Mitchell and Young were kindred souls of a sort; both young, intense and painfully unique. It must have been like two aliens recognizing each other out on the prairie. Although never as tight as some have imagined—both are essentially loners—the two artists would frequently cross paths in the years to come. “Neil and I have a lot in common: Canadian; Scorpios; polio in the same epidemic, struck the same parts of our body; and we both have a black sense of humor,” said Mitchell. “Typical Canadians.” Mitchell recalls ending up at a sporting event with Neil, watching Rassy curling. “Rassy was brassy. Tough prairie stock.”
Mitchell never got a chance to see the Squires at the 4-D, which was too bad, because once Young talked the club into taking a chance on a little rock and roll, the band got the beatniks in a tizzy that February 1964. Band members recall that the Beatles covers scored big, even with Young’s tentative vocal attempts. “When we did ‘It Won’t Be Long’ at the 4-D, we actually got a hand,” recalls Bates. “Neil came back later and said, ‘They liked it! They liked it!’ He was really fired up.”
The 4-D would become a favorite hangout and, for the perpetually destitute Young, a source of free meals. Undoubtedly all the exposure to folk music was putting ideas in his head, expanding his musical vocabulary beyond fifties-based rock and roll. He would never forsake his roots, though. Part of the beauty of Young is that he cut his teeth in a geeky instrumental band that lived to play “Rumble” and mean it, and unlike many of his folkie contemporaries, he would never forget or dismiss the intensity of the great big fucking noise that had blown his mind in the first place. There was room in Young’s soul for “Bop-A-lena” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” for the serious guy with the acoustic guitar and the string-bending rocker—sometimes in the same song. In the next year or so, Young would find that while he was in the fourth dimension, he could be both.
I was innarested in the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary at the beginning. Way back there when it was popular, a college thing—then Dylan. Folk music, the coffeehouse thing. I liked it. Music all the time. People. Hang out, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee. It was fun. I’d go to the 4-D and hang out. Never had enough money. I could always get in for nothing.
“Four Strong Winds” by Ian and Sylvia. It meant a lot to me. I remember playin’ it down at Falcon Lake where Jack and Pam and Pat and I were, listening to it over and over. Just the song, melody, the whole thing. It had a message too, y’know—leaving things behind. That feeling of something’s not gonna work. There’s a feeling in the song that I related to.
—Who first turned you on to Bob Dylan?
Bob. He just came over the airwaves—in Winnipeg. This is when I was tryin’ to figure out a way to get a visa to go to the States, some way to go to L.A. directly from Winnipeg. I was hangin’ out with these kids who went to this private high school that I couldn’t go to because we couldn’t afford a private school. Some pretty cool people who were older than I was. They had Freewheelin’ or his first album. That’s when I heard it first. I was diggin’ it.
I said, “This guy’s a real character.” First time I heard it, I knew I liked it. His voice was so different. I never heard anybody sound that different. Guess if I had been listenin’ to my own voice, heh heh … There have always been a lot of weird voices. How ’bout Ray Peterson—“Tell Laura I Love Her“? Now there’s a weird voice. Roy Orbison’s got a weird voice. Beautiful—but weird. Opera-velvet kind of a sound.
I liked Bob’s voice when I first heard it. I just said, “Hey, there’s a guy who sounds different doin’ this thing, too—I really like this guy. I can write songs.”
Since the family split, Scott had become a distant figure in Neil’s life. For the most part, communication consisted of Rassy’s irate phone calls for more money. “Rassy was difficult,” said Scott’s second wife, Astrid, who recalls an operator actually disconnecting a call due to her foul tongue. Astrid also remembers Scott being frustrated by the lack of information concerning his son’s academic career. “There were a lot of demands made with no information given,” she said.
Both Pam Smith and Jack Harper recall Neil’s nervousness over the infrequent meetings with his father. “He seemed so distressed about it,” said Harper. “I remember saying, ‘Gee, do you want me to come with you?’ No, he said, he was gonna handle it himself.” It was during such a visit in May 1961 that Neil first told his father about his interest in music, giving him a card for the Esquires, the band he’d shortly be fired from. Scott admitted that Neil’s love of music didn’t sink in at the time. “I couldn’t fully comprehend it; I wasn’t with him all the time, hadn’t been there to see and hear,” he writes.
