Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  I used to really love Floyd Cramer, “Last Date.” That was really the only one I knew. “Dowdowdowdowwwwdow”—everything’s pulled. Everything. There’s always something movin’ down there. I liked that sound, so I play the guitar a lot like that … pull the notes. I just always have. When I first did it on guitar I thought it was really cool, but it was Randy Bachman who did it first. Randy was the first one I ever heard do things on the guitar that reminded me of Floyd. He’d do these pulls—“darrr darrrr,” this two-note thing goin’ together—harmony, with one note pulling and the other note stayin’ the same. I thought, “I can do that if he can do it. It might take me two years to learn how, and I’ll do it at half his speed, but I’ll fuckin’ get it.”

  I loved Roy Orbison from the beginning—“Only the Lonely,” that was big when we were visiting that lady at the record store. Great singing, great arrangements, great records. Roy was the closest thing to Bob in rock and roll. He was just so … sincere and he just stood so tall. His fuckin’ records were brilliant. They were revolutionary records. Hit after hit after hit … totally off the wall. Voice like a fucking opera singer—singing these ballads with a Ravel’s Bolero type of beat. What the fuck? Where did that come from, y’know? “Evergreen.” “Blue Bayou.” I loved that fuckin’ record. I played that record over and over and over. I just loved the fuckin’ track. And the vibe—the way he sings that song. That is a fuckin’ song. There’s a songwriter who sings about tragedy to such a fuckin’ degree it’s almost impossible to comprehend the depth of that soul. It’s so deep and dark it just keeps on goin’ down—but it’s not black. It’s blue, deep blue. He’s just got it. The drama. There’s something sad but proud about Roy’s music.

  —What did you like about Del Shannon?

  Same thing I liked about Roy Orbison. He used all these weird chords, and there’s something about him—such a tragic character. * He struck me as the ultimate dark figure—behind some Bobby Rydell exterior, y’know? “Hats Off to Larry,” “Runaway,” “Swiss Maid”—very, very inventive. The stuff was weird. Totally unaffected. He was just doin’ his thing. How he ever came up with those ideas I don’t know.

  Bobby Darin. He was pretty funky back then … innaresting guy. Actually, his first song came out when I was in Pickering—“Queen of the Hop.” I appreciated what he was doing. It wasn’t that I ever got washed away with the message, although “Queen of the Hop” was pretty cool, you could see a picture with that one. “Dream Lover” was good, too. Y’know when he did the Tim Hardin song “If I Were a Carpenter“? Another completely different sound. “Mack the Knife” was cool, too. But it was almost a distraction, ’cause it was such a radical change—you were goin’, “Wait a minute. Jesus Christ. This is really good, but who the fuck—is this the same guy? What the hell happened?”

  That’s the first artist I can remember where you’re goin’, “Well, shit—he just changed. He’s completely different. And he’s really into it. Doesn’t sound like he’s not there.” “Dream Lover,” “Mack the Knife,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Queen of the Hop,” “Splish Splash”—tell me about those records, Mr. Darin. Did you write those all the same day—heh heh heh—or what happened?

  He just changed so much. Just kinda went from one place to another. So it’s hard to tell who Bobby Darin really was.

  Comrie and Neil sometimes headed off to a special secret little neighborhood spot—whipping out a couple of pipes packed with a particularly noxious blend of tobacco called Bond Street—then ruminated over girls, bands, records and other important matters while they puffed away. According to Comrie, the conversations all had a way of creeping back to Neil’s home life.

  Once Scott and Rassy separated, things went from bad to worse. Scott’s new love, Astrid, had been writing to him, sending letters via his brother’s address. Bob’s wife, Merle, got ahold of one of these letters and, perhaps in retaliation for Rassy’s antagonism toward her, forwarded it. “She knew Rassy would recognize a woman’s handwriting and open it—and read it,” said Scott. “This is exactly what happened.” In 1960, Rassy filed for divorce. According to Scott, Rassy told him that she’d shown Astrid’s letter to their children. For over twenty years Scott believed this to be true, until he was working on Neil and Me. Neil told his father he’d never seen the letter. “Why would Rassy say that?” asked Scott. “She was just trying to make you feel good about yourself,” quipped Neil.

