Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  See, Crosby’s a real person. I always like to be with him. Crosby’s the heart and soul of the whole thing. CSNY was at its best when Crosby was right there in the middle of it. Crosby’s a musical guy. He loves to play music, show ya his songs, talk about words. It’s real important to him. He’s an individual who has his own point of view. It’s so refreshing, somebody so much on their trip. You can count on Crosby.

  Big Sur was funny. Stills went nuts. I don’t know what the fuck happened—he picked a fight with somebody in the audience. Oh man, so many crazy things happened—what the fuck was going on? What the fuck were they doing? I still have no idea.

  —What effect did Woodstock have on music?

  That’s when the market got big enough for the marketers to realize that they should go for it. They could isolate this whole group of people, target them as a consumer group—and they did. They used the music. That was the beginning of rock and roll being used in commercials. That’s the long-term effect.

  Woodstock was a bullshit gig. A piece of shit. We played fuckin’ awful. No one was into the music. I think Stephen was way overboard into this huge crowd. Everybody was on this Hollywood trip with the fuckin’ cameras. They weren’t playin’ to the audience as much as to the cameras—these fuckin’ cameramen were all over the stage. It was a distraction.

  I thought TV was a sellout. You get used to it after a while, and you even start getting into filming things to keep a record of it, but at first I never thought of being filmed while I was playin’, and I could see everybody changing their performances for the fucking camera and I thought that was bullshit. All these assholes filming, everybody’s carried away with how cool they are…. I wasn’t moved. I wouldn’t let them film me, that’s why I’m not in the movie. I said, “One of you fuckin’ guys comes near me and I’m gonna fuckin’ hit you with my guitar. I’m playing music. Just leave me out.” Peace, love and flowers. That’s where I was at when we did Woodstock. So I was there … but I wasn’t. I left an imprint.

  You gotta look at these events in rock and roll history as shit, okay? Woodstock was a big piece of shit, and there have been several pieces of shit all the way down the line since the beginning of rock and roll—it’s all waste.

  The event is nothing. It’s what made the event happen—which is no longer where the event is. The event is the leftovers—it happens so the entity, the spirit, or what made the shit happen can move on.

  So all these events, no matter what the hell they are, are nothing. What is meaningful is what is left and gone beyond that. So all we have is people standing around a pile of shit, looking at it. You wouldn’t expect the thing that shit to go back and sit in the shit, would you?

  The sudden, monstrous success of CSNY unleashed the demons within. “Stephen and I were druggies together,” said Crosby. “Cocaine, acid and pot. In Neil’s case it wasn’t coke—that was never his drug—but me and Stills just went right out the window on it.”

  Poor Stephen. Stills was now the superstar he always wanted to be, but unfortunately he had invited company. “After a long CSN set, they’d leave and Neil would come on by himself,” Elliot Roberts recalled. “From then on it was ‘Wow, who’s the heavy guy with these three poseurs?’” Young’s seemingly effortless ability to control situations sent Stills over the edge. “Neil started making all the decisions, all the calls. Stephen would speak and then everyone would look at Neil. It killed Stephen, who had started it all. It still always shocks me that it was Stephen’s call to invite Neil back into the fold when he knew he wouldn’t be able to intimidate him.”

  “Stephen was always intensely, obviously, juvenilely competitive with Neil,” said Crosby. “He always wanted to be better than Neil but never could. Neil would never respond at the same level. Stephen would get loud, Neil would be loud enough to be heard, but he’d make a joke out of it. Stephen would have stacks of Marshall amps and Neil would have two little tiny amps and be louder. It would drive Stephen crazy.”

  With drugs fueling his paranoia, Stills would stretch his live CSNY solo segments by way of an excruciating, endless piano medley of “49 Bye-Byes” and “For What It’s Worth,” complete with topical Nixon/Agnew references. “Stephen overplayed,” said Roberts, who frequently clashed with Stills. “He was so high he was missing notes…. He would destroy himself by thinking, ‘This is how I get on top, this is how I get on top.’… You knew Stephen was tortured. You felt sorry for Stephen all the time.”

