertising that states: Neil Young will sing twenty-one songs tonight. They don’t get listed, as on an album cover. On this tour each night he sang a mix with a lot of craft in it. The Buffalo Springfield fans got theirs; the Harvest fans got theirs; the Trans fans probably wish they got more of theirs, and every night except in Pine Knob the people who dance in the aisles at the Everybody’s Rockin’ stuff got theirs in the form of something many of them have never known: a dance party. He sang what he felt – there were no Tonight’s The Night songs in the concert. But there was “Comes a Time,” the gently melodic and upbeat song that he wrote not long before he and Pegi got serious, and there were the vivid images of “Powderfinger.” And almost every night he gave them the Shocking Pinks, music in the genre of his nights as an eleven-year-old with his radio turned low under his pillow in Pickering, and tuned to CHUM. But not this night.
Half an hour or so later Bob said, “Well, I guess we’d better go,” and, to Astrid, “are you kids going on to Lansing or what?”
“We’re taking a train from Windsor to Toronto tomorrow,” Astrid replied.
“Well, you might as well come with us then. We’ve got lots of room at our place and we’ll drive you to the train tomorrow.”
Astrid thanked him and said she’d just be a minute, she wanted to see a friend on one of the buses.
“We’ll see you tomorrow in Lansing, Daddy,” Neil said. “You driving over tonight?”
“No, but we’ll probably be there by ten, ten-thirty in the morning.”
“Good. We can have a game of golf.”
“A long time since we played golf,” I said.
“It sure is.”
It was nearly an hour after the concert by then. As I started my car, Neil’s bus went by. We fell in among other cars which were honking when they saw the bus and followed until we were out of the parking lot, and then went our own way for a couple of icy draft beers at the Holiday Inn in Pontiac. Then I read awhile – a reread, after thirty years or more, of Joyce Cary’s Aissa Saved. Maybe a restoration of perspective.
When we’d been talking about playing golf the next day in Lansing, Neil said he’d be parked near the Harley Hotel, where the crew would stay. When Dave and I got there near noon the Shocking Pinks’ bus was in the lot, but not Neil’s. We figured Neil’s bus had stopped along the way for sleep. We ate breakfast and called Glen Palmer at noon to say we were at a motel across the road, and did he know where Neil was? He didn’t, but as we got back to our room the phone rang. Glen told us that the bus had just called and was at a 76 Truck Stop a few miles away. “Neil wants you to go right over and go golfing.”
It took us half an hour of driving up and down highways to find the place. Away at the back of dozens of big rigs two buses were parked. Neil and Paul and Don Perri were up. Neil’s bus had lost its air pressure just as they rolled into the place. Neil was shaving, cleaning his teeth, asking, “Where’s the nearest golf course, I wonder?” I walked over to the busy truck stop restaurant for directions.
“Go out of here,” the woman on the cash said, “turn right, go three lights, turn left, go four lights and you’ll be there, it’s right on the corner.” Either she golfed there herself or a lot of her customers did. When I walked back the hundred yards or so to the bus, Neil was outside waiting for me. We left a minute later in my old Olds, Neil beside me, Dave in the back.
I don’t know if Neil feels the same way, but it seems to me that each time we’re together the give and take of our times past, times present, and time to come becomes easier. We were on this flat straight four-laner near Lansing with the trucks and vans and hot-rodders. Something, a boat on a trailer or on the roof of a car, reminded me of something you’ve gotta tell a man with a 105-foot yacht.
“Hey, you know,” I said, “this year they’ve made a boat-launching place where the old swimming hole in Omemee used to be. The government did it, concrete launching ramp, parking lot, the works. They wiped out all those old boat-houses that used to be under the trees at the side of the swimming hole.”
As I drove I thought of the swimming hole. I used to swim across the deep part of the river on my back, with Neil riding my stomach. The nearest house was that of Austin and Bessie Hayes. One day, fishing from the Mill Bridge, Neil hooked himself in the abdomen, the hook going right through the fold of skin. He carried his fishing pole, held so the hook in him would stay steady, wouldn’t pull, and walked across the road to where Austin Hayes, my friend Jay’s dad, was sitting on his front steps, a round and cheerful man who had farmed much of his life before coming to live in town.
“Say, Mr. Hayes, do you think you could get this hook out for me?”
Mr. Hayes, with four sons of his own all raised and away, got pliers to cut the hook and carefully worked the two pieces out. He washed the patch of skin and put iodine and a Band-Aid on the cut. Then Neil went back to the Mill Bridge to resume fishing. There was no tetanus shot, no crying. Austin Hayes told me about it later. It became part of local folklore, not because Neil became famous, but because he was an Omemee kid who didn’t cry, didn’t run home, and didn’t quit fishing because of an accident that could happen to anyone. He was five at the time.
We were still on the highway near Lansing, counting lights.
“I bought a boat trailer this year,” I said. I’d got it as soon as I came back from England (if you don’t get the things you want when you’re sixty-five, you’re not going to get them), and I was looking forward to getting my twelve-foot aluminum boat with the four-horse Johnson out on the river to fish and see the carp in their sex dance, and the big blue herons, and the rest of the familiar river scene. For a couple of years Margaret and I had been lifting the boat on and off the 1973 Ford pick-up, and I thought I could indulge myself with a boat trailer.
