I’M NOT SURE OF THE EXACT instant when I decided that instead of two concerts, I’d stay for five. Eight months earlier in Dallas and Norman, Oklahoma, I’d found myself wishing that I didn’t have to go to England right then, or otherwise think about making my living, and could stay for the whole tour. The feeling now was the same. Which meant looking at the map and finding that from Lansing’s Tuesday night concert we would drive past Chicago and northwest to the Poplar Creek Music Theater near Arlington, Illinois, for a show Thursday, South to Bloomington for the University of Indiana concert Friday, east for the Sunday concert to be filmed in Dayton. Once decided, I felt light and free, like a travelling fly on the wall. This feeling was not based on the prospect of continued daily contact with Neil and the others, or even entirely on the fact that no concert is the same as the last. I had felt the same way at Olympic Games, World Series, Stanley Cups, many other major (at the time) sports events long forgotten now, and even the summer I travelled by ancient bus with the old Winnipeg Maroons through Fargo and Duluth and Wausau and Eau Claire and Crookston for class D baseball games when I was nineteen or twenty. I always just wanted to be there. Eyes and ears open.
It was early afternoon Wednesday when Dave and I arrived at the Arlington Hyatt. We weren’t intending to stay there, and had watched for cheaper places as we got near, but parked and went in to check at the desk whether the crew had arrived. As I was talking to a clerk, another woman behind the counter was on a phone nearby. She put the phone down and asked, “Are you Mr. Young?”
“Yes.”
“Glen Palmer wants to speak to you.” She handed me the phone.
I’m told I have a distinctive voice, some say as recognizable in its way as Neil’s singing voice, but this was ridiculous. While I was talking to the woman, Glen had recognized my voice in the background. He told me that it wasn’t definite yet, but he’d been thinking that a night off would be good for a crew party. If it happened he’d like me to be M.C. So that I would be easily available if this worked out, he asked me to check in at the Hyatt. My room would be paid for. I said okay. The crew was ambling more or less aimlessly in and out of shops around the lobby, much like a hockey or baseball or football team on a day off, relaxing, having a few beers, cruising, maybe looking for a Miss Right. Some found her, or reasonable facsimiles. The crew party didn’t come off. I never heard it mentioned again. Maybe it was just a ploy to keep me out of cheap motels. But I’ve been on the road on days off before and know how to handle it in accord with my own, if you can call it this, lifestyle. I decided I was tired. I spent the afternoon in my room with a huge bag of potato chips, a bottle of good rum, and a sheaf of computer print-outs covering every mention of Neil in The Globe and Mail in the last six years. You can call that research, mostly of things I already knew. One thing bugged me. I had heard of it a few weeks earlier. Here it was again, an Associated Press item dated August 24 from Los Angeles and headed: “Neil Young sued for child support.”
The item said Carrie was asking $10,000 a month because of Zeke’s “special needs.” Her lawyer said it was about double what Neil had been paying under a longtime informal arrangement. The report said Zeke was six (he was really two weeks short of eleven and had been in school for years) and that Carrie and Neil had lived together from 1974 to 1979 (it was really 1971 to 1974; Neil and Pegi had married in 1978). Neil’s lawyer noted that Carrie and Zeke were living in a house provided by Neil. The story didn’t mention that this house, paid for and maintained by Neil, had also been home to the man Carrie married in 1982.
I was annoyed by the omissions and inaccuracies (AP is not supposed to be inaccurate) but more annoyed later by a sob-sister interview with Carrie in People magazine where the writer appeared to have been taken to the cleaners. He had Carrie living on $500 a month and considering bumping off, for food, a couple of chickens said to be in the back yard. The story didn’t mention that taking all her support into account, Neil was providing about $6,200 a month. It was a totally one-sided story. It’s hard to know in this case whether to blame Carrie for talking, the reporter for ignoring Neil’s side, or the magazine editors for goofing off. I don’t think the other major Time-Life publications, Time magazine and Sports Illustrated, would knowingly put up with that kind of editorial copout. At any rate, the eventual judgement by the Superior Court, which learned only at its courtroom hearing about Carrie’s 1982 marriage, set the support sum – agreed to by both sides – at around $5,000 a month plus the house, less than Neil had been paying directly or indirectly.