  Larry Kurzon told a story about Stills in England after the tour. “Stills was dyin’ to play with Paul McCartney. He just bought a Ferrari to go see McCartney. Stills paid cash for it, $12,500 cash in a shoe box. I led him to McCartney’s house. It was teeming out, an unbelievable Friday night in London where it was rainin’ like the world was comin’ down. I said, ‘Ring the bell, he’ll either answer or he won’t answer. You gotta ring the bell, I ain’t playin’ groupie.’ McCartney never answered the door. I left him there in the pouring rain with his brand-new Ferrari. Three days later he totalled it.”

  “Do I think that cocaine destroyed CSNY? Absolutely,” Neil Young told Nick Kent. “Cocaine and ego.”

  I’m trying to make records of the quality of the records that were made in the late fifties and the sixties, the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison records and things like that … It’s just a quality about them, the singer is into the song and the musicians were playing with the singer and it was an entity, y’know. It was something special that used to hit me all the time, that all these people were thinking the same thing and they’re all playing at the same time.

  —Interview with Elliot Blinder, 1970

  Thinking the same thing, playing at the same time. Listen to Young and the Horse’s 1969 version of Don Gibson’s 1958 country hit “Oh Lonesome Me” and you can feel what Neil is talking about. Gibson’s classic original is smooth, up-tempo country; Young’s version is doom-laden, funereal. From his crying bursts on the harmonica—WAAAAH!WAAAAH!—to Ralphie’s hit-you-in-the-gut kick drum on the breaks, to Young’s withering bee-sting solo at the song’s climax, this is astonishing stuff. “I’ve thought of everything from A to Z,” wails Young, sounding ready to crack.

  “You could compare CSNY to the Beatles and Crazy Horse to the Stones,” Young said to writer Gary Kenton in 1970. “Another thing I’ll tell you: The Rolling Stones are my favorite group.” Young went on to add, “The CSNY thing supports Crazy Horse. Without the other trip, Crazy Horse wouldn’t be doing this … that’s why I joined.”

  In the early seventies, CSNY was omnipotent, inescapable. Rolling Stone and the rest of the burgeoning rock media fawned over their every move—throughout Young’s seventies interviews, the emphasis was on CSNY. Crazy Horse just didn’t exist—there’s no press, no filmed performances, hardly any good live tapes and no real interviews with Danny Whitten. They were invisible—a point that, in retrospect, seems in their favor. Young could toil in the shadows, making great music with the Horse, while the universe hung on CSNY.

  Although most of the music remains unreleased, the studio recordings from Sunset Sound/Larrabee/Topanga and the taped live shows from the Fillmore in March 1970—the great lost period of the original Horse lineup—is some of the finest rock and roll ever made.

  Recorded, unbelievably enough, during the day while Young was rehearsing with CSNY at night, this music was completely different from the garage mysticism of Everybody Knows—short songs, countryish, more traditionally based, perhaps in a tiny way reminiscent of the Band. These sessions would begin Young’s long-standing tradition of recording during a full moon. “There are certain times to record,” Young would tell writer John Rockwell in 1977. “For the longest time I only recorded on a full moon, and it always had the same intensity…. Everybody would get crazy.”

  Young and the Horse cut “Everybody’s Alone,” “Oh Lonesome Me,” “Wonderin’,” “I Believe in You,” “Birds,” an exquisite version of Whitten’s “Look at All the Things,” as well as an epic
ballad called “Helpless” that failed to make it to tape. “We were doing it live, everybody playing and singing at once, and we did about an eight- or nine-minute version of it … with a long instrumental in the middle,” Young told writer Jean-Charles Costa. “And the engineer didn’t press the button down. It was much more free than anything I’ve done onstage.”

  Young’s live singing on these sessions is completely unrestrained, gut-wrenching, and the instrumentation is exquisite: just Danny, Billy and Ralph, with Neil on guitar and piano, plus a few tasteful overdubs—ringing acoustic guitars, muted electric solos placed low in the mix and spare touches of vibes (not the first instrument that comes to mind when you think of the Horse) that add the spook to everything.

