Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Young was not that easy to get close to. Despite all the activity swirling around him, he remained unapproachable to many. “You gotta understand that Neil would send out this vibe, like ‘STAY AWAY,’ and a lot of people walked around on little cat’s feet because of that,” said filmmaker Jeannie Field. “I think at that point Neil was just living in his own head, which is why he had gone to the ranch in the first place. He was a private man. He was not accessible.”

  The portrait of Young that emerges during this period is of a prolific, driven artist, a recluse who followed his whims and avoided confontation at all costs, insulated by layers of people happy to do his bidding. David Briggs would have a falling-out with Young early into the Harvest period. In January, Briggs had recorded two Massey Hall solo shows in Toronto, but now that Young had recorded the new material in the studio with Mazer, he wouldn’t even listen to the tapes. Briggs wouldn’t work with Young for another two years. *

  Young’s back problems would draw out completion of the Harvest album. In March, Young went to London with Jack Nitzsche to record a pair of songs live with the London Symphony—“A Man Needs a Maid” and “There’s a World.” In April, Young returned to Nashville to cut “Harvest.” September would bring the first recordings done on the ranch, with “Words,” “Are You Ready for the Country?” and “Alabama” cut by backing up a remote-recording truck to a dilapidated old barn on the property, where Nitzsche would join Young’s Nashville outlaws for these sessions, playing piano and, for the first time in his life, slide guitar.

  Poking around an instrument shop, Young caught Nitzsche eyeing a vintage 1936 Epiphone amp and an old Kay guitar. Young bought them for Jack on the spot and, after overhearing Nitzsche fumble around with an ancient blues lick he’d copped from a Howlin’ Wolf record, Neil soon appeared with “Are You Ready for the Country?” †

  Much to Nitzsche’s embarrassment, he was soon sitting amid bales of hay accompanying Young on the Kay guitar he barely knew how to play. Bernstein would capture the barn vibe in a photo Young used for the back cover of Harvest: all the Stray Gators, hands at their instruments, staring apprehensively at Young bent over his guitar, his long mane of hair totally obscuring his face, indifferent to their attention. Look at me, I’m not here.

  Vocal overdubs were added by Young’s CSN buddies, giving him yet another chance to weird out Graham Nash. “I’m down at the ranch and Neil goes, ‘Hey, Willie, wanna hear something?’ So we go down to the lake and row out to the middle in this rowboat and I think, ‘Jesus Christ, this guy’s been a fuckin’ mystery to me all my life—if he wants to talk to me privately, surely there’s more places to do it than the middle of a fucking lake in a rowboat.’ What he’d done is he’d wired his house as the left speaker and his entire barn as the right speaker, and they played Harvest. And at the end of it Elliot Mazer comes down to the shore of the lake and goes, ‘Neil, how is it?’ Neil turns around and shouts, ‘More barn!’”

  On August 11, 1971, Young was operated on by Dr. Peter Lindstrom, undergoing a laminectomy that removed a couple of discs in his back. He was welcomed home by Carrie’s parents. “My mother made this nurse’s hat, my father a stethoscope. Talk about corn. Neil loved it.” The months of physical debilitation were about to come to an end. Young was particularly relieved to get off the pills. “Neil hated those Percodans,” said Snodgress. “He’s not a man who likes bein’ on dope consciousness.”

  Finishing Harvest was complicated by Young’s health problems and the fact that he wanted to mix the record at home. The ornately lettered Tom Wilkes cover was another unending nightmare for the record company. Much care was given to finding just the right kind of oatmeal paper, initiating a Neil Young tradition of self-destructing album covers that drove the pressing plants crazy.

  Finally the record was complete, comprised of the Mazer sessions, the two Nitzsche cuts and a live performance of “The Needle and the Damage Done” from the solo tour recorded at UCLA. “Heart of Gold” hit number one on the Cashbox charts on March 18, 1972 (“Old Man” would reach number thirty-one on the Billboard charts in June). * The album shot to number one on the Billboard charts and would stay in the top forty for twenty-five weeks.