According to Rassy, the freedom to pursue music would’ve been impossible under his father’s rule. “Neil would’ve never been allowed to practice all those hours if we hadn’t separated. Heavens. No way. Too noisy.” Bob agreed: “I think it was very good that Neil had somebody there that didn’t get on his case because of what he didn’t do in school. A lot of creative spark is killed by parents who play it safe.”
Visitors to the Toronto home of Scott and Astrid at 280 Inglewood Drive recall an atmosphere that was conservative to the point of stuffiness, and many attribute that environment to Scott’s wife. “Astrid had no sense of humor,” said June Callwood. “She was very Icelandic, only wore black and white—ever. She made us all think color was vulgar. None of us were able to warm to her, and Scott took that as meanness on all our parts.” Once again, Scott stood by his mate, said Callwood, just “like he did by Rassy.” *
The subject of music came up during a weeklong visit to Scott’s home in the summer of 1962, as Neil’s grades in Winnipeg continued to plummet. “It was almost as if Neil was just putting in time just so the financial situation would carry on,” said Astrid, referring to the $100 a month Rassy was getting as long as Neil stayed in school. “Neil said, ‘I can’t concentrate on school … I’m so interested in music that it just goes out of my head,’” recalls Scott, who suggested his son drop out and attend classes at the conservatory of music. But Neil was disinterested in the offer, according to Astrid, who recalls, “He said, ‘No, if I’m ever gonna make it, this is the time. I can’t take the time.’”
If the idea of the barely communicative rocker attending music school seems well meaning but misguided, the proposition was certainly greeted with derision in Winnipeg. “‘Would Neil like to go to a conservatory in Toronto on a hundred bucks a month?’—that would’ve been interesting,” said Rassy. “Scott lives in a dream world.”
Unquestionably, Scott was the more conventional parent, stressing success in school and a career to fall back on. “My father had a tendency to attach whatever he would do to whatever grades were achieved by whoever he was dealing with,” said Bob. “My mother would look at the school system and say, ‘These blockheads don’t know what they’re doing.’ She would not only say it, she would tell them if they prodded her.”
This clash of values came to a head over an amplifier. Early in May 1964, Scott received a letter from his son requesting a loan of $600 to buy an amp. “I’m doing better in school and am finally beginning to settle down,” Neil wrote, unaware that Scott had already phoned the school for his grades—four failures, which was one more than at Christmas. On May 9, Scott wrote a very blunt reply, chastising Neil for being dishonest and offering to cosign a loan for the amplifier if his grades improved that June:
I’m not trying to discourage you, but obviously you have a grave need to face facts. If I had read that letter you wrote me without knowing the facts, I would have thought everything was going great. Unfortunately, I don’t see you often enough to know how you are in day to day life, but to get anywhere, in anything, you have to be able to distinguish between what you HOPE is going to happen and what really is true. I think that if you dig in at school you can make the grade—but that means DIGGING, not sitting there saying you’re doing better when there are four failures out of seven subjects st
aring you in the face …
I am pleased by your interest in music and by your apparent proficiency, but that is not as important right now as getting through school as rapidly as possible. Your mother gets $100 a month to see you through school, unhampered by outside needs for making money …
I don’t want to indulge in any lengthy discussion of this matter: You haven’t time. Exams must be upon you, and every hour at the books counts. Now would be a good time to show what you are made of. I know that from when you were a boy, you were always an optimist, but also had guts and determination when you needed it. I think that you need it now. I would be the happiest father in Canada if you could wave those report cards, or card, at me in a few months and say, “Okay, Dad, I’m ready for the amplifier.”
Love, Dad
A buddy of Neil’s, Pete “The Magic Dragon” Barber, was with Young the day he received the letter. “We were walkin’ home after school and he had the letter with him. Neil was disappointed, hurt—you might even say angry. It was a painful thing.”