  “Songs are supposed to be heroic enough to give the illusion of stopping time,” Bob Dylan once said. Well, “I Believe in You” knocks the clock off the wall every time. Ralphie smacks out a sad, empty drumbeat—it sounds like he’s back to banging cardboard boxes, for chrissakes—and Young comes in with that eeriest of first lines, “Now that you’ve found yourself losin’ your mind, are you here again?” The song creeps along, and as Young picks out a forlorn note on the piano—dit-dit-dit—he utters a question unspeakable in any relationship: “How can I place you above me? Am I lyin’ to you when I say”—now the piano ascends dramatically—“I believe in you.” He moans over and over, his voice soaring to unearthly heights, a singing apparition, the Horse la-la-la-ing in the background. The sound of Neil with Danny and Ralph on harmonies … I’ve never heard anything remotely like it. As for those pained by Young’s voice, on this track I’d put him up against Elvis, Roy Orbison, anybody.

  What emotions come to mind listening to “I Believe in You”? Fear, paralysis, complete doom. Just because you believe in somebody doesn’t mean you’re going to stay with them, and one wonders what thoughts went through Susan Young’s mind the first time she heard this little ditty. The honesty with which Young addresses his own will chills me to the bone. As Young wrote of the song in his 1977 Decade liner notes, “I think this gets to the heart of the matter and as Danny Whitten once said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’” Powerful, raw stuff, some of the best—and already some of the last—the original Crazy Horse would make. Unfortunately, Young returned to the CSNY circus, and while it was a jackpot in terms of exposure, in terms of his art it paid meager dividends, as his first venture into the studio with the lineup would attest.

  In October 1969, Young joined his infinitely more famous friends at Wally Heider’s San Francisco studio to record the album known as Déjà Vu. The band stayed at the Caravan Lodge Motel, a dump in the middle of the Tenderloin district. Young was accompanied by Harriet and Speedy, two bush babies purchased from a Topanga pet store that unsettled Nash. “Neil never had his room cleaned because the maids wouldn’t go in. You’d be talking to Neil, and all of a sudden this thing would go BING! and leap right across the room onto his shoulder. You know how dogs start to look like their owners? Neil started to look like these fuckin’ bush babies. It was insane.”

  Emotionally it was not a good time for CSN. Stills was reeling from a breakup with Judy Collins; Nash and Joni Mitchell were about to go kaflooie; and Crosby had lost his girlfriend, Christine Hinton, in a head-on car collision. He began missing sessions, snorting heroin. “I would come into the studio, just sit on the floor and cry,” said Crosby. “It wasn’t a big upper.”

  Dealing with Neil Young in the studio presented its own problems. “Trying to get through Déjà Vu was a nightmare,” said Dallas Taylor. “See, the formula that we hit on during the first record—with Stephen in the driver’s seat—worked. That didn’t work when Neil came into the picture. You can’t have two presidents.”

  “Neil was very Neil during Déjà Vu, ” said Nash. “He never played us all his songs—he was obviously doing his own solo record—and he would take his CSNY tracks down to the studio, do overdubs and mix ’em himself. Once again, it’s part of Neil’s insatiable quest for control. I was physically moved to tears at least once.”

  Only one non-Young cut would be done as a live band track—Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair,” a hippie meltdown expressing fear of the barber’s chair that has an Ed Wood Jr.-like intensity. Most of the recordings reek of Overdub City, which Young bitched about in the press—a criticism Nash felt was two-faced. “If it’s so fucking much to have the band in one room playing, why did Neil do all the overdubs on ’Country Girl’ himself? He’s full of shit.” Recording dragged on, with Stills grandly claiming that Déjà Vu took eight hundred hours of studio time to make. “Eight ten-hour days,” Young later cracked to his father.

  One can’t deny Déjà Vu’s outrageous commercial success—upon its release in March 1970, it shipped two million copies—but it contained little of what made CSN’s first album unique. The one great pleasure is the cut Young failed to capture with the Horse, “Helpless,” a ballad so spare not even Crosby, Stills and Nash could muck it up. William S. Burroughs once said, “The function of art and all creative thought is to make us aware of what we know and don’t know we know. You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already.” Primordial, aching, trancelike, “Helpless” is something you already know, and it makes you believe Young is only the messenger of his work. It’s the only one of his songs I could actually imagine Otis Redding singing.