When the People reporter had tried to get Neil’s version, he had been referred to the court record where it was all set out. What Neil and his lawyers had not found out until weeks after publication was that the court record was sealed, unavailable. However, I have worked for many a city editor who would have laughed in my face if I had turned in a one-sided story with that kind of excuse.
The morning after the day off at Arlington, I found the bus parked outside the Hyatt. Neil and I talked and drank coffee there for a couple of hours. I mentioned Old Ways. “Want to hear it?” he said, and played it on a cassette tape. He talked of changes he might make, but I liked it as it was. Later back in the hotel I had a late breakfast with Anthony Crawford and Ben Keith. Anthony commented that Neil pushes him to the limit in his singing; once, not satisfied with one of their duets, Neil had told it to him plainly, “I want blood.”
That was a terrible night at Poplar Creek for weather, a great night for the concert. It was almost as if the weather psyched everybody up. Backstage Neil was going around responding with something upbeat to every remark about the weather: “I go my best in the rain! I’m really one of those singin’-in-the-rain guys. A real mudder.” As the concert began, latecomers could be seen running towards the theatre with their open umbrellas held directly in front of them against the flat-out rain. The windswept edges of the covered-seats area were wet. Out in the open on the crowded grassy slopes it was that much worse. Onstage, Neil’s hair blew straight sideways as he played and sang. His breath streamed out frostily the same way. Balloons from the audience kept blowing onstage; he’d kick them off without interrupting the music.
He opened that night with “The Old Laughing Lady,” an old song, and the whole concert was like something done on the deck of a schooner in a storm. The crowd rushed, the stage late in the concert and danced. In one hectic Shocking Pinks segment, Vito Toledo ran to the front of the stage and started passing out Everybody’s Rockin’ albums. One was tossed back on the stage and hit Larry Byrom above the eye. It drew blood but he winced only for a second and never stopped his stand-up hammering on the piano. (Vito, later: “I learned something tonight – only give the albums to the front rows. I tried to hand that one back and so many people grabbed that it got broken and then somebody threw it back when they were fighting over it.”) Two girls from the audience climbed onstage and began dancing side by side with the Pinkettes. The rain and wind also added to the finale – the video screen showing Neil and the Pinks running offstage into the storm and climbing into a vintage Cadillac, Dan Clear racing alongside for a last few words from Neil. Neil stuck his head out the window and said, “Y’know, this leavin’ ya just don’t move me. I want a play one more song.” Wild applause from the video viewers out front. The band ran back to the stage, and did chorus after chorus.
When they finally left, the car taking off, Neil’s last shouted words were “Buy our album! Help us out!”
In Bloomington the next night the video failed in mid-concert and everybody had to improvise from then on, getting through the show without the sound and visuals of the video. “Well, if things were going to go wrong,” Neil said, “better here than in Dayton when we’re trying to film.”
That night before the video failed, Neil drastically flubbed some lines referring to his mother and me at the start of “Don’t Be Denied,” tried to carry on, then stopped and said to the audience – “That’s about my dad and mother, you know. My dad’s in the audience tonight and maybe it’s the pressure.” He started the song again but the effect was not the same: the feeling that makes the song so strong had been marred by the correction and repeat. I saw him a couple of minutes later, backstage at intermission.
“Shame on you,” I called.
He stopped, laughing, and we bantered back and forth. Then, leaving, he called, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if life was as easy to fix as the wrong start to a song?”
