Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  “Biggest small town in North America” is how Harper describes Winnipeg. Topping the news the day I arrived was a story on a local supermarket where the checkout staff hadn’t shown up; patrons took the goods they wanted and left their money on the counter.

  Bitter cold in winter—as Neil said, when you walk in the snow, you hear your feet squeak—and swarming with mosquitoes in summer; one has to be of hardy stock to survive here. Incorporated in 1873, Winnipeg’s location at the crossroads of the Red and Assiniboine rivers made it a center of trade and a gateway to the West, populated by a diverse mix of Ukrainian, Jewish, British, Scottish and native peoples.

  “There’s something to be said for the geography of the place,” said Winnipeg rocker Randy Bachman, who achieved rock stardom through über-Canadian outfits the Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive. “It’s very isolated, in the middle of nowhere—it’s almost dead center in the middle of North America.” Eastern Canadians can be downright snobbish, characterizing the city as a hockey-and-prairie hicksville. “Winnipeg is nowherestown,” said writer Juan Rodriguez. “It’s not even the windiest city.” But when asked to attend Canada’s answer to the Grammies, the Juno Awards, Young said he’d attend on one condition: that Winnipeg be allowed to host the show.

  “I think Neil’s values were shaped by this city, the prairie mentality,” said Harper, and as we drove outside the city one day, across the endless prairie, I heard the lonesome clanking of Young’s Harvest in my head. I felt a lot of Winnipeg in Neil.

  A big music scene went on in Winnipeg during the early sixties, much of it involving a network of community clubs. These neighborhood halls—invariably adjacent to the ubiquitous outdoor hockey rink—served families in a multitude of ways. As Randy Bachman recalls, “On Sunday night you’d find a wedding in there, on Tuesday a wedding shower, on Thursday they’d be playing bingo. Somebody said, ‘Let’s give Friday night to the kids. Let’s have dances.’”

  For a buck or under you could crowd into a club, see a band, drink a Pepsi and, if you were lucky, dance with a member of the opposite sex. Beat-up phonographs blaring scratchy 45s provided between-set entertainment. Innocence was the name of the game: Parents chaperoned the dances, the drinking age was twenty-one and drugs were still off in the future. “It was a very healthy environment,” said Jim Kale. “You didn’t have to worry about perverts screwing your children, drive-by shootings—you didn’t have to worry about anything. It was all very civilized.”

  Kale played bass for Allan’s Silvertones, aka Chad Allan and the Reflections, aka Chad Allan and the Expressions, eventually and best known as the Guess Who. Chad Allan (aka Allan Kowbel) and the Expressions were the kings of the community-club scene when Neil Young was coming up, and Kale in particular would be a good friend, occasionally thrilling Young by letting him borrow his much coveted Fender Concert amp, a rare piece of equipment in this prairie town. “It was the first big amplifier anybody had in Winnipeg that had the name Fender on it,” said Randy Bachman, the band’s guitarist and songwriter, whose playing would influence Neil’s greatly. “The rest were from Sears.”

  There were scores of community clubs throughout Winnipeg, and they proved fertile ground for up-and-coming bands seeking to develop their chops and make a few bucks. Deejays were as popular as the bands; you were plugged on the radio and guaranteed a good weekend crowd if you hooked up with a big jock like Bob Bradburn or Irving “Doc” Steen. “Irv Steen was a bloody saint,” said Jim Kale, “a big-brother type of character. He’d come out and be the master of ceremonies and take home a tumultuous ten dollars. He helped a lot of kids.” CKY and CKRC were the big AM stations, and bands lip-synched on the local music show, Teen Dance Party. Off-duty rockers congregated at the Paddlewheel, a restaurant in the Hudson’s Bay department store downtown, or downed burgers at the Red Top, where CKRC’s Jim Paulsen would interview bands live on the air.

  Saturday meant the ritual—take the bus downtown, have fries with gravy at the Paddlewheel, then head to Lowe’s Music or Winnipeg Piano to drool over the gear. Before Randy Bachman saved up enough to purchase his beloved Chet Atkins Gretsch, there were countless visitations with Neil Young just to see it hanging in the window. “We’d just stand there and stare, like it was a naked woman or something,” he said.

