Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  LARRY KURZON, agent and manager: Briggs was evil, an evil individual. He looked like the devil.

  There was this anti-Semitic thing I used to get from David Briggs. He wasn’t too crazy about Jews, David Briggs. He was from Wyoming—where they thought Jews had horns.

  JOEL BERNSTEIN, archivist: Once I said to Neil, “Well, you and Briggs have always been into that quasi-criminal thing.” That just completely riled him. He gave me that look and said, “Quasi?”

  SAL TRENTINO, amplifier expert: With Briggs and Neil, there’s always this thing going on that’s very powerful. I’ve been around electric fields all my life, and I know what they feel like—and when those guys work together, it literally feels high-voltage. If you stand between them, you feel the twenty-seven thousand volts pulling at your hairs. It’s like being in a vortex.

  NIKO BOLAS, engineer, producer: One thing about David Briggs—even when you thought he was completely gone, he was a hundred percent there. He may have been there a hundred percent stoned, a hundred percent out of his mind, a hundred percent lost on some fuckin’ trip, but he was there. The one thing I got from David is “Be great or be gone.” Briggs’s job? I think he kept the chaos happening.

  SANDY MAZZEO, artist: Neil thinks creativity can come from harmony and order. Maybe it’s because Neil’s an epileptic that he fears chaos, because his brain goes chaotic. He fears that. Lack of control.

  That’s why he and Briggs had an on-and-off relationship, because Briggs put fire into it. Briggs believed in chaos.

  JEANNIE FIELD, filmmaker: I think when people who work for Neil get into it, he likes the theater—as long as it doesn’t take over. Neil lets it happen. He thinks it’s funny.

  ELLIOT ROBERTS: Neil gets bored. He’ll put Briggs and I next to each other when he knows we’re fighting. I’m always saying, “Why do you do that?” That’s why Neil’s bands are crazy—he purposely does that. He likes to see people mixed up.

  I think one of the things Neil’s very successful at is that he keeps a lotta the same people around, and those people are far from yes-men—if anything he has, like, no-men. There are constantly people in his face about what he’s doing, and David is the ultimate of that. I had a great relationship with Briggs. We had different motives. It was very combative. And the records he makes with Neil are easily the best records. I respected David a lot. David lost a lotta jobs ’cause he was an asshole. David was very much like Stills, who, again, had no father—the one recurring thing in all these guys: They all had no father and they all had failed relationships. In David’s case, it was worse. Neil at least knew his father, Stephen at least knew his father—David didn’t know who his father was.

  He’s very much like Neil. I remember David and Neil not being very physical at all. A hug would be a big thing, or physical with relationships—kids, women, any of that stuff. Later on, David loosened up like Neil did.

  Neil is a very lonely person. All his strong friendships are still musically based—me, Briggs. Neil’s very, very lonely, and he isolates himself. And then he gets further isolated by his scene and who he is.

  That’s why David Briggs is so fuckin’ cool, because David still has the same attitude towards Neil that he had in Topanga—if Neil’s an asshole, it’s “Hey, asshole—I don’t take this shit. FUCK YOU.”

  And when he did that, Neil listened.

  RICHARD KAPLAN, engineer: People may think Neil took care of David—and it may have even looked like that—but David took care of Neil. Loving care. David was the one guy who would say, “No, that wasn’t good enough, Neil,” when everybody else was kissing his feet.

  PONCHO SAMPEDRO: David knew Neil had rock and roll in him and he just tried his best to get it out.

  DAVID BRIGGS: I can teach you everything I know in an hour. Everything. That’s how simple it is to make records. Nowadays, buddy, the technician is in control of the medium. They try to make out like it’s black magic, or flyin’ a spaceship. I can teach anybody on this planet how to fly the spaceship. If you look at the modern console, there’ll be thirty knobs—high frequency, low frequency, midfrequency, all notched in little tiny, tiny, teeny tiny degrees—and it’s all bullshit. All this stuff doesn’t matter, and you can’t be intimidated. You just ignore it—all of it.

