Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Carrie Snodgress floated in and out of the tour. I asked Elliot Mazer to characterize her presence. “Remember Monty Python—‘Spot the Looney’? Carrie was always rolling joints and had this crazy band of characters around her. There was a certain vibe in that relationship which was very weird, and I don’t think it made Neil particularly happy. Something wasn’t right and I think he knew it.”

  Snodgress felt a wall developing between her and Young. “I’d say, ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ and he couldn’t, he was so tied up with the pressure. It was the beginning of booze, Cuervo Gold and a rock and roll tour that was overbooked.”

  Ken Viola, who snuck backstage at Boston Music Hall, had an unsettling encounter with his hero: “Neil came out and grabbed me by the lapels and stuck his face right in my face and said ‘They’re gonna win the war!’” Young was more out of control than Viola had ever seen him, then or since. “Neil was boozed up. He let go of me, pushed the door open and ran outside. He was runnin’ around out there until Elliot came and got him. Neil was way out.”

  Much to the consternation of the audience, a third of the songs performed would be dark new rockers that bore little relation to the gentle acoustic bliss of Harvest. Young—who had tried unsuccessfully to record a new album during rehearsals—decided at the last minute to record the new songs live on the road, and Elliot Mazer had to scramble to put a recording truck together. Young dubbed the traveling studio “His Master’s Wheels.”

  Denny Purcell, manning an onstage video camera that fed to the recording truck, still remembers the intensity of Young’s gaze. “Sometimes you’d zoom in on Neil and those lasers would come right through the camera. I didn’t want to look through the lens.” Purcell sensed no great love between artist and producer. “I never figured out why Mazer had the gig. ’Cause the most I ever saw Neil beam those looks was right at Elliot.”

  Mazer wasn’t alone. “We’d have incredibly tense sound checks,” said Buttrey. “Once, Joel brought out a review from the night before and it wasn’t favorable. Neil just reeled around and, with his guitar neck, knocked the article out of Joel’s hand—and all the mikes across the stage—and told him, ‘Don’t ever do that shit again!’”

  When Young wasn’t putting everyone through the meat grinder, he was unapproachable or out of sight. At hotels, he stayed on a separate floor. Anyone who tried to talk to him was chased off by his ever blustery road manager, Leo Makota. “There was always separation,” said Nitzsche. “Neil was in the penthouse. Fuck him.

  “Neil was such a jerk on that tour. Now he’s a star, he’s not easygoing Neil anymore. He’d yell at people. We’d get to a town and he’d say, ‘I want everybody to stay in their rooms, ’cause we’re gonna do a sound check and rehearsal.’ So we’d sit in our rooms and sit in our rooms and we wouldn’t hear anything until two hours before the show, and then he’d say, ‘Well, there’s not gonna be a sound check, just be ready to go.’ It wasn’t like ‘Jesus, I’m sorry, you guys, we fucked up here.’ It was as though he owned us. Since he was gonna pay us that much money, he could treat us like slaves.”

  When the sound checks did take place, things weren’t any better. Young was playing a Gibson Flying V, an instrument that would not be seen again after the tour. He spent hours changing his guitar rig around, moving amps, tinkering with mikes, driving the band and the crew crazy in the process. “The Flying V. sounded like shit,” said Joel Bernstein. “Neil was never happy.”

  “There was always a lecture in the dressing room after the show,” said Nitzsche. He’d say, ‘I don’t want you guys to play so stiff, I want you to loosen up, play what you feel, not what we rehearsed.’ The next night we’d all stretch out a bit more, and in the dressing room a new lecture would come—‘I can’t let you guys just ramble and play whatever the fuck you want. I mean, you gotta stick to the arrangement.’ Finally I said, ‘Why don’t you put both speeches on a cassette and tell us which one to play in our hotel room?’”

  Nitzsche had terrible stage fright and turned to the bottle to cope. The more he drank, the more hostile he became toward Young. “We used to solo Jack’s vocal mike in the truck,” said Mazer. “He would do commentary, say shit into the microphone, editorializing. Neil would sing a line and Jack would answer him—‘I don’t believe that. Bullshit!’ The audience wouldn’t hear it because [soundman Tim] Mulligan had the mike off, but I was sitting in the truck hearing this shit and just getting hysterical.”

