Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  At the time Young moved into his ranch in the fall of 1970, Jim Mazzeo was inhabiting a nearby stretch of land that he and fellow artist James McCracken had given the name Star Hill Academy for Anything. Sixteen hundred acres of redwood forest surrounding an abandoned sawmill, Star Hill was presided over by a young conservative named Jimmy Wickett, whose freethinking father had donated the land for an artists’ community.

  The first inhabitants were Mazzeo and McCracken, who moved to the property in August 1968. A hulking giant in wire-rimmed glasses who would soon be wreaking havoc in everyone’s life, including Young’s, McCracken was “the greatest artist I’ve ever known,” said Mazzeo. “He was able to create thunder in the middle of a sunny day.” The pair created all manner of art together, McCracken carving giant faces out of wood and Mazzeo forging gnarly sculptures out of scrap metal.

  Star Hill “was an extraordinary place, with all these weirdos up there,” said Johanna Putnoy, who later lived in a geodesic dome on the property. She recalls one of the unique power sources for the enclave: a methane-gas generator. “They got this big canister with a hole in the top, and you’d sit on this canister overlooking the hills and everybody took their shit in this big canister. One night it blew sky-high. Luckily no one was on it, but there was shit all over the place.”

  Mazzeo also managed to con the phone company into putting a pay phone on the wilderness property, then pirated the electricity for a number of abodes, including a seven-room tree house perched a hundred feet up in a towering redwood. A pulley-and-rope cable car very tenuously made its way from one of their workshops up to the tree house, and it was Neil Young’s bad luck to show up the day after the contraption had been completed.

  Young had already made a couple of neighborly visits to Star Hill, and Mazzeo—aware that Young was an aficionado of odd art—led him to the trolley. “He didn’t know it was a gondolier car, he thought it was some kinda sculpture, some kinda art. I go, ‘Hop in. Check it out. Ya gotta sit in it.’ Neil was takin’ all kinds of medication—he was really frail, really weak, his back hurt, so he’s bein’ real careful. I go ‘Click!,’ the wall swings open and Wham! We launched him!” Mazzeo watched as a terrified Neil Young shot up through the air, gripping on to the car for dear life. “He spent about four hours in the tree house before he took the cable car back.” Such was the chaos Sandy had to offer, and he and Young became fast friends.

  Star Hill would soon become more of a bona fide commune rather than a retreat for oddball artists, and when Young added another six-hundred-acre parcel to his ranch, Mazzeo moved to Broken Arrow, converting an old blacksmith shop into a welding studio where he made Young stoves, art and, recalls Larry Johnson, “weird chandeliers that are great to look at but still don’t work. You shock yourself trying to turn them on.”

  I didn’t like L.A. Topanga. Too busy. Too many weirdos. I like the country better. Somebody’s comin’ at ya, you can see ’em. And then if they do somethin’, they got a long way to go to get away from where they were when they did it.

  The ranch was great. First place I looked at. I liked the road—getting in, getting out. The view. I was so happy I had my own place. Everything was new.

  —Did you have a plan when you moved to the ranch?

  Nope.

  —Did you know you were gonna build?

  Yeah. I didn’t know I was gonna build as much…. I just loved the ranch, and it grew with me.

  —Were you a hippie?

  Well, y’know, I wouldn’t call me a hippie, but I think anyone else would’ve. You see a lot of kids walkin’ around today that look almost exactly like I did then, down to the fuckin’ boots, jeans, plaid shirts and long hair. It’s unbelievable. Don’t know what that means.

  —You should’ve copyrighted that look.

  I feel good about lettin’ it go.

  The first few months on the ranch were quiet. Young lived in a small house with meager electricity and heat. “It was this little old funky ranch—the living room was half the house,” said craftsman Morris Shepard. Indian blankets decorated the walls and a tree stump served as a coffee table. Out in the driveway were a couple of old Cadillacs and a Willys Jeepster nicknamed “Old Yeller.” The property was sparsely populated at first: Drummer Johnny Barbata lived with Young for a month or so, then roadie Guillermo Giachetti moved in for a while. Louie Avilla—the Portuguese ranch foreman—and his wife, Clara, lived nearby. Avilla would find himself immortalized to some degree in “Old Man,” a moody meditation on age, love and everything else Young was feeling at the moment.