  I walk into studios with the biggest console known to mankind, and I ask for the schematic and say, “Can you patch from here to here and eliminate the ENTIRE board?” I just run it right into the tape machines. All the modern consoles, they’re all made by hacks, they’re not worth a shit, they sound terrible. None of it touches the old tube stuff—like the green board from Heider’s. It has two tone controls—high end, low end and a pan knob—and that’s it. I had great good fortune when I was a kid and started makin’ records. I made ’em at Wally Heider’s, Gold Star, so all the people that taught me were Frank Dimidio, Dave Gold, Stan Ross, Dean Jensen—these guys were the geniuses of the music business, still are.

  They taught me more about sound and how sound is made and the principles of doing it, and it’s unshakably correct what they said to me: You get a great sound at the source. Put the correct mike in front of the source, get it to the tape the shortest possible route—that’s how you get a great sound. That’s how you do it. All other ways are work. The biggest moment of my life—the one I haven’t been able to get past ever, really—is 1961, when I first got to L.A. I got invited to Radio Recorders to see Ray Charles, and I walk into the studio, and Ray’s playin’ all the piano parts with his left hand, reading a braille score with his right hand, singing the vocal live while a full orchestra played behind him. So I sat there and I watched. And I went, “This is how records are made. Put everybody in the fuckin’ room and off we go.” In those days everybody knew they had to go in, get their dick hard at the same time and deliver. And three hours later they walked out the fuckin’ door with a record in their pocket, man.

  Of course, in those days they didn’t have eight-, sixteen-, twenty-four-, forty-eight-, sixty-four-track recording, ad nauseum, to fuck people up, and that is what fucked up the recording business and the musicians of today, by the way—fucked ’em all up to where they’ll never be the same, in my opinion. People realized they could do their part … later. Play their part and fix it later. And with rock and roll, the more you think, the more you stink.

  It’s very easy for people to forget what rock and roll really is. Look man, I’m forty-seven years old, and I grew up in Wyoming, and I stole cars and drove five hundred miles to watch Little Richard, and I wanna tell you somethin’—when I saw this nigger come out in a gold suit, fuckin’ hair flyin’, and leap up onstage and come down on his piano bangin’ and goin’ fuckin’ nuts in Salt Lake City, I went, “Hey man, I wanna be like him. This is what I want.” Even today he’s a scary dude. He’s the real thing. Rock and roll is not sedate, not safe, has truly nothin’ to do with money or anything. It’s like wind, rain, fire—it’s elemental. Fourteen-year-old kids, they don’t think, they feel. Rock and roll is fire, man, FIRE. It’s the attitude. It’s thumbing your nose at the world.

  It’s a load. It’s such a load that it burns people out after a few years. Even the best of ’em burn out. People get old—they forget what it’s like to be a kid, they’re responsible, they’re this and they’re that…. You can’t have it both ways. You’re a rock and roller. Or you’re not.

  I wanna tell you somethin’: Neil’s never been insecure about anything in his fuckin’ life. First among equals is Neil Young, and it’s always been that way. When Neil’s got his ax in hand, it’s like the Hulk. His aura becomes solid—he becomes eight feet tall, six feet wide. The only guy other than John Lennon who can actually go from folk to country to full orchestra. The only guy. I think when it’s all written down, he will unquestionably stand in the top five that ever made rock and roll.

  Elliot and I get along really well. He’s a witty guy. But he and I stand at opposite poles of one of the great artists of rock and roll. My trip is further, like K
en Kesey said. Go more out there, be more dangerous, risk it all. Out there is where the great artists should be.

  Elliot sits on the other side of that.

  I never wanna be Neil’s employee, and that’s what allows me to be his partner. I do the work, and when I’m done, I’m done, dude. And I don’t care about the money, and they all know it. I’ll say “Fuck you” and walk away—or I’ll work for a year for nothin’. It scares them, especially Elliot. I’m a very dangerous guy. If I’m in control, he knows I motivate Neil like nobody else in the world. And if I motivate him within what Elliot thinks are acceptable boundaries, we get along fine. When I think it should go farther—big sparks. When people ask, “Oh, you produce Neil Young’s albums?” I’m not ashamed to say, “Only the best ones.” When Neil was starting to put together his Archives, he gave me a computer printout of what he thought it should be. Hundreds of songs. I thought he was asking for my opinion, y’see? I took it and I crossed off every fucking song that I didn’t produce and I gave it back to him. And I meant it. Neil looked at me like I was being … arrogant.