  Ironically, “Heart of Gold” would be bumped from the charts by a clone—America’s moronic “Horse with No Name.” Young even received a congratulatory phone call from his father, who heard the record on the radio and assumed it was his son. Amazingly, Elliot Roberts immediately signed the band to a management contract, a bit of information that both Nitzsche and Mazzeo would use to wind up Neil. Mazzeo: “I remember him callin’ Elliot, yellin’ and screamin’—‘Waddya spendin’ time with this copy band when you’ve got the original right here, Elliot?’”

  Jeannie Field recalls Young showing up for dinner one night around this time. “I was really surprised. He didn’t usually hang out with us—it was so unusual. Well, I found out later that Elliot had brought America up to meet him, and Neil was so pissed off there was no way he was going to meet them. He was just hiding out.”

  Young might’ve been momentarily annoyed, but by most accounts the musician was unimpressed with his massive success. “I remember coming up to the ranch one day and ‘Heart of Gold’ had just started on KFRC, the big top-forty station up there, and I grabbed Neil and set him out in the rent-a-car,” said Elliot Mazer. “He was disappointed, hearing his song on the radio.”

  —Hearing your own hit song on the radio didn’t thrill you, I’m told. What else is new?

  —Do you have a philosophy about fame?

  It’s part of my life now. I can get away from it with my family—Pegi gives me a nice kind of hiding place from fame, gives it reality. There’s no recipe for how to deal with fame, there’s no book. I think you just gotta do what you gotta do and not be a prisoner of it. Don’t try to do things just to satisfy other people—or fame can really eat you.

  But, y’know, I think I focus maybe too much on that aspect of life.

  I spend too much of my life thinking about fame and what’s hard about it…. I’ve covered that, I’ve gotten into that, I’ve tried to figure it out. May have learned some things—I don’t know how to articulate them—about how to survive.

  You can’t dwell on it. You can’t take it seriously. You can’t believe too many of the good things that people tell you. Nobody should be told that many good things about themselves. Makes you kinda cold, kinda gets so you don’t feel it. Because if you feel all those things, you just can’t help but get addicted to “You’re different.”

  —Do you have a philosophy about money?

  Keep it moving. Don’t hoard. Money’s no good, get rid of it. Turn it into people doing things. Turn it into jobs. Turn it into happiness.

  —You get off on that?

  Oh, I love that. The more people I employ, the happier I am—that means my money’s goin’ into other people’s lives, and if I can give ’em somethin’ to create that they can be happy with, that’s great. Now that all sounds fantastic—unless you happen to work for me. The idea’s great—“Okay, I work for Neil, I make records, I take care of his ranch”—but the truth of the matter is that I’m very remote.

  —What was the result of Harvest?

  Seclusion was a big part of it. I liked the idea of bein’ able to get away. Control that part of it. Not be on the front lines all the time.

  Despite its mass appeal, Harvest didn’t fare so well with the critics. Even Rolling Stone, which Young has had in his pocket most of his career, panned it (to be fair, it should be pointed out that the magazine was on a bit of a roll: They had been lukewarm on Gold Rush and would torpedo the Journey Through the Past soundtrack). But Harvest was another important piece of the puzzle.

  Mazer and the Stray Gators bring a little polish to Young’s sound on Harvest, adding mathematical precision to his standard boom-boom tak. Consciously or not, Neil had hired Nashville pros and made ’em play like Crazy Horse. Restraining players from their licks created a palpa
ble tension: Listen to Buttrey sneak in the tiniest variation in “Out on the Weekend,” hoping the boss doesn’t catch him adding the dreaded extra stuff.

  “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man” were irresistible: extremely well executed, commercial country-pop of a sort Young hadn’t attempted before but instantly mastered. Even these songs had some dark shadows within—who else but Young would slip into “Old Man” such an unsettling line as “Does it mean that much to me / To mean that much to you”? Was it directed at somebody in particular, or Young’s entire audience? “The audience is definitely who I was going after,” Young wrote to me in 2000.

