Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  —I have a feeling you see them as Let’s Make a Deal—“Don Pardo, what’s behind door number one?”

  Heh heh. That’s right.

  —What’s your concept of God, if you have one?

  It’s not a little guy in a white coat.

  —Okay. We’ve ruled that out.

  That’s where the Bible loses all credibility.

  —Why?

  God created man in his own image?

  —What is it to you?

  What is it to me? What is God to me? God is faith that there is a higher power. It’s an understanding.

  —Heaven?

  It’s bollocks. That’s nothing. That’s a story.

  —Hell?

  They’re stories.

  A responsible organized religion is one that reaches out into the congregation and helps people. Uses the money, sends it back. The ones that are just into it for the buck, go the other way—they take advantage. Those are probably the ones that give you the most doubt about whether the system is even workable.

  —Do you believe in karma?

  Karma’s much easier to believe in than heaven and hell.

  —Why?

  It makes more sense. It happens. But the heaven and hell story—those are just big metaphors for “You go up or down.” Y’know—“What did you do? How did you fare?” All that stuff. That’s just a way of measuring whether you’re a good person or a bad person. They gotta give you a conscience—tryin’ to organize this conscience to be responsible.

  Define faith and conscience—it’s very hard to do. So people write stories. To explain what they are. The Bible is one of them. None of them are perfect. They all got mixed reviews. Some people like one, but they don’t like the other. Nobody likes all of them. So in the end these stories—heaven and hell and Adam and Eve—the whole fuckin’ thing is no more than this year’s crop of movies. They’re just stories to hang your hat on.

  Once completed, Journey Through the Past was screened at the ranch for John Calley, vice president of production at Warner Bros. and, according to Larry Johnson, “a young, hip guy who understood.” But apparently Young’s vision wasn’t easy for even Calley to decipher. “It was the shock of his life,” said Johnson. “He was wide-eyed and sorta … left. I think that’s when Neil realized it wasn’t commercially viable.” The film was also shown to executives at Universal, where Snodgress was still under contract. After seeing the actress puffing on a joint in the movie, the suits terminated her immediately. “Clever Neil,” said Snodgress.

  Warner Bros. took the two-record soundtrack—a mishmash of source music and such must-haves as a sidelong workout on “Words”—and dumped it on the marketplace before the movie was out. “They chickened out on the movie because they thought it was weird,” Young told Cameron Crowe. “That’s the only instance of discooperation and confusion I’ve ever had with Warner’s…. They fucked me for sure.”

  The film premiered at the U.S. Film Festival in Dallas on April 8, 1973. It then ran at a couple of art houses but received scant notice, none of it positive. “To be charitable, Neil’s filmic odyssey, a $400,000 home movie, makes any of the old ‘Francis, the Talking Mule’ films seem absolutely incisive,” wrote critic Henry Armetta.

  Graham Nash associate Mac Holbert recalls attending a special screening for Young’s peers. “At dinner, nobody said much about it … I remember everybody walking away very confused. They were all a little embarrassed, because maybe there was something they should’ve caught—‘There must be something there, because Neil did it.’” Young was apparently unfazed by the apathetic response. “Neil got in his car and left. He didn’t give a shit what people thought about it.”

  I bought this Beaulieu Super-8 and I was workin’ with it. And I worked with it and worked with it. Then I went to Hawaii and I shot stuff in a zoo. Filming the animals and filming the flowers, filming everything— with all these jungle sounds like you were in the Amazon. I think the concept was that, “It’s a jungle,” y’know, but you could always see a little litter…. You could never see fences or anything, but you always knew, heh heh. I’m better at ideas than I am at actually doing things.

  Later, I shot a commercial. Hyatt Hotel. Jeannie Field got me the job. I was just hired on as Bernard Shakey, cameraman. I had my assistant who knew how to set up the camera—which I didn’t. I can remember doing a long pan over these suitcases outside on the street with the traffic going by and, like, two hundred suitcases, and this one guy standing there with a red outfit and a hat. I pulled back to the Hyatt—that was my big payoff shot.