  Neil’s a funny guy. Once he told me, “If you agreed with me all the time, there wouldn’t be any need for one of us. Guess which one?”

  Manning Philander “David” Briggs was born in Casper, Wyoming, on February 29—the day exists only in leap years, so he claimed one quarter his age—1944. He knew little about his real father except that he had a sense of humor: In recent years, David started receiving mail for another David Briggs, a professional gambler who turned out to be his brother. Apparently his father liked the name. “It’s a franchise deal,” quipped Briggs. “There’s probably a million of us all over the country.”

  There was little else amusing in his bleak childhood. “I left home and started workin’ at thirteen. I had a very bad home life, the brutal stepfather … things I don’t like to talk about much.” He worked in uranium mines and on oil wells, moving in with the family of a friend, Kirby Cohee. “David’s mother had married a man who despised him,” said Cohee. “They threw him out. He had no place to go.”

  With Kirby, David discovered rock and roll. “We had the largest record collection in the entire state,” boasted Cohee. They were also members of a car club, the Vaccaros, and had turned into the kind of teenage hoodlums girls love. “We had a reputation. We were the criminal element in town. The more they bad-rapped us, the bigger our reps got.” Driving David’s green ’41 Ford street rod, the pair cruised the Casper & and hung out at Joe’s Pool Hall until “we were asked to leave the state,” said Cohee. “I got thrown out for fighting, David for raising hell.”

  Briggs and Cohee left Wyoming on Christmas Day, 1961, and hitchhiked to Los Angeles. “I was a player,” Briggs said. “When I was seventeen, eighteen, years old, I just realized I could never play guitar like I wanted to—I started way too late. I didn’t have the physical tools, it just didn’t flow for me. Gettin’ past it was a big deal for me.” What he wound up doing was making records, “great records that nobody ever heard.” His first major production was for comedian Murray Roman—“I did the first record that ever said ‘fuck’ on it,” claimed Briggs. It led to a job as staff producer for Bill Cosby’s Tetragrammaton label. Briggs made a handful of records no one heard, and then one fateful day in 1968 he met Neil Young out on the highway.

  “I was driving my army personnel carrier. It’s meant to hold twenty people, and I’m thundering down the road. I looked at this guy and said, ‘Hey, dude—wanna ride?’ It’s kinda the way we both started off. We both liked cars, y’know?”

  I was hitchhiking. He stopped to pick me up. I just wanted to check out the vehicle. Briggs was a unique individual. He was as crazy as I am. I called him Mr. Briggs most of the time. Monsieur Briggs.

  —Why did you take a chance on him?

  Just the energy. He was there. He wanted to do it. We just went through it together—learning how to make records. David didn’t know much more than I knew. But he knew how to keep on top of me and keep things organized. Give me an objective opinion. Learned all about me so he could get the most. His ways of getting things out of me were probably more subliminal … mentioning certain singers at certain times. People that he knew I thought were good, like Roy Orbison or somebody like that. He would mention their names in a conversation the day or the afternoon before a session. Just to bring people into my mind, remind me of my roots.

  —How did you get the best out of Mr. Briggs?

  Just by bein’ his friend and bein’ together with him. Lettin’ him do what he could really do best and always tryin’ to come through when he needed it. When you see how into it David was, it made you wanna do it. The guy wanted to help me get to where I needed to go. He’d do everything he could to help me get the music. If I really had the music, he was gonna really help me get there.

  Briggs went on the trip—whatever it was. Stayed with it. As long as it was happening, he was there. Hard to describe, really. The thing is, he knew how much work went into this. If it was a record or a song or somethin’, he knew the effort that went into making it right and the care it took. He understood. That that was more important than a lot of other things. Very few people understand that. Particularly very few people around me. He was as tenacious as I am. Maybe even more. When he got an idea in his head that somethin’ was fucked, it was fucked. He wasn’t gonna change his mind.

  —How did Elliot and David get along?

  Terrible.

  —Why?