I’m winding down, now. I’ve never known how to finish this, and I still don’t. In effect I have been rummaging through my past and sometimes relating it to Neil’s present, but when it comes to the time of this particular parting I still have no final judgements springing to mind. I don’t even know what I am supposed to be seeking. Once in a while I still think of what I muttered to myself outside Carnegie Hall in 1970, as valid now as it was then, “What the hell happened?” In reality, human beings get to know as much about one another as either wishes to reveal. Irwin Shaw once had a character in a novel think to himself how, late in life, you suffer or profit from the consequences of the acts, or non-acts, of your early manhood. “Nothing is lost, nothing forgotten. The man who had devised the first computer had merely organized the principle of inexorable memory into a circuit of wires and electrical impulses.” I am part of Neil’s life and he is part of mine. It may be that I have gotten farther below the tip of his iceberg than he has of mine, but even of that I’m not sure. I know of his life only what I can see and feel. The famous are fair game for gossip and rumours and half-truths, or outright lies based on hidden truth, and I hear much about Neil that I simply balance against what I know of his life. I do not care whether it is truth or fiction, what’s the difference? What I know is that what he has now is good, his life with his family, and how he relates that to what he is in public. Otherwise, he remains as mysterious to me as he is to others, and as I must be to him if he thinks about it in those terms. Yet I have a slight edge from a non-personal standpoint in that from time to time I can consult the judgement of others, as when I read the book All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century, by New York Times music critic John Rockwell, published in 1983 by Alfred A. Knopf. In that book Neil is the only rock ’n’ roller given the full treatment, a chapter to himself, as accorded other major composers in genres other than rock ’n’ roll. Rockwell remarks that some readers might find Neil’s inclusion in this company surprising, but “Young is note-worthy for several reasons: the quality of his songs, the idiosyncratic charisma of his performing style, his elevation of rough simplicity into an art. But another distinction is his sheer, determined longevity in a field that prizes the transient fashions of youth. Neil Young got started a little later than the oldest still-functioning rock stars, men like Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Mick Jagger. But he has sustained a first-class body of work longer than any of them.”
In Dayton, once again I stayed – at Elliot’s request, this time – at the same hotel as the crew. I drove back and forth to the Harrah Arena. I laughed at Elliot in the hotel lobby. He had ordered a taxi. The pressures on him in this concert, during which they were filming for theatres, video cassettes, and pay TV, were greater than on anyone except Neil. So he was edgy. The girl at the desk, summoning his taxi, held the phone and called to Elliot, “What’s your name?” Elliot reacted somewhat as Gene Wilder might do, called upon to play the role in a movie; “Elliot! Elliot! But I’m just looking for a taxi, not a roommate!”
Pegi and Ben flew in Saturday night and were met by Neil at the airport. He took them to spend the night in the bus parked behind the arena instead of using the suite reserved for them at the hotel. He wanted to be near the setting up. Later Saturday night he strolled in to look around and immediately said, “How high’s that stage?”
“Five feet.”
“That’s too high for the film crew to get the shots we want around the front of the stage during the concert. It should be three and a half feet, not five.”
The crew worked all night striking sets, pulling cables, waiting for the dismantling of the stage, its rebuilding, putting up sets again, stringing cables again, checking lighting and effects again. He told me about it Sunday morning. “I was popular. I’m going to have T-shirts made with ‘Mr. Popularity’ on the chest, and below that, ‘Pull It Down And Put It Up Again Lower.’”
There were thirty-five people in the film crew under the director Hal Ashby, a calm man of long experience. The film crew and tour crew had to cope with each other. There were no more hitches. On Sunday Neil sometimes stood like a quarterback at an open huddle on the stage: talking, pointing, making hand motions while camera and sound people stood in front of him with Ashby in a hollow inverted U, listening. Neil got into the saddle of the crane camera directly in front of the stage and took it up to full height to look through the viewfinder. He squatted on the stage, wearing his guitar, and talked to Tim Mulligan, Larry Johnson, Tim Foster, Joel Bernstein, Lyle Centola, and others of his crew. Once he sat on the stage for a while with his legs crossed like a man at a campfire. He was oddly difficult to pick out among the throngs on the stage; his white shirt hanging over black torn-off shorts seeming to blend with the background. Once he tapped a microphone, found it live and said, “Okay, what’s stopping us from continuing?” And later, “Joel, I need a couple of harmonicas – a B flat and a C.” And later, amplified, for everyone: “I don’t want to do this run-through at show levels. I don’t want to sing at all until tonight.”
I checked out of the hotel and phoned to book a motel room thirty or forty miles north, so that I could drive that far towards home before I slept. I was around the bus a lot, chatting with Pegi, Ben, Neil, and whoever came by. Pegi had been away from the tour for a week and was tidying and checking the bus supplies, grumbling kiddingly at the mess, making a list of what was needed. “It’s awfully hot in here,” she said once. “Isn’t the air conditioning working?”
Neil, on a settee: “I opened the sunroofs to let some moisture in. It seems awfully dry on my throat.”
“Well, it’s sure hot.”
Neil got up and pushed the buttons that closed the sunroofs. No sign of the temperamental artist.
