Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  The mere mention of Crazy Horse sent David Crosby into a twenty-minute rant. “What does Crazy Horse give Neil Young? A clean slate. They should’ve never been allowed to be musicians at all. They should’ve been shot at birth. They can’t play. I’ve heard the bass player muff a change in a song seventeen times in a row. ‘Cinnamon Girl’—he still doesn’t know it! And the drummer—boom-boom thack! Boom-boom thack! I’d say to Neil, ‘What the fuck are you doing playing with those jerks?!’ He’d say, ‘They’re soulful.’ I’d say, ‘Man, so is my dog, but I don’t give him a set of drums!’” *

  I can always tell a musician—because a musician said, “Why the fuck do you play with those guys? I can play that good. Anybody can play that good.”

  No—they couldn’t. Nobody can do that—except Billy and Ralph and Poncho. They’re all equally fuckin’ great, and I really would not be able to do what I do without them. It’s an intangible. What can I say? It’s the Horse. Had a major effect on American music—while being musicians that most musicians thought couldn’t play.

  —What do you get out of that rhythm section?

  It sustains me. Keeps me goin’. It’s not just a rhythm section, either. The guitar player is also very fuckin’ important. Poncho—you look at him and you look at Billy and Ralph and you go, “Oh fuck, why don’t you get new guys? What’s special about them?” What’s special about Poncho and Billy and Ralph and me is that it’s a band.

  Crazy Horse is a great, great thing. You can never go out and play a whole show with a band that’s gonna be more fun through the whole thing than Crazy Horse, because it’s so real.

  It’s not that they fuck up that makes them great. That’s a by-product of the abandon that they play with. They’re not organized. No matter how fuckin’ much we practice the song, Billy can get so into the groove he’ll forget to do the change, y’know? And Ralph may turn the beat around. It happens. Or I can start playin’ the guitar, and Ralph can pick it up on the wrong beat and play it backwards—that happens all the time. Never happens with real professional groups. With our band this shit happens all the time. But what really happens all the time is that it grooves—even if it’s not in the groove, it’s in a groove. You hear it and you wanna hear more.

  —The Horse haven’t had a lot of big moments with you in terms of a certain visibility. Was that intentional on your part?

  I like to keep ’em outta that shit. Might disturb them. I don’t wanna spook ’em.

  —And that’s part of the reason they’re still here with you … right? I protected them. Hard to tell, though, the amount of damage I did to them. Heh heh.

  —It’s a tough gig.

  Oh, yeah—it’s a tough gig for them, it’s a tough gig for me. I gotta keep ’em going without having them feel I’m taking care of them, y’know. That they’ve gotta be their own people. They don’t do much when I’m not with them. They do, but it doesn’t make them a lot of money. But they’re true to their craft.

  —So where does the Horse sit in your art?

  Top o’ the heap. I mean, for me, I love Crazy Horse. But if I hear a sound in my head that’s not Crazy Horse, I wanna go there. Try it.

  It’s utter pandemonium at Billy Talbot’s house. Music blasting from the stereo, his soon to be ex-wife, Laurie, hovering over a pot of pasta in the kitchen, Billy on the phone haggling over the price of some fancy new doors. The ranch-style southern California home is a pastiche of the very expensive amid the very broken.

  Four kids burst into the living room, home from school, and Billy, suddenly looking down at the joint he’s been absently sucking on, rasps, “Oh, no! What am I doing?” and quickly stabs it out. Wiry and dark, with a prominent proboscis not unlike an eagle’s beak, Billy sprawls in a chair next to the stereo he keeps fidgeting with. He’s playing me rough mixes of Weld, the live set from the Young and Crazy Horse 1991 Ragged Glory tour, and I’m anxious to hear them, only Billy keeps turning it off to play Left for Dead, a Horse-alone record from 1989. I can’t stand the fuckin’ thing. Without Neil and Poncho, it sounds more like Toto than the Horse.

  I try to be polite and keep my opinions to myself, but Billy is UNRELENTING. He squeezes out every nuance of the way you feel about something, and if he sniffs out an opposing opinion, watch out—he’ll talk you into changing it even if it takes hours, days, weeks, months. Billy wears you down. The guy should have been a manager. “I love Billy,” said former Horse member Nils Lofgren. “But sometimes you just want him to shut up and play.”

