Outlandishly tall with thinning hair, glasses and an inscrutable face, Ken Koblun walked outside to have a smoke after our interview. This led into a mindless discussion of smoking, during which I asked him how he got started. “Neil,” he said blandly. “He told me, ‘Real men inhale.’”
One of the first of a hundred odd ducks Young would gravitate to, Ken Koblun would be Neil’s principal musical cohort for the next few years. Koblun was equally obsessed by music and documented every gig and dollar earned in a meticulous diary Neil called “The Gospel According to Ken.” When Neil asked Ken to switch to bass, Ken gave up guitar. When Neil quit school, Ken quit school. Ken would follow Neil to Thunder Bay, Toronto, even New York. As Scott Young put it, “I think maybe Neil led Ken Koblun into areas that he couldn’t handle.”
“It was a weird relationship,” said bandmate Allen Bates. “Almost co-dependent. I don’t know how Ken could live without Neil. He’d light all Neil’s cigarettes for him—he was sorta like his right-hand man. But you wondered who was takin’ care of who.”
Rassy was frequently absent from the Grosvenor apartment, off with her cronies at the Winnipeg Canoe Club; Neil was often alone, “just this kid in an apartment,” said Bates. Koblun would come over in the evenings to hang out. “He’d invite me over for supper,” said Koblun. “A big loaf of bread, peanut butter and honey. We’d talk about music, play records, maybe watch Rassy on TV.” Once Young had gotten Koblun to take the plunge and inhale, the big thrill was stealing a couple of Rassy’s Black Cat Plain cigarettes and lighting up. But the main bond between them was music, for Koblun was as deep into it as Neil. So into it, drummer Ken Smythe recalls, that when they played, “Ken appeared to be in a trance—and there were no drugs involved.”
Ken was an orphan who lived with this English family, the Claytons. I think his mom and dad had some problems and he didn’t live with them—something about his past, there was some darkness somewhere—and he was in my room at school. He was one of the nerdiest and I was one of the geekiest. We hit it off.
We worked together well, supported each other. Ken was a good friend. He was always ready to go. And he was into it. There was a good bass player—when Ken was into it, he was pretty fuckin’ cool.
The only thing I can remember is I used to get mad at him—sometimes he would take a while to answer. I’d go, “I’m talking to ya, what the fuck are you …” And he’s still like that, only now I understand. I didn’t understand anything at that point. I must’ve been quite a piece of work, apparently, heh heh. Who wouldn’t look back on their life and say, “Wow, what a development.” Or, as William Bendix would say, “What a revolting development.”
Koblun and Young met at Earl Grey in Mr. White’s math class. “Both he and I were suffering the same fate,” said Koblun. “We were failing miserably just about all our classes.” They also had one other thing in common: broken homes. “Ken didn’t have parents and Neil didn’t have a dad,” said Allen Bates. “There was sort of a bond there.”
“I thought Neil was cool,” said Koblun. “I didn’t think he was cool in the greasy-haircut sort of way. Neil was different—he had a brush cut. He was about the only guy in class who wore a sweater … I was a little disappointed he hung out with the guys who smoked.” Being friends with Neil came at a price in school. “I know some of our classmates were very anti-Neil,” Koblun recalls. “I got in a fight with Sid Rogers once about Neil.” Koblun doesn’t remember Neil being in too many fights—“he was too sly for that”—although he does recall “there was one girl at the Earl Grey Community Club who said she was gonna beat us up. She was a hulk.”
Koblun, an amateur guitarist who had already made his debut on local TV backing an accordion player, found out Neil was also a fledgling player. “I asked if I could come over and hear him play, and he was reluctant,” said Koblun, who recalls Young playing a tune on his first real electric guitar, a secondhand Les Paul Jr. that Rassy had gotten him. “I said, ‘That’s good—what is it?’ Neil said, ‘It’s something I wrote.’”
Young had already started a band at Earl Grey—the Jades: two guitars, vibes and the inevitable bongos. They lasted exactly one performance at the Earl Grey Community Club, playing the hits of the Fireballs and the Ventures. Then came a brief stint in a band called the Esquires.
