Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  The sixties are definitely not with us anymore … the change into the music of the seventies is starting to come with people like David Bowie and Lou Reed … “Walk on the Wild Side.” He’s telling a story, a street story, and that’s a reality in the seventies, heroin…. This is much more of a dope generation that we’re in now … and that’s what the approach a lotta these people have towards makin’ records—is that homosexualism and heavy dope use and everything is a way of life to a lotta people—and they don’t expect to live any more than thirty years and they don’t care. And they don’t care. They’re in the seventies.

  What I’m tryin’ to say is these people like Lou Reed and David Booie or Bowie, however you pronounce it, those folks—I think they got somethin’ there, heh heh. Take a walk on the wild side!

  —Interview with B. Mitchell Reid, 1973

  The smooth sounds of California rock were fully entrenched by 1973, but other sounds were blowing in, and not very nice ones. Bowie, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, the Stooges’ Raw Power—it was all rude, crude and made by people who had little use for the hippie ethos. “I hated Woodstock,” Iggy Pop said in 1996. “Still hate it … the worst. Crosby, Stills, Nash. Just so loathsome. Just not music.” Uninterested (at least at the time) in finessing their guitar solos, overdubbing out mistakes or attending benefit concerts, these angry hooligans gave members of the status quo the willies. “I wouldn’t even stay in the same hotel as the New York Dolls,” barked Stephen Stills in 1974. Perhaps alone among his peers, Young hadn’t forgotten that rock and roll was supposed to be made by misfits.

  Nineteen seventy-three was a curious, potent year in music—Dylan was back in the studio with the Band, Roxy Music and Lynyrd Skynyrd were unleashing their particular visions of the world, and Jerry Lee Lewis recorded two late masterpieces in Memphis and London. Beginning perhaps in 1972 with Leon Russell’s Carney, a new disillusionment with fame and celebrity began to ooze out of many singer/songwriters. Neil Young would outbleak all competition.

  For his walk on the wild side, Neil Young turned back to Briggs and the Horse. Crazy Horse had stumbled along without Danny Whitten, enlisting new members for the vapid Loose, but “when we weren’t playing with Neil, we were dogshit,” said Billy Talbot.

  Talbot, ever the instigator, called Young while he was in Hawaii with CSN. “I said, ‘Remember Ralph and me? We’re still here.’” Something clicked in Young’s mind, because when he returned to the States, he played a two-day benefit gig at the Topanga Corral with the Horse in August 1973. * Young—who already had a handful of new songs, among them “Tired Eyes”—took the band into the studio later that month. “We went to L.A., checked in to the sleaziest motel we could find down on Sunset,” said Briggs. At first, they stayed at the Hollywood Center Motel, the fleabag dump where Young had stayed when he first arrived in Los Angeles.

  Adding Ben Keith and Nils Lofgren to the Horse rhythm section, Young returned to Sunset Sound, where he had cut such past triumphs as “I Believe in You.” But after just a day, “I could hear it wasn’t going anywhere,” said Briggs. “Too stiff. I said, ‘Man, if it’s not going anywhere in this fuckin’ studio, we gotta get outta studios entirely. I went down the street to S.I.R. and said, ‘Do you mind if I knock a hole in your wall?’”

  Studio Instrument Rentals was run by Bruce Berry’s brother Ken, and down on Santa Monica Boulevard they had an innocuous black and gray building that functioned as a rehearsal space. Briggs backed a mobile recording truck into the alley next to the building, then someone actually took a twenty-five-pound sledgehammer and smashed a hole through. Cable was run into a cramped, closet-sized equipment locker that served as a control room. The band played on a small stage and was recorded live. It was a concert without an audience, save for Briggs. “When I’m in the room, I’m in the band,” he said.

  “He was down in the trenches with ya the whole time,” said Nils Lofgren. “Briggs was the go-go dancer MC, shakin’ his legs, snappin’ his fingers, illustrating the music while we were playin’. He was the music video.” Briggs and Young refused to let the musicians listen to playback of any of the recordings until it was all over. If Briggs liked a particular take, he’d mix it out in the truck.