  Talbot is Crazy Horse’s bass player and, to say the least, a real wild card. He puts the Crazy in the Horse. “Billy Talbot is horribly inconsistent,” said David Briggs. “Nobody hates it worse than me, because I’m the guy in the studio who has to say, ‘Billy, hey, you fuckin’ blew it. I actually had him say, ‘Oh yeah? You know so much, let’s hear you play it.’ I play left-handed, right? I walked into the fuckin’ studio, took his bass away from him, turned it upside down and played his part to him—upside down—and said, ‘Okay, MOTHERFUCKER?’”

  But it must be said that some of the greatest Neil Young/Crazy Horse projects happened because Billy picked up the phone, hunted Neil down and got him excited about the Horse again. “Billy brings enthusiasm to Crazy Horse,” said Lofgren. “Billy’s a cheerleader.”

  Talbot lives, breathes and sleeps music like a teenager in his first band. Without Billy you don’t have the magic, as Briggs himself attested. “The greatest example I can make is this: on ‘Lotta Love,’ Billy Talbot played two notes that aren’t even in the chords. Two notes, like, one here and one there. Terrible fuckin’ notes. I just left them in. When it got to that part, I just ducked the notes a little bit.

  “Well, when Nicolette Larson covered the fuckin’ record, son, they wrote the charts, and guess what? Billy’s two bass mistakes are written in. What you gotta remember is this: Billy Talbot’s the guy who played on all these great fucking records. He’s part of the band. It’s an emotional thing. It’s tribal. Can you dig it?”

  When you discuss Billy, it’s inevitable that you arrive at drummer Ralph Molina. They’re a package deal. “Ralph tempers Billy, he’s the voice of reason,” said Lofgren. “Where Billy runs amok, Ralph is the deadpan guy.”

  Not fifteen minutes away from Billy’s house sits Ralph Molina, the deadpan guy, a ubiquitous baseball cap atop his head. Curly black hair peeks out from under, and with his dusky complexion and slightly sour expression, he resembles a stern Chico Marx. His duplex apartment is immaculate—his wife, Barbara, once caught Ralph crouched on his knees with flashlight in hand, searching under the furniture for suspected cobwebs.

  So here Ralph sits, admonishing his dog, Cody, for barking, or clawing, or even breathing. As usual, he doesn’t seem very excited to see me, but that’s Ralph. Crazy Horse can play the greatest, most transcendental set of their lives, and Ralph will come offstage bitching and moaning about how he missed a Dodgers game on Channel Nine. “Ralph never gets excited,” said Nils Lofgren. “He lowballs everything.”

  Ralph keeps time for Crazy Horse, and from so-called professional musicians you’ll get the same disparaging comments: He slows down, he speeds up, blah blah blah. It’s all a load of shit. Ask Neil Young: “Ralph? The greatest drummer in the world. What can I say? Number one. Numero uno. For my music, he’s fuckin’ great.”

  “Ralph’s genius is that when Neil goes wandering away into dreamland, where he creates out of the cosmos, Ralph’s there to catch him when he hits the brick wall,” said Briggs. “That’s what allows Neil to go sailin’ out where no other people go but him, ’cause when he gets to the end of it all and falls off, there’s Ralph. He’s like the catcher on a trapeze act.”

  For Molina, recalling the past is bittersweet. He liked it better when they were all young nobodies. “Back then it was just four guys playing music—if I made two hundred bucks, I was happy. I loved those days. I think when you get to where Neil is, for instance, it’s, like, staying there. Getting there is the fu
n. We’re still getting there.”

  Unlike Billy—who gets into everything—Ralph doesn’t know much about the technical side of music and wishes he were more ignorant about plenty of other things. “I didn’t start getting aware until my thirties. I’m glad—you get too aware, you get fucked up. They say you can’t turn back the clock … it’s a fuckin’ drag.”

  As I perused the framed memorabilia on Ralph’s walls, one thing in particular caught my eye: a lyric sheet for “Look at All the Things,” a classic Horse song written by Danny Whitten, who was Billy and Ralph’s driving force until 1972. Ralph saw me looking at it, and, turning to stare out the window, he sighed. “If Danny had never died, who knows what woulda happened.”

