Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  With the exception of the 1974 CSNY tour, the next few years would be full of weird records, raggedy tours and long silences. Now that Young had “made it,” he retreated from the press, TV and most everything else that was out of his control.

  Those huge concerts … I did it and it was great for my head, to know that I could do that … but y’know, even as much as I tried every night to get everybody in those barns off, I couldn’t. Because I couldn’t even see them, man, and I knew they couldn’t see me … I had to cut off all the subtleties of my music and just project it out to eighteen thousand people…. My music is basically subtle … that’s why I’ve gone back to just playin’ clubs like the Roxy. And the Corral in Topanga … it gets me off. It makes me feel like I’m still a musician and not in a circus … the Allmans, Led Zeppelin, all those groups, they’re great for those big events, y’know, but you take a guy like me and put me in those circumstances, it’s just not right. I just don’t belong there.

  —Interview with B. Mitchell Reid, 1973

  Before Young headed for the ditch, there would be a short, typically surreal side trip with CSNY. In late May through early June, the group made a trip to Hawaii that was part vacation and part “to see if Stephen could get off the coke, ’cause Neil didn’t want to be with Stephen doin’ the dope,” said Carrie Snodgress. “So Graham and Crosby developed this to show Neil that everything would be okay to do a tour. We were gonna get Stephen sober, right?” The quartet began working on new songs, among them “Human Highway,” Young’s image-laden folkie ballad that was chosen as the tentative title track for the next album.

  “They sang me ‘Human Highway’ over the phone in Maui,” said Elliot Mazer, and once everyone was back at Broken Arrow, recording got under way. “Those sessions were a problem, ’cause Stephen wanted to do drugs and stay up all night recording. Graham and David wanted to get up early in the morning and watch the Watergate hearings, then play. Right about the time Stephen was waking up, they’d wanna go to sleep, so there weren’t many times during those few weeks they were all together.”

  The fact that the record was done at Young’s ranch was indicative of his omnipotent position in the group. Silently, subtlely, Shakey was once again in command. “Neil would drive up in a ’56 Packard with a bad paint job,” said Guillermo Giachetti. “The guy had his own style. I think they were all either jealous or they hated that he was a goddamn original.”

  Engineer Denny Purcell recalls the vibe surrounding the ranch sessions. “On one side of the studio was a whole bunch of Neil’s guitars, and on the other side were all Stephen’s guitars. I looked at one of his old Washburns and I said, ‘Y’know, Neil’s got one just like that.’ And Stephen said, ‘Yeah, but mine’s older.’”

  Young kept CSN at arm’s length. “Neil didn’t socialize with those guys,” said Snodgress. “I remember all of ’em comin’ to the ranch one day and Neil ran off with Elliot. They sat and waited for him all day long, until dark.

  “There were so many times. Graham would invite Neil to the city and he’d say he was coming, then he wouldn’t come. Or they’d plan a whole meal and we’d spend like thirty minutes. Neil would say, ‘I gotta go, I don’t feel so good. Maybe something’s wrong’—the seizure stuff.

  “Graham would say to me, ‘Why can’t we be friends? Why can’t Neil come and be with us?’ I’d say, ‘Well, he doesn’t like leaving the ranch.’ But it was more than that … something not balanced, not equal. It was keeping people hungry for him.”

  During the CSNY get-together in Hawaii, another tragedy would occur: the death of Bruce Berry, a young roadie who had worked extensively with CSNY. “Bruce was a wonderful kid” is invariably the first thing you hear when his name comes up. But Berry—along with his business partner Guillermo Giachetti—would get swept up in seventies rock and roll excess, and it would cost Berry his life. “Bruce and Guillermo,” stated Neil Young, “were the dark side of Wayne’s World.”

  Bruce Berry was part of a music-business family. His brother Jan had been half of the surf duo Jan and Dean. After Jan was seriously injured in a car accident, another brother, Ken, took his dormant equipment and started renting it out. Los Angeles-based Studio Instrument Rentals would quickly grow into a thriving business.

  Bruce started working at S.I.R. as a teenager in the summer of 1968, along with his high school buddies Guillermo Giachetti and Richard O’Connell. “Bruce and Guillermo formed a team,” said O’Connell. “I was the third musketeer.”

