Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  “A lot of it just came about,” said Tim Foster. “We stole the palm tree from the S.I.R. entryway. Then there was this guy who had an arts-and-crafts store on Santa Monica. Neil said, ‘God, look at that wooden Indian—that would be cool on our stage.’ So we went down there, cut the chain and left a note: ‘We stole your wooden Indian. If you want your money, come to the Roxy.’” The Indian ended up onstage with a Gibson Explorer around his neck. At various points in the show, Young would talk to him. Before the first Roxy show, a woozy Ben Keith staggered over to Foster, pointed to the Indian and said, “Tell that guy to turn up. I can’t hear him.”

  Then there were the platform glitter boots. Leslie Morris remembers getting a call at the management office the day of the Roxy show. “Neil decided that day he wanted these glitter boots. Nine hundred dollars’ worth.” A chorus line of the knee-high monstrosities was duct-taped around the edge of his grand piano, “Black Beauty.” On every stop of the tour, more boots were bought. Briggs remembered snagging a shitload on Carnaby Street in London. “We went in and said, ‘We wanna buy some boots.’ They said, ‘What size?’ We said, ‘It don’t matter. We’ll take ten pairs.’”

  Even the way the band looked was from beyond. “The guys came out, they never shaved—I don’t think they even bathed,” said Hinds. Young was dressed for the party in a white Tinkerbell “Topanga All-Stars” T-shirt, patched jeans, scruffy beard, a pair of shades worthy of Elvis—Polaroid Cool-Ray 420 Fastbacks—and, to top off the ensemble, a thrift-store jacket: “a gray-and-white seersucker sport coat like a bad-news band would wear in the forties,” as Hinds described it. Young pinched the jacket from Lofgren. “Neil said, ‘Hey Nils, can I borrow your coat?’ He never took it off.” The overall impression struck some in the audience as borderline demonic. “He looked like Manson,” said writer Mike Thomas.

  Young might have looked like Manson, but his onstage patter was pure Shecky Greene. He rambled on about Miami, made obscure references to Bebe Rebozo and Spiro Agnew, then played new song after new song. “Here’s one you’ve heard before,” he would mutter toward the end of the night, and the relieved audience would start to applaud. Then he’d lurch into “Tonight’s the Night” for the third time.

  Young played only one or two familiar songs during the entire show, and that was just for the encore. The rest was all the unheard Tonight’s the Night material, and the band, finally getting to learn the songs they’d already recorded, played with an intensity that seemed to increase nightly. “The mood live was completely different,” said Lofgren. “There was an angry edge the original recording didn’t have. We were all pissed off about losin’ a couple of people close to us and it came out.”

  Lofgren took the downer ambience as a personal challenge. “I was the most naturally up of the group, so to help me stay in the groove, I brought along giant combat boots and ankle weights beneath my jeans. To have that extra ten pounds on the bottom of my feet helped me stay more in the place Neil was in.”

  What place was Neil in? “Wasted out of his mind,” said Dave Sigler, a sixteen-year-old fan sitting in the third row at the Roxy. The audience yelled at Young to take off his shades, and when he did, Sigler noticed “his eyes were just bloody-red pulpy slits. You couldn’t even tell what color they were.” Young smoked joints thrown from the audience and took occasional swigs from a gallon jug of Cuervo Gold he passed down to the front rows. But as bombed as he was, he wasn’t depressed and self-destructive like he’d been on the Time Fades Away tour. “It was trashed, but in a controlled way,” said Briggs.

  Those who were a part of Tonight’s the Night are quick to downplay the doom and gloom many rock critics have seized on when it comes to this period. “Even today, people come up to me and go, ‘Oh man, that heavy, horrible Tonight’s the Night thing,’” said Lofgren. “I’m like, ‘Hey man, we had a party. We were releasin’ all that dark stuff—on a nightly basis.’” “That’s the first tour I ever saw Neil have fun,” said Willie B. Hinds.

  The final night at the Roxy was a wild one. Annoyed that industry weasels had scarfed up all the tickets for the first three nights, Young added an extra night for his fans, and when the second show started late, he invited the audience to have a drink on the house. “I had a tequila sunrise on Neil,” said Dave Sigler. Young’s handlers went ballistic over the expense.

