Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Nationally, “Clancy” stiffed, and everyone has an opinion as to why. Some say the lyrics were too abstract and contained the word “damn.” Others say the song was too long and the odd time changes threw people. There are also those who think that Richie Furay, despite his good intentions, just couldn’t convey the very subjective feelings of Neil Young.

  Vicki and Donna remember sitting a very confused Furay down and explaining Neil’s lyrics word by word (Young himself, thank God, wasn’t present). Rassy Young remembered a live show where Furay mangled the words to “Clancy” by singing “Who’s putting bells in the sponge I once rung.” “Neil turned around and looked at him,” recalled Rassy, laughing. “Richie hadn’t realized he’d done it.”

  Whatever the reason, when “Clancy” showed signs of bombing, “We all panicked and started climbing on Charlie and Brian’s back,” Furay told the Los Angeles fanzine TeenSet. Continuing to work on their first album, the group eventually gave up on Gold Star’s four-track, following the Byrds over to Columbia’s new eight-track studio B, but studio trickery couldn’t mask the fact that the magic hadn’t been captured in the first place. Meanwhile, Atlantic was pressuring them to get the album finished.

  Greene and Stone claimed that the band’s inexperience in the studio was a major factor in the delays. “You reach a point where you say, ‘That’s it,’” said Stone. “We’d been in the studio a long, long time just holding hands with them. We used to spend enormous time doing and redoing vocals, because really the lead singer was Richie.”

  When the record was finally done, the Springfield took an acetate over to a friend with the best stereo system in town, gathering around the speakers in anticipation. “It was awful,” said Richard Davis. “It sounded so good in the studio, but when you put a needle to it, it wasn’t there. Everybody knew it. It was a devastating moment.”

  When we heard the record, we said, “Fuck, this isn’t what we wanted. This isn’t what we did.” The stereo mix was done in a day and a half—and we weren’t even there.

  I was pretty frustrated, because we had to play—then sing. I watched a lot of sessions for other groups, trying to figure out why the Buffalo Springfield records were so fuckin’ terrible compared to the real thing. I’d already made records with Ray Dee that were better than the first Springfield records—they may not sound better, because the musicians weren’t as good, but the concept of how to make them was better. On the Springfield records, we didn’t ever really play. Everybody put everything on one thing at a time, trying to be the fuckin’ Beatles instead of the Buffalo Springfield. We got off on a tangent. If we’d had a little bit of direction …

  See, Ahmet Ertegun’s the only guy who’s heard Buffalo Springfield recorded. A musician’s businessman, Ahmet. He knows music. Ahmet always said, “This record’s not as good as the fuckin’ demos, man.” Before the first Springfield record, we had made demos, and the demos were fuckin’ great. It was very early on and we cut demos of “Go and Say Goodbye,” “Clancy” and “Sit Down, I Think I Love You.” Ahmet heard those demos and, based on hearing those demos, signed us to Atlantic. And then Charlie and Brian made a record with us that was nowhere near as good as those fucking demos. See, the demos were done the way we played it. We did ’em live. We just went in and played, sang, did everything all at once.

  Those demos were ours, but “Doc” Siegal, the Gold Star engineer who recorded the first album, didn’t get paid, so he took them to hurt Charlie and Brian. So we got the shaft on that one. He had all that shit in his garage, and when he died they didn’t know what to do with it. They sold the acetates to some record store, the record store apparently sold them to somebody in Japan who collects acetates, and we’ve never been able to find ’em. Probably sittin’ on somebody’s shelf—some Japanese guy who’s proud of how many acetates he has and doesn’t even know what’s on ’em. Now I can’t find the guy. Don’t know where the tapes are. Bummer.

  The acetate listening party for the first album produced grim results. The next day, according to Brian Stone, “the Springfield called us and said, ‘We have very bad news. This record has to be destroyed. It has to be burned. It’s a piece of shit!’”