  Through their S.I.R. connections, Berry and Giachetti started working as roadies, which led to steady gigs with CSNY. “At sound check we’d play ‘Cinnamon Girl’ every day,” said Giachetti. “Bruce played guitar, he taught me bass and another roadie played drums. It started sounding good, but CSN got upset and told us to stop—I guess ’cause it was a Neil tune.”

  The pair tooled around town in a white Ford Econoline van given to Bruce by his brother Ken. Two handsome young kids working for one of the most popular bands on the planet—the women were unlimited, and so were the drugs. According to Richard O’Connell, it was Danny Whitten who first turned Berry on to heroin. “Bruce said, ‘Hey Richie, you’ll never guess what I did.’ So that was the beginning of the end for Bruce.” Berry joined a small clique of roadies and musicians, among them David Crosby and Dallas Taylor, who were using the drug secretly. “Heroin was a no-no,” recalls Crosby crony Debbie Donovan. “You did not associate with anybody who did heroin. It was kept very hush-hush.”

  Around this time Giachetti was doing ranch work for Young and Roberts. “I was making a hundred bucks a week—fifty from Elliot, fifty from Neil,” said Giachetti, who was soon offered more money to join Berry working for Stills, living in England with his new band, Manassas. “It was like Neil lent us to Stephen for a couple of months—but we never came back.”

  The scene around Stills was much faster and Berry’s friends say it had an effect. “After England, Bruce was a changed guy,” said O’Connell. “That’s when we lost Bruce. He was always like a light, and now there was a shade over that light. It wasn’t out, but it was so dim. He never laughed.”

  Upon returning to Los Angeles, Giachetti and Berry broke up their roadie company. “It was a heartbreaker, ’cause the three musketeers had broken up,” said O’Connell. “When Bruce came back he was just a junkie, man. A fuckin’ junkie. He’d sell us dope that was beat. He’d burn his best friends.” O’Connell shared a house with Berry on Beverly Glen. “I come home and there’s fuckin’ Bruce stoned out of his mind on dope with a Walther PPK, shootin’ at my favorite cactus.”

  Berry’s descent continued when Crosby hired him as his roadie for a Byrds reunion album. “He came back one afternoon and said, ‘Hey, somebody broke into the trunk of your car and stole your Stratocaster,’” said Crosby. “Well, nobody broke into my car. Bruce had sold it for junk.”

  It was while CSNY were in Maui trying to dry out Stills that Bruce Berry showed up at the wrong time with some cocaine. Delivering drugs was part of the roadie’s gig. “Bruce would’ve been one of the ones who went and got what was needed,” said Debbie Donovan. According to Snodgress, Crosby and Nash tore Berry a new asshole for his muling. “They said, ‘We’re gonna tell your brother about this! You will not work in this business again! Get the fuck out!’ Neil wanted nothing to do with it. Nothing.”

  Berry was soon sent back to Los Angeles to purchase more coke—let’s just say it wasn’t for Neil Young—and ran into O’Connell. “Bruce told me he had been doing coke in Hawaii. He hadn’t slept for days.” Berry bought the drugs and, according to O’Connell, “the dealer threw in a shitload of dope. We got so stoned I couldn’t believe it. I used to have a high tolerance, and that shit knocked me for a loop. I didn’t even do a whole one. I was used to doin’ a whole bag of dope and nothin’. This was boom!” The potency of this heroin—combined with cocaine—would prove to be a fatal combination for Berry.

  At some point, Guillermo Giachetti showed up, and he a
nd Berry patched up their feud. O’Connell was ecstatic. “I said, ‘God, it’s great. The three of us are back together—this is a good thing, don’t fuck it up.’” O’Connell departed for home, and Berry said he’d be in touch.

  Three days later O’Connell still hadn’t heard from Berry. It was June 7, 1973, a typically beautiful southern California day. After breakfast, O’Connell hopped into his pink and white ’57 Chevy and headed over to Berry’s Santa Monica apartment at 317 Ocean Park Boulevard and knocked on the door. No one answered.

  “The place smelled awful. This fuckin’ smell, it was death. I walked into the bedroom and there he is on the floor in one of those unnatural positions that you can only end up in if you go out, right?