Esquire Larry Wah has stated that Young performed so poorly he was fired. Not so, say the other band members, who recall that Young played about forty or fifty gigs with the band over a six-month period. Ken Johnson had been abandoned by his singing quartet, so with the help of drummer Don Marshall, a band was put together. Gary Reid not only had a guitar, he had a red and white ’57 Olds that could serve as transportation, so he was in. Neil Young was enlisted to play rhythm. “First time I met Neil, I walked into his apartment at 205 Hugo,” recalls Marshall. “He had a really cheap guitar, and he didn’t have an amp, so he plugged it in to the record player.”
The Esquires played their first gig at Churchill High School, a dance after a basketball tournament. Relieved by what initially appeared to be a mediocre turnout for their first public performance, the band was flabbergasted when the curtain opened to reveal a crowd numbering in the hundreds. “We about shit ourselves,” said Reid. Playing a set of Shadows and Ventures instrumentals, plus a few rockers and pop ballads sung by Johnson, somehow the band got over. The Esquires began to get gigs, playing Saturday afternoons at a former country music nightspot called Paterson’s Ranch House.
Johnson recalls Young as “the skinny kid with the brush cut who didn’t quite look the part of a hip musician.” Neil’s ability on guitar was crude at best. “I remember feeling really bad for him, because he wasn’t making it,” said Ken Koblun. “I couldn’t tell what to make of him,” said Reid. “He was a lone wolf, off in his own little world—he did things his own way. I spent most of my time leanin’ over his shoulder, yellin’ at him: ‘For God’s sake, Neil, change chords!’”
Visiting Neil at Gray Apartments, Don Marshall got the impression Young was basically raising himself. “Looking back on it, I think he was alone more than he shoulda been,” he said.
As far as the Esquires were concerned, Neil’s mother was a force to be avoided. Ken Johnson recalls Rassy “really lit into me one time that Neil shouldn’t even be in a band, that I was keepin’ him out way late for someone his age, he’s not even sixteen, he’s gotta be in school. She was very tough. It scared the shit outta me.”
Young’s involvement with the Esquires came to an end after an escapade involving Neil and Don. “We heard on the radio that the Fendermen were playing out in Portage la Prairie, fifty-three miles away, so we figured, ‘Hey, let’s go,’” recalls Marshall. The pair hitchhiked, and a kind soul in a brown ’64 Corvair station wagon took them all the way to the gig. On the way back they weren’t so lucky. Stranded in the middle of Manitoba in the wee hours of the night, Neil called his mother. Don got the impression Neil hadn’t even let her know where he was going. “Rassy came all the way out and picked us up, and she was not in a good mood. I don’t think she talked all the way back. I think she thought I was leading her son astray. Back home, she told Neil to quit playing around with this shit because he’d never make any money out of it. So that was the last time we played with him.”
When word got back to Scott that Neil had been stranded in the middle of the night hitchhiking, he let Rassy have it. In retrospect, Scott regretted his meddling. “Rassy and Neil’s relationship—and Neil’s approach to life—had gone far beyond what I knew, so I was wrong in that sense.
“Rassy would do anything in the world for either Bob or Neil,” said Scott. “But it came with a price, and the price was a sort of unswerving loyalty—which I don’t think would work very well with Neil. He’s never said a word to me, but I just know.
“Rassy didn’t keep any kind of a firm rein on Neil at any time, of course. Eventually I came to understand he didn’t need a firm rein. He knew where the hell he was going—instinctively.
”
When I grew up, Rassy was really all I had as far as bein’ around. She was a big supporter during the early times, a very big supporter. We had a lot of fun. She was real emotional, though. If you’d get her too upset, she’d go off the deep end.
I love my mom, she was so wry and down. When people would say, “Your mother’s crazy, she’s really obnoxious,” I would be going, “Goddammit—she thinks she’s bein’ funny.” Her humor got so dry that she forgot it was a joke.
She had a boyfriend for a while. Bill Trebilcoe. He was her last flame, I think. Big, tall, bald guy—horn-rimmed glasses and polka-dot shirts. Great guy. Real gentle. That’s the last time I really saw her flowering. She started wearing bright-colored clothes … she just changed. He got some disease and he died.