  Then, commemorating the Roxy’s previous incarnation as a strip joint, Young offered a pair of glitter boots to the first topless woman onstage. Urged on by Ben Keith’s wife, Linda, Carrie Snodgress started making her way to the stage to claim them. “I’m unbuttoning my little vest, and Roberts and Geffen are standing there. Elliot said, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Well, Neil said that the first girl who came out topless was gonna get a pair of those shoes, so I think my name’s written on them.’ Elliot said, ‘You’re not goin’ out there! Snodgress, you must be tripping on acid to do an insane thing like this! Do you know what you’re gonna do to Neil’s reputation?’” Crew member Tim Foster was standing next to Elliot. “As Carrie was going past me, she hands me her shirt. Elliot was exasperated, tellin’ me, ‘Put that shirt on her!’ I’m goin’, ‘Fuck you, Elliot—you put the shirt on her.’ He was embarrassed. Nobody else was.”

  “The whole theme of Tonight’s the Night was ‘Let go of all the crap and get real,’” said Snodgress. “So I just came up behind Neil and put my arms around his waist—he just looked, started laughing, said, ‘Oh my God,’ and started playing ‘Tonight’s the Night.’ Elliot didn’t speak to me for days.”

  As game as Snodgress was for the antics at the Roxy, inside she felt that Young had left the building with Elvis. “That passion, that hunger, that rock and roll release … watchin’ musicians get swept right up in it. Neil didn’t belong in that world. Tonight’s the Night was the beginning of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and it was the beginning of the end for my life with Neil.”

  The Tonight’s the Night circus gathered steam during a trio of Canadian dates one month later. “Briggs goes, ‘Neil, I got the set. You’ll love it,’” recalled Tim Foster. “And he pulls out all these hubcaps, speedometers and turn signals.” The stage took on the appearance of an auto junkyard. Buick hood ornaments and rearview mirrors were attached to Young’s piano, the speedometer onto Lofgren’s amp and hubcaps hung everywhere. Cheesy trophies were stacked on the amps. “Anything that glittered and was kind of goofy,” said Foster.

  Briggs blew hundreds of dollars on crew T-shirts emblazoned with obscure in-jokes like EVERYTHING’S CHEAPER THAN IT LOOKS, EQUAL TIME FOR PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE and HELLO, WATERFACE. Briggs got everyone involved. This was group art of the highest order. “It was like a buncha actors in a traveling road show, but the roles went on all day and night,” said Briggs.

  The Canadian audiences didn’t get it at all. “The audience really thought they had come to the wrong building,” said Joel Bernstein. “People were pissed off. It was not funny.”

  “It was so intense,” said Briggs. “I’d look at the crowd going out, and I never saw such a drained bunch of people before or since. They looked like they’d gone ten rounds with Ali—all of ’em.”

  A week in England and Scotland began on November 3. Midnight, Young abruptly renamed the band the Santa Monica Flyers, donning a plastic Nixon mask Briggs had given him. Tim Foster awoke to a surreal card game in progress. “I remember looking up and seeing Nixon go, ‘I’ll bet thirty dollars.’” Foster had grown tired of hubcap duty, so Willie B. Hinds was called in as set dresser for Europe. He also snuck in some much needed spiritual supplies.

  “When I flew over to London, I brought a case of tequila,” said Hinds. He was allowed to bring in only two bottles, so he handed out the rest to fellow passengers, then collected it all back after landing. “I’m on the other side of customs and I’m tryin’ to catch these people as they’re walkin’ off with my tequila.” Some incredibly potent Hawaiian grass—Maui Wowie—was also smuggled over in a speaker case. “The case was impounded fo
ur days in customs,” said Foster. “Next day you see nine guys with screwdrivers tryin’ to get the back off the cabinets.” To keep the Indian company onstage, there was now a suit of Samurai armor—wearing the Nixon mask when Young didn’t have it on.

  Also on the British bill were newcomers the Eagles, who were dumbfounded by the drunken buffoonery of their big hero. The English audiences were equally bewildered. “They think, ‘We’re gonna have an evening of really fine country-flavored rock and roll and folk rock,’” Young recalled to Cameron Crowe in 1979. “And then we just came out and … took ’em all to Miami Beach.”

  The assault continued. At the Rainbow Theater in London on November 5, Young guzzled tequila onstage, awarded the crowd a trophy and borrowed a camera from a concertgoer to take a picture of the audience. Impatient with such antics, someone in the house shouted, “Rock and roll!” “I’d love to see some,” retorted Shakey.

