“I’ve Been Waiting for You” is another bomb: massed guitars churning out a killer riff as Young searches for “a woman to save my life.” At the end of the chorus, hallucinatory pipe organ pushes the bass and drums to a dizzying crescendo full of such tension and menace it feels like Young’s grown tired of waiting and has taken to stalking instead. Then the riff kicks back in, exploding in a crazed, squalling solo. “That record is a masterpiece of tones,” said Briggs proudly of the album. “We got tones nobody’s ever got except Hendrix.” * Jack Nitzsche’s measured orchestration in “The Old Laughing Lady” closes out side one, featuring sweet, sad countermelodies passing from strings to French horn with beautiful restraint. The track employs a vocal-muting technique Nitzsche stumbled on to called pre-echo, which made Neil sound, in his words, “a million miles away but right there.” On most of the record, Young sounds like a small, wounded animal—inward, fragile, barely able to yelp the words out.
Not everything works. Nitzsche’s use of a soul chorus feels overwrought, as does Young’s first released solo acoustic performance, the almost endless paranoiac barrage of “Last Trip to Tulsa”; * but you have to admire Young as he stretches in more directions than Plastic Man. The overall impression Neil Young leaves with you is of the sound itself—submerged, smothered, desperately controlled. All the jagged edges are overdubbed away, as if this would somehow conceal the hysteria in Young’s vocal cords. Music made by a terrified kid cowering in a closet, playing keening, demented guitar solos through layers of gauze.
Neil Young shows Briggs and Young in a conventional L.A. studio setting: building tracks piece by piece, playing around with string sections, echo chambers and limiters; making the smooth, seamless, professional record expected of them. Who knew it would be their last?
Now facing the music press as a solo artist, Neil Young made clear he was no longer the Hollywood Indian of Buffalo Springfield lore. Putting on the beloved fringe jacket “just got ridiculous,” said Young in the record company bio. “People expected me to wear that all the time.” He told journalist Pete Johnson that he “never wanted to be in a group” and that the only reason he returned to the band was because management problems had him “starving to death.” I’m not that guy, Young suggests, and maybe I never was. The chameleon act was just beginning.
Young made clear that distancing himself from Los Angeles was no accident. He ranted about what he’d been put through in Hollywood. “The Strip! The Whisky A Go-Go! It’s just a big phony scene,” Young told writer Marci McDonald. “A bunch of people trying to make it and they don’t care how. Those idiots, they have no taste. They’re not sensitive. They have no idea what real art is. Sure I sound bitter about it. I’m one of the most bitter people I know when it comes to the Hollywood music scene.”
Neil Young was released in December 1968 (or January 1969, depending on the source). Despite a typical Warner/Reprise counterculture ad campaign that promised fans a free sample of Topanga dirt, the record flopped. Those involved in making it put a lot of the blame on an experimental mastering process called Heico-CSG that was supposed to allow stereo records to be played back on still existent mono equipment. Unfortunately Heico-CSG also muffled the dynamics of a record featuring vocals that were difficult enough to hear without it. (Young said he found out his solo debut was a guinea pig for the process only after it was in the stores and managed not only to talk Reprise out of using the process, but also to rerelease a new version of the record. “It was too late,” said Elliot Roberts.)
Neil Young’s title-free original cover was a garish head-on painting by Topanga artist Roland Diehl of Young against the mountains, a cityscape surreally jutting out of his body. According to Jack Nitzsche, Young hated the cover at first. “What am I supposed to do?” Neil told Jack. “My wife asked the guy to paint it.”
No, no—I liked the cover. I just didn’t know what to make of it. It’s like a straight-on picture of me right in the camera, but it wasn’t me—it was a painting. I dug that. Not really commercial, though. We’re not selling an image here. It’s not like a David Cassidy cover or something.
One of the hardest things to do is look through pictures and decide which ones you like. I could live without it. I’ve seen too many pictures of myself. Figure out how many pictures I’ve seen of myself compared to you. I think I’ve got my fuckin’ quota already.