  Nitzsche found little humor in the situation. “I remember playing a big hockey arena somewhere and Ben’s out there during the opening act, sitting on a folding chair just staring at the audience. He turns to me and said, ‘You may not know it, but this is the greatest time in your life.’ I said, ‘If this is as good as it gets, suicide is a real viable alternative.’” Jack got so fed up with Neil at one drunken moment that he went up to Young’s room and pissed on the floor. Neil was unfazed. “Aaaah, you just did that because McCracken did it,” he told Nitzsche, whose whizzing was something of a trademark. “Were that it was just hotel rooms,” said Carrie Snodgress. “His own home was the worst. Jack was always whippin’ that thing out.”

  Jack was pretty steady. Really. He was just fucked up all the time. But he was pretty steady.

  —He was givin’ you a hard time.

  Oh yeah … a hard time from Jack’s not that bad. It’s just like gettin’ a hard time from Briggs, y’know. They’re just doin’ it to keep me real. In some ways, I guess Jack thinks that I sold out when I started playin’ with Crazy Horse.

  —Did he tell you that?

  No. I got that feeling—that somethin’ I did somewhere along the line with my albums made him not respect me or not like me like he used to.

  —I think everybody goes through that feeling with Jack.

  AHAHAHAHA. To tell ya the truth, I don’t remember much about that tour. I don’t remember bein’ with anybody much. I was mostly alone. I’ve had some funny ideas in my time about what was the right thing to do. That was a big tour … I coulda made a big impression. But it just goes to show ya. Every time I’ve had a big tour, it’s been a shitty tour. A tour where I took the wrong people.

  Kenny Buttrey had the most miserable time of all. “I remember one of the rehearsals. It was after dinner, everybody had a couple beers. We were gonna count off the song we’d been workin’ on all that day, and just for the hell of it I did some drum pickups. Neil stopped right there and said, ‘That’s what I don’t want. I don’t want you to ever do that again,’ and he just proceeded to jump down my throat. From that day on, I never played one drum fill. I played just the licks Neil wanted me to play—I was just so damn afraid to add anything I felt.”

  Things got much worse out on the road when Young began complaining Buttrey wasn’t drumming loud enough. “Two or three hours at sound check, Neil would just jump all over me. I was a studio drummer. I never had to play that loud in my life.”

  Bernstein saw Young grow so furious at one sound check that he plunged a drumstick through the snare and stormed out. Young kept telling Buttrey to get bigger sticks, until the clerk at one music store finally told the drummer, “Son, anything bigger than this is gonna have bark on it.” Nothing worked, and adding to Buttrey’s misfortune was the fact that Mazzeo—who knew nothing about drums—had been hired to be his roadie. “I wasn’t an expert drum tech,” said Mazzeo, smiling. “I’d tune these heads and go bam-bam, ‘Well, close enough.’”

  “I was playin’ ten times louder than I had ever played in my life,” said Buttrey. “I was tryin’ thicker heads, bigger sticks. It was drivin’ me crazy. I looked down at the snare drum one night and saw somethin’ splatter. My hand would bleed, it was drippin’ down the stick and formed a big puddle on the snare. And when I hit the drum, blood would fly through the air. I just said, ‘Oh man, what’s happening here? This is a damn nightmare.’ It was the roughest time of my life. I wouldn’t go through that again for ten times that amount.”

  Buttrey didn’t
have an easy time. I was not really groovin’ on the music. Buttrey was not really cuttin’ it for that kind of music. He was uncomfortable out there. There was nothin’ wrong with the way Buttrey was, the problems stemmed from me. It was my fault the tour didn’t come off. I tried to get the band to do somethin’ they couldn’t do. I probably shoulda had Billy and Ralph out there with Jack and Ben—but I didn’t know that at the time.

  —Did it get any better when Buttrey left?

  A little bit. But not really.

  I was searching for something that I never really got. It didn’t get to the groove like I wanted it to. I never really nailed it. And y’know, you could blame anybody for that, but I blame myself. I don’t think I put together the right organization.

  It was a bad tour. I didn’t feel good. Didn’t have a great time. Not a lot of smiling. It wasn’t like you would expect a tour to be at that point in my life. The music was not rewarding.