  Nearly thirty years later, Greene and Stone were still sensitive to claims that they botched the production. “Listen, at that time we had probably made a thousand records, and these guys knew nothing about making records,” said Stone. “These guys played live, and they expected to hear back what they played. We tried to improve their sound. We spent eight hundred million hours mixing that thing, and all six members were present. I think the record stands by itself.”

  The record does stand by itself—anyone who gives even the most cursory listen to Buffalo Springfield can hear why the band was so unhappy. On songs like “Pay the Price,” the rhythm section feels a football stadium away from the guitars. The recording is thin and crappy, and it never sounds like a group of people playing in the same room. The mono version of the album, which Stills and Young reputedly spent ten days mixing, was an improvement, but few would hear it.

  The band demanded to recut the record. Charlie Greene’s response: “Go fuck yourself.”

  Stills, who had grown dubious of the duo’s production abilities early on, went ballistic. “Stephen really took on Greene and Stone while they were in the driver’s seat,” said Richard Davis. “Stills insulted Charlie and Brian, made enemies of them—he really drove a wedge between them and the group, and maybe rightly so.

  “I was in a position of trying to make things work. I used to tell Stephen, ‘You wanna fight these guys, just make sure you can win—they’ve got your contract.’ But Stephen was impossible. ‘Reason’ wasn’t a word you used.”

  Epilepsy, band problems, management hassles, arrests—if you want to know how Neil Young was feeling circa mid-1966, pull out that beat-up copy of Buffalo Springfield and play “Out of My Mind.”

  “Tired of hangin’ on / If you missed me I’ve just gone,” sings Young, the terror apparent in his voice. With its death-knell drumbeat and trembling Gretsch fed through a Leslie, this circular song without a chorus clearly chronicles the tortured times its creator was going through. His first album, and already Young was disillusioned with the whole trip. As Ken Viola put it, “The audacity to write a song about bein’ a star—before he even was a star.”

  The Beatle-esque pop of Stephen Stills dominated the first side of Buffalo Springfield, finally released in November 1966, but the most original material on the record belonged to Neil Young. “Burned” was his first tentative vocal with the band. As Young would write in the liner notes to his Decade anthology, “The boys gave me uppers to get my nerve up. Maybe you can hear that.” Furay sang three of Young’s songs, Neil only two, but the quality and range of his writing was auspicious: “Out of My Mind,” “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” “Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It?” and the magnificent “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong,” perhaps the most sophisticated piece of writing on the album. *

  Despite the band’s misgivings over the production, Buffalo Springfield would gain them a loyal following beyond Los Angeles and in the burgeoning rock press, where Paul Williams at Crawdaddy! and Judith Sims of TeenSet spread the word. Ken Viola was obsessed by TeenSet. “I’d be at the candy store at six A.M., waitin’ for them to snap those bundles open so I could get the latest issue and read about the Springfield.”

  Ken Viola remembers his first glimpse of his new spiritual adviser. Just fifteen years old, he turned on the TV one day in his family’s New Jersey home and “here’s this guy in a Confederate uniform, which to me was such a statement, like ‘Down with the old, in with the new.’ It was so heavy.” The guy was Neil Young, the band was Buffalo Springfield and Viola ran right out and bought their first album.

  “It’s so strange, if I think back, I can remember that exact day, the exact feeling when that connection happened. I had a strange habit of playing the second side of a record first, so the first thing I heard wa
s a Neil Young song, ‘Flying on the Ground Is Wrong.’ I knew from the second I heard it that this guy was plugged in to everything. It was somebody speaking directly to me. Everything about it was so right, when everything in my life up to that point had been so wrong. I mean, he understood.”

  Hiding in the sanctuary of his bedroom, Ken would sprawl out across the bed and play record after record, listening on headphones to avoid drawing the attention of his father, a fruit-and-vegetable man who sold his wares off a truck he drove through the streets of Hackensack.

  His parents thought rock and roll would be “the ruination of me. I knew something was happening, and they were trying to keep me from going in that direction with everything they had.” When Neil Young became the focus of Ken’s attention, he became Public Enemy Number One. On the morning of Ken’s twentieth birthday, his mother would march into his bedroom, waking him up at six A.M. by screeching a Neil Young lyric: “You can’t be twenty on SUGAR MOUNTAIN!”