  “I was so freaked out, I ran to the phone and called the ambulance—‘Ya gotta get here quick!’ Fuckin’ dead for three days, I’m callin’ the ambulance. I also knew there were a couple of bags of dope in the bathroom, just laying there on the toilet—two bags of dope that woulda killed me. Him on a coke binge, that was it.”

  Suddenly frantic over what to do before authorities arrived, O’Connell ran into the bedroom and found Berry’s hypodermic. “I ran outside and I threw it away, but I leave the bags of dope in the bathroom. Like, I’m really doin’ great. The cops come in. ‘When did you last see him? What’s the deal? Roll up your sleeves.’ There were some week-old tracks they didn’t notice.’”

  Detectives—along with minions of the aforementioned rock star, claimed O’Connell—initially suspected foul play because of the recent bad blood between Berry and Giachetti. “They had formulated this opinion that Bruce had come to the house and Guillermo and I had hotshotted him. In other words, I was a murder suspect for one of my dearest, closest friends. They came back two or three times. One day they sat us down and Guillermo was just fuming. He hollered at the cops, ‘You get the fuck outta here!’ After that I got an ulcer, man. Twenty-one with an ulcer. Guillermo and I won’t even talk about it.”

  “Bruce killed himself by breaking the rules, which is to get high alone,” said Giachetti. “I never knew Bruce was on heroin, I never fucking knew,” said Nash, echoing the sentiments of many. “I never knew Cros was on it, and he was my best friend. Cocaine and dope were okay, but heroin was for jazz musicians.”

  George Whitsell had seen Berry just days before his death at a nightclub, dropping off a Hammond B3 organ from S.I.R. “First Danny Whitten, now Bruce Berry,” he said. “They were droppin’ like flies.”

  I asked Dallas Taylor, who also had a bad heroin habit at the time, what he thought when Berry died. “I didn’t,” he said, frowning. “I just shot dope. That’s all I did for ten years.”

  The seventies. Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison had all checked out; now the grim reaper was paying visits to Young’s inner circle. The death of Danny Whitten in November 1972 and the loss of Bruce Berry seven months later registered deep within Neil Young, inspiring a new record that would be much more unsettling than Time Fades Away. It would be a project that CSN—and Elliot Mazer—were incapable of understanding. So on the way to the sessions one day, Young decided to mosey over to David Briggs’s place instead.

  “There was a knock on my door and it was Neil. I hadn’t seen him in years. He said, ‘I’ve been doing this record with CSN and it’s all wrong. I want to make a rock and roll record.’”

  Crosby, Stills and Nash were left in the dust. According to Joel Bernstein, Young told them he was just too fatigued to start a new project. But almost immediately he was in Los Angeles with the remnants of Crazy Horse, working on his next record. CSN, who had planned the entire next year around Young, were understandably outraged. Whatever feelings were hurt, Young’s decision to walk away from CSNY would turn out to be a good one, because he could now record his greatest—and certainly seediest—work to date, Tonight’s the Night.

  *In Texas on February 24, Young and the band crossed paths with country-rock icon Gram Parsons, who was also playing a gig in Houston. Sharing a limo, Nitzsche appalled everyone by taking one glance at Parsons and muttering, “You look like Danny … and Danny’s dead.” Parsons would overdose just seven months later.

  *Indiana-born Lonnie Mack—himself influenced by & guitar legend Robert Ward—combined a Gibson Flying V. with a Magnatone amp to create wrenching ballads like “Why?” and intense vibrato-laden instrumentals such as his 1963 top-twenty hit, “Memphis.” Young has also utilized Magnatone amps. “Good sound,” said Young. “Low, funky.”

  *Despite Young’s assertions that Time Fades Away is his “worst record,” it was far ahead of its time in its raggedy-ass nakedness. In 1996, R.E.M. cited it as an inspiration for their recorded-live-on-the-road New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

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  It was long past midnight on April 19, 1972, and the Doctor was definitely in. An orgy was under way in the Topanga Canyon house on Vision Drive. Outside, a drug deal was going sour. The stereo was cranked, so they wouldn’t hear the shots.

  “I was a big-ass coke dealer,” said the Doctor, a member of the Topanga All-Stars, just a nice guy who got caught up in narcotics. “I was importin’ pounds of cocaine outta Lima, Peru. Flyin’ ’em into Ventura. Big guy, lotsa bucks. All of a sudden I was in a situation with five pounds and fifty grand.”