  The whole thing was, I was finding out that it wasn’t me who made the records. The records I was making with Crazy Horse—I couldn’t just go and do another record that was that good with just anybody. I didn’t know that until I did the Time Fades Away tour. Because with Buffalo Springfield, then Crazy Horse, it was there. I had Bruce and Dewey and then I had Billy and Ralph—y’know, they all moved. As much as there were great players in the Harvest band, it wasn’t the same kind of thing as Buffalo Springfield or Crazy Horse. So I think I was finding that out—that I was frustrated on that level.

  That tour was like payin’ your dues. It was a long tour, hectic. It had a devastating physical effect on me. Flying in that stupid airplane—up and down in this dumb plane. Why I didn’t take a bus, I’ll never know.

  —Why did you switch to the Flying V?

  Old Black had lost its pickup. I loved Lonnie Mack, * and I thought if I had a Flying V. that I’d get a lot of the same sounds, but I didn’t. It wouldn’t stay in tune.

  —People shudder, remembering your sound checks on that tour.

  I was tryin’ to find it. Couldn’t find where it went. Thought it must be the equipment.

  —Any regrets about those times?

  They were meant to be the way they were. The only thing I regret is, I wasn’t on the road with Crazy Horse at that time. But Crazy Horse didn’t have Danny—or Poncho. There was no Crazy Horse.

  Somewhere in that tour I started drinking. A lot of tequila.

  —I get the picture you were much more fucked up on the Time Fades Away tour than, say, Tonight’s the Night.

  Maybe after I started drinkin’ tequila I was … Tequila kind of got me away from the reality of things.

  All the people that were with me, all of a sudden they were on this new level of success. Sold-out concerts night after night after night. Nobody had ever seen success like that before. People went crazy. Everybody wanted more than they were making last week. More and more and more all the time. Everybody.

  —Who got you into the tequila?

  Drummond. My experimenting with tequila proved to be quite innaresting. It does something else to me than alcohol usually does.

  —There’s a tape from the Cleveland show …

  Heard that tape? Heh heh heh. I got into drinking tequila that night.

  —What effect did tequila have?

  Well, you heard the tape. We started goin’ the other way. That was completely turning on the audience, turning on everybody … but still playing music. It wasn’t like we stopped.

  Jose Cuervo became the sixth member of the Time Fades Away band on February 11, during the encore at the Cleveland Arena. Frustrated by an apathetic crowd who had undoubtedly come to hear the soft rock of Harvest, a drunken Young became unglued. After a hoarse dedication to those in the audience who had come to see Young and Crazy Horse in their 1969 appearances at La Cave, a tiny basement coffeehouse, he begins mumbling incoherently. “We got last dance tonight / C’mon turn on the light / Look out mama, you’re right / Can you stand up tonight?” Then Young and the band lurch into “Last Dance,” one of the unfamiliar new rockers featured on the tour. There is a demo of the song recorded before the tour in which the song sounds almost optimistic as Young implores listeners to take charge of their lives and do what they want. By Cleveland, the hope is gone. The performance is grating, the tempo molasses. Young, painfully out of tune, his voice raw, screams at the audience to “Get up, Cleveland, get up!” In between demands, Young free-associates. “TE-dium, BOREdom,” he yells, spinning out a tone-deaf traffic jam on the Flying V. “I got a woman I love,” he insists, then howls, “No, no, no,” over and over until anyone listening wants to scream back at him to shut the fuck up.

  It was also the worst guitar playing of Young’s career. The only life in the band comes from Ben Keith’s outthere pedal steel parts that seem to mirror Young’s bent condition and Nitzsche’s two-fisted rhythm piano, which adds little glimmers of sunlight to oil slicks like “Last Dance” and “Time Fades Away.” To Young’s credit, he didn’t shy away from documenting any of it, and although Time Fades Away—released in August 1973—is augmented by a couple of delicate solo performances, they do nothing to blunt the grating headache of the electric material. The record was a big spit in the face to those expecting more hits. *

  “Neil hated the audience’s inability to follow him into the next phase,” said Joel Bernstein, who admitted that the folkie inside him was equally shocked. “How does a guy go from being the mellow hippie smiling in the barn to the drunk, intentionally out-of-it guy screaming at the audience? The hippie’s gone. The hippie took a plane home.”