I love parts of the “Piece of Crap” video [1994]. I like to have a great thing that purposely leaves the rough edge in and goes, “Fuck you.” I like it to be purposely shitty. One verse of the video is the back of the grip’s head. You can’t see fuckin’ anything. Till the very end—he moves his head, and I’m like “PIECE OF CRAP!” That’s me, okay? That’s the way I like it—you know I’m there, you can feel it all over the place, but you can’t get enough. You always feel like you didn’t quite see it.
—You’ve never made another record like Neil Young since.
No.
—Drove you crazy?
Exactly. We got into that one—don’t know if we’ll do it that way again. It was intense. If I had left it alone at an earlier stage, it woulda been better. Like a lot of that Buffalo Springfield stuff—I went on working and fucked it up. I don’t do that anymore. Thank God I got that out of my system at an early age, heh heh.
—You once said, “My first record was a lonely experience.” Why? Because I wasn’t playing with anybody. A labor of love is another way to look at it—it was either a lonely experience or a labor of love. But there’s not that much difference between the two. It’s something I had to do. I was really glad when it was over, because it was so technical, it took so much thinking. That’s when I learned how hard it is to construct something when you can actually just play it.
Briggs and I used to drive home in this old Bentley I had. Had a great time makin’ that first record. The actual doin’ it was great. Near the end, the responsibility got to be pretty heavy for what we’d done. And then to have it come out with the Heico-CSG process. Here I was, a brand-new artist, my first record, hadn’t had any hits, and I’m screamin’ and yellin’, “You’re fuckin’ crazy if you think this is good—don’t tell me it’s better, because I know it isn’t.” And it wasn’t.
—What did you learn about overdubbing on the first record? There’s almost no overdubbing on the second record. Heh heh. You could do it for a little color, a little bang now and then—but not as an integral part of the music.
When I first got freedom in the studio, I abused it. I played almost everything on that first record myself. That was the kind of thinking that was goin’ on in the Springfield. We shouldn’t have been allowed to do that. It was wrong. And that’s as well as I could do it at the time with the technology I had, and it’s really cool and it felt great when we made it—but it’s not rewarding. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere—now that’s rewarding.
No one remembers exactly how Neil Young stumbled upon the Rockets—probably through Robin Lane or Autumn Amateau, both friends of Danny Whitten. At some point early in the Springfield days, Young wound up in Laurel Canyon at Rockets Headquarters, sitting in Talbot’s bedroom playing the original D-modal version of “Mr. Soul” with Danny and Billy singing along. There were some hazy jams. Neil told Tony Pig that playing with the Rockets “changed my mind about a lotta things … I heard a lotta things that I’d forgotten. We used to get together and really get stoned and play to all hours of the morning … there were about thirteen or fourteen of us … sitars, tabla … Ralphie hadn’t started to play drums … Billy had just bought his bass, he didn’t know how to play.”
When the Rockets album came out in March 1968, they made the trek out to Topanga to play it for Young. He loved it, and one night during the Rockets’ engagement at the Whisky—August 11 through 15, 1968—Young sat in with the band. “I didn’t know who Neil was,” said Molina, typically blasé. “He was just another guy who sat in with us.” But Talbot recalls that Young’s big guitar sound “blew George Whitsell’s away.
He was kind of overshadowed.”
Young came to the gig armed with the weapons that have become crucial elements of his rock and roll sound: Old Black, a 1953 Gibson Les Paul plugged into a 1959 Fender Deluxe. The guitar came from Jim Messina, who found the instrument’s monstrous sound uncontrollable. “Neil’s the kind of guy that if there’s an old scraggly dog walkin’ down the street, he’d see somethin’ in that dog and take it home. That’s kind of like that Les Paul—I liked the way it looked, but it was just terrible. It sounded like hell. Neil loved it,” said Messina.