  *According to recent recollections, Young maintained that Buffalo Springfield’s first public gig took place at a Monday-night hoot at the Troubadour on April 11, 1966. The Springfield era remains the most chaotic period of Young’s life. Trying to ascertain a specific date for many events during the Springfield era remains a convoluted nightmare, and I have attempted to avoid it unless there is some corroboration. So many rumors have swirled around the Springfield—such as “Stampede,” a mythical second LP. “Buffalo Springfield was a mirage,” said Young. “Only those who were there know what happened and we’re not too sure.”

  * At one point Young was going to produce Love’s second LP with engineer Bruce Botnick, and it has long been rumored that he had a hand in arranging some of their songs. Member Bryan McLean claimed in a recent interview that Young had a hand in arranging their sidelong opus, “Revelation.” Arthur Lee told me Neil might have had something to do with “Daily Planet.” “Nope,” said Young.

  * This date, the subject of much dispute in recent years, came to light only when, over thirty years later, Susan Mayer, aka Jennifer Starkey—a fan who interviewed the band and crudely taped some of the earliest live performances—surfaced during the eleventh hour of work on the Buffalo Springfield boxed set.

  * Greene had occasion to use the firearm during an altercation over money with Esquerita, a notorious New Orleans singer/pianist with a propensity for women’s clothing, and who had also taught Little Richard a thing or two about being a rock-and-roller. “Esquerita was a big fuckin’ guy—six-three,” said Greene. “He wanted an advance—he grabbed me by the throat and I broke it by sticking my hands up. Then I ran into my office, took out a gun and stuck it in his mouth.” R&B crooner Barry White was present for the event and disabled Es-querita by grabbing him from behind.

  * Jerry Wexler: “Greene and Stone were constantly hitting on us, and we were constantly bailing them out. They came to the well again and again until the pitcher broke. Listen, we were completely aware of their hype—it was a deal where they knew that we knew that they knew that we knew. But the bottom line was, it was a very productive relationship. Also—we enjoyed them. We enjoyed the scoundrel, scamp, aspect of them.”

  * It appears nobody wanted Young to sing. He told deejay Tony Pig in 1969, “Our producers Charlie Greene and Brian Stone used to think my voice was pretty funny, and it made me pretty paranoid—and I just didn’t sing that much.”

  * In a rare admission, Young would tell deejay Tony Pig in a 1969 interview that the song was partially inspired by the work of his hero Roy Orbison: “That’s where ‘Flying on the Ground’ came from … the idea of the melody came from ‘Blue Bayou.’”

  the red-haired guy

  The sixties ended for Donna Port on November 28, 1968, when a van driven by a famous L.A. guitarist sailed off a cliff in Mexico. Donna, a passenger in that van, never walked again. Since that accident, life has not been easy for Port, but the painkillers and countless operations haven’t dulled her spirit. She lies in her bed and shares withering insights—usually about any member of the Springfield except Neil—and then giggles like a schoolgirl, quickly covering her missing front tooth with her hand. Donna is one ornery critter. I’m sure she’s driven the few friends left by her side crazy.

  Vicki Cavaleri stands by the bed, and Donna, despite her often helpless condition, still mothers her friend of nearly twenty-five years. The two will disagree over some arcane detail of the distant past, then Donna will pipe up, “No, Vicki, it was Commodore Gardens, not the Saint Regis,” ending the matter forcefully. Port doesn’t hold back her opinions of Neil, good or bad; Vicki—who was writing a largely autobiographical screenplay named after the Springfield song Young dedicated to her and Donna, “Expecting to Fly”—is more reserved. Donna hasn’t seen Young since her accident and she’s pissed off about it, much to the dismay of Vicki. “Oh, Neil can’t pick up the phone, he’s so goddamn special? I mean, Neil doesn’t shit roses,” said Donna indignantly. “I’m sorry, Vicki—he’s not God.”