  It was like “When you arrive in L.A., stay at the Hyatt,” so I went to the airport, went into one of the revolving restaurants, and I was shooting all these people in the restaurant. You’re not supposed to do that, they really didn’t want me in there. I told them, “We’re doing a commercial for Hyatt.” I got thrown out of the fucking revolving restaurant at the L.A. airport, me and my assistant. It was great. I shot a bunch of footage. They didn’t use much of my shit…. I don’t think they used any. It had a little bit of a slant.

  Super-8 made me ill. I got sick. I think I musta OD’d on it or somethin’—I was so into it, I got a fever. It was like you eat something poison and you get sick, you never wanna have it again? After that, every time I thought about filming I got sick. That was the end of it. I didn’t want to have any more to do with the camera.

  —Sometimes other people feel sick when they see your movies. HAH HAH HAH. That’s right.

  —Most people I talk to think Journey Through the Past is a self-indulgent piece of shit that doesn’t make any sense. Does that bother you?

  No. That wasn’t why I did it. I didn’t make the film to teach anybody anything or to preach to anybody. I made it to express myself. So in that way it was pretty selfish. But I had this dream. I had this image of the way these things went together and I just couldn’t stop myself from doing it.

  It’s pretty obscure. I haven’t seen it for years. Years. There should be some funny stuff in there—drunk debutantes singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” while lizards are invading this little castle somewhere with an electric chair in it and all this shit Mac made…. What a nutty fuckin’ movie. See, I wasn’t intimidated by anybody. Nobody could stop me at that point. Now I probably wouldn’t do that kinda movie. I’d have to really open up to do that. I really would. And I think there’s room for that kind of movie—little metal people, trains and shit. Lizards …

  I thought what was happening in my life was very innaresting. Should be documented—heh heh—and then I found out that, y’know, I had no perspective and was an egomaniac because I did that. But I had to make that movie to find out. Heh heh.

  It’s a little like windsurfing. I was really into it. I got all the equipment, and I windsurfed a couple of years. I thought about it a lot. Read windsurfing magazines. Finally one day I realized, “Fuck, I could just be doin’ this for the rest of time, just buyin’ equipment—new equipment comes out every four months. Windsurfing’s great, but I’m not really very good.” I never was able to get a jibe down. So I stopped. But I did it for two or three years. It totally distracted me. And when I made films, that was a major distraction. For years. From music, okay? It enabled me to come back to music.

  “You’re the only friend I have, because you’re the only one that tells me the truth,” Young would say to Jack Nitzsche on their car rides through the ranch. “So I played that role,” said Nitzsche. “I told Neil he was an asshole—not realizing I was being an asshole myself a lotta the time.”

  Nitzsche had become the most improbable addition to the ranch bunch, living with his wife, Gracia, and son, Jack, in a house he rented from Elliot Roberts. Jack Jr. recalls that living at the ranch wasn’t the brightest time for the Nitzsche family. His father was obsessed with voodoo, and “he would use this shit to scare me. He once got me in a car when I was a kid—he was pretty drunk—and he started screamin’ at me that he was the Angel of Death.”
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br />   The arranger quickly grew weary of playing second banana to Young. “It was stifling, because I was there for Neil, and that started to get to me,” said Nitzsche. “I started drinking heavy, doing a lot of drugs and becoming more abusive to Neil.”

  Few understood the relationship. “The ridicule Neil suffered at the hands of Jack’s opinions was ruthless—and that’s what turned Neil on,” said Snodgress, who felt Nitzsche was acting out of envy. “I mean, look at all the music Jack Nitzsche’s written, and who knows who Jack Nitzsche is?” Nitzsche reserved his most potent venom for Carrie herself. “I didn’t get along with her at all. I said to Neil immediately when I met her, ‘This is the biggest phony I’ve ever met in my life. What an asshole this woman is—she’s constantly lying, she’s an actress.’”