  Scott would be wracked with guilt for years. “First love is very powerful, and you can never be sure of some drastic action you take in relation to a marriage,” he said. “I often thought that people who were really sane could handle those things somehow, make it work. There were so many good things in our marriage—our two kids, all the things we did, the career things we fought through together…. I think the perfect marriage for Rassy would’ve been if she and I had worked out and I had become a wellknown writer, but without betraying the love we had sworn to one another.”

  Unfortunately, Scott still suffered from the marryalator blues. His brother, Bob, recalls Scott ranting on about how “he’s never gonna get married again, never, never, never, and we’re driving along Yorkville and there was a Northwest breeze, hot day—and an Indian girl wearing a sari walked across the street, the sari plastered to her front in the breeze. She was a beautiful creature. Jesus Murphy, Scott’s ears came up. That was five minutes after he told me he was never gonna look at another woman.”

  In 1960, divorces were almost impossible to obtain in Canada. “There was only one way to get a divorce, and that was to prove adultery,” said Scott. “That was it. And there were these guys and girls who made a living at this. Your handy divorce lawyer would get a girl, she’d sit in her slip or panties on a hotel-room bed, and the guy that was supposed to testify would walk in and see this.” Rassy had one special requirement: that Astrid be the corespondent. “She had to be the woman who was found in my room,” said Scott, chuckling. “It was tough being in court with Rassy.”

  Once the marriage was over, it was open warfare for Rassy. She attacked Scott with the same tenacity she had once used to support him. “I seriously disappointed Rassy, and there was no surrender in her makeup,” said Scott. “She went all over town saying what a shit I was.”

  She was still saying it over thirty years later. “Scott was a very odd man—he was never proud of anything anybody ever did. Scott’s got no faith in anybody doing anything unless he’s running it. He couldn’t stand it if somebody admired something I’d done—it really drove him up the wall. A selfish man—he had no idea what other people’s needs were. A cold fish is what he is.”

  Following the breakup, Bob stayed in Toronto with his father, while Neil returned to Winnipeg with Rassy. “Probably the one mistake I made was not telling them both that they could come and live with me if they felt like it,” Scott recalls. “I’ve always regretted that, because Bob chose to come with me and I couldn’t quite face the idea of Rassy being without anybody—‘Okay, I’m gone, okay, Bob is gonna go, so …’ Neil was, in a sense, I wouldn’t say the victim … I advise people: Don’t ever break up with your family without telling them that you love them and you want them if they’ll come and live with you.”

  Bob took the divorce especially hard. “At that time I didn’t wanna go anywhere else, I didn’t wanna live in a different place, I didn’t wanna go somewhere where I didn’t know anybody,” he said. “I’d had enough of moving all over the place. I played amateur golf—it was like a life-or-death struggle. I figured it was my only way out.

  “There was no choice that would ever keep both people happy. From my perspective, it was a no-win situation. It caused me a lot of trouble—I think it caused Neil less trouble because he was still sort of protected in the sense that he was too young to do what I did: work.”

  Everything would be a battle for Bob; he would quarrel with his family, let his golf career slip away and wander through life in search of a purpose that still seems to elude him. Not lon
g after the family broke up, Bob recalls tramping around on a wintry Winnipeg day with Neil, each of them promising that whoever made it first would help the other with his dreams. Over forty years later, Neil is still helping his brother pursue his.

  Rassy, of course, thought it all would’ve been different had Bob come to Winnipeg. “Scott didn’t like Bob. You can murder somebody with words, just cream ’em right into the garbage by putting them down at every opportunity, and that’s what Scott did.”

  Neil would internalize everything, immersing himself in music. Later in life he’d often find himself the seemingly passive eye in a tornado of quarreling producers, managers and musicians, all clamoring for his attention. Perhaps it is a form of affection Young can understand.