  Then there were the nightclubs. Bankrolled by a retired farmer, the Twilight Zone, with its tiny stage, was a big hangout for bands between gigs. The beatnik folkie crowd hung at the Fourth Dimension, a coffeehouse that charged twenty-five cents admission by the hour. There was the swanky Town and Country Supper Club and the notorious Cellar, a smoky basement dive where fists and bottles flew. “The Cellar was a piece of shit,” said Jim Kale happily.

  Feeding the minds of all these Canadian kids was an amazing confluence of radio waves made possible by a quirk of geography. “The thing about Winnipeg is, it’s what they call the top of the great plains—it’s flat, from Winnipeg almost to Texas,” said Randy Bachman. Meaning musichungry youths could routinely pull in stations as far-flung as Shreveport and New Orleans, which exposed them to all sorts of exotic regional sounds. As Bachman recalls, “I’d say, ‘Neil—were you listening to the radio on Wednesday night? Did you hear that song by Slim Harpo? Do ya know how to do the guitar thing?’ ’Cause I’d actually have my guitar in the middle of the night right by the radio and hope they’d play the same song night after night. You’d try and figure out the blues chords, you’d try to scribble down some of the lyrics.”

  “When you move in right up close next to me / That’s when I get the shakes all over me,” wails Chad Allan on the Guess Who’s 1965 hit “Shakin’ All Over.” Crudely recorded in the middle of the night on one mike at a local TV studio, with the entire band plugged in to Kale’s Concert amp and awash in reverb, “Shakin’ All Over” is the quintessential document of Winnipeg’s early scene: Allan’s desperate vocal, Bob Ashley’s menacing rhythm piano, and Bachman wrenching violent exclamation points out of his Gretsch.

  “Shakin’ All Over” had already been a hit in England for Johnny Kidd and the Pirates in 1960. Early on, a friend of Chad Allan’s had turned him on to his collection of English imports; this led to Allan’s band becoming, in Bachman’s words, “the ultimate British copy band.” Allan would inadvertently start a trend: Many Canadians had British roots, with relatives who became conduits for overseas records. “They would send us their old 45s,” said Bachman. “It was brand-new material for us. It made Winnipeg very different from anyplace else—we had this connection to England. All the top stuff, way before the Beatles or Cliff Richard.”

  Some of the most influential records from England in the early sixties were made by British pop idol Cliff Richard’s backing group, the Shadows, who had a string of instrumental hits on their own. “The Shadows were actually a four-piece band, but they sounded like a symphony,” said Bachman. Guitarist Hank B. Marvin augmented his Fender Stratocaster with two key pieces of equipment that would also become integral to Neil Young’s guitar sound: a whammy bar—a metal bar attached to the bridge used for bending notes for maximum emotional effect—and an Echoplex, which creates an echo controllable in terms of length and repetition. Marvin played with gizmos like these but kept it clean and simple, the opposite of instrumental trash-rockers like Link Wray. “Hank Marvin was the greatest melodic-guitar player,” said Bachman.

  A big baby-faced kid with a two-year jump on Young, Randy Bachman could draw blood with a guitar from an early age. He sported a big orange hollow-bodied Chet Atkins Gretsch—the guitar of his mentor, jazz whiz Lenny Breau—that he fed in to a lethal piece of equipment: a German tape recorder that helped him replicate one of the key elements of the Hank B. Marvin sound. Randy Bachman, as Young’s soon-to-be bandmate Ken Koblun recalls with awe, “was the only guy in the city with echo.”

  Bachman stumbled across the setup by accident. “I was desperate. I mean, you couldn’t even buy an amp in Winnipeg, let alone an echo machine.” Bob Ashley’s mother was a sc
hoolteacher and had a Korting tape recorder to help with French lessons—until it was discovered that by slightly repositioning the heads, you could create a gap that induced echo. “Out of the blue, I was able to get a studio type of echo that Elvis had on ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’” said Bachman. “It blew my mind, because it was the Hank Marvin/Shadows sound, y’see.”

  Bachman was another fanatic when it came to sound. He’d study the solos on radio and records, then eyeball the guitarists of any bands who came to town. “I used to go see Brenda Lee and the Casuals—‘Gee, the guy played the solo on the fifteenth fret’—and I’d write it down.” Bachman said this was the only way to learn in Winnipeg. “We didn’t know any of the notes on the guitar neck. We were all playing by fake, feel and by ear.”