  Nitzsche’s main running buddy was James McCracken, who was getting more and more out of control. “Neil tried to hang in there, but McCracken wore out his welcome everywhere he went,” said Mazzeo. “He always bit the hand that fed him, really hard.” One night he pulled up to Young’s door at two in the morning, drunk out of his mind, demanding that Neil buy ten of his paintings and give him thousands of dollars immediately to “fix his magic carpet.” Young declined, and, according to Mazzeo, McCracken “pulls out his dick and pisses on Neil’s brand-new oriental rug that cost, like, sixteen thousand dollars.” *

  Rogue behavior like this only further endeared him to Nitzsche. And, according to Mazzeo, “It was suicide hanging out with those guys. You’d hop in the car and they’d both be drinking and they’d start arguin’ in the front seat, and Mac would just take the wheel and the car would go off the road into a cow field. Nitzsche would be very indignant ’cause now he didn’t know where the road was.” Nitzsche and McCracken would try to out-macho each other by throwing knives and grinding their hands into broken glass. Needless to say, the peace-and-love types were terrified by these two.

  At some point McCracken ventured off to the desert and—painting with the whiskers of a dead mouse he’d accidently overdosed on hash—created a Bosch-like image of a horse skull to adorn Nitzsche’s album of classical music for Reprise, St. Giles Cripplegate. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and produced by Elliot Mazer, the record didn’t even feature Jack’s name on the cover. Surely it ranks as one of the most bizarre releases by a major label. “After you deliver something like Harvest to the record company, they’ll let you come in their mouth,” said Mazer.

  Nitzsche felt Young had gotten a little carried away in lording over his empire. “Neil would’ve made a terrible southerner,” cracked Jack. He began to feel sorry for Neil, who he felt was besieged by the scene he’d let happen. “When Neil took Carrie, he took a whole fucking load of people, a commune of his very own. Carrie was treated like a goddamn queen, and these stupid hippies would talk about ‘the inner circle’ … it was so ridiculous. ‘Ohhh, far out’—that’s the most profound thing anybody ever said. What could I do but rant and rave, surrounded by that kind of assholery?”

  Jack watched as Neil grew weary of the situation. The last straw came when Carrie’s parents parked a trailer directly outside Young’s kitchen door. “I couldn’t figure out how Neil could take it. And one day he came up in one of his old cars and came in the house and said, ‘Man, if something doesn’t change pretty soon, you’re gonna see flying Snodgresses out here.’”

  —Was the ranch kind of a commune when it was first started?

  Not in my eyes. Maybe in Carrie’s it was. When it first started, it was just a little tiny farm, a hundred and forty acres. Louie and Clara living across the way, me and Johnny Barbata and Guillermo Giachetti in the ranch house. So it wasn’t a commune. It started to be a little like a commune when Carrie moved in…. Carrie had so many people around all the time, it was sick.

  —How did you put up with it?

  Well, y’know, I just wasn’t very forceful. I was never an enforcing type of person. I give people a lotta slack, a lotta rope, and either they have a good time and a good relationship—or they hang themselves. That’s basically it. But I’m not a controller that way. McCracken’s a great artist. He was a little scary because he was so fuckin’ out of it. Guy had to pee on my rug and ask for ten G. It’s not my deal. I know I didn’t owe him ten G. That was his trip.

  I don’t like to tell people what to do, what they should do to make me comfortable or whatever. I figure either they know or they don’t. That’s the way I was then—now I communicate a lot more with Pegi because, number one, I know Pegi would never lie to me. Pegi tells me the truth all the time. That’s a big difference right there.

  —How did that affect you? Seems to me honesty’s pretty important to you. Well, y’know, honesty’s important, but I’m not that honest myself. I did a lotta things in my early relationships that I couldn’t talk about where I was fuckin’ around and everything. I’m as guilty as the next guy. So honesty’s a matter of how you use the word. It doesn’t have to do so much with “Oh he never told a lie” or “He never covered anything up.” That’s not honesty. Honesty’s something else. I can’t put my finger on it. Because I know I’m not. People tend to think I’m honest because I speak from the heart. If that’s what honesty is, I’m honest. But if honesty’s never telling a lie in your whole life, then I’m not honest. I’m as much of a fuckin’ dishonest person as the next guy.