  The old, intimate theaters Young played in Britain were the antithesis of the cavernous arenas of his last tour. The band was flying, the music soaring higher and higher. * The set list was Young at his disillusioned best and included a short acoustic segment featuring a powerful, booze-soaked version of “Helpless” with Ben Keith on Dobro and, on accordion, Nils Lofgren, who—at the urging of Briggs—just stumbled onstage one night and joined in.

  The versions of “Tonight’s the Night” were also growing longer and weirder, expanding like some out-of-control amoeba. As the band vamped, Young launched into demented, impromptu raps about Bruce Berry’s downfall, relating stoned-out dialogue between Berry and CSNY that was at once chilling and hilarious. Here’s the one from Liverpool:

  “So one day Bruce was pickin’ up the guitars, y’know, for the band. That’s what Bruce did, carried around the instruments, made sure everything was workin’ good.” Young trills a few notes on piano. “And, uh, one day he showed up with his station wagon.” More piano. “Walked up to my friend David and said, ‘I lost your guitar, man … I left it in the station wagon, but when I came back it was gone … I don’t know what happened to it.’” The band plays a few bars.

  “A couple of years passed, y’know … wasn’t too much work for Bruce…. One day he came to us lookin’ for work and he said, ‘I’d like a job … I got everything together, man. I’d like to take care of your guitars for ya’. So we looked at him and I said, ‘I’m sorry, man, can’t do it. I mean, ya lost David’s guitar, y’know. You don’t know what happened to the guitar, it’s gone. Ya lost his guitar, man, I mean, that’s his ax. That was it. Ya lost it. That’s your job and you lost it …’” Young thunders the low notes on the keyboard. “You took that guitar and you put it in your arm, Bruce,” he moans as the band charges back into the song.

  Riveting stuff, but undoubtedly lost on an audience who hadn’t heard any of the songs before and had no clue who Bruce Berry was anyway. Murray McLauchlan, the Canadian folkie who had the unenviable task of opening the shows in America (“I was the human sacrifice on that tour”) recalled it as an era “when university kids were drinking wine and eating quaaludes. There was a mindless, amorphous energy about it all. It was really insane—the audience was very druggy, very stoned, very rude. I mean, they were screaming for Neil Young while he was playing.

  “And the tour was built around this one phrase—‘Everything is cheaper than it looks’—which was Neil’s laconic summation of what the entire music biz and most of life is all about. The more people would act like howling monkeys, the more it would vindicate that point of view. It was like ‘Waddya here for, ya fuckin’ assholes? I’m gonna stick somethin’ ya don’t even want right in your fuckin’ face, and you’re still gonna be here. Where are you at?’”

  Things spun totally out of control at the Bristol Hippodrome, the second English show. “Neil will be right along,” Young said to the audience, introducing the band as “Clark Kent and the Micronite Filters.” Between songs, he carried on a nonsensical monologue about senior citizens in Miami Beach charging up their electric carts to go to a big nightclub show that culminated in an orgy. Bruce Berry, Young told the crowd, never got to attend the gig, so it was time to raise him from the dead. “We’re gonna attempt to bring him right back here to the Hippodrome,” said Young, fingering the chords to “Tonight’s the Night.” “Shake your opera glasses.”

  The impatient crowd grew more and more rowdy, until Young got so perturbed that he stormed off at the beginning of his acoustic set, vowing not to return. The audience went nuts, and Roberts had to plead with Young to finish the set before a riot started. Young angrily returned to the stage, and by the end of the show—“Tonight’s the Night,” of course—the band was going berserk. “Neil was freaking out on piano, just banging away,” recalled Lofgren. “I wound up jumping on top of it and trying to break the strings with my combat boots, playing guitar with my teeth. Neil was just yellin’ and screamin’, ‘Bruce, you took the guitar and put it in your arm!’ The intensity was outrageous. All this for an audience that was hoping this was a bad dream and any minute we’d do ‘Cinnamon Girl.’”

  The crew watched the Bristol show from the safety of the wings. “I remember lookin’ at Briggs and sayin’, ‘I don’t care if somethin’ breaks—I ain’t goin’ out there,’” said Foster. On a chaotic audience tape you can hear the crowd—what’s left of it—getting more and more intense. “Piss off!” someone screams. Young plays on, unconcerned. “Elvis has left the arena, ladies and gentlemen,” he drawls, tinkling away at the piano.