Pegi, a little later: “I wonder how far it is to a market where I can buy some stuff?”
Me: “About a mile away. I’ll drive you.”
As we went shopping, Neil put Ben in his stroller and took him for a walk. The large paved parking area around the bus was fringed, in the distance, with trees. They headed that way. Elliot joined them. When we got back Elliot met us, holding out some apples. “You should taste these – picked them right off a tree over there! Never tasted anything like them, so crisp and sweet!” Elliot, a New York and Los Angeles guy, might never have picked an apple off a tree before. Neil looked at me and grinned. He had.
Just as an athlete, an actor, or a musician will key up for a big occasion, Neil had been leading up to this filming all week. It was a hidden or perhaps even recognized part of his cancellation of the Pinks segment in Pine Knob, of his fingers drumming on the car roof after golf in Lansing, his “I want blood” to Anthony over their singing, his fluff in “Don’t Be Denied” in Bloomington, even his relaxing while pushing Ben’s stroller that afternoon. In recent concerts I had taken to standing along the wall near the stage. As this one got underway with the six fixed-position cameras and the hand-held one on the stage all rolling film, turning, moving to follow the action, the smallish arena jammed and deafening, Tim Mulligan’s hands were flying over the switches, Tim Foster at stage right was wearing a headset, Larry Johnson and Dan Clear at work out of sight in the video room. All the other people I had come to know were crouched, running, standing, making it all work.
Near me a woman stood on her wooden folding chair. Her face wore an expression of such overwhelming happiness that I could not take my eyes off her, except to note that the man she was with did not stand up. It was later I saw that he was in a wheelchair. When the crowd rushed the stage, the woman got down from her chair and pushed her man up to a safe position near the edge, and Dave sprang to link hands with her and keep the crowd back from overrunning the several people in wheelchairs. When the dancing began she came to me. Maybe she had noticed me watching her. She put out both her hands for mine and I went with her and for a long, long time, as long as the Shocking Pinks were up there, we danced. I had been pretty good at jitterbugging around 1939: it wasn’t so different now. I sweated and sang and realized that I never had seen a woman that happy, that transported – and that it came from Neil and his music, and in that way she represented all the millions, and I had been holding her hands.
When the concert was over I went backstage. Elliot thanked me for doing my intermission turn once again on the video with Dan Clear. I walked out to the stage where the dismantling was going on (tomorrow night, Kalamazoo), said many goodbyes, and then went backstage again. Pegi came up to me and said, “You’re leaving?” I said yes, and we embraced. Holding her I said thanks to her, for a lot. Nobody was being allowed in Neil’s dressing room. The woman guarding it knew I was Neil’s father. She opened the door for me. He was sitting alone on the floor over by a television monitor, his back to it, leaning against the stand, slumped, a bottle of beer on the floor beside him, looking happy and wrung out.
“Hi, Daddy!” he said.
I sat on a settee facing him and told him it had been wonderful.
“You’re sweating,” he said.
“I was dancing.”
He laughed. We talked on for five or ten minutes. I got up finally and thanked him for the hospitality and said I’d be going now, hitting the road.
“You’re going, tonight?” he said, looking up at me. “Right now?”
I nodded. He put down his beer and got up, all in one motion. “Well, you can’t go without a hug,” he said, and we stood holding each other tightly for a few long seconds, clasped together, father and son no matter what else.
Postscript: Before Christmas, Neil told me happily that Pegi was going to have a baby. Amber Jean was born, alert and pretty, on May 15, 1984. I visited during Pegi’s pregnancy and sometimes fussed about telling her she should not sweep this, or lift that, even though she was being very careful. I slept in a room across the hall from Ben and, being a light sleeper, would hear him stir and make his first morning noises, sometimes crying a little. I would look at my watch: six, six-thirty. Then he would become quiet, right away. I never heard anyone come, but each time would stay awake listening to the birds outside and thinking of my morning tea. I would wait a few minutes so as not to disturb Ben, then silently open my door and see the reason he’d settled down – Neil was lying there with him, both asleep again. This would happen each morning. At the first sound of Ben on the room intercom, Neil would make a silent dash from his and Pegi’s room. And I would see them, Neil in his long robe stretched out above the covers, one arm holding Ben, the two heads close in sleep, early morning in a good family in California.