Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  The more difficult things became, the more Stills fought to control them. “I was trying to be boss cat and keep the thing in order,” he told writer Allan McDougall in 1971. “You gotta dig that part of my upbringing in the South was very militaristic. I was in this military school and being taught to be an officer. A lot of the ways I relate to situations like that is to simply take command—because someone has to…. That is the only thing that will work, and of course somebody like Neil or Bruce is instantly going to rebel. So there was chaos.”

  Stephen was the group leader. He also had arrangement concepts that were solid, and he knew a lot about harmony structure that was very valuable. Stills was a great musician then—before cocaine. He knew about the groove. Stills was always counting things off, saying this guy can’t rush, that guy can’t drag—it was then I became conscious of the groove.

  —Donna Port feels you probably buried a lot of the conflict between you and Stephen because it would be too painful to recall.

  Maybe she’s right. I know there was a lotta conflict in the group, but I don’t know why … that’s true. There was that turmoil there I kinda buried, I guess.

  Stephen truly felt that it was very important that he tell everybody what to do. He had a vision for the band. The only thing wrong was that Bruce and I resented being told what to do. It just didn’t work, especially with Bruce. I was more quiet about it, more brooding. But Bruce didn’t take any shit at all.

  Bruce would just imitate him. Stephen would do something, and Bruce would be right in his face. Stephen would say, “Well, play it this way,” and Bruce would go, “Well, play it this way—you diggee?” Bruce would get right up in his face, look him right in the eye, and say, “You diggee? You’re NOWHERE, man!”

  The fact of the matter was that no matter how crazy it was—no matter how domineering Stephen could be to do what he thought was the right thing for the band—believe me, this guy was trying to do the right thing for everybody. It broke his heart when the band broke up, because he knew how good it was.

  With Stephen and I, it was two young guys—two musical forces—tryin’ to coexist in a band that we knew was really good. But neither of us had planned on the other being a force.

  I don’t think I ever did what anybody told me to do. But that’s the way it’s always been. That’s the way it is.

  —Did you and Stills grow simultaneously on guitar?

  I guess so. I think I could play a little better than him when we first met, especially electric, because he was just learnin’ it. But then he caught up. For a while he was really good. And he’s still really good.

  —Are you a competitive guitar player?

  I don’t think so. Stills and I used to get into playing what could be termed competitively, but not really. It’s more like we’re building this thing together, y’know.

  Patti Smith told me how she saw Bobfest and we were doin’ “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and I kept playing … I didn’t realize I was making the song longer. She could tell some of the people onstage thought it was just crazy—“What the fuck is this about? What are they doing?”

  But hey, it’s all in the spirit of the thing. It’s funny—I never looked at it like that, ’cause I had my eyes closed. I was just thinkin’, “Wow, we’re really fuckin’ groovin’, hah hah hah. Everybody’s gettin’ off.”

  That’s where music’s funny. What one person likes, another person might think is really not cool.

  —Did you see any of yourself in Stephen?

  Yeah. Just the maniacal egomaniac guitar player/singer/songwriter—but I didn’t think I was an egomaniac until he pointed it out to me. Then I realized, “Maybe he recognized me.”

  I didn’t even know the word “ego” until I got to Los Angeles. Ego—what do you mean? Of course you wanna do something because it is you. I mean, fuck, “ego” all of a sudden became this byword. Kind of like paint-by-numbers psychoanalysis through marijuana. “Ego trip.” People were talking like that—paranoia, ego—“Oh, he’s paranoid, man.” Looking ahead … is a form of paranoia. If you wanna look at it that way, everything’s paranoia.

  However entertaining Greene and Stone may have been as managers, many failed to take them seriously as record producers. Phil Spector summed it up on Les Crane’s radio show when he turned to Charlie and Brian and said, “There’s Beach Blanket Bingo, which is you guys, and there’s me—Fellini.” When the Springfield went into Gold Star Studios to begin cutting their first album, problems began.