  —Tell me about your Tonight’s the Night guy.

  One of the hardest-workin’ men in show business.

  —People tell me Time Fades Away was bleak, and Tonight’s the Night was more fun.

  Oh, yeah—Tonight’s the Night was a lot more fun. ’Cause I was with my friends. I was havin’ a fantastic time. It was dark but it was good. That was a band with a reason. We were on a mission. That’s maybe as artistic a performance as I’ve given. I think there was more drama in Tonight’s the Night because I knew what I was doing to the audience. But the audience didn’t know if I knew what I was doing. I was drunk outta my mind on that tour. Hey—you don’t play bad when you’re drunk, you just play real slow. You don’t give a shit. Really don’t give a shit.

  I was fucking with the audience. From what I understand, the way rock and roll unfolded with Johnny Rotten and the punk movement—that kind of audience abuse—kinda started with that tour. I have no idea where the concept came from. Somebody else musta done it first, we all know that, whether it was Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard, somebody shit on the audience first.

  Elliot Roberts was stuck with the thankless task of trying to keep Young’s career on track throughout the Tonight’s the Night debauchery.

  “Elliot didn’t get it,” said Lofgren. “We’d do this insane show and all be high off it and feeling great, we’d all get on the bus, all be drinkin’ tequila, talkin’ about the show and how wild it was, havin’ a ball partyin’, and sure enough, Elliot would always drag Neil to the rear of the bus and just berate him. ‘What are you doing? You gotta cancel this tour now. You’re gonna lose fifteen thousand dollars! Crosby, Stills and Nash are waiting.’ Every night Neil would go to the back of the bus and let Elliot give his rap and try to calm him down.”

  Roberts, who still seemed pained when discussing this period over twenty years later, related an apocryphal tale concerning Ahmet Ertegun and his entourage attending one of the British shows. “Neil is really really drunk, and he comes off and said, ‘Man, we kicked ass. We never played better. It’s really coming together now. Let’s go out and do the encore.’ I say, ‘Neil, do an encore to who? There’s no one here but Ahmet.’ ‘Ahmet’s here?’ ‘Yeah, he’s got, like, this one row of people.’ Neil goes, ‘All right! That’s who was applauding.’ Neil actually deluded himself like that … he went out and did a three-song encore to Ahmet.

  “And it cost us a lot of money to do that—it was in overtime. Not only was Neil being abusive an
d losing it, but the whole tour really hurt us in the marketplace. We couldn’t tour Europe.”

  Although the press would come around quickly when the Tonight’s the Night album was released eighteen months later, most of them were harsh on the tour. “Banal … off-key” is how Young’s old Buffalo Springfield supporter Judith Sims summed up the Roxy shows in Rolling Stone. “Tedious,” decreed Melody Maker of the London Rainbow show. “He talked too much about nothing and went on too long.” One disgruntled fan who had attended the show wrote in to the paper declaring, “The real Neil Young is dead.”

  Best of all was a long piece by Constant Meijers, a Dutch correspondent who was allowed to attend only after he provided Young with numerous bottles of Jose Cuervo. “Neil couldn’t hit any of the high notes. I began to lose all hope. What on earth was happening to Neil? Where had the magic gone? He talked a lot, drank tequila by the wineglass in one gulp … Jesus Christ, what a downer!” Meijers got even more hysterical after Young’s inebriated performance of “Helpless.” “And how helpless he looked sitting there, his hair hanging in his face … shaking on his stool, knocking the microphone in his fury and his fear…. Who was that man sitting there? What in the name of Jesus was he doing?”

  Invited backstage, Meijers found Young’s traveling circus much more upbeat. “They made a lot of jokes, always punning. Neil’s a man’s guy. Drink a beer, be around guys, go out for a meal—he wants to play. There were no girls around. This was not Elvis Presley time.”

  Young would eventually reprint the entire Meijers article, untranslated, in an insert for the Tonight’s the Night album. “It seemed a good idea to print it in Dutch because nobody in the U.S. would be able to understand any of it,” he told a writer in 1976. “Because I didn’t understand any of it myself, and when someone is so sickened and fucked up as I was then, everything’s in Dutch anyway.” *