  “Neil has those classic elements of sturdy song construction,” said Linda Ronstadt, “but still gives you something new and unique. There’s just some completely classic support structures in his chord progressions—that often seem to run off the key of D—that are just so sturdy and so right, like Greek architecture. The strength of the classic traditional stuff, even though they’re completely unique, they’re all completely Neil.”

  The London sessions were Nitzsche and Young at their most over the top: The bombastic reading of “A Man Needs a Maid” gave it a pretension not present in the naked solo performances. So much of the Harvest-era material that seemed so heavy at the time is just that: heavy. As in turgid, man. Like the overly simplistic “Alabama.” You might skip this one altogether if it weren’t for that gorgeous howling guitar.

  But then what’s a great Neil Young track without the flaw? The unreleased Briggs-recorded solo demo of “See the Sky About to Rain” is one of the gems of the period, with stark, powerful lyrics just this side of Hank Williams; that is, until the excruciating end line, where Young whines about “the man” breaking his fiddle “down the middle.”

  Some expected more from Young. Ken Viola, who had been somewhat disappointed by what he felt was the lighter direction of After the Gold Rush, felt cheated by Harvest. The lyrics were full of “surface vagaries” and “simple chord changes”; there were none of the mind-altering surprises Viola had come to expect from his hero. Joel Bernstein preferred the bootlegs of the solo shows to what ended up on record.

  Hiding out in Phoenix at the time, Bob Dylan was driven crazy by “Heart of Gold.” “I used to hate it when it came on the radio,” he said to Scott Cohen in 1985. “I’d say, ‘Shit, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should well as be me.’ … There I was, stuck in the desert someplace … I needed to lay back for a while, forget about things, myself included, and I’d get so far away and turn on the radio and there I am, but it’s not me. It seemed to me somebody else had taken my thing and had run away with it, y’know, and I never got over it.”

  The one truly great moment on Harvest is “Harvest.” Accompanied by the empathetic and evocative piano work of John Harris, Young explores the darker side of the Snodgress clan: The way Carrie tells it, Young pumped her for details of her bizarre family life as she and a friend tripped on acid. She revealed her mother’s many false-alarm suicide attempts, which Young perhaps refers to with: “Did she wake you up to tell you that / It was only a change of plan?” “Harvest,” as Briggs would say, had the spook, and Carrie’s mother, Carolyn Snodgress, would burst into tears when Young invited her to the studio to hear it. Carolyn would be dead within a few years and, eerily enough, so would John Harris. *

  It was during the Harvest period that Young’s film company, Shakey Pictures, was born. Young had already toyed with moviemaking, fooling around with Super-8 equipment in Topanga. The first Shakey Pictures project would be a pseudo-documentary entitled Journey Through the Past. Did Young work from a script? No, nothing so conventional. “I have a list,” Young would tell Larry Johnson, his principal collaborator, and with a crew consisting mainly of Fred Underhill, Jeannie Field and veteran cameraman David Myers, Young ran around the country shooting mostly sixteen-millimeter footage relating to weird ideas on his list and whatever other odd ideas popped out of his skull in the process.

  A man who’s funny, fast and takes the weirder aspects of Young’s scene with a grain of salt, Johnson said Journey Through the Past “was very experimental, and that to me is the strength of Neil and why he’s great to work for—because he will try stuff that other people more knowledgeable than him would never think of trying, because they know all the pitfalls. Neil’s the naïve explorer.” Much of the film was straight-documentary footage of Young in various locations; the rest consisted of symbolic reveries that Mazzeo claimed were extrapolated from Young’s dreams. The film was then augmented with bits of CSNY footage shot the previous year (much to the chagrin of Gary Burden, who felt Young hijacked his never completed documentary).