  “When we got to our first session and we went into the studio and cut this one song, the voice came over the talkback saying, ‘No, that’s too long. Play it faster,’” Stills told writer Joe Smith. “Neil and I looked at each other and said, ‘We better learn how to work this shit ourselves.’”

  There was no mystery to the way Greene and Stone recorded the band: First they built the band track, then they overdubbed vocals. In the process something was lost. “The Buffalo used to arrange songs so they’d go somewhere vocally and instrumentally,” said Richard Davis. “‘Clancy’ got shortchanged in the studio because we ran out of tracks for the backing vocals.” Tensions began to mount.

  In the mid-sixties, harassment by law enforcement was an occupational hazard for longhairs, and the Los Angeles police seemed to have a particular ax to grind. “The cops were terrible, man,” said Charlie Greene. “All of a sudden all these longhaired guys were walking around in flowered pants, a little zoned out, but not causing anybody any trouble. The cops didn’t know what to do. It was culture shock.”

  On July 10, 1966, Young got caught in the cross fire. Driving around town in his Corvette, he came across Richard Davis being hassled by cops over a parking infraction outside the Whisky. When Young stopped to help, the cops turned their attention to him and dragged him off to jail.

  When Greene and Stone arrived to bail Young out, Charlie promptly got into an argument with one of the officers behind the desk. Not liking the looks of these two hipsters any more than the musician already behind bars, the cop ran a make on Greene, found out he had an outstanding warrant for a traffic violation and threw him in the cell with Neil.

  “Charlie started screaming, ‘Call my attorney! Call my attorney!’” recalled Stone. “So I said, ‘All right—I’ll bail him out.’ And the cop said, ‘Can we have your ID?’ Now, I’m not an idiot. I saw what they did to my partner, so I refused. Finally they said, ‘We’re gonna arrest ya.’ And I said, ‘That’s the only way you’re gonna get my ID!’ Now we’re all in jail.”

  In the wee hours of the morning, all three were bailed out by the managers’ wives. Back at Charlie Greene’s house, a doctor tended to Young’s wounds, which, according to legal papers Brian Stone filed as part of a lawsuit he eventually won, included “lacerations, head injuries and a broken bridge in his mouth.” Young shrugs off the incident today, but those around him say it took its toll. “Neil was pretty shaken up,” said Stone. “He’s not a big tough guy and they really worked him over.”

  I got stopped drivin’ my ’57 Corvette and I didn’t have a license. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I didn’t have a fuckin’ visa, I didn’t have anything, but I had a car. I had a lot of things and I didn’t have a lot of things.

  They took me to jail. They were running a make on me, whatever. Fuckin’ guy walks by and calls me a filthy animal, this cop. He had on these big horn-rimmed glasses and a brush cut. I told him he looked like some kind of fuckin’ insect, a grasshopper. He came in the cell and beat the shit out of me.

  —When I look at pictures of you when you were in the Springfield, you look like you were scared of everything.

  I was—that’s why I have such a healthy respect for everything. A lotta things scared me. But I was just growin’ up. I was a late bloomer.

  —Some people link what happened with the cops to your seizures.

  Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t know if there’s a correlation or not.

  I don’t think so. I think t
hat was my trip.

  I was gonna go on that trip anyway.

  This was yet another complication that would have an impact on the Springfield, not to mention Young’s psyche: epilepsy. Without warning, just as things were starting to happen for the band, Young began having seizures.

  Bruce Palmer was there for the first recognized one, standing next to Young at a Teen Fair at Hollywood and Vine sometime in the summer of 1966. “When I turned to say something to Neil, he wasn’t beside me,” Palmer told Scott Young. “Then I saw him on the floor having convulsions. I was scared as hell.”

  The seizures—which went undiagnosed for a brief period—began occurring with alarming frequency. During a gig at the Melodyland Theater in Anaheim in early September 1966, Young had to be carried offstage on a stretcher. John Hartmann witnessed one the first time he saw the Springfield, in San Diego. Early in the set Young bolted from the stage midsong. “I turned to Charlie Greene and said, ‘Is this part of the act?’” Stills rushed offstage after Neil, and the crowd swarmed toward the exit door after them. Out in the parking lot Young was sprawled across a Corvette, convulsing. “Some woman who turned out to be a nurse had her hand down his throat tryin’ to keep him from swallowin’ his tongue.”

