“It was about discovery—you have the artist, you have the artwork, you have the audience—and I’m not gonna say that we were all one in the fabulous sixties, but those three things were in tandem: the artist, the work and the audience. It was a dance.”
The original explosion of rock and roll—Elvis, Jerry Lee, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and so many others—had petered out by the tail end of the fifties. “Everybody I know who came outta the fifties couldn’t have made it to the end of the fifties without rock and roll,” said Meltzer. “In the fifties, you had all this regional music that suddenly became national. I think that it was something that had been brewing forever that finally got exposed. Whereas the sixties were an accident that was even more massive than the fifties. The sixties were the fifties with chops.”
Meltzer clearly remembers November 1963 and the frenzied soundtrack that accompanied the wake following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas—“Surfin’ Bird” by the Trashmen and the Beatles’ first album. “The Beatles were the suggestion of infinite possibility in a music that really wasn’t thinking very big. You felt that rock and roll had been reborn, and one of the clues was that teenage girls were screaming again—that was to me the most spine-chilling fact. Not since the beginning of Elvis had there been that kind of frenzy about it.”
The Beatles begat the British Invasion: the Stones, the Kinks, the Animals, the Zombies; the Byrds brought it back to America with “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Then Dylan went electric, and he and the Beatles headed an intense period of experimentation that crossed rock and folk and soul with exotic bits of Eastern, jazz and music-hall pop to arc toward the future. The Kinks’ Face to Face, Love’s Da Capo, The Velvet Underground & Nico—each, as Meltzer put it, “strip-mining a new continent.” And this cyclone of innovation couldn’t help but feed off the chaos tearing through social structures.
“Put the music together with all the social stuff going on—you have a civil rights movement, you have a lot of people taking the same drugs, you have a peace movement—a bunch of guys who wanna get out of the war because otherwise they’re gonna die,” said Meltzer. “Here were kids who pretty much stuck their necks out, put their head on a guillotine block—‘I’ll stand for who I am right now. Kill me.’ Certainly lots of bullshit took place during the sixties, and certainly most of the participants were bourgeois middle-class white-bread assholes, but it was their finest hour. It did help that you had fear of death, combined with drugs, combined with music that worked.
“Because of the fact that so many of the people involved were doing the same things—you had an ideology of some sort, you had a war, you had these drugs—you had people that were coming to the music with a full head of steam. Without the music, drugs would’ve delivered nothing, the Vietnam protests would’ve delivered nothing. Music was the cutting edge of everything. And the music was great. It was like an anthem for rejecting the house with the picket fence, Mommy, Daddy, let’s sit down for some roast beef and talk about nice things or whatever the American myth was supposed to be…. It was like the beast that controlled everything was losing its grip.”
As Elvis, the Beatles and Dylan reconfigured the world, Neil Young listened and watched from the sidelines. Now he would be thrown directly into the eye of the hurricane—Los Angeles, 1966. Buffalo Springfield would be critically acclaimed, gain a rabid following and influence much music that followed but the band itself never got over, and the story they left behind is so tortured, it’s amazing Neil Young survived it at all. “Kind of hopped up” is how he described himself during the Springfield days to Karen Schoemer in 1992. “Not on drugs, but kind of amped out. A little out of control. And too open. Wide open.”
Buffalo Springfield met on the road. Chance has played a big part in Neil Young’s life, and it was chance that brought the Springfield together.
The Byrds phenomenon had drawn Stephen Stills—now free of the Au Go-Go Singers—out to California in the fall of 1965. There he hooked up with Barry Friedman, aka Frazier Mohawk, a music business eccentric with many odd involvements, among them producing such outré artifacts as Nico’s The Marble Index and The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders. He would play an integral part in the early days of the Springfield, and would promptly get screwed over in the process.
At first, Stills hadn’t exactly set Hollywood on fire; he’d even failed an audition for the Monkees. He did succeed in conning his friend Richie Furay to fly out and join him, bullshitting that he had a band together. Furay stepped off the plane to discover the band Stills touted had exactly one member: Stephen Stills. It was a grim time, although Friedman managed to get the pair a publishing deal with Screen Gems that kept them alive.