  Featured in the film were some of Young’s more eccentric neighbors. Richard Lee Patterson “lived in a heart-shaped hole carved in the side of a hill,” said Mazzeo. “He put sod back on the roof so you couldn’t tell he was there.” Patterson played “The Graduate,” a character who wandered silently around the desert through most of the film. Young also enlisted Gary Davis’s participation. A nomad with long gray hair and a drum named Bob, Davis has floated in and out of Young’s world for years. “Scary Gary—he was just this weird freak who decided he was gonna clean our studio for the rest of his life for free,” said Mazzeo. “He sat around the first year just quoting the Bible—and we were rather far from the Bible.” Mazzeo pinpointed the moment Young realized Davis had star potential. “I remember we were driving, and Gary said, ‘You know, I find a lot of personal solace talking to my truck.’ Neil went, ‘You talk to your truck?’” Davis was quickly before the camera, conversing with his vehicle—and the truck, in a voice dubbed by James McCracken, talked back to him.

  McCracken, who also appeared before the cameras, spent hours and hours building elaborate miniature adobe buildings housing salamanders, and then promptly destroyed them. “Mac was drunk and he didn’t think Neil responded appropriately—like he was totally blown away—so he just walked all over ’em,” said Mazzeo. “Neil would go, ‘No! No!’ and Mac would step on another one.” (The incomprehensible salamander footage would give Young an out when constructing the equally incomprehensible movie; when things got too confused, he’d command Johnson, “Cut to the lizards.”)

  What’s Journey Through the Past about? “About ninety minutes,” quipped Johnson, and that’s the kindest analysis I’ve ever heard. Many viewers found it unwatchable, but if you have a road map for the characters involved, Journey Through the Past is a valuable (if grimy) artifact of some of the more surreal and ridiculous aspects of Young’s hippie lifestyle circa the early seventies.

  You get to see Graham Nash haughtily lecturing someone on how to handle his master tapes. Stills wanders through a field, guitar over his shoulder, looking high out of his mind and spouting meaningless psychobabble about how in the future “the reassurance by way of words won’t be necessary.” Crosby, looking equally dazed, and as arrogant as ever, mumbles his own convoluted soliloquy: “I mean, man, on one side you’ve got a set of values that’s doom, death, degradation and despair, being dealt out of the cards of the bottom of the deck by a gray-faced man who hates ya. And on the other side you’ve got a girl, runnin’ through a field of flowers, man, half naked and laughin’ in sunshine. Now you offer those two alternates to a child, and a child is too smart to make that mistake, man. It’s not gonna go for that gray-faced dude with the cards.”

  Thankfully, Young is somewhat wittier, doing some old-car shtick in a junkyard, but it’s hard to sit through endless nonscenes like the long shot of Carrie and Neil driving an old jalopy across a bridge at the ranch, then stopping to smoke a joint (which Carrie bogarts, by the way) and drink from a jug. (There is said to be a mountain of outtakes from the film, including an amusing scene where Young wanders into a record store and, as Sugarloaf’s “Green-Eyed Lady” blares in the background, claims one of his own bootlegs and walks out without paying.)

  The symbolic sequences are even more inexplicable. Hooded men on horseback carrying cross
es come to a 2001-like obelisk on the beach that’s being circled by Gary Davis’s truck. The hooded men surround the post, straining to stroke and worship it. The Graduate is handed a Bible concealing a syringe, then shoots up (this scene would contribute to the film’s being banned in England and also would arouse the ire of Topanga artist Wallace Berman, who walked out of a screening angered by what he felt was Young’s cavalier handling of narcotics).

  The climax of all this is Young, sitting at the piano next to a billowing sawdust burner, performing a song called “Soldier”: “Jesus, I saw you / Walkin’ on the river / I don’t believe you / You can’t deliver right away.” We encounter a limo containing a trio of new characters, a general, a robed religious figure and a mafioso guy who contemplate a little silver cross, then get out of the car. The end. “I can’t say what the theme is,” Young told one of the few audiences to see the film. “It speaks for itself.”

  —Do you have a beef with organized religion, Mr. Young?

  HAH HAH HAH. Yeah—I do.

  —What is it?

  Well, y’know—there’s good and bad, just like anything else, okay? The thing about religion is, it preys upon people’s weaknesses. If you take that kind of power and use it in the wrong way—that’s really bad. And that song “Soldier” was written to represent the subconscious of the Graduate guy movin’ through his decision-making process about what he was gonna do with his life or the kinda person he was gonna be. That was the decision—to go either to drugs, to religion or the army.