  “The seizures were sort of an event,” Richard Davis recalled. “We’d have a system. If Neil was gonna go down, I could always tell—we’d slap the lights on and somebody would grab him and get him off.” Poor Richie Furay was the one assigned to get Neil’s Gretsch. “I hated bein’ the guy to get his guitar on the way down,” he said. “He would sense this thing comin’ on and he would hand me his guitar. Our guitar grounds would never be the same, and I’d get a jolt.”

  Not everyone took the seizures seriously. “Stills always thought Neil was full of shit, having one of his phony spells,” said Brian Stone. “It was like ‘He doesn’t want to play the date and now he’s fainting.’”

  “It seemed like some of the attacks were staged—maybe they weren’t, but it seemed like that—for dramatic effect and attention,” said Dewey Martin. “He’d always get some babe rubbing his forehead with a cool towel.” Richard Davis concurred: “Neil did me out of a couple of women by having the occasional seizure or coming close to it. He was ruthless.”

  This kind of attitude infuriated Donna Port. “I wanted to kill them. See, it was all supposed to be that Neil was faking. He wasn’t doing it to get attention! With epilepsy, people under great stress can have more attacks, so it became a real catch-22, because the more crap they gave him, naturally the more problems he had. Neil was exposed in the worst possible way.”

  Just the feeling that a seizure might be coming on could provoke panic for Young. One night at songwriter Tandyn Almer’s house, Young suddenly bolted out the door. Vicki Cavaleri followed and found him inside a car, shaking. It took him almost half an hour to calm down. “He kept saying, ‘Hold me, but don’t touch my head.’”

  A neurological condition that produces brief disturbances in the electrical functions of the brain, epilepsy can cause more than twenty different types of seizures. The mental-health professionals I contacted suggested Young’s episodes were very much in keeping with complex partial seizures—what the Epilepsy Foundation of America calls “a disturbance which occurs in just one part of the brain, affecting whatever physical or mental activity that area controls.” The psychic symptoms for these seizures can include sensations of déjà vu, unreality and depersonalization, fear, panic and hallucinations.

  Many epileptics experience a preseizure warning state known as an aura, which can produce its own anxieties, even if the expected seizure fails to materialize. “When they happen, you actually forget who you are, but you feel something wondrous and holy is at hand,” writer Thom Jones said, “and when it passes you get frightened.”

  Certainly some creative people have been epileptic—van Gogh, Dostoevsky, plus such musicians as Jimmy Reed, Robert Johnson and Ian Curtis. There are even those close to Neil who dare to suggest some of the more abstract aspects of his songwriting might have been influenced by the seizures. Sandy Mazzeo, the artist whom Young would grow close to a few years after leaving the Springfield, recalled discussing this once with him.

  “Neil told me about going into other lives. He’d go to this same place every seizure, and all these people would go, ‘Oh, haven’t seen you around—how ya doin’?’ He was called by some other name. Neil was just in another world, another reality, and just about the time he started to adjust and adopt to that reality, he’d get yanked out of that one and find himself back in this reality again. It was really strange, because he didn’t want that other place to be all that familiar to him because he was here. But then he was there. It was out of his control.

  “I think that’s why he writes such weird shit. That’s the strength of his creativity—he’s been to all these far points where he’s had only himself to talk to. Most of his songs are just Neil talking to himself, really. The voice inside himself.”

  Did I get songs from the seizures? Probably. To go somewhere else and you’re there and you’re talkin’ to people and you’re part of the thing and you are somebody else. Then you realize, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m not—” You don’t know who you are because you know you’re not the person you seem to be. And you start waking up. Then you find out who you are by looking around.