  And he’d hold his cards so close to his chest that even those closest to him couldn’t be certain of anything. His music might ooze with raw emotion, but as a person, “stoic, inward Neil” was frequently an impassive, impenetrable fortress.

  I guess it was kinda early for divorce. My mom and dad were trailblazers, heh heh.

  —Do you remember a lotta conflict as a kid?

  Between my mother and father? Yeah—a fair amount. There was conflict. My mother was very emotional. Extremely emotional.

  —How would it affect you?

  Y’know, I don’t remember. I mean, I don’t have any vivid remembrance of lying there feeling bad or anything. It happened—but it didn’t happen so much that it was like a big bother. I think when my parents broke up, I realized, “Well, those were real fights.” I mean, they were trying to work something out that didn’t work out. Somethin’ happened. I don’t know what.

  My dad kind of got around a little. That’s what I think. He was a really friendly guy, heh heh. My dad knew everybody, right?

  —And Rassy knew that your dad knew everybody, and she kept tabs on all of ’em!

  That must’ve burned her up, keepin’ track of all that shit—and my dad was just havin’ a good time. My dad is a cool guy and I could learn a lot from him. Better start pretty soon….

  I must’ve led the most sheltered life in the world—because all the shit that happened, it may have been happenin’ right in front of me, but I didn’t see any of it. I didn’t. I was just spaced out.

  I still can remember trying to make the best of that situation. ’Cause I thought, “Well, hell—it’s not so bad. It’s not so bad. Here we are.”

  I don’t know. At first I cried, it blew my mind and everything but hey, y’know—on the other hand, I think I knew they weren’t happy together. And I was thinkin’, “God, maybe my mom will find somebody new. Maybe my dad’s gonna be happy.” It felt to me like we should try to just keep on goin’ and be positive. I mean, I was kind of lookin’ forward to the future, y’know.

  It hadn’t been very happy around the house. The vibes had been pretty heavy. I don’t have the best remembrance of that place on Old Orchard. I remember not spending a lotta time there, spending time at other people’s houses. So I think that when my dad left, part of me was happy. Now we can have some fun around here, fer Chrissake! Y’know: “Let’s go down and buy a new shirt. Look at the fuckin’ shirts they got—sparkling shirts. Let’s go. Let’s get something happening here.” Heh heh.

  —I asked your dad what he thought you had in common. He said your outlook on women. “I used to ask everyone to marry me,” he said. AHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha … There you go. Sounds awful familiar to me—I was wonderin’ if that was him or me.

  It’s funny, though—people tell me what a SAD CHILDHOOD I had. What a bummer all this was, how down I seemed to be. And I listen to that and I’m goin’, “I don’t think it was that bad. I don’t think it was like that.” But even today, a lotta people look at my picture and they think that I’m very down and I’m always low. Even my kids. “Dad, lighten up.” And I’ll be at the movie with Pegi, havin’ popcorn—chomp chomp chomp. I’m overamping on something, who knows what it is—Pegi goes, “Come out of it, what’s wrong, are you feelin’ all right?” Maybe I was obsessing about some fucking detail of something somewhere, about Lionel or how am I gonna tell Billy that certain songs aren’t gonna be on the record….

  I work out a lot of shit on my face. I know sometimes I stress, but it seems like I look a lot worse than I am…. Apparently I look like I’m a fuckin’ maniac half the time. Really heavy. I think that I’m kinda a funloving guy. A fuckin’ good-time guy.

  “When I was a young boy / My mama said to me / Your daddy’s leavin’ home today /I think he’s gone to stay / We packed up all our bags / And drove to Winnipeg,” Young would write thirteen years later in “Don’t Be Denied,” as his father puts it, “saying in six lines what took his mother and me a year or more to live, in bitter acrimony.”

  Bob remembers going to the family house and finding it empty. Rassy and Neil had vanished. “They were gone. I didn’t even know they’d left.”

  Rassy and Neil made their way to Winnipeg, hoping for a new start. The intense focus and support Rassy once had for her husband was now, for better and for worse, concentrated on her son.