  Louie—What did I get from him? Just a nice old guy. It was cool when he was there. Times were simple. I didn’t realize for him it was the end of an era and for me it was the beginning of one. Too many things happened on the ranch. He told me he had to go. Too many changes.

  “Whenever Neil’s had a big success, he’s had to do something to counter it or he can’t appreciate it,” said Elliot Roberts. “Always. His whole life. After every big album he’ll do something inane—like put on blackface and do a minstrel show.”

  Young’s own sheet music for “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” is adorned with a sketch illustrating the Neil Young of the early seventies—the forlorn, lonely troubadour with a guitar. With the massive success of his past two albums and the work with CSN, Young had created a persona that would prove so indelible some would never know him as anything else. But just as quickly as Young created, he would destroy, and the music that followed the radiofriendly Harvest would please few of those expecting some kind of consistency, whether they were his fans, the record company or the handlers and musicians around him.

  It would take a terrible tragedy to send Young on his way. In 1992 Kristine McKenna would ask Neil what episodes in his life had forced him to grow up. “The birth of my children and the death of my friends,” Young responded. The joy of his firstborn came on September 8, 1972, with the arrival of Zeke. Next Young would experience the death of a friend, and it would spiral him into the shadier side of life.

  *Reviewing these remarks in 2000, Young added a third name to the list: Jim Keltner, known for his session work with Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, Richard Thompson, Eric Clapton, J. J. Cale, the Traveling Wilburys, Leon Russell and many others; an unusual choice for Young, who tends to prefer more minimal drums.

  *When Shepard expressed his frustration at not being able to create full-time, Young underwrote his living expenses and got his career off the ground. As Shepard recalls, “Neil said, ‘I make a lot of money and I can’t think of anything better to do with it than give it to you.’ I was stunned. It changed my life.”

  *Those who have heard the Massey Hall shows say they’re tremendous. Twenty-five years later, when Young finally got around to listening to the tapes for his Archives project, he realized how great the recordings were, but David Briggs was no longer around to thank. “What Neil told me was, David was furious at him because he never listened,” said Young’s studio engineer John Nowland. “Neil sat here and heard it…. It was pretty intense.”

  †“The image in my mind was the Uncle Sam poster lookin’ out, sayin’, ‘Are you ready for the country, because it’s time to go,’” Young told Ra
lph Emery in 1984 when asked why he wrote the song.

  *Although Young and Elliot Roberts disagree, Mazer claims both he and Young rejected copies of test pressings to delay the album’s release until after the single caught fire, much to the dismay of Warner Bros., who wanted to release the single and album simultaneously. “I still think at that point they didn’t figure Neil in this top-forty genre,” said Mazer.

  * Young, of course, backed away from any commitment when I asked if Carolyn inspired the song. “She’s in there,” he muttered.

  *Now sober and creating art in Maine, McCracken has little memory of his antics with Young but doesn’t deny they happened. “I used to drink so much I had blackouts—didn’t remember what I’d done. Neil was mostly very gracious when I would get crazy and do stuff—I probably woulda said, ‘Hey, that’s enough. I don’t ever wanna see you again.’ I stepped outta line a lot with that guy. I had no respect.”

  world on a string

  “Everybody tried to save Danny—everybody,” said Don Paris, stiff drink in shaking hand. “But hey—we’re lucky we lived through the sixties. Shit happened.

  “Danny was the dustiest guy, just the dustiest. He was too good, too damn good. He had a heart of gold. He gave too much. Shared too much. Bottom line—he loved too much. But Mr. Whitten’s not gone—he’s holdin’ up the sky right now. He’s here. Every day I feel him.” As if on cue, Whitten’s voice wafts up from a jukebox down below. Sitting in the upstairs office of his dingy Hollywood bar, Don Paris sighs.

  Paris is one of those unsung heroes who support a band not because of fame or money but for the love of music. He was a dancer at the Peppermint West with Danny, and the two were running buddies until the end. For years after Whitten’s death, he wore one of Danny’s teeth around his neck. “Don Paris was Crazy Horse’s spiritual adviser,” said guitarist George Whitsell. “Don always had a joint down his boot and a couple of reds for the end of the evening.”