  At the end of November, Young played some acoustic solo gigs at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., then two prestigious dates at Carnegie Hall in New York City on December 4 and 5. Young sold out both performances without the benefit of either CSNY or Crazy Horse. Carnegie Hall didn’t smooth Young’s mercurial temperament one iota—he angrily stormed offstage after some noisy fans snuck into the packed house via the fire exits. “It was intermission,” Young would tell writer Bud Scoppa. “I just took it a little early.” Both Rassy and Scott attended, on separate nights.

  Although most of the material performed consisted of career highlights from as far back as the Springfield days, there was, as usual, a handful of new songs: “Old Man,” “See the Sky About to Rain” and “Bad Fog of Loneliness,” one of Young’s more revealing relationship songs. The droll first line said it all: “Bad fog of loneliness / Put a cloud on my singlemindedness.” It was written in the aftermath of his marriage to Susan, and you can hear the agonizing dialogue in Young’s head as heart tries to overrule mind. “So long, woman, I am gone / So much pain to go through / Come back, maybe I was wrong,” he cries, then plunges into a sad little jig on guitar.

  Relationships were on Young’s mind. As he sang in “Old Man,” “live alone in a paradise / that makes me think of two.” He would encounter the next woman in his life while in traction, confined to a hospital bed. Directly after the Carnegie Hall show, Young wrenched his back severely while moving a slab of walnut at the ranch. For nearly a year Young would live in a back brace, frequently under the influence of a powerful muscle relaxant called Soma.

  First time I got in trouble with my back was from working in the garden in Topanga, doing a lot of work with a shovel. Then I got stuck in my car and I couldn’t move. I went to the chiropractor, got straightened out, was kinda okay, then within a year I was movin’ somethin’ else heavy, some big pieces of wood. The next day I got in my car to go somewhere and my leg wouldn’t come up—I put my foot on the clutch, on the brake. I had to lift it up. So I went to the doctor and they put me in the hospital.

  It wasn’t good. It wasn’t a happy thing. Soma compound.

  —How long were you on Soma?

  Too long! Long enough to make some really stupid mistakes. Soma compound and Michelob—the combination is just unbelievable.

  I made some erroneous decisions based on that stuff.

  —Can you, uh, tell me exactly what decisions you’re referring to?

  No. If you could find decisions that I’ve made in my life that are obviously erroneous—chances are, you just put the time together with when I was takin’ the Soma compound, you can figure it out yourself. I can’t say.

  —Not the best grounds for starting a relationship, you being in a neck brace and on painkillers?

  No … that was the grounds for starting the relationship. That’s the shaky foundation it was built on.

  “I do everything backwards—I get an Academy Award nomination to start out with, and I end up in B pictures.”

  Carrie Snodgress is behind the wheel of a beat-up white Caddy. Dressed in a flimsy white shirt and white jeans, she blasts Tracy Chapman on the stereo and sings along without really knowing the words, talking a mile a minute in her infamous voice, a rasp that sounds like a thousand cigarettes have been ground out on her vocal cords. Her sinewy, spare figure betrays her midwestern roots, and her features are worn but sturdy—a classic American look, Pipp
i Longstocking by way of the Carter Family.

  The Caddy careens down the road like a bumper car broken free of its orbit. At the very least, riding with Snodgress is exhilarating. You sort of cover your eyes and hope for the best. And although the song wasn’t written for her, Carrie really is like a hurricane. The minute I hop in the car, she’s on me like a searchlight, picking my brain, hugging me, invading my personal space.

  With Carrie you think you’re long-lost buddies, then months pass with phone calls unreturned. Then you see her roar by in the Caddy, which is invariably a little more dented, with a neighbor’s baby in a car seat at her side. That’s Carrie. Always helping everybody but herself.

  Snodgress was not a popular figure with many in the Young camp. While taking Young to court for child support, she aired her grievances in a sensational and inaccurate People magazine article. Then there was the lurid court case with Jack Nitzsche, which had many questioning her role in the whole affair. “She’s an actress,” I would hear over and over from those who knew her, as if that explained away some affliction worse than death.