—Did Rassy understand you?
I don’t think so. No. Does your mother understand you?
Rassy let that music grow, she let it do its thing. She tried to support it. And that really became her mission in life. I mean, she was on a mission from God. We’d practice in the living room. She was there, wandering around in her bedroom. Towards the end there, when a few of the guys were gettin’ to be over twenty-one, she’d bring ’em beer, heh heh.
Rassy was pretty funny on TV. That was pretty outthere. I’ve had an innaresting family. My dad was on a quiz show, too. I’m breakin’ the fuckin’ chain. No quiz show. Gotta draw the line somewhere.
—Once Scott was gone, Rassy focused on you?
Yeah. And I think that something happened there that I wished hadn’t happened. Meaning I think that she focused on me so much that it just made things kinda out of perspective with women. So I have all these built-in reactions because of the way my mom treated me. ’Cause my mom’s biggest tool to get me to do things would be to cry. I think she used EMOTIONS to control me—instead of talking to me. If things didn’t go right, she would start crying, and that always—I couldn’t do anything. So now, to this day, if a woman starts crying, I can’t—I can’t— I can’t handle it. I just want everything to be all right, whatever the fuck it takes. And that’s probably not a good thing, because you get wishywashy about things. So I’ve had to deal with that in my life. I was kind of trained to cave when she cried because I couldn’t see myself disagreeing with my mother. Immediately I would feel like “Well, fuck, what have I done? What can I do?” And that just passed on to my relationships with all women. I have a tough time holding a position that I may feel is right if they start crying. It’s a problem. So really, my whole psyche with women came to the point where if they start to cry, I fuckin’ cave. Which I suppose is not much different from any other guy, heh heh. I think it would’ve been different if my dad had stayed—but I’m not positive. In retrospect, it would’ve been nice to have had my father’s point of view on some of the things that were happening. It woulda been nice to hear what he woulda had to say about it. That’s somethin’ I didn’t get. But I got a lotta other really good things from my dad. So that’s the balance.
—What was the hardest thing for you to accept about Rassy?
Well, I think the hardest thing for me to accept about her—and still is—is that it’s quite possible that during the entire time she was bringing me up, she was a raving alcoholic. Now, I still don’t know if it’s true, but now I think it’s possible. And that I just didn’t recognize it.
Despite whatever initial protests might’ve been made by his mother, Young continued to play in bands. In the fall of 1961, Young began attending Kelvin High School and Koblun went off to Churchill High School, but the pair still played music. The Stardusters, aka (perhaps) the Twilighters, played one known gig at a Kelvin dance in February 1962. The Classics lasted long enough to play a handful of gigs toward the end of that year. But it was over Christmas vacation, 1962, that Young would put together his first real band. They would have uniforms, a pile of shitty homemade equipment and even a fan club. The Squires (were the Esquires pissed off by the name? “You bet we were,” said Ken Johnson) played everywhere, from gigs on the back of flatbed trucks in subzero cold to performances between wrestling matches. As Ken Koblun said proudly, “At one time we were third best band in the city.”
Kelvin High was known as a school for Winnipeg’s elite; it was Neil’s attendance at Kelvin, coupled with a new address in the River Heights district, that prompts Randy Bachman to say, “I was from the wrong side of the river and Neil was from the good side.” Toward the beginning of Neil’s tenure at Kelvin, he and Rassy moved to 1123 Grosvenor Avenue, occupying the second floor of a nice old brick and stone home. The Youngs might have had the address, but they didn’t have the money.
“Neil stood out,” said Mike Katchmar, Kelvin’s phys-ed teacher. “He was a tall, gawky-looking character—I always worried if there was a strong wind we’d have to put lead in his running shoes just to keep him down. Throwing a football at Neil? Well, you hoped it didn’t hit him in the head. Kind of an awkward individual.” And yet Neil managed to get Mike Katchmar’s goat; Jack Harper recalls him coming to gym class in such getups as Bermuda shorts and street shoes. “Neil went to Kelvin for two and a half years and never had the outfit,” said Harper. (When Young performed in Winnipeg decades later, during a 1996 Canadian tour, he dedicated a song to Katchmar, “Fuckin’ Up,” the chorus of which is “Why do I keep fuckin’ up?” ad infinitum.)