  There we sat, in a shabby Los Angeles apartment that Donna would eventually have to vacate due to dwindling funds, and as one of her sons—a serious-looking adolescent with a pet rat on his shoulder—darted in and out of the room, Vicki and Donna took me back to 1966, when they were wide-eyed innocents in bell-bottoms and moccasins, working as waitresses on the Sunset Strip, and an oddball named Neil Young entered their lives.

  “People thought we were a threesome,” said Port, shaking her head. “We were a nothing-some,” added Vicki. “We weren’t his groupies, we were just good friends.”

  Donna brought Neil home one day to Commodore Gardens, a low-rent apartment complex around the corner from Hollywood Boulevard run by a grouchy old woman who would get drunk at night and throw everybody out, only to invite them back the next morning.

  “I remember Neil’s reaction to the bowl of marijuana we had,” said Port. “He wasn’t used to it. He was very green. You gotta remember how young we all were. We were all babies. Neil was not this worldly creature off the streets everyone envisions. He was just a kid from Canada who was exceptionally talented. Thank God he had this talent, because I don’t know what would’ve happened to him without it.

  “Neil was looking to hang on to something in every direction. That’s one of the things that first attracted me—his vulnerability. He was so timid and fragile—he didn’t hang out with the band. That’s why he stayed with us all the time.” When the girls first met Neil, he was staying with the Springfield at the Hollywood Center Motel. “He hated being there,” said Cavaleri. “Neil didn’t really want to be with the guys.”

  “Neil made sure he had relationships with females that were platonic,” said Port. “It’s really odd—Neil might as well have been a girl at times, in the sense of closeness and comfort.” Young began showing up nights at their Commodore Gardens apartment. Often they’d wake up in the morning and there Neil would be, curled up in a ball, asleep on the floor. During the early days of the Springfield, the trio were inseparable. “We were the three musketeers.”

  Donna, a few years older than the other two, was the protective one, out battling the world; Neil and Vicki were like two scared kids who had retreated into their own little protective bubble. “Those two were the biggest dreamers I ever came across,” said Port. “I’d come home from work and these two are watching cartoons and playing with blocks. The place was a mess. Goddamn it, I was twenty-two years old—I didn’t want kids!”

  The three of them shunned what they considered the phony Hollywood scene, preferring instead to haunt toy stores or scour Los Angeles to find Young a pair of kittens. “We went to every shelter until we found the right ones,” said Cavaleri. “Neil knew exactly what he was looking for.” Neil christened one kitten Orange Julius and the other Black Cat Plain, after Rassy’s favorite brand of cigarettes.

  Neil’s family was a sensitive subject for him at the time. “He had a big scene with his mother and father,” said June Nelson, Greene and Stone’s secret
ary. “He wasn’t speaking to his father, and he didn’t want to speak to his mother. He used to tell me, ‘I don’t wanna talk to her.’”

  Donna Port remembers putting quarters in a pay phone and dialing Rassy long-distance because Young was unable to do it himself. “He really loved his mother, but he was scared to death of her. Rassy came down to sign the Buffalo Springfield recording contract—at twenty, Neil was underage—he begged Donna to come along. He was looking forward to that like a cyanide pill. He could not go alone.” *

  Port also remembered Rassy calling Commodore Gardens, her voice booming out of the phone for all to hear. “Neil would sense the looks in the room and how everything went quiet. Once he got off the phone, he’d be very upset. He’d either go off to the guitar or listen to records.”

  Donna didn’t discuss it with Neil. “It was an area you didn’t want to probe, because the guard came up and you knew you were upsetting him just by bringing it up. He always tried to get her approval. I don’t know to this day if he has it.”

  You know, you start out and everything’s groovy. Then you get popular and you get money, and when you get money all of a sudden you get all these dumb chicks hanging around the group with nothing to do but use any excuse to try and climb into bed with a guy in the group—any guy in the group, it doesn’t matter—and they’re called groupies … ten, fifteen steady groupies hanging around and picking out some guy they want to make it with, and starting to tell him he’s the best, he’s the greatest, he should be making it alone—and the other guys start to get jealous, and it creates a real hassle.