  He lost himself in music on the trip west. “Neil used to bite his nails, so if he could go an hour without bitin’ his nails, I’d let him play the guitar,” Rassy recalls. “So that’s what we did all the way to Winnipeg—which is a helluva long way.”

  * Scott had a different version of events surrounding Neil and Me. When the manuscript was in galleys, Rassy called up, threatened all sorts of legal action and claimed Neil—conveniently on a boat trip at the time—had given her permission to edit the book. Scott gave her five days to peruse the manuscript and make any factual corrections. A few days later she called back with a very minor correction. She then offered her congratulations on the book, telling Scott how much she had enjoyed it. Scott later repeated Rassy’s flattering review to Neil. “Well, Dad, you’re the only person she said that to,” he quipped.

  * Rassy’s wedding was a pretty dramatic affair, according to her sister Snooky. Rassy was set to marry star athlete and Canoe Club favorite Jack McDowell, and invitations had long since been sent out when, one week before the wedding, Rassy changed her mind. “Instead of marrying Jack McDowell, who was the gentleman on the invitation, Rassy informed Mother she was marrying Scott,” said Snooky, who recalls the Raglands returning a mountain of wedding gifts with “a little announcement that the wedding was still on—but the bridegroom had changed.”

  * There is some controversy about Young’s middle name(s)—which he wouldn’t confirm for me—but both his father and a musician who’s seen his passport say “Percival.” Young is allegedly a triple Scorpio.

  * Wild man Ronnie Self—aka Mr. Frantic—was born in Missouri in 1938. “Bop-A-lena” was a number-sixty-three hit in 1958, and he then wrote both “Sweet Nuthin’s” and “I’m Sorry” for Brenda Lee. In and out of jail, married to the same woman three times, Self—according to writer Randy McNutt—“sank into personal troubles and frustration” in Nashville, and at one point “burned his gold records in front of the BMI office.” He died in August 1981 at age forty-three.

  * Del Shannon ended his life via a self-inflicted .22 bullet to the cranium on February 8, 1990.

  leaving things behind

  “Neil’s a guy who likes to collect old things—and I definitely fit that bill,” said Harper with a mild laugh.

  Jack Harper—or just plain Harper, as Neil calls him—was my guide in Winnipeg. A compact, athletic powerhouse who seemed to have a million projects going at once, Harper is head professor for the faculty of physical education and recreation studies at the University of Manitoba. Married to his high school sweetheart, Pat, Jack was the furthest thing from a rocker I encountered in this project, although he does manage to sneak off and bang drums in Midlife Crisis, a motley band of old-time amateurs that performs, among other Neil Young tunes, “Cinnamon Girl”—and plays it, as Harper puts it, “not very well.” They rehearse at the Crescentwood Community Club, an old recreation h
all where Neil played with his first real band many decades before.

  Neil and Jack met in the fall of 1962 at Kelvin High School. Jack would join Neil’s band, and Neil would fire him a month later. “Harper was in track, he was a gym rat, a gregarious, very outgoing guy,” said their old phys-ed teacher Mike Katchmar. “I don’t think Neil hung out with a heck of a lot of people—he was a very quiet type of individual.” The misfit musician and popular jock remain close friends over thirty years later. “Neil and Jack are really an odd couple—one is so outgoing, one is so quiet,” said Katchmar. “Different as night and day.” Yet when Neil comes to Winnipeg, Harper is the one he looks up. “I don’t get the sense that Jack’s changed very much from when Neil knew him,” said Joel Bernstein, Young’s archivist. “I think Neil’s comfortable with that.”

  Long periods will go by without word from Young, or even a return phone call, but Jack understands. “A lot of people lose patience with Neil,” said Harper, who chooses his words carefully, not wishing in any way to upset his old friend. “He isn’t the greatest corresponder and he isn’t the greatest communicator … I don’t get offended by it. Neil’s doin’ his thing. I always hear from him when it’s important.” When Harper lost a parent, Neil wrote him a letter. Young can be a man of painfully few words, and a letter from his own hand is no small matter. Discussing it, Jack was moved to silence.