“Neil was a nonconformist,” said Katchmar, frowning at the memory. “He didn’t mix with a lotta people. A loner is a good way to describe him.” But he made friends with Harper, the gym rat who played drums—albeit only a marching drum—and was also friendly with Allen Bates. Class president and a varsity basketball player over at Grant Park High, Bates was classically trained on guitar and full of jazz licks that would never surface in Young’s funky band.
Young, Koblun, Harper and Bates started playing in the drummer’s basement. Young named the band the Squires, picked the material and, said Rassy, “Anybody who didn’t make rehearsals was out on their ear so fast they didn’t know what hit ’em.” After a month of practice and a handful of gigs, Harper was out. “I remember saying, ‘God, I don’t think I can make practice—I’ve got hockey.’ Neil said, ‘Well, that’s okay—we’ll see if we can get another drummer.’” There was no confusion as to who was the leader. “It was Neil all the way,” said Koblun.
“Neil was intense, driven and focused,” said Allen Bates. “When he was eighteen he appeared to be twenty-five. He took control and he knew what the hell he wanted to do. Neil never showed any weakness in the time I saw him … he was hard as nails. You get that with kids whose fathers are gone. They feel sorta stranded in a way, so they gotta take over, they gotta have total control. That’s the way Neil was.”
Ken Smythe, another Grant Park student, took over on drums. The Squires’ repertoire of instrumentals ran the gamut from old pop tunes and waltzes to the inevitable Shadows covers, as well as Neil’s originals. Young’s prolific output knocked the drummer out. “Right from the beginning, Neil had his own stuff. Half of our stuff, easy, was his own. It just kept comin’, one after another … it seemed to be endless: ‘Come to practice, I got a new tune.’ And it always seemed to be catchy.” Said Bates, “Neil was writing really nice melodies with nice harmonic changes in ’em. Something your ordinary run-of-the-mill guitar player wasn’t doin’.”
This lineup of the Squires would be the most stable, lasting a little over two years. The band played their first official gig on February 1, 1963, for the grand total of five bucks. Soon they had a small following, playing community clubs and CYOs around Winnipeg and hooking up with CKRC deejay Bob Bradburn. Five months after their first gig, they managed to snag a recording date. On July 23, Neil and the boys would enter the tiny studio of CKRC radio and lay down two instrumentals, with engineer Harry Taylor turning the big knobs on the primitive two-track console. Eight weeks later a two-sided single of “The Sultan” and “Aurora” would be released by V Records, a local outfit specializing in polka bands.
“I thought you’d go down, do three takes, pick the best one,” said Smythe. “We didn’t just sit down and play the songs—it was put together.” The resulting single had some amusing touches, like Smythe intermittently hitting a gong and Bradburn whispering “Aurora,” but sonically the record is so dim it sounds like it was recorded over the phone from Siberia. “Shakin’ All Over” seems as polished as Sgt. Pepper in comparison. “The Sultan” was a likable surf number, and if you strain, you can hear in “Aurora” the crude beginnings of the dark, descending minor-chord Del Shannon-style mood pieces that would eventually lead to “Like a Hurricane.” As exciting as it was to have an actual record out, what made more of an impression on Jack Harper was Young’s continual frustration. “I remember Neil never being satisfied with the way things sounded. He was searching for the right sound. Neil was so driven.”
Young was on his way, and another avocation bit the dust in the process. “I almost was a professional golfer,” Young told deejay Tony Pig. “I used to wear alpaca sweaters, I was on a whole trip…. I came to a new realization about a lotta things when I turned eighteen, and I sold my golf clubs and bought another guitar which was good enough for me to play in front of more people.”
That guitar was an orange Gretsch not unlike Randy Bachman’s. Young had smashed his Les Paul Jr. after he received one shock too many, and after some maneuvering, he bought the Gretsch from Johnny Glowa. Now he had a band, songs and a worthy ax.
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