It was around this same time that Neil Young and Bruce Palmer, having spent days looking for Stills, were thinking of leaving Los Angeles and heading for San Francisco. The details of the unlikely event that happened next depend on which participant tells it, but the outcome was Buffalo Springfield.
“We were in this white van,” Furay told writer Dave Zimmer, “stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard. I turned to brush a fly off my arm, looked into the other lane and saw this black hearse with Ontario plates going in the other direction. Then Stephen looked across and said, ‘I’ll bet I know who that is.’” Furay swung a quick U-turn and gave chase. “We hear honk! honk! and all this screaming and yelling,” said Bruce Palmer. “We turn around and there’s Stephen and Richie.
“They were going that way and we were going this way,” said Palmer. “Karma turned Richie Furay’s head.”
We didn’t have a plan. I hung out at the Trip tryin’ to find Stills. Asking people did anybody know Steve Stills—just people on the street. Couldn’t get anything together in L.A. Hadn’t met anybody we could get together with, so we were on our way to San Francisco. We knew music was happening up there, too. Later that day we were gonna leave. I don’t exactly know what we had to do to be ready, heh heh.
It just so happens we met Stephen in a traffic jam that day. I just remember them yelling at us in traffic. Turned around and came up behind us. Stephen recognized the hearse and Ontario plates—even though it wasn’t the hearse I had before. He thought that must be us.
We went to Friedman’s house because it was a place to stay. We started playing, and right away it seemed like it would be a good thing to start a band.
The name started out as a joke. We saw it on the side of a steamroller. Me and Stephen and Van Dyke Parks were walkin’ along and we saw this Buffalo Springfield steamroller parked right outside Barry’s house. “What the fuck are we gonna call our group?” Either me or Stephen said, “Buffalo Springfield.” I think it was me, but I can’t swear to it. Then we started tryin’ drummers—Dewey Martin and Billy Mundi. Billy was really good, but I liked Dewey. I still like Dewey. I like playing with him. He’s a sensitive drummer—same way Ralph Molina’s sensitive. Sensitive. You get harder, he gets harder. You pull back, he pulls back. He can feel the music—you don’t have to tell him. Eye contact. Signals. All natural. To me that’s worth its weight in gold. I guess I didn’t feel that with Billy—although he may have been a better drummer.
Born September 30, 1940, Walter Dwayne Midkiff, aka Dewey Martin, the third Canadian to join the band, already had a reputation as a professional musician: he had gone out on the road with the likes of Patsy Cline, Faron Young and Roy Orbison. After fronting an ersatz, Seattle-based British Invasion band called Sir Walter Raleigh and the Coupons, Martin had made his way to Los Angeles, playing in an unsuccessful rock version of blue-grass outfit the Dillards. Out of work, he heard about some hot young band in need of a drummer, so he called Stills, who promptly informed Martin he could drag his kit over to Fountain Avenue and audition.
“I’m going out on an audition,” grumbled Martin, still indignant decades later. “I didn’t have to audition for Orbison or Patsy.” A few years older than the rest of the Springfield, Martin was perhaps the most incongruous addition to a band full
of mutual misfits. Cocky, aggressive and sporting mod attire, he behaved more like an extra from a cop show than some folk-rocker. Dewey liked showbiz: He’d be the only Buffalo to appear as a contestant on The Dating Game.
“After the first rehearsal, I said, ‘What are you gonna call the band?’” he recalls. “They went over and pulled out this sign, BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD. I said, ‘Great, man—a steamroller. You got a heavy sound. Let’s go for it.’”
“There was no downtime,” Young would later tell his father. “Everybody was ready. These were people who had come to L.A. for the same reason, identical, all finding each other…. It didn’t take any time before we all knew we had the right combination. Time meant nothing. We were ready.”
And in retrospect, Young felt they were all equals. “It was the best of the bands that I’ve played with in my life, because of the fact that there was no one in it that was any more than anyone else,” he told David Gans in 1982. “Everybody was the same; we were all in a band together. That gave an urgency to the music which I haven’t experienced since.”
On April 15, 1966—approximately ten days after getting together *—the Springfield began a short tour of southern California with the Byrds that Barry Friedman had arranged. “We went from rehearsing in the living room to opening for the Byrds,” said Palmer.