  People remember funny things about Danny Whitten. Nils Lofgren recalls that Danny took pride in maneuvering his car around the speed bumps on the highway. Willie B. Hinds remembers the psychedelic nickname he gave Whitten: the Golden Lizard. Robin Lane recalls how encouraging Danny was: he “didn’t have an ego, the self-esteem that would’ve enabled him to be a somebody—he was always a sideman.” His buddy Terry Sachen remembers, “We coined a word for Danny: He had ‘verballs’—verbal balls. He didn’t mince words.” “Danny was the one that everybody wanted to hug,” recalls his sister, Brenda Decker. “I always thought he’d make a great comedian. Danny could say the awfulest thing and it would come out funny.” David Briggs could pick up a guitar and play unreleased Whitten songs that were twenty years old. Everybody gets a little quiet remembering Danny, a little sad. No one has forgotten.

  He was born Danny Ray Whitten on May 8, 1943, in Columbus, Georgia. His mother, Dorothy, worked round-the-clock as a waitress to feed her two kids. The family was fatherless and poor. “Danny used to tell me in his house you could see through the floor to the dirt on the ground,” said Billy Talbot.

  When Danny was nine, Dorothy remarried and moved the family to Canton, Ohio. It was there that Danny discovered teenage rebellion. “Danny and his sister were really great dancers,” said friend Larry Lear. “So were my girlfriend and I. We used to end up in a lotta contests together. We were kinda wild—hoodlumish—and we loved rock and roll.”

  Danny formed a vocal group, the El-Cadins, whose specialty was “In the Still of the Night.” Danny and Larry were soon skipping more school than they attended, preferring to hitchhike into town to steal 45s. “We’d hit all the record stores and come home with bagfuls of the hot new records,” said Lear.

  Doo-wop, &, soul—Danny loved black music, and he and Larry were often the only whites in a nightclub called the Baby Grand. “Danny always ran around with an older crowd,” said Brenda. “At fifteen he used to slip into my stepdad’s closet, slip into his air force uniform, then go downtown and get served.”

  Much to the relief of his mother, Danny quit school at seventeen and joined the navy. Studying to be an air traffic controller, he rose to the top of the class, but it was not to be. “He was in the navy six months and his knees got big as basketballs,” said Brenda. “They found out it was rheumatoid arthritis. He was in the hospital four months. They said he’d probably be in a wheelchair by the time he was forty.” For the rest of his life, Whitten would blame a sadistic commanding officer who had made him stand watch overnight in subzero weather.

  At eighteen, Danny took a trip to California. “When he came back, he started hypin’ me on the Rivingtons, all that,” said Lear. “So we left for California, Labor Day weekend, 1962.” Within a few months, Whitten wandered into a popular Hollywood dance spot—the Peppermint West—and met a sexy black dancer named Marie Janisse.

  “I was thin and gorgeous—just a real hot number on the scene,” recalls Janisse. “And in walks this pumpkin-headed country boy. The minute he walked in, we all knew he wasn’t from Hollywood. He looked like they had just scraped him off some corn patch. All the girls thought he was cute, but you knew he wasn’t hip. He just wasn’t a part of the ‘in’ crowd.”

  Determined to break into the gang, Danny crashed a party one weekend at Marie Janisse’s. “The thing was, if I didn’t invite you, you didn’t dare show up. And here comes Danny knocking at my door. I said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’” Danny conned his way in, and the pair became fast friends and dance partners.

  The black sex kitten and the blond hillbilly from Ohio had a show-stopping routine: Marie would pull a long scarf out of her sleeve, and Danny would charge like a bull. “Danny was hot. We won contest after contest.” Yet his arthritis continued to plague him. “His joints were getting so bad they said he’d drop right on the dance floor and they’d have to carry him off,” said Brenda Decker. “He’d just get right back up and dance again.”

  Marie Janisse introduced Whitten to a small clique of Peppermint West dancers that included her brother, “Three-Finger” Joe (“Gimme five and I’ll give you back two”), and Don Paris, who would infuriate Janisse by sneaking Danny off to a gay bar across the street. It was at the Peppermint that Danny met another doo-wop fan by the name of Billy Talbot.

  Billy Talbot was born on October 23, 1943, in New York City. His mother, Verna, was a struggling nightclub singer who barely kept the family together. “My father was a frustrated musician,” said Talbot. “He used to drink a lot. My early childhood was emotionally unstable—funky at best.”