  A picture began to develop, and with it came more new songs. “We didn’t go down with the idea, ‘Let’s make a spooky record,’” said Briggs. “The album just kind of evolved.” Crew member Tim Foster remembers that the album’s title song came from an offhand remark Young made the first day of the sessions. “They started workin’ this thing out a cappella, everybody sitting around thumping the tables. The next day, Neil shows up with all these lyrics about Bruce Berry.”

  Mind-altering chemicals were an essential component of this particular trip, with alcohol at the top of the list. Ben Keith set the tone when he popped the top off a bottle of tequila and threw it to the wind. “We won’t be needing that anymore,” he quipped. “A drunken Irish wake,” is how Billy Talbot described the sessions.

  Getting loose enough took time. On the two-track masters, Young initially sounds uptight and impatient with the band, particularly over the background vocal parts for such songs as “World on a String.” But as the days passed and the tequila flowed, so did the music. *

  “We weren’t stumbling or anything,” recalls Ralph Molina. “We’d just get to a point where you get a glow, just a glow. The head was fucking great, man. When you do blow and drink, that’s when you get that glow.” The band shot pool and worked on their glow until the wee hours, then began to record. “No one said, ‘Let’s go play,’ we all just knew it was time. We never talked about what anybody was playin’, who’s playin’ what part or any of that kinda shit. It was so fuckin’ emotional—it wasn’t like we were doin’ sessions.”

  The music created at S.I.R. began to conjure up spirits. “The mood was hangin’ in the air. You could cut it with a knife,” said Lofgren. “There was no need for Neil to lead us to the mood. We were all affected in our own ways by Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry dying. That’s what that whole record was about—we didn’t sit around and talk about ‘Oh God, what a shame.’ This was a chance for all of us to come together and get out of that stuff.”

  What we were doing was playing those guys on the way … I mean, I’m not a junkie, and I won’t even try to check out what it’s like. But we’d get really high—drink a lot of tequila, get right out on the edge, where we knew we were so screwed up that we could easily just fall on our faces…. We were wide open … just wide open …

  I was able to step outside myself to do this record, to become a performer of the songs rather than the writer. That’s the main difference—every song was performed.

  I just didn’t feel like I was a lonely figure with a guitar or whatever the trip is that people see me as sometimes. I didn’t feel that laidback…. So I thought I’d just forget about all that and … wipe it out.

  —Interview with Bud Scoppa, 1975

  Spontaneous, ragged, and headed for a cliff, this music was much further out than anything Young had attempted before. “With After the Gold Rush, even though the recording was done as live as possible, at least we rehearsed things and got pretty on top of ’em before we recorded,” said Lofgren. “On Tonight’s the Night, Neil took it a step further. He was kinda rebelling against everything. I remember talkin’ to him and he said, ‘Hey, I’ve made records where you analyze everything and you do it three thousand times and it’s perfect. I’m sick of it. I want to make a record that’s totally stark naked. Raw. I don’t wanna fix any of it.’”

  Between songs, Young and the band would conduct rambling, drunken raps that were frequently hilarious. “I just wanna play, I don’t give a shit,” Young mumbles before lurching into a liquid version of “Everybody’s Alone.” “I don’t care if it’s out of tune, man, let’s just play. Fuck it…. Cut that, will ya, that ‘Fuck it’? Just cut it right out so it doesn’t offend anybody, the ‘fuck it’… from the top of the ‘f’ to the bottom of the
‘t.’ Just cut that fucker out.”

  The band holed up in the rehearsal hall, getting tanked, wearing sunglasses all night and playing drunken sets of new songs for a nonexistent audience. “If I wasn’t a part of it and I peeked in, I woulda gone, ‘Whoa, what the fuck’s goin’ on in there. Who are these weirdos?’” said Molina. “It was like working in a bottle, but a great bottle,” said Briggs. “It wasn’t like onstage, where if you got too far over the edge you’d embarrass yourself in front of a bunch of people. It liberated everybody from the confines of makin’ records.”

  Visitors to the sessions were dumbfounded by the grimy, film-noir atmosphere. “It was completely black inside, didn’t matter what time it was,” said Joel Bernstein, who was assigned the task of taking visa photos of the band for a proposed Japanese tour. “I had to get ’em in daylight. It was like doing a documentary on nocturnal animals pulled out from under a rock. They looked like little rodents when you shine a light in their eyes.”