  The Mr. Hyde taking Young’s place continued to rant and rave. About halfway through the tour, Buttrey was replaced by Johnny Barbata, who’d replaced Dallas Taylor on the last CSNY tour. “Neil calls me up and goes, ‘Barbata, waddya doin’? Buttrey’s not makin’ it.’ I sped down in a Chevy wagon with my drums.” Things improved a bit, but overall the band never gelled, and the pressure of the tour wore on Young. “Neil was petrified, very insecure,” said Tim Drummond. “One night he said, ‘Oh fuck, I can’t take this shit no more.’ The tour was so big it was beyond his grasp. He was scared to death.”

  The nightmarish quality of arena shows would make an indelible impression on Young. Months later, in a radio interview with deejay B. Mitchell Reid, he’d liken it to “gettin’ together for a war dance or somethin’ … it’s a very primitive thing … people that are just shakin’ and boogyin’ to those loud sounds, having a great time—getting drunk, taking reds and downers and OD’ing in the audience. I mean, I’ve been to those places. I know there’s an ambulance behind the stage, and those wheelchairs just fly back and forth all night, man. That’s what’s really happening, y’know. That’s where it’s really at.”

  To make matters worse, Young’s voice gave out toward the end of the tour, and dates had to be canceled. David Crosby and Graham Nash were invited along to cover but only added to the cacophony. “Nash and Crosby had no business being in that band,” said Bernstein. “There’s not enough shit coming out of the speakers—we gotta add two more rhythm guitars and voices? It was abysmal.” Graham Nash’s presence on “Last Dance” certainly added a surreal touch to Young’s dirgelike rocker, as you can hear on Time Fades Away. “C’mon, everybody—sing along!” shouts Nash with the zeal of a game show host.

  Nitzsche and Crosby also clashed. “When Crosby was onstage, you couldn’t hear anything,” said Nitzsche, who was constantly telling him to turn it down. “He turned around and said, ‘Don’t start tellin’ me, man. I’ve been doin’ this all my life.’ I wanted to say, ‘You’ll be doin’ it the rest of your life, ya fat fuck.’” Once again, Crosby’s regal behavior didn’t enamor him to the crew. At one of the final shows in Long Beach, a coked-up Crosby injured himself jumping around onstage. Elliot Mazer recalls the moment: “How I heard about it was my guy onstage called me and said, ‘Crosby’s down on the floor. He looks like he’s in pain and everybody’s having a really good time watching
him.’”

  The Time Fades Away tour came crashing to a halt at the Oakland Coliseum on March 31. During the encore, the band lurched into “Southern Man” as it had most other nights on the tour. “Show number fifty-eight, having a pretty mediocre time, feeling like a Wurlitzer” is how Young later described his mood at the time. But the audience, undoubtedly excited that Young was finally playing a song they knew, rushed the stage, and a burly black cop began punching out one overzealous fan. Young stopped playing. “I can’t fuckin’ sing it with this happening!” he shouted. “I’m sorry, I just can’t!” As Ben Keith oozed out a menacing, liquid note on the steel guitar, Young put down his guitar and proceeded to leave the stage. “I said, ‘Where are you goin’?’” recalls Drummond, who was dumbfounded. “Neil said, ‘We gotta get outta here right now, ’cause this place is gonna go up.’”

  As the crew was pelted with bottles, the band ran for their lives. “I remember opening the door to my truck and watching the limo go flying out,” said Mazer.

  A few dates later the tour ended. “It was a terrible affair,” Young told writer Ray Coleman a few months later. “It was like I was watching myself on TV and someone had pulled the plug … I said to myself, ‘Who needs it?’ Who needs to be a dot in the distance for twenty thousand people … the circus might be all right for some acts, but it’s not for me anymore. I’m tired of singing to a cop, that’s all.

  “Filling a twenty-thousand-seat hall is not rock and roll but rock and roll business…. I want to be able to see the people I’m playing for … I want to be able to live with myself … I just hope there is not a single off my next album.”

  Released in August 1973, the hitless Time Fades Away would more than fulfill Young’s wishes, and his next three albums would contain some of his most extreme and least commercial music. Not that Young gave a shit. As he would write in the Decade liner notes, “Heart of Gold” had “put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.”