  We made our way through Hollywood to the home Young provided her and their son. Zeke was in his room, glued to his computer, deep into his current project: logging in the lyrics to every one of his father’s songs. He was up to Young’s 1975 album, Zuma, which was blaring from a stereo system Zeke seemed to know every working detail of.

  Zeke suffers from mild cerebral palsy, and Carrie is obsessively devoted to him. The slightest whimper from his lips had Carrie up fixing whatever caused it, as Zeke’s wry observations pricked holes here and there in his mother’s nonstop monologue. I wondered what would happen when Zeke was full-grown and mother and son would have to separate. It wasn’t going to be easy for either of them. “It isn’t what you’d call your average mother-child relationship,” she said with a grin.

  Carrie was a million laughs, but a hellhound always seemed to be on her trail. Every time I saw her there was some new catastrophe going on in her life: car crashes, strange people hanging around the house, harassing phone calls in the middle of the night. Typical was the unappreciative soul she took in who turned out to be a crackhead and took her for everything she had. “Police said he must’ve pulled a truck up,” Carrie said with a tired chuckle. In the process she’d lost a hand-carved antique heart of gold, one of her few mementos from the long-gone relationship with Young. She was always racing around putting out fires, and occasionally you couldn’t help but wonder if the match was in her own pocket.

  Carrie Snodgress was born in Barrington, Illinois, on October 27, 1946. A tomboy among three brothers, Carrie said her role in the family was “the clown, the little kid who would put on funny outfits and do little skits to make everybody laugh when things were bad. What my parents gave me as a toolbox to live with was a joke—I had screwdrivers with no handles. I didn’t have a clue to identify my feelings. How the fuck was I supposed to figure out if I was sad, glad, mad?”

  Her father was “the most honest car salesman in Chicago,” she said. “If you bought a used car from Harry Snodgress, you knew what you were buyin’.” Her mother, Carolyn, was a severe alcoholic who would test the love of her children by feigning suicide on a regular basis.

  “She was so funny. She’d have the gas going, then she’d announce, ‘I’m going to kill myself, everybody. So if anybody wants to see me alive in the morning, maybe you’ll do something about it.’ Well, we all heard it so many times we’d all go back to sleep. Next thing you know she’d be sayin’, ‘Goddamn it isn’t anybody gonna get up and come downstairs? I’ve been down here for fifteen minutes, for chrissakes. I could be dead and nobody cares. NOW GET DOWN HERE!’ We’d all flip coins to decide who was gonna save her. Oh my God, it was too funny.”

  Abandoning an original plan to become a nurse, Snodgress got a master’s degree in acting from the prestigious Goodman School of Drama. By 1968 she had moved to Hollywood and begun acting in television. Signed as one of the last contract players at Universal, Snodgress burst into the limelight with her portrayal of a neglected mate in 1970’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, for which she would win two Golden Globe Awards and be nominated for an Oscar. Snodgress had to endure five screen tests to win the part. Director Frank Perry was “hostile and cold,” she said. “Oddly enough, I took that as a stage direction: ‘Maybe that’s what he wants—nothing.’”

  The result was an unnervingly real performance, and among the many viewers captivated was Young’s roadie Guillermo Giachetti. “I had seen this movie and just fell in love with this person—I wanted to save her from this asshole husband,” he recalls. While on the road in Washington, D.C., he took Young to see the film. Young was similarly smitten, and upon returning to Los Angeles he discovered she was appearing in a play at the Mark Taper Forum. Giachetti and fellow roadie Bruce Berry were dispatched to slip backstage and check her out. “The next day there was a note on the table saying, ‘Call Neil Young,’” said Snodgress. “Of course, I didn’t know Neil Young from Neil Diamond.” Her roommate Gigi filled her in, Snodgress called back and a date was arranged for the following month.

  When the time came, Young was bedridden at the Chateau Marmont, seeking medical attention for his back. What Snodgress remembers most from their first encounter was the incredibly potent marijuana. “That Panama Red! Jesus, that was strong pot. I got about halfway home and had to pull over and go to sleep. I got lost goin’ home.”