  Art Linson—Briggs’s partner in the Spindizzy record label—brought Mel Brooks by. The director watched, somewhat nonplussed, as the musicians got more and more trashed, only to suddenly crawl out of the bottle at midnight and go to work. “You mean first they do that—then they do this?” Brooks exclaimed to Linson, incredulous.

  Not all the musicians got it at first, either. “It was frustrating,” said Lofgren. “It took me a while to latch on to the concept. As we learned the songs, we’d be recording. I’m sittin’ there thinkin’, ‘Well, another five run-throughs and I’ll have my part down,’ and Neil would be like ‘Okay, next song.’ I’d go, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute!’” Young would show the band the chords, the words, and work out harmonies—all simultaneously. “Just as we were learnin’ a new song and trying to sing at the same time, he’d be rollin’ tape, lookin’ for a final take. It freaked us all out. We were like ‘Hey, c’mon, man, let’s rehearse a little bit. Let’s learn the song.’ But Neil’s attitude was ‘I know the song—and that’s all that matters.’”

  They didn’t even know the song—what could be better?

  —What did you notice was going on with the way your peers were making records in the seventies?

  They all took a dump.

  —Why?

  Technology. Too much control. Not enough creativity in the recording process, too much in the mixing. It wasn’t about music. It wasn’t about performing. Slick. Many overdubs. Cleanest, dinkiest, pissantiest-sounding records that could possibly be made … I hated that shit.

  —What was it about—craft?

  Yeah. Building things. Painting instead of taking pictures. I like the idea of … capturing something. Record something that happened. I’m a musician. I don’t wanna sit there and build a record—I built a coupla records. Big deal.

  —Tom Waits said, “Recording is so permanent, it’s maddening.”

  He doesn’t record enough. He should record everything, so everything becomes maddening and then he can deal with it. That’s how I dealt with it. For years I wouldn’t play unless the tape was running. I just recorded everything—all the tours, everything. Make it so there’s no difference between playing and recording—it’s all one thing. Then you forget you’re recording, ’cause ultimately the music gets in your face, you forget what your doing, and all of a sudden you realize, “Jesus, we recorded that.” That’s the ticket, that’s the way to get it. So I just tricked myself into not having to worry about whether we were recording or not.

  I don’t worry about the permanence of the record. That’s what’s good about it. You make it, you got it, that one’s too late to change, you do another one.

  After the Gold Rush was in a studio I had in my house. Then we realized how easy it was to build a studio anywhere. We built a studio in S.I.R. Tonight’s the Night was the first record recorded in a studio after Danny died.

  “Tonight’s the Night” I wrote in my head without a guitar—I just heard the bass line. Most of the other songs, I don’t remember where they came from. “World on a String”—I like that one. But the singing is really out. It’s so outta key, it’s terrible. We tried to fix it, but we couldn’t, heh heh.

  I played a Broadcaster on all of Tonight’s the Night. I wanted a different sound—very funky-sounding, but clean. We were groovin’. We all liked each other and we didn’t have anything else we were doin’. Just focused on that until it was done. It was a pretty funky scene. We’d go home down Santa Monica Boulevard every night, Briggs and I, back to the hotel, eat burgers, drink tequila. That tequila was very relaxing. Y’know—after you get into drinking it a coupla days in a row? It’s a whole other thing. Tequila and hamburgers. That was the input.

  When I first started the record, I didn’t know what the hell I was doin’. But I did get into a persona. I have no real idea where the fuck it came from, but there it was. It was part of me. I thought I had gotten into a character—but maybe a character had gotten into me.

  I was twenty-seven when we did Tonight’s the Night, livin’ down there in L.A., travelin’ around … that’s the time when you start realizing, “Hey, this isn’t what I thought it was gonna be.” Things happen and they hit you around that age … but you still have enough energy to go nuts.