Scott’s letter didn’t prompt one in return from his son; instead, he writes, “it drew a long letter in reply from my ex-wife, who said that was the trouble with me, I was always measuring things—her, our sons, everything—in terms of money. As a diatribe, it would stand up anywhere. World class.” Writing in his Globe and Mail column about the incident—and others involving his ex-wife and son—Scott created the alias James Reilly Dunn. “You could really be frank about your feelings toward your fellow human beings if you’re writing through somebody else,” said Scott, sounding much like his son would years later, describing writing songs from another character’s point of view.
“James Reilly Dunn was my doppelgänger,” said Scott. “He was a good character—he had holes in his socks, drank a little too much. At this time I have a son I really love out in Winnipeg, I’m gettin’ shat upon by people who were sympathetic to Rassy and who were unsympathetic to me, which is okay—but a lotta times, things would happen that there was no way I could explain, even to myself, let alone to some other friend, so if it was somethin’ that James Reilly Dunn could solve in seven hundred words … in fact, I was sort of justifying, in some of the columns, the course of action that I had taken that I suspect a lotta people in that situation take or might take—so it angered people and it interested others.”
One of the people it angered was Rassy, who took the columns—which were fairly harmless—as a direct assault. “I don’t know what Scott had in mind, but he sure used to write these god-awful columns about what a crud I was, lettin’ Neil do all this. My lawyer said sue him for every dime he’s got, Neil didn’t want me to because I woulda made a big mess.”
For Rassy, supporting her son’s dreams was undoubtedly a way to undermine her ex-husband. “Scott sure didn’t approve of me letting Neil do this. Not that he could stop me.” That Christmas, Rassy would scrounge together the funds to buy Neil his amplifier. Scott would forever be known as the ogre of this story, but he maintains in Neil and Me that “I’d do the same thing again. It’s one of the ways I operate; value for value.” (Years later, when Scott’s daughter, Astrid, started showing interest in music, she soon received a gift from her half brother Neil: an amp.)
Certainly there is no denying the devotion of Neil’s mother. As out of control as she must have been at times, she stood out of the way and let her son do his thing. Rassy, as son Bob wrote in a 1971 Maclean’s article, “was Neil’s first fan, his greatest supporter, and he needed her. She battled on his behalf, and, too often it seemed, the battles were with my father.”
I don’t remember that much of it. I wanted an amp. I asked my dad if he’d lend us some money to buy an amp. He said my grades weren’t good enough. If I got good grades, I could get an amp. My mom freaked out—that was just one of their arguments, y’know. I probably woulda done what my dad did. Hard to say.
—Your dad thought that you weren’t alone when you wrote that letter to him.
I can’t remember—I’m sure that Rassy saw the letter. How could she not see the fuckin’ letter? She saw the answer to it. She knew I asked him. Men are not going to like hearing from their wives through their son’s mouths in that situation.
My dad deserves credit for bein’ my dad and helpin’ out, but he wasn’t there as much as my mum thought he should be, so she was takin’ it very personally…. Anyway … that was their deal.
That August, up at Falcon Lake, Young had a revelation. “Neil saw this band, the Crescendos, come down to the lakefront and plug in to the concession stand—just plug in to an outlet with a couple of amps and start playing,” said Harper. “I think that sort of tweaked Neil’s mind—‘Hmmm … touring.’” Young talked the hotel management into booking the Squires for room and board, then excitedly called his bandmates and told them to get their asses up there. Unfortunately, Smythe and Bates had other plans for the weekend. “Neil got pretty upset,” recalls Smythe, still uncomfortable with the memory over thirty years later. “He was angry. Angry.” Young fired the band—except for Koblun, who had been ready to go to Falcon Lake and was equally ready to join Young when he quit school a month later.
“I think Rassy had—well, call it ESP,” said Nola Halter. “I think she knew it would be exhausting to turn him ’round to something he wasn’t. She really believed in him.”
Rassy’s sister Snooky was in Winnipeg to visit an ailing Pearl in the hospital when Neil came by to inform her of his plans. “I said, ‘Neil, you’re nearly finished—why don’t you wait and get your high school degree?’ He said, ‘I can’t, Aunt Snooky—my music, it has to come out.’ He was driven by this mysterious music.”