  For most of his preteen years, Billy and his brother, Johnny, were shuttled between foster homes. When the family reunited and moved to New Jersey, Billy started singing in vocal groups. “I got into hard-core doo-wop—the Penguins, Lee Andrews and the Hearts. A lotta groups that were funky and soulful, even a little bit weird.”

  When Talbot was sixteen, his mother and brother moved to California. Billy’s music career went nowhere, and while wandering through Times Square, he saw a billboard advertising one-way fares to California for $360. “I thought, ‘What the hell,’” said Billy, who headed for the promised land, where he soon encountered Danny Whitten.

  “Danny was a James Dean guy,” said Talbot. “A rebel. He wanted to be an actor.” Discovering their mutual passion for doo-wop, Whitten and Talbot sang together at a party with two other guys, Lou Bisbol and Pat Vegas, then formed a vocal group. Even though Vegas was committed to another band, the quartet recorded a demo, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall.” “We decided it was gonna be a hit,” said Talbot. “We needed another guy in the band, so we called Lou’s cousin—Ralph.”

  Another product of poverty and doo-wop, Ralph Molina came into the world on June 22, 1943. He was born in Puerto Rico and raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in a housing project at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Ralphie was an a cappella fan, but his real love was the angst-ridden castrato pop of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. At fifteen, Molina moved to Florida and sang with a group called the Enchanters. Five years later, his cousin Lou called and asked him to “come out to California and sing the high part,” and in August 1963, Danny and the Memories were born.

  The group haunted the Peppermint West, where, said Molina, “Danny would dance in contests, win twenty-five bucks and we’d eat for a week.” Billy and Ralph weren’t really dancers, but it was five bucks a night and all you could drink to stand around and make the club look busy. “What a funny bunch of guys,” said Janisse. “Here was Danny—Mr. Blonde—surrounded by these short little dark guys who looked like Italian thugs.”

  In between dances they sang in the club’s alley, grooving on the echo. It was there they met Sal Mineo look-alike Bengiamino Rocco, aka Dino, who replaced Lou Bisbal. “As soon as my voice got into the other three, we had a sound,” said Rocco. “We started jamming vocally. We did Mills Brothers, Four Lads, show tunes, rock and roll—and we did ’em with a unique flavor, not really doo-wop. We had this falsetto lead thing that Danny did.”

  They dressed in green velvet pullovers, black pants and boots, chosen by Danny, the group’s leader. “He always used to say, ‘Make sure our shoes are shined,’” said Molina. “Danny was smooth, man. He was so together. He looked like a
surfer.” “Danny was real serious about music,” said Ben Rocco. “Maybe more serious than any of us.”

  The group lived in adjacent apartments in Mark Manor, an $80-a-month complex not far from Hollywood Boulevard that was run by Verna Talbot. “I remember when I first got to California and stepped into the courtyard,” said Ralph. “The first thing I saw was this lady with all this long black hair staring at me through the window. The impression I got was ‘Wow, a witch.’ Turns out it was Billy’s mom.” An eccentric who ran her own religion, Verna would function as den mother to many a starving artist at Mark Manor.

  Danny and the Memories secured few gigs—spending most of their time gathered around the courtyard fountain, serenading the denizens of Mark Manor—but in spring 1965 they would release one single, “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Girl of Mine” on Valiant Records. The group sex-changed the old Jerome Kern show tune and sailed it into the air, with Whitten’s dreamy lead floating above killer harmonies that hint at the Crazy Horse sound still years away. As Molina said, “We sang the shit outta that song, man.” The record went nowhere and neither did the group, although they were too young to care. “What we learned with Danny and the Memories was how to be together, how to be a team, that kind of shit,” said Molina.

  Sometime early in 1965, Danny got a job promoting a pre-MTV filmclip jukebox called Scopitone (a great clip exists of an ultra-cool Whitten and the boys lip-synching “Land of a Thousand Dances”). The gig took him to San Francisco, with Billy and Ralph following close behind. They lived in bohemian North Beach, off of money their girlfriends earned from topless dancing. ” Sixty-five—that was the crazy year,” said Ben Rocco. “We were in San Francisco when it happened.”