  On August 26, Young and the band blasted through five performances that would form the core of the finished record—“Tonight’s the Night,” “Tired Eyes,” “Mellow my Mind,” “Speakin’ Out” and “World on a String.” They also cut a track with an unlikely guest star. “Somebody said, ‘Listen, open up another mike, we’ve got another guitar player,’” recalls assistant engineer Andy Bloch. “We started rolling tape, and the most awful-sounding electric guitar came down the wires—a person slamming the strings as if it were a big twelve-string acoustic. It wasn’t more than five minutes later we took a break. I wandered into the room, and there’s Neil trying to teach Joni Mitchell the difference between electric and acoustic.”

  Mitchell had entered with Joel Bernstein and Young immediately handed her a Gretsch. Soon the band was plowing through a train-wreck rendition of Joni’s “Raised on Robbery,” complete with boozy off-key harmonies from Young. When Briggs later played Mitchell a tape, she winced, shaking her head over the racket. Briggs said he threw her out of his house.

  The music recorded at S.I.R. is some of the top-drawer, big-time, hotshit greatest rock and roll ever made. You could write a book on the bit of piano that opens Tonight’s the Night. Just an offhand, uncertain tinkling of the ivories, but so ominous, so full of dread. It sets the tone for the onslaught to come—out-of-tune singing, bum notes, mike hits and some of the best, most beautiful noise ever.

  These are dispatches from the other side—sublime, stream-of-consciousness poetry set to drunken Jimmy Reed rhythms; “Speakin’ Out” is half Kahlil Gibran, half Fats Domino. “Oh tell me where the answer lies / Is it in the notebook behind your eyes?” croons Young, propelled by his chunky honky tonk piano and Lofgren’s quicksilver blues guitar. “All right, Nils, play it!”—one of the only times Young will ever invite a musician to solo on record.

  The unearthly “World on a String” sports lyrics that evoke all sorts of thoughts on success, purpose and mortality, and one couplet in particular could be tattooed on Young’s heart: “It’s just a game you see me play / Only real in the way that I feel from day to day.” The doomed, resigned opening rumble of guitar tells you no happy face came up with this riff.

  In the sly, soulful “Roll Another Number”—written on the spot in the studio—a well-oiled Young fumbled with the key to his ignition, then tells us he’s “a million miles away from that helicopter day” of Woodstock and goes on to mourn those who didn’t go the distance (“Though my feet aren’t on the ground / I been standin’ on the sound / Of some openhearted people goin’ down”). At once funny and profound, the music is exquisite—loose, liquid and just short of falling apart.

  Perhaps the most luminous playing is by Ben Keith, whose otherworldy steel lends just the right
lonesome-prairie feel to songs like “Albuquerque.” “I couldn’t believe all that weird slide in Tonight’s the Night,” said Lofgren. “All those shades of melancholy that were in us … it’s almost Middle-Eastern, like ‘Ben Keith Goes to East Cairo.’”

  “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn,” Charlie Parker once proclaimed. Young was in the thick of it. Surrounded by friends, his subconscious unhinged, he had tuned in to the cosmos. Halfway through “Mellow My Mind,” Young’s ravaged voice cracks with emotion. “I still get chills when it gets to that fuckin’ note,” said Molina. “It’s so real. I’ll tell ya, man, Neil was right there with us. He was wide open.”

  The finished tracks were sequenced with drunken between-song raps, and toward the end of September—believing the record was near completion—the band played eight shows opening the Roxy, a Sunset Strip nightclub owned by David Geffen, Elliot Roberts, Lou Adler and Elmer Valentine. It was a flashy joint, with the exclusive private enclave “On the Rox” upstairs, and opening night attracted all manner of record-company slime and celebrity. Young and company gave them a show they wouldn’t soon forget.

  “Every night was like goin’ for broke, like the end of the world” is how Bob Dylan described his infamous 1966 tour. Neil Young was about to add a mushroom cloud of his own by taking Tonight’s the Night on the road.

  “Welcome to Miami Beach, ladies and gentlemen. Everything is cheaper than it looks.” This is the cryptic introduction Young would customarily use to open Tonight’s the Night shows—after banging through the title song, a number the audience had never heard but would get to know painfully well before the evening was over. “Put a little light on that palm tree, B.J.,” he’d call out, and roadie Willie “Baby John” Hinds—resplendent in Hawaiian shirt and beach baggies and looking like the tackiest Florida tourist—would pull the chain on a bare forty-watt bulb to illuminate a sad, sickly specimen with about four fronds.