Young bought the Deluxe for approximately fifty bucks in 1967. As Young told writer Jas Obrecht, he “took it home, plugged in this Gretsch guitar and immediately the entire room started to vibrate…. I went, ‘Holy shit!’ I turned it halfway down before it stopped feeding back.” The Les Paul/Deluxe combo, which remains the cornerstone of his sound, would make its thunderous debut in Young’s music on his very first record with Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. *
After the Whisky gig, Talbot said, “the wheels started turning in Mr. Young’s head.” A Topanga jam session was arranged but limited to only three members from the six-piece Rockets: Whitten, Talbot and Molina. Young booked studio time almost immediately. There would be no false starts or missed opportunities like there had been with the Springfield. “We got together, started rehearsing and we went right in,” Young told writer Jean-Charles Costa. “That whole album was like catching the group just as they were getting to know each other … we didn’t even know what we sounded like until we heard the album.”
“That’s when a change came over me, right then,” Young would say of Everybody Knows a few years later to deejay B. Mitchell Reid. “I started just tryin’ to be real instead of fabricate something…. Since then I’ve just been striving to get realer and realer on record. As in More Real.”
At the beginning of the seminal “Running Dry”—most likely Young’s first live studio vocal with a band—you can hear chattering as the tape starts rolling. David Briggs, not a man given to looking back, recalled with gusto the origin of the impromptu babble: “I knew the band was hittin’ it, so I turned around and said, ‘Fire up the machine!’” said Briggs, exhilarated by the memory. “These guys didn’t act like they were in the studio, they acted like it was the end of the world. GIVE IT ALL.”
In the middle of January 1969, Young and the Horse began recording at Wally Heider’s in Los Angeles, cutting two landmark nine-minute-plus jams—“Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” and two short, funky rockers—“Cinnamon Girl” and “Everybody Knows.” Twin archetypes of the Crazy Horse sound: long, guitar-heavy epics and compact, country-tinged numbers, both so instantly familiar they seem to have come down from the ancients.
In March the band went back in the studio—this time Sunwest—to cut a plaintive country ballad with beautiful harmonies from Danny called “The Losing End,” and the moody, magnificent “Running Dry,” featuring spine-tingling electric violin work from Rocket Bobby Notkoff. Unlike the labored creations of the Springfield and the first solo record, the music on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was recorded and in the can as quickly as it happened. Robin Lane said Young ambushed her on “Round and Round.” “I thought we were rehearsing. I didn’t even know what I was singing…. Neil was the original punk rocker.”
Young named the new band Crazy Horse, although he couldn’t remember when or why. The Rockets were history. “My understanding was Neil was gonna use the guys for a record and a quick tour, bring ’em back and help us produce the next Rockets album,” said Whitsell. “It took me a year and a half to realize my band had been taken.”
“Big pictures, wide-open spaces” is how Young described his music to writer Paul Zollo in 1991. The Horse left wide-open spaces in which Young could go berserk on Old Black and the frequently minimal lyrics he wrote painted big pictures. His imagery was sometimes over the top on Everybody Knows. “Purple words on a gray background / To be a woman and to be turned down,” Young sings in the truly obtuse “Cowgirl in the Sand.” What the hell does that mean? “My songs are pictures,” Dylan once said. “And the band makes the sound of the pictures.” In Crazy Horse, Neil Young had found his own picture-sound band.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was a fusion of all Young’s influences, not only Dylan and the Stones, but country music, the Shadows and Orbison. “I remember Crazy Horse like Roy Orbison remembers ‘Leah’ and ‘Blue Bayou,’” Young writes in his 1977 liner notes to “Down by the River” on Decade.
Captain Beefheart once described Jimmy Reed’s music as one-head music. A group of players coalescing into something indivisible. Crazy Horse was a one-head band Jimmy Reed could love: crude, simple and loud, in the groove one minute and ready to fall apart the next. No fancy licks, no extra stuff. These guys were incapable of it—they’d barely played outside their goddamn garage. “Crazy Horse weren’t musicians,” said Briggs. “They weren’t musicians at all. They were a bunch of dudes that hit a simpatico, a rapport, an emotional thing. Neil was the musician.”
According to Billy Talbot, it was figuring out how to play “Down by the River” that gave birth to the moronically perfect Crazy Horse backbeat. “At first we played it double-time, faster, like the chorus is now. It was almost a jazz thing. George Whitsell had showed me and Ralph a basic James Brown beat the first time he taught us how to play—boom-boom tak! boom-boom tak!—and I said to Ralph, ‘Let’s try it with George’s beat, except real slow.’”