  Whatever Bachman picked up was then transferred to a protégé of his own. “Neil would be standing at the foot of the stage, him and Koblun, and they’d be smiling, writing stuff down,” Bachman recalls. “I wouldn’t show him anything, but he’d see where I played it on the neck. Basically we both wanted to play the same thing—it was James Burton backing Ricky Nelson, Scotty Moore backing Elvis, Hank Marvin backing Cliff Richard.”

  Randy Bachman was my guitar-playin’ hero. He had a big influence on me. The best player in town. Had a lot of style. Very funky. He had some kind of tape recorder that he had rigged up for his echo. It blew my mind.

  I knew he’d been listenin’ to the same people I’d been listenin’ to—Jimmy Reed, the Shadows. Randy was a big Hank B. Marvin fan, too. Marvin had this rich tone, kind of like a brass, ballsy tone. Jet Harris, too—the bass player. They were the hot combo. Had a good groove. Those dance steps were pretty wild. Holy shit. Doin’ the little twist and shake—they had to be good to do all that and play. Just playin’ that shit woulda been real hard for me.

  But Randy could really play. I couldn’t, but he could—and it’s still true to a great degree. I’ve gotten a little better, and he’s still great. He’s just funky—a straight-ahead rock and roll guitar player. And in the beginning, he was the happening guy. We’d go stand in the audience and watch. Allan Kowbel, he was great. Bob Ashley, the piano player, he was really cool—big glasses, kinda nerd-lookin’. Cool piano player—timing. Gary Petersen, drums. Jim Kale, the bass player, was really good—Koblun used to go watch Kale, I used to go watch Randy. But I was impressed with the whole fuckin’ band. I thought they were all great. There was no weak spot in that band, until a little later. Back in Winnipeg, I listened to some old records that my mom had. They were not hard-core blues, but there was some blue in them. When I really started gettin’ into it was hearin’ Jimmy Reed. It must’ve been just around whenever I started learning how to play the guitar. And Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee came through Winnipeg. I saw that, and I liked what they were doin’.

  Listenin’ on the radio, I heard “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” and oh, fuck. I just had to have everything he did. First record was Just Jimmy Reed—it had “Goin’ to New York.” Then I got Rockin’ with Reed. What a wonderful musician. Harmonica—I can’t play any of the shit he plays. I still can’t. High, screechy notes, and yet they sound really mellow. So soulful and squeaky, this alley-cat sound to it, man. Completely original. Fuck. Unconsciously great.

  I think he uses really old harmonicas. That’s one thing—with guitar strings, too—a guitar sounds better when it’s funky and you’re gonna break a string and you’re all outta shape. Those old strings sound good. They’re mellower.

  When I do “Baby, What You Want Me to Do” with the Horse—I mean, I’ve heard other people do it before, but I’ve never heard anybody play it like that—other than Jimmy Reed. Because of that laidback beat, that steady, funky thing. I’m copyin’ him, it’s fun, and people are groovin’ on it…. That’s the right way to approach a song like that, I think. It’s not like I’m ever gonna be doin’ a definitive version of that song. There’s never gonna be a definitive version on any of his songs—other than his. *

  Jimmy Reed proved that it doesn’t matter what you play—it’s the feeling. ’Cause he played the same thing almost every fuckin’ song—the changes were a little different, but always that riff—the turnaround riff. “Dededededuhduhduh …” Where the fuck did that come from? Did he make it up or did he get it from someone else, and why is it that he plays it in every song and yet it sounds okay? Seems to be a little different every time he does it … Jimmy Reed just had it. There was no bass on those records. No bass. They had a guitar tuned down—listen to any other record, tune in on the bass, then put his records on—you’ll just hear low guitars. Pretty amazing. I still can never figure out what it is those people play. It’s like watchin’ John Lee Hooker. You can’t tell what the fuck he’s doing. [Stray Gators bassist] Tim Drummond showed me the real notes, but it still doesn’t sound right when I do it.

  Rassy and Neil’s first address in Winnipeg was Gray Apartments, number 5, in the working-class neighborhood of Fort Rouge. The location had been picked for Rassy by her mother, Pearl. Sister Toots and her husband, Neil, also lived nearby and were supportive of Rassy until even they could no longer take the bitter person she’d become after the divorce. “She was antagonizing one old friend after another until she had hardly a friend left,” said Toots. “Rassy never left anything alone.”