Neil was still thinking about the swimming hole being gone.
“Did they fix up another place for the kids to swim?” he asked, looking sideways at me.
“Yeah. Over on the pond.” That’s the big mill pond upstream from the mill dam, where big muskies still live. “They trucked in sand to make a beach. It’s near the school where you started. Past Cap’s place.”
“Cap’s Cabins!” he laughed. “They still there?”
“Yep.”
Cap’s Cabins (where Rassy and Bob and Neil and I once stayed for a month after renting our house and preparing to leave Omemee) are on the edge of the pond and had been next to the old two-storey brick school. Some country kids used to ride horseback winter and summer to get to school. Its yard was a gentle grassy slope that ended marshily on the shore of the pond.
We turned left, as directed, at the third light.
“Is that old school still there?”
“No. It was empty, then burned, then was torn down. The high school kids are bussed to Lindsay, and the public-school kids come by bus from all around to Lady Eaton Memorial School back on the land we used to own, between our house and the railroad station.”
We were counting lights again.
“Hey,” I said, “I was past one of your other schools the other day, too. The two-roomer on the Brock Road at Pickering. Somebody sells air-conditioners there now.” The place where Neil had played the rich shepherd in the Nativity that Christmas.
“Yeah?” His icons were disappearing one by one. He laughed. “That was the neatest school I ever went to. At recess we’d go down to the edge of the water, a little creek, and catch frogs.” He laughed again. “We had a baseball team and we’d go and play other schools in little towns like Brougham.”
We were at the fourth light, and could see golfers to our right. We turned in and parked.
The greens fee for nine holes (all we had time for) was five dollars, including club rental. Good repaint balls were three for a dollar, tees fifteen cents. It cost eighteen dollars and change for the three of us. There weren’t many people around. We took off, Neil hitting the ball pretty well. It was a long course, with difficult par threes and fours and two long par fives on the first nine.
When we holed out, Neil had shot a forty-nine, not bad on that course. I was sixty-one in my first game in fifteen years. (I used to have a sixteen handicap.) Dave was sixty-nine, in his first game since he was a kid. Neil asked the time. He was thinking about time, now. In the car, he was drumming his fingers on the roof, not so much in impatience as in something, a tempo, he was working out. I could hear him singing something softly in the passenger seat.
When we wheeled into the truck stop the buses were gone, so we drove downtown to the Lansing Civic Center. Getting there, Neil left the car all but on the run. “Thanks, Daddy,” he said, and shook hands with Dave. “Enjoyed the game!” he said. “See you!” He disappeared into the bus, parked with the semis and other buses; back in his routine.
That night the crowd obviously had more of what Neil, wanted. A white-haired man in his forties or fifties sat next to me with an impassive expression and his arms folded, but everywhere else the place was jumping. Dan Clear had told me after the Pine Knob concert that he’d expected me in to do an interview that intermission. But he hadn’t asked me and I’d not even thought of it. This time he did ask. Soon after Neil ended the first set with “Don’t Be Denied,” Dan Clear introduced me with, “I know, but the audience doesn’t, that you’re Neil’s dad.”
I said yes, I was, and found myself saying, “Yeah, I’m the bad guy in those first four lines of ‘Don’t Be Denied’: ‘When I was a young boy, my mama said to me, your daddy’s leaving home today, I think he’s gone to stay, we packed up all our bags and drove out to Winnipeg.’” From sleepless nights and worried days to a vaudeville turn in only twenty-four short years.
I knew as we went on that I really didn’t want to go back to the seat I’d had for the first set. It would mean people coming up to me and wanting to talk about Neil. That’s all right, but some other time. When they were talking to me I couldn’t concentrate on the stage. So I went to the far back of the hall. It wasn’t far enough. Two beautiful young women came to me and talked. When they left one of them put her arms around me and kissed me and said, “Pass that kiss on to Neil. Tell him it’s from Norah Lopez.” Ushers came up and sat with me to talk. Others came by. I was someone they could touch as a surrogate for Neil. When people asked me for autographs I signed them, but that rush was pretty well over by the time I first saw the Shocking Pinks segment of the show. Neil was brought back late, near the end, by cheers and flickering lighters to say, “Thanks for bringing me back,” and then saying that he’d like to roll back the years and they could help by singing with him. He sang “Sugar Mountain,” and on the video screen behind him the numbers 1983 appeared. He went back to the screen and made a pushing motion with his guitar that started the numbers rolling back, 1982, 1981, 1980 and on. When he left the stage not everyone in the audience knew what was happening. Pink-garbed roadies began swiftly changing the set, bringing in an old-fashioned microphone, old-fashioned instruments. When the screen had rolled back to 1957 Neil charged back to the stage dressed in a white suit with his hair greased and shoved up at the front like Elvis used to, and stood at the piano and hammered out 1950s rock accompanied by Tim, Ben, Karl, Vito; the string bass, the saxophones, the drums, the Redwood Boys singing, the dancing-girl Pinkettes doing kicks (Pegi was head Pinkette when there). The crowd danced wildly through five, six, seven songs in the Everybody’s Rockin’ style. All I could see from the back was dancing humans and the silhouettes of arms held high shaking in unison against the stage lights.