  Two others were involved in the deal. One was a friend; the other, a stranger supplying the drugs, would turn out to be “much heavier than I thought.” It seems he was involved in pornography and had ripped off a hundred grand in a Texas transaction. “They had to make my deal to pay off another that went bad … they were settin’ me up one way or another.”

  The Doctor had until midnight to come up with the cash and stopped by the party on Vision Drive to raise some. “I invited him to take off his clothes and stay awhile,” one of the five people in the house would later testify. The Doctor was able to unload only two ounces, and with time running out, he called his partners, informing them he wouldn’t have the money until eight the next morning. The connection got antsy and drove up to the house with the Doctor’s partner. Out in the driveway, the Doctor approached the orange Porsche and the three men conferred. The connection didn’t want to wait. He wanted his coke back and ended up firing on the Doctor’s partner, putting a hole through the back of his head.

  “The guy shot him twice,” said the Doctor. “Because he put a second bullet in him, he missed me. I was standin’ there, he dropped, the rear window of the Porsche splashed all over me. That’s when I hit the dirt and ran. Bullets started flyin’, I spun around and shot. It was over in less than a minute. A very big minute.”

  The connection fell to the ground, dead. The Doctor hopped in his Volkswagen and split, leaving behind a car full of cash and drugs that would be ransacked by one of the partygoers—allegedly a gofer on After the Gold Rush—before the police arrived. “I was so scared I walked away from thousands of dollars—dirty money,” said the Doctor. “I took two reds and went to sleep. I lived through it. Not everybody did.”

  The folks in the house were oblivious to what had gone down outside until one of the women, looking out and seeing a man slumped over with the car door open, wandered out naked. “I thought he was drunk or stoned,” she later told the court. “I was going to lift his head up and close the door so he wouldn’t get busted when they patrolled. He looked dead.” The woman came back into the house crying, but no one called the police, who finally arrived at 6:50 that morning, answering a complaint call by a neighbor who had also seen the “drunk” in the car. The man the Doctor shot had died instantly. His partner didn’t pass away until later that morning in a Santa Monica hospital. It would be four years before the police, tipped off by a snitch, arrested the Doctor. *

  News of the double murder traveled quickly. “I knew about it the next day. Everybody knew about it,” said Briggs. The other Topanga All-Stars rallied to the Doctor’s defense. One of them even disposed of the murder weapon, tossing it off the Santa Monica Pier. The crime cast a pall over the canyon scene. “It
was heavy,” said bass player Mark Andes, who left Topanga—and his band, Jo Jo Gunne—in part because of the event. “It touched the canyon in a very specific way. It really epitomized the dark side.”

  Neil Young was not around, not involved, didn’t even know the full details, but he caught the vibe. The seventies had arrived, maaaaaaan. Close on the heels of the deaths of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, the Topanga drug murders would be the third grim event to inspire Tonight’s the Night, in particular a song called “Tired Eyes.”

  In a bleary spoken voice Young looks at drugs and death, empathizing with one “who tried to do his best but could not.” The recitation gives way to a grim melody. “Please take my advice,” he pleads. “Open up the tired eyes.” But somehow you know these particular eyes will never open again. The starkness of “Tired Eyes”—“as if Dylan did ‘Wild Horses,’” is how Richard Meltzer describes it—is hard to shake. “I think it’s the best song on Tonight’s the Night,” said Briggs. “You’ll never hear another song like it. The dreamy recitation, the lyrics are so abstract—Neil really caught dope murder, that kind of feel.”

  The Doctor agreed. I played him “Tired Eyes” out in the Topanga shack where he was living. He had spent two and a half years in prison for his part in the event, and the song—although Young smudges the details and throws God knows what other inspiration into the picture—definitely took him back. As the ghostly song echoed through the cabin, I asked him if I could tell the story. He didn’t mind.

  “I had to do what I had to do,” he said, frowning. “I was in a defensive situation. I did kill somebody. What I don’t want is to be made out as some heavy … I was victim to the romance of it all. I liked being in that position—the Doctor. I prided myself almost to the point of delusion, looking out for these poor little drug addicts, ’cause at least my shit was good. Ain’t that sick?”