To hear what a difference the Horse made one has only to listen to “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” a song cut at the Neil Young sessions in August 1968 and then five months later with the Horse. The Neil Young version is typical of those sessions—jaunty, restrained, polite, complete with a rooty-toot-toot Moog solo. The version with the Horse is a real pip.
“Everybody seems to wonder what it’s like down here,” Young muses, his caustic tone making it clear that for him, the entire Los Angeles scene might as well fall into the sea. Young’s Les Paul guitar leaps out of his amp and directly into your heart. It’s a garage/country sound, ragged but right, with guitars, vocals and drums smack-dab in your face. By the end of the song Young is absently moaning the song’s refrain over and over, while Danny and Ralph’s wistful, slightly sarcastic sha-la-las provide just the right edge. “Cinnamon Girl” is another kick—irresistibly melodic, with ridiculous but great lyrics, funky hand claps and a Johnny-one-note solo that had axmeisters everywhere cringing. Young and Whitten’s vocals, truly a dual performance, not harmony, blend beautifully and drive the song like a motherfucker. When Whitten lets out a “Whooo!” as Young slides into the ringing solo—each note bent ever so slightly by his Bigsby wang bar—it feels so good, you have to laugh. *
*There exists a single version of “Cinnamon Girl” that band members sounded less than thrilled with. The 45 contains a “different vocal performance,” said Young. “The parts are switched, Danny is on the bottom and me on top. That was so you could hear my voice clearly, which Reprise wanted for the single. We left the album version alone because it was better and we knew it.”
The vocals for the Everybody Knows title track were recorded directly onto tape, without even passing through a mixing board. “We were tryin’ to get all the bullshit out, so we figured directly into the machine would be better,” said Young. “Actually, the way we did it there was an impedance mismatch, which made it kinda spitty-sounding. We kinda liked that … gave it an edge. It could cut through anything.”
Who was making music like this? Long songs were not uncommon: San Francisco bands had their endless spacy jams, New York’s Velvet Underground had their harsh, metallic ones; but Crazy Horse was out in the barn, rooted in melody and wobbly, repetitive rhythms. “Everybody thought San Francisco music was druggy,” said aficionado Charlie Beesley. “Crazy Horse was really druggy—bleary, laidback, stoned. Nobody played that slow.”
Then there are the warhorses, “Down by the River
” and “Cowgirl in the Sand.” “It’s a cry—a desperation plea” is how Young described “Down by the River” to Robert Greenfield in 1970. “There’s no murder in it—it’s about blowin’ your thing with a chick.” The song oozes dread. Opening with shaky, nervous electric guitars, Ralphie picks the beat up to a stoned rumble, and then Young warbles, “Be on my side, I’ll be on your side / Together we can get away.” The feeling is that this pair is headed straight for the electric chair. “I shot my baby, shot her dead, shot her dead,” Young howls. The guitar playing is violent; as one critic put it, “He draws out notes with a sound that might remind one of a man taking his own blood with a knife.”
“Neil Young does with his guitar what Dylan does with his voice,” said Ken Viola. I agree. It is futile to try to link either Young’s songwriting or his voice to much of what came before, but his guitar sound carried clear links to the past: the gutbucket emotion of Link Wray, the hypnotic rhythm of Jimmy Reed, even Floyd Cramer’s slip-note piano. It feels traditional and yet sounds like no one else. Young had forged something wholly his own, as instantly identifiable as a few notes from Jerry Lee’s piano or a phrase from the lips of George Jones.
Even though nearly all the vocals on Everybody Knows were overdubbed, one hears the tremendous confidence Young had gained as a singer. * As Briggs said, “After everybody told him he shouldn’t sing at all, he went from his first record—where his singing isn’t that projected—to bein’ the fuckin’ man right there in front.” High, trembling, full of vulnerability yet somehow strong, “It’s not a classical voice,” said Emmylou Harris. “His voice has a real innocent quality, like a choirboy, but it’s almost scary. It’s very haunting, other-worldly.”
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