  The rest of Déjà Vu sounds like a lead turd by comparison. “I remember being very disappointed by that record and feeling it was overblown and pompous,” said Joel Bernstein. The extravagant leatherette paper cover said it all—an old-timey photo of the group as sullen hippie aristocrats, decked out in period regalia. It was a long way from Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

  But the money rolled in. Dallas Taylor, who went from wretched poverty to paying for Porsches with fistfuls of cash, tasted the ennui of stardom. “I can remember one night after one of our better shows, watchin’ our roadies Bruce and Guillermo packin’ up the equipment and putting everything in cases. I just wished they could pack me away in a case until the next show.

  “What started out as our goal to be the world’s greatest rock and roll band became trying to be the world’s richest rock and roll band. It seemed to happen overnight. In the beginning, nothing mattered but the music. Then nothing mattered but the money. Once that happens, you’re doomed.”

  I think that Crosby, Stills and Nash made great records. Crosby, Stills, & Nash is better than Déjà Vu. “Country Girl” is overblown. It’s overdone. It’s my fault … parts of Déjà Vu are as good—but they’re the parts that I’m not on.

  The rest of it … I don’t really know what to say. Dallas was right.

  The best records were when Stephen and Dallas were making the tracks. They really had a unified thing happening. My thing was “We gotta play it live. We gotta play it together,” and that was like, fuck, it didn’t fit. Different approach. That’s okay. CSN is still together.

  —What do you think of the Crazy Horse Sunset Sound sessions?

  The electric version of “Birds” with vibes turned out to be great, but it was only half the song. After the first verse I stopped. “Wow, that’s great.” “Neil—you stopped.” Forgot the second verse, heh heh. Good shit. If I hadn’t been distracted by the CSNY thing, I probably would’ve made a whole record like that. But things have a way of doing what they do.

  —How did the Horse feel about you and CSN?

  Hey, lemme put it this way—it didn’t bother them at all. It wasn’t the same on the other side.

  —Did you explain it to CSN?

  No. Crazy Horse was hard for anybody to understand when I was in CSNY. CSN couldn’t understand. “What the fuck do you need Crazy Horse for?” There was very little understanding of what the hell was I doing with these people. Why would I waste my time? CSN were fulfilled with what they were doing, and I guess they couldn’t understand why I wasn’t. But I had already had this other thing going before and I wasn’t gonna give it up. I had to
keep going. I liked it. Everybody Knows was good, because even though CSN thought it was no good—it wasn’t, like, theirs, it wasn’t CSN—in the long run, it hung in there. It stayed on the charts. It was like, y’know, a constant reminder to them.

  All the different ways that I could express myself with all these different groups of people … I had twice as many possibilities as the other guys. But CSN had their own thing. And y’know, it’s funny how many more people liked that. Isn’t that funny?

  —Speedy and Harriet made quite an impression on Graham Nash.

  I bet they did. Go back to my room and there’re MONKEYS in there. I was ahead of Michael Jackson on that one.

  —Your spare taste in drums might not have been Dallas Taylor’s trip.

  It was his trip at five o’clock in the morning after playing “Helpless” about sixteen times…. I had to wait until it was real late and keep on playin’ it with ’em for a long time. They got so fuckin’ tired, everybody got slowed down—they could actually play it without goin’… too fast.

  Dallas couldn’t play my shit for crap. That was hard for me, because I liked Dallas. He had to work to play my stuff, ’cause he had to lay back. I really gave him a rough time. It was like he felt I shouldn’t be in CSN, and I felt like he couldn’t play my music. It’s funny—I didn’t even know he was on junk at the time or I woulda said, “Go out and get high—because it might slow you down a little.” Dallas really was Stephen’s drummer, so they had their thing goin’. And their thing was playin’ a lotta notes, okay? I’d been playin’ with Ralph. It was a different thing.

  The Crazy Horse “Helpless” was just like all those other ones at Sunset Sound—it had the big cymbals, guitars. When I missed recording it with Crazy Horse, I took that as an omen. I said, “Well, that’s why I did it with CSN.”