  Rassy supplemented her alimony by, improbably enough, becoming a panelist on a local TV quiz show. Hosted by crusty Englishman Stewart MacPherson, CJAY’s Twenty Questions featured panelists Nola Halter, Rassy and a man named Bill Trebilcoe, who would become Rassy’s last romantic interest. The object of the program was to guess, in just twenty questions, who or what the mystery guest was. It earned Rassy the grand sum of $70 a week.

  It is unfortunate that no copies of the program seem to exist, because it is said that Rassy proved a lively panelist. “I think Stew was fascinated by Rassy because she was pretty convoluted,” said Halter. “Rassy would ask the most bizarre questions, oh God! And the rest of us would just slide over and get ready to croak.”

  Rassy and Neil were quite a pair. “It was like sittin’ around with a couple of martians,” remembers Neil’s future bandmate Allen Bates. “Rassy, this woman, she was from another planet—those black eyes, just like Neil. His eyes cut right through you. If you were tryin’ to hide somethin’, forget it.”

  “Neil was a sweetheart of a boy, lovely to his mother,” said Halter. “He listened to her.” In return, said Snooky, “there was never a moment that Rassy didn’t think that Neil hung the moon.”

  Although there were a few battles on the subject, Rassy would be the first to recognize how serious Neil’s obsession with music was, and she encouraged it. “I figured anybody who was practicing like Neil was—at six, eight, hours at a stretch—wasn’t just fooling around. Neil was so determined you knew it was a matter of time, and not long, either. That guitar grew right out of the end of his arm. Never left it for five minutes.”

  While attending Earl Grey School, Young took lessons on guitar from a Mr. Jack Riddell, but only two. Mostly Neil just played by himself in his room, exiting just to torture his mother. “He’d do stuff deliberately to drive me crazy. ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’—he’d play that beautifully, then go flat right at the end—on purpose.” Feigning illness, Neil stayed home from school one day, only to declare himself recovered in time for band practice. Realizing she’d been had, Rassy refused to let him go. “Neil went to his bedroom muttering away. Half an hour later he came out and sang this song—it had four million verses—‘My Mother Is a Fink.’ I nearly died laughing. He never got one of those phony illnesses again.”

  The lonesome sound of Neil’s music got to his mother. “To me his music always had a sort of forlorn and desolate undertone,” Rassy would tell her son Bob. “At times I would wonder why his face would light up with a sort of joy when he’d play something that was so sad it brought tears to my eyes.”

  Neil can’t come up with any particular reason why he wanted to make music, altho
ugh almost every other musician I’ve talked to cites the same inspiration: “Anyone that tells you they didn’t get into rock and roll to get laid,” said Graham Nash, “is lying.”

  I dunno why I played rock and roll. I don’t think it was to get laid, because I don’t think I got laid for fuckin’ years after I got into rock and roll. I think I was in Fort William when I got laid. Me and a nice little Indian and a deejay. The first time was not really that great … at least I didn’t get any diseases. So it was good.

  A Harmony Monterey. I think I bought it at the little music store in Winnipeg that had Fender equipment and old stuff … I might’ve gotten it in a pawnshop. Thirty bucks. I had two guitar lessons … Mr. Riddell taught me everything I know in those two lessons. I would play quite a bit at home in my room on Grosvenor Avenue. I wrote “No” in my bedroom.

  —Was “No” a significant first song?

  I guess it might. Not a very positive beginning to my songwriting— “NO!” That was the chorus—“NO, NO, NO!” Maybe that’s where I developed my negative attitude, heh heh. That song was my foundation. Something had to be a counterpoint to the positive things I was seeing everywhere else.

  I’d work out stuff on my own. Sometimes I’d learn records by listening ’em—like Shadows records—I’d try to learn ’em, try to figure out what fuckin’ chord it was and what they were doing. I mostly learned all that stuff from watching Randy Bachman, though. He knew more about music than I did, so he’d learn it, and I’d learn it by watchin’ him.

  I tried to make a reverb out of a garden hose. It didn’t work too well. You stick a mike in the end of the hose and wrap the hose along the way—about fifty feet of it. You have a small speaker on the other end and you put, like, a funnel on—the sound goes into the garden hose, through a funnel, out the other end into the microphone, back into the fuckin’ amp … I could never get it to work. But I saw this diagram of “How to Make Your Own Reverb” … I still wanna try and get it working someday, only this time I think I’d use galvanized conduit or something. Get a little more metallic sound happening.