  I don’t know. It’s not my business. Briggs could’ve told ya—but he probably didn’t wanna. I mean, more than three or four times. It’s all water under the bridge, it’s all old hat. The only time we had a problem with Briggs is when somethin’ went wrong—usually somethin’ was wrong financially somewhere—and he didn’t mention it until it was time to explode. Because he didn’t wanna talk about it. Just like all the other guys—they don’t wanna talk about money.

  Briggs and Elliot worked well against each other—but at the end, it was kinda a love thing between them. They really liked each other. It grew to that over twenty or thirty years from the other extreme. The majority of it was David didn’t like Elliot. But David didn’t like ANYBODY. So that’s okay.

  —There were periods where you and David didn’t talk.

  Uh-huh. Like brothers. We had a love/hate relationship. Y’know? I couldn’t do every record with Briggs.

  It was not a bad thing for Briggs when we got away from each other. It was good for him. If we were together for too long, we fought. Like any other close relationship, after awhile, y’know, it almost becomes its own worst enemy, heh heh. It’s so familiar, it’s scary.

  There’s a lotta relationships like that. Where you just go out, come back, go out, come back—that’s the way Briggs and I were. What did we do—seventeen albums? That’s a lotta fuckin’ albums. From the time I was twenty-three right up until forty-nine. That’s a lot of fuckin’ time.

  I believe David had more fun with me than he had with anybody. When we were havin’ a good time, there was nobody fuckin’ laughin’ harder than us. I always kinda felt that David might be one of the early ones to go. He was so destructive when he wasn’t around me, y’know. Self-destructive. He was a tormented guy.

  —No idea what tormented him?

  Not really. There was a lot he didn’t share. He didn’t really reveal much of his inner self to anybody. There was always somethin’ that you didn’t know about David. I’m not sayin’ that he ax-murdered his original family or anything like that, please don’t get the wrong idea—heh heh heh—it could’ve been … quilt-making. But it was something we didn’t know about.

  Something bothered him, something hurt him somewhere. David was a fun-lovin’ guy. He didn’t let it get him down for long … but it would always come back.

  Most of the records David Briggs would coproduce for Neil Young would feature one band: Crazy Horse, originally with Danny Whitten on guitar, Billy Talbot on bass, Ralph Molina on drums.
Whitten would be replaced on guitar in the mid-seventies by Frank “Poncho” Sampedro.

  The history of Crosby, Stills and Nash is well known: countless books, documentaries, magazine articles. You have to rattle a few garbage cans and look under rocks to unearth the story of Crazy Horse. Only recently have they turned up in music videos or mainstream interviews, and they’ve never appeared live on network TV. For close to thirty years they have toiled in the shadows.

  This is a band like no other. Muffed changes. Tattered harmonies. Tempos that slow down, speed up or collapse altogether. Guitar passages that last longer than a lifetime. Songs about nothing that never end. Repetition to the point of lunacy. Those who love the Horse can’t live without ’em, but those who hate the band are equally passionate. It is the antithesis of the smooth California soft-rock sound churned out by Young’s peers.

  “If I would go into a little bar to go dancin’, I’d say, ‘What a great band.’ But presented in concert?” Joni Mitchell said with a sniff. “That should not be elevated to the concert level.”

  Tim Drummond, bass player for Young’s most commercial and traditional band, the Stray Gators, echoed an opinion I heard more than once; Crazy Horse’s lack of musicianship eliminates a threat. “I think Neil’s afraid of a band that will kick ass. He’d rather have Crazy Horse around so he can yell at ’em—‘I like playin’ with Crazy Horse ’cause I can yell at ’em and they’ll take it.’ Neil told me that right to my face.”

  Graham Nash chimed in. “That’s the difference between Crosby, Stills and Nash and Crazy Horse—Crazy Horse only plays what Neil tells ’em to play, always. No extra stuff, no experimenting … that’s terribly confining for a creative musician. I can see exactly why Neil plays with them—because he completely controls everything, and God forbid they should ever have an opinion. Neil’s got such a single-minded direction that it does not allow for the creative process from other people, because sometimes when you’re being creative, searching, you fuck up. If you fuck up with Neil, it’s terrifying.”