Of course, there was one person Rassy had to fill in on Neil’s scholastic progress. “Dear Scott,” she wrote in a letter to her ex-husband that September, “Neil has decided to follow your advice and become a dropout.”
School was secondary to music. I can remember Mr. Hodgkinson—vice principal at Kelvin—took me in and said, “Neil, waddya wanna do with your life?” I said, “Well, I’d like to play music in a bar.” And he said, “That’s a flash-in-the-pan kind of a thing, y’know. In the music business, people come and go real fast. Look—you hear about somebody one year, and the next year they’re gone.”
Well, that made a big impression. That wasn’t gonna be me. But I took that information in and I figured, well, y’know, if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is. This is what I wanna do. I still wanted to be a professional musician so bad it didn’t matter. None of the shit that people would say, tryin’ to convince me not to do it—none of those things would matter. I never stopped.
The professional musician now needed some new band members. Bill Ed-munsen, who lived across the street, was brought in on drums. Loud, soulful, and a ladies’ man, Edmunsen was a breed apart from previous Squires—“a real wing nut,” said the departing Allen Bates. Rassy bailed Edmunsen out of trouble a number of times, most notoriously when he “borrowed” a flag from the Pan American games and hid it in Neil’s apartment. Edmunsen was the first in a long line of characters whom Young would gravitate to again and again in years to come: a wild-ass musician with a little too much heart and soul to survive the nine-to-five square life. *
Young added pianist Jeff Waukert and, apparently inspired by John Lennon’s harmonica work on “I Should Have Known Better,” started playing harp. Young also made a subtle change in the name of the band. Sitting in a restaurant one day, the drummer recalls Neil saying to him and Koblun, “I’m gonna be in this business the rest of my life, guaranteed. Do you mind if I put my name in front of the band—Neil Young and the Squires?”
Young also needed a set of wheels for the band to travel in, and Rassy loaned him the money to buy his first car, a ’48 Buick Roadmaster hearse he christened Mortimer Hearsebug, aka Mort. Mort was heavy iron: big and black, sporting blue broadloom carpeting, black curtains and gold tassel trim. “You open the side door and the tray whips right out onto the sidewalk,�
�� Young told Cameron Crowe. “What could be cooler than that? What a way to make your entrance. Pull up to a gig and just wheel out all your stuff on the tray.” Unfortunately, the hearse also attracted the attention of local police. Rassy remembers Neil getting caught behind a funeral, second hearse in the procession. “I wonder how many people they thought were dead,” said Rassy, who maintained that her son was impervious to any foul-ups. “Nothing ever fazed Neil. You couldn’t faze Neil. He was doin’ what he was doin’, and that’s what he was gonna do.”
After a month of playing gigs around Winnipeg, Young decided to head out of town. He picked Fort William, a working-class city five hundred miles east of Winnipeg. On October 12, the band set out by train, minus Waukert, whose family wouldn’t let him go. In this improbable location many important things would happen for Neil. It would be in Fort William that he would first start playing his weird brand of rock-folk, getting lost on his electric guitar in the process. It was also in Fort William that Young would encounter Stephen Stills for the first time. What was most important to Neil about Fort William? “Independence.”
Thunder Bay is one of those surreal, end-of-the-earth places peculiar to Canada. Fort William and Port Arthur, originally two cities, were joined as Thunder Bay in 1970. Located on Lake Superior not far from the Canadian/ U.S. border, Thunder Bay is a grimy little town with soul. Trains rumble through the old downtown, and the dilapidated Sea-Vue Motel—where, once upon a time, Neil and his band lived on SPAM and crackers—still rents rooms. The port even raised its own grim celebrity: TV bandleader Paul Shaffer. There was also this unknown folksinger from nearby Hibbing, Minnesota. “We threw Bob Dylan out of the radio station,” claimed local legend Ray Dee. “He walked over the border, guitar on his back, wanted to sing on the radio. Producer told him, ‘We don’t do that here.’”
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