When I asked Arthur Lee of Love to give me a feel for what Los Angeles was like in 1966, he laughed wearily. “I think that feel is gone, friend—it was a more loving, sharing-type feel, and not so much drive-by shooting, y’know what I mean? It was real free.”
Part of the freedom involved drugs. “It’s a shame to have to talk about drugs in a way today—the connotation,” said Henry Diltz, then a member of the Modern Folk Quartet. “I remember it was just kind of dream time where everybody was just so idealistic…. I was smokin’ grass all the time, and it kept you in this constant state of idealism and this wonderful sort of euphoria—not an escape kind, the kind where you say, ‘Why is there war? Let’s be friends. Let’s put down the guns and hug each other for God’s sake. Life is beautiful.’ I remember thinking if only we could get the president to smoke some grass, we could have world peace.”
Rock music took over Los Angeles, and most of the action centered around a flock of clubs on Sunset Strip, a scene galvanized by the overnight success of the Byrds. “The Byrds were the absolute paragon of what it meant to be hip in the sixties,” said Peter Lewis, songwriter/guitarist for Moby Grape. Omnipresent in the L.A. scene: rebel Byrd David Crosby. “David smoked a lot of really fine grass,” said Henry Diltz. “I remember him walkin’ through the Trip in his Borsalino hat with a whole box of Bambu rolling papers you couldn’t buy anywhere, just handing them out to people.”
As influential as the Byrds were, they still suffered from “the lingering stink of folk,” said writer Richard Meltzer. “They came from the very squeaky-clean folk scene…. Nietzsche came up with this dichotomy for music—Apollonian and Dionysian. Dionysian is drunk and falling down and of the flesh; Apollonian is ethereal, the music of the spheres. The Byrds were totally an Apollonian band without exception, until the more hard-core psychedelic period—I don’t think before ‘Eight Miles High’ they had one song with much Dionysian oompah—but the Springfield had a lot of that Dionysian thing in them, because they came from rock.”
Three veteran folksingers gone electric, with a rhythm section made up of a bluegrass mandolin whiz on his first Fender bass and a notoriously erratic drummer whose only previous experience had been playing bongos on Venice Beach, at the time they played with the Springfield, the Byrds were, as bassist Chris Hillman recalls, “so ‘lacksadaisical’ we were on the verge of collapsing.” In the studio, the Byrds were miraculous, but live, the situation—exacerbated by clashing personalities and drugs—was hopeless. A Byrds show was more a happening than a listening experience. The reverse was true of the Springfield, who would triumph onstage and fumble in the studio.
“Live, we cast a spell on people,” said Dewey Martin. No one had ever heard anything like it—three guitars, three singer/songwriters and an extraordinarily funky bass-and-drum combo. “A bunch of folkies backed by a Stax-Volt rhythm section,” is how fan John Breckow puts it. “The Springfield blew us off the stage,” said Hillman. “It was tough to play with ’em. They were hungry and young and they just had the goods.”
From the beginning we were really good. I think Chris Hillman really helped us out in the beginning. I thought the Byrds were great, too. Michael Clarke—I thought he was a great drummer, I didn’t think he was a bad drummer. He lost the beat every once in awhile—but that didn’t make him bad. He was a funky drummer. I remember the Byrds being really fuckin’ good. The fact that they were sloppy didn’t bother me. They were still the Byrds, and they sounded like the Byrds. The only problem they had was that sometimes they were too high. Crosby would start talkin’ or they’d get disoriented or somethin’. But they all sounded great to me. I loved it. I was happy to be there.
The L.A. music scene. The Doors. Used to play with them all the time at the Whisky. One week it would be the Doors with the Springfield, the next week it would be the Springfield with the Doors—for weeks on end. Play every night. Crowds would come. The Doors were fuckin’ great. A little weird. Kinda arty. They were over my head at the time—I didn’t even realize how great they were. I didn’t see it till a lotta time had passed. Love—they were cool. Pretty “out there.” They were just bad enough and fucked up enough to make fun of—but they were so good, too. They were just off-the-wall—they weren’t really respected for what they were doing by the other musicians. But Love was a great band—when you look back on it, they were really awesome. “Orange Skies.” “I just got out my little red book….” Those fuckin’ songs, what the hell is that? Great stuff. *
I loved the Beach Boys. I hung out with Mike and Dennis—Dennis and I were real tight. Brian’s a genius. Ever heard this song Brian wrote called “A Day in the Life of a Tree“? Great song, man.