  Having to learn my own name—I had to do that a couple of times. Learn who I was. Get familiar with it. Then hear the first LIE—or the first thing somebody would say that wasn’t exactly true—it would be like a fucking terrible trauma to me when I was coming back from these seizures. It’s like being a baby. Anything that’s not pure, you go, “What the—” because you’re starting over again, regrouping. Everything’s coming back together.

  I can remember one seizure at the ranch in 1974 when this doctor took my blood before I went out on the road with CSNY. Probably the last big one I had. It was mind-blowing. I faint regularly from having my blood taken—not because I’m scared of the needle, but because the blood leaving my body does something to me. I can feel my life leaving me, and I go under and I have a seizure sometimes. Just from having blood taken.

  I had just had a grand mal seizure and I went for a walk—and I had just barely figured out that it was my ranch—and this doctor was with me and he was sayin’, “Now, we’re not gonna tell people this happened, because it will upset them. The only people who need to know about this are you and me and Russ Kunkel”—a drummer who was there, too.

  So it was like bein’ born again and wakin’ up and seein’ everything is beautiful—seein’ things for the first time—and then having someone tell you, “Well, this is not what it seems. We’re not gonna tell. People are not gonna know what happened.” So it’s a lie. Why should there be a lie?

  When you’re born, I don’t think you can conceive of telling a lie. But if you can imagine being born, and within ten minutes after you’re born, you’re introduced to the concept of a lie—y’know, you’ve only been alive for five minutes, and now they’re teaching you how to lie.

  So there’s something that happens there. I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t happen anymore hardly at all because I just have such control over it. But it used to happen all the time back then, because I was running hot.

  I think at some point the seizures became an escape for me. Some of the seizures probably weren’t real. I would think I was gonna have one, and then I’d get myself kinda into havin’ one—“Oh, I’m gonna have one”—and then I wouldn’t.

  You gotta remember, I was, like, twenty years old. So there was a lotta escape hatches, and the seizures were an escape hatch. Now I know I had several seizures that were real, so what can I say? I outgrew the seizures. They gave me Dilantin and I took it for a couple of years and then I tapered off of it. Then I controlled the seizures like I control everything else—mind over matter.

  Control. Inner control. I can’t explain it. It’s not a matter of the psyche or controlling your
actions so much as it is controlling the velocity that you’re working at inside yourself. Slow down that thinking process, because you know that you could burn out. Take a little more time. Be able to pull out of things.

  I used to be the kinda guy, if I smoked anything—or even sometimes if I didn’t—that if I was lookin’ at somethin’ for too long, I would get so far into it that I would have trouble gettin’ out of it. And that’s what would happen when I would have a seizure—I would keep lookin’ at somethin’ for so long, like I’d be readin’ a book and I’d get to a certain word and I’d just start lookin’ at the word. And I’d start getting right into the letter. And right into the granules on the page. And pretty soon I was gone.

  I’ve learned to control that. I don’t let those things happen. Maybe that’s why I was able to see where I was going and pull back so many times—I would say, “Okay, you’ve gone far enough, you’ve made your point. Now is the time to stop.” And it’s not conscious. I think I learned something, dealing with that condition. It’s helped me in other ways. So consequently, I think once you start controlling that, then you control all kinds of things. Maybe that’s why I’m still here.

  The A-side of the first Buffalo Springfield single was supposed to be “Go and Say Goodbye,” a jaunty Stills song featuring a lick taken from an old bluegrass tune Chris Hillman had shown him. Unfortunately for Stephen, the flip side—Young’s “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing”—was chosen instead.

  “‘Clancy’ was probably the worst fucking song that I ever heard in my life,” said Ron Jacobs, then promotion director for L.A.’s top-forty station KHJ. “I heard it in the parking lot at Gold Star and I almost threw up.” But whatever Greene and Stone’s deficits might have been as producers, they got the band heard by the world. “Charlie and Brian really lit the fuse that allowed Buffalo Springfield to at least start moving,” said Jacobs. “They worked their asses off to get things happening. There’s no way that group would’ve ever gotten played at KHJ without Charlie and Brian.” In late August 1966, “Clancy” debuted on KHJ, reaching a high of number twenty-five there.