  The next day Young was hospitalized, and Snodgress, with roommate Gigi di Piazza in tow, came to visit. Snodgress was on her way out of town on a lengthy publicity tour for Diary, and Young was headed back to the road as well, but another date was arranged, this time for lunch at a fifties coffee shop called Ship’s. Snodgress showed up with her cocker spaniel, Timer. “I told him I went everywhere with my dog. Neil said, ‘Everywhere?’” Young was in fragile condition. “He had this real old-fashioned lace-up brace on, with metal bars diggin’ into his hips to keep him straight—it was gruesome. My choice was being an actress or a nurse, so Neil was right up my alley. I just got to nurse the hell out of him.” Snodgress would tell Jeannie Field, “I fell in love with Neil’s pain.”

  The simplicity of Young’s life impressed Snodgress. “When I first met him, he was on tour with that little bamboo case. I said, ‘Is that it?’ He truly was what he represented himself to be—the man with the single suitcase and two pair of jeans.” Snodgress visited the ranch and the romance blossomed. “I had something to offer him in the beginning, which was to keep it simple. To go look at sunsets. To say fuck the phone and pull the jack out. Neil loved it—management didn’t.

  “We were in this cocoon of intensity. Neil and I were uniquely in the same position at the same time, having overwhelming success facing us.” Much more savvy than Snodgress when it came to dealing with the success, Young quizzed the actress on her finances and counseled her on how to cope with fame. “Neil was the one who pointed out to me the edge I was walkin’ on. I was goin’ so goddamn fast I don’t think I knew how to sit down.” When Snodgress complained about being scrutinized by the press, Young maintained that pleasing reporters wasn’t necessarily part of the job. “Neil had a concept that the media could screw ya, and he’d have nothin’ to do with that.”

  Young and Snodgress were like “a royal couple,” said Elliot Roberts. “He was the big pop star, she was a movie star nominated for an Academy Award. Wherever they went it was a big thing. Diary was a big women’s film—people looked at Carrie like she was this incredible political figure. She was what Jane Fonda wanted to be.” The quintessential hippie in granny glasses, Snodgress didn’t seem to care about money, spoke out against the Vietnam war and had a menagerie of characters she looked after. “She would have all these people who didn’t have places to stay just sleeping in the downstairs room, and Neil thought that was just so cool,” said Roberts. “She devoted herself to the poor and the tired.” For the inward and remote Young, it must’ve been overwhelming. “Everything he
couldn’t be, she was.”

  Accompanying himself on piano, guitar and for the first time extensively on harmonica, Young spent January and February 1971 on a solo tour of small halls that took him through the United States, Canada and England. It was a small production with a four-man crew. Young tuned his own guitars because roadie Guillermo Giachetti didn’t know how. These were intimate shows. At the end of the Edmonton performance, Giachetti remembers, “The windchill factor went down to sixty below—all the autos were frozen. The people came back in the theater, and as we were tearing down, Neil played some more.”

  A raft of new songs shot out of the love-struck musician. This would be by far his most popular incarnation: the lonely, lovelorn boy (he looked and sounded oddly adolescent) with guitar. Most of the songs were ballads—simple, accessible tunes like “Journey Through the Past” and “Love in Mind.” “Heart of Gold” was the archetypal Young lament: restless, romantic, intent on getting what he wants, even though you wonder if he’ll still want it when he has it.

  At first Young performed “Heart of Gold” on piano coupled with another new song, “A Man Needs a Maid.” The “Maid” lyrics were remarkably honest in expressing a typically paralyzed male point of view on relationships: “Just someone to keep my house clean / Fix my meals and go away,” yearning for something more, but incapable of intimacy. “To give a love, you gotta live a love / To live a love, you gotta be ‘part of,’” he sings, acknowledging he is part of nothing. The line that was perhaps most revealing was cut when the two songs mutated into separate entities: “Afraid,” he cries, “a man feels afraid.”

  In an era of women’s lib, “A Man Needs a Maid” would be number one on the hit parade of Male Chauvinist Pigs everywhere. “Young was tired of cowgirls,” said writer Richard Meltzer. “He just wants to limit what a woman is to him to those few things that can be managed without falling apart, so let’s begin very simply—the first thing he wants is a maid. He needs love, he needs pussy, he needs excitement, but primarily he needs a maid. I thought that was just so thrilling.”