The Seeds—they were one of those great bands that were terrible. Didn’t matter—their records cooked. “Mr. Farmer”—that’s a good one, man. Buffalo Springfield wasn’t as “out there” as those bands. With the Byrds, the energy may be similar—the music isn’t. But the Byrds’ records sounded better.
Impresario Barry Friedman took credit for encouraging the band to develop distinct onstage personalities. “I copied what the Byrds did, really,” he said. “Each one had their own individual trademark.”
The engine of the Springfield was Palmer. “There was a mystique around Bruce,” said record mogul Ahmet Ertegun. “He was like a guru, a musical guru. The rest of the band all idolized him.”
Silent, gangly, with psychedelic shades and the longest hair in the band, at this point Palmer looked like, as Dewey Martin put it, “a cross between Alfred E. Newman and Ichabod Crane.” Palmer would stand with his back to the audience, seemingly oblivious of everyone and everything around him, start fingering the four fat E strings he’d stuck on a beat-up violinbodied bass, and whip out James Jamerson Motown-styled melodic runs that would propel the band into the stratosphere. Seeing the Springfield became, in the words of soon-to-be aide-de-camp Richard Davis, “going down to hear Bruce.”
Furay was the nice midwestern guy, at first considered the band’s lead performer. “Richie didn’t have much to do with the music,” claimed Davis. “They gave him a twelve-string guitar and told him to strum along. But he contributed quite a bit in terms of stage presence. I don’t think you could say Stephen or Bruce or Neil had a lot of stage presence, but Richie did. He sort of charged around on his toes backward, screamin’.”
Stills and Young: what a combo. Outfitted in cream-colored pants and cowboy hat, Stills was the white-soul blond southerner, determined to lead the Springfield with the firm grip of a plantation owner. But Neil Young was a force to be reckoned with, onstage and off. “Neil always had presence,” said David Crosby. “Stills would try too hard. Neil would be m
ore laidback, and everybody would go, ‘Oooh, what’s Neil gonna do next?’”
Young dressed in a buckskin fringe jacket, a Comanche war shirt and some funky jewelry. As he would tell Robert Greenfield, “The group was Western, the name ‘Buffalo Springfield’ came off a tractor, so it all fitted. I was the Indian.” The Hollywood Indian would turn out to be the band’s wild card. Initially his role was that of lead guitar and songwriter, though getting his idiosyncratic ideas across to the band was a struggle. “The rest of us probably thought his stuff was the weakest of everything,” proclaimed Dewey Martin. “I still don’t understand a lot of his songs. They’re so weird.”
Young grew dissatisfied with his assigned role, and some observers felt he was frustrated from the outset with others performing his compositions. “They wouldn’t let Neil sing his own songs,” recalls Donna Port, a friend of the band. “That really hurt him.”
I started singing a little later, ’cause the other guys could really sing. The harmony thing I wasn’t too good at … I don’t think I could be counted on for a good harmony. I played lead guitar—which is what I’d done in the Mynah Birds. I didn’t care all that much that Richie sang “Clancy.” I wasn’t pissed. It didn’t make any difference. I thought, “Well, we’re doing my song.” I wasn’t dyin’ to sing every song. I could sing other songs. I could write more songs. Richie didn’t write that many songs, and he was a good singer. So to be in that band, somebody’s gonna have to write the songs Richie’s gonna sing. It was all wide open then—no preconceptions.
In the beginning, the Springfield lived at the Hollywood Center Motel on Sunset. We had this double-story house back there. All of us living in one little house, top and bottom. And Bruce lived in the closet. Bruce said, “I’ll take this.” This big closet. Fuckin’ set up all his shit in there. It was perfect. We had a little dollar-a-day allowance we were gettin’ from Barry Friedman.
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