Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  *Young: “There were a few Tonight’s the Night songs in the show, but it wasn’t the Tonight’s the Night vibe—it was the ‘Walk On’ vibe. We’d do ‘Walk On’ when we walked on, then we’d do it when we walked off. So that concept of doing the same song at the beginning and the end happened with ‘Walk On’—then we dropped ‘Walk On’ and put in ‘Tonight’s the Night.’”

  * It had been over twenty years since the Tonight’s the Night session tapes had been heard when Joel Bernstein and I listened to them in 1996, and it provoked one of those weird coincidences that seem almost routine around Neil Young. “Wow, man, I feel like I’m in 1996,” Young mutters between songs on the tape from August 26, 1973. “I really do.”

  *Curiously, for an artist who has documented his own career so obsessively, the Tonight’s the Night tour is a bit of a blank spot. The only live shows Young recorded were at the Roxy, before the band truly caught fire. The best way to enjoy the tour is through audience tapes of the European and most of the American gigs. No tapes have surfaced of the Canadian shows. Joel Bernstein’s thirty-five-millimeter shots of the Canadian tour were lost, as was Super-8 film Briggs shot at the Roxy.

  *Typically, Young didn’t ask Meijers permission to reprint the article—he just did it, and the writer found out only when he saw a copy of the album. “It blew my mind,” Meijers said proudly. He became friends with Young, visiting the ranch a few years later. He attempted to write a book but felt in the end that Shakey had somehow snake-charmed him out of the project. “As a journalist, you can become someone’s friend, and after that you can’t be a journalist anymore,” he said. “Neil got me in his pocket. As a journalist, he castrated me.”

  *The Tonight’s the Night material went through an insane amount of different running orders, but the cassette Briggs played for me—which contained the raps—was a twelve-song version: “Tonight’s the Night,” “Mellow My Mind,” “Bad Fog of Loneliness,” “Speakin’ Out,” “Walk On,” “Winterlong,” “Albuquerque,” “New Mama,” “Roll Another Number,” “Tired Eyes,” “Tonight’s the Night.” “Bad Fog” and “Winterlong” were cut on February 5, 1974; the rest are from S.I.R. Eight of these songs would wind up on the released album, two would be released on subsequent LPs, and one tremendous performance—“Bad Fog”—remains unreleased. “It really is one of my best recordings,” said Young, who had cut a more polished “Bad Fog” nearly three years to the day earlier during the Harvest sessions. How frequently does a later version of a song top the first recording? “Almost never,” he said. At S.I.R., Young also cut versions of “Wonderin’,” “Everybody’s Alone,” “Lookout Joe” and a solo acoustic take of the Springfield-era “One More Sign.”

  shit mary, I can’t dance

  “Ask Buttrey about Rusty skinnin’ cats,” advised Tim Drummond. Feline turned to canine by the next version. “I heard the dog was in pieces,” whispered engineer Denny Purcell. “Somebody at the motel found the dog pieces and they got arrested.”

  Tales of animal sacrifice seem to hound Rusty Kershaw. Lawyer Craig Hayes said the stories originated back in the seventies when he extricated Ben Keith and Rusty from a sticky situation. “They had destroyed a hotel room in their tequila madness,” Hayes said. “There’s been a lotta subsequent rumors about everything from voodoo to dog mutilations.” I can’t even print the story Graham Nash recounted. Rusty busted a gut when I told him the tales. None of them were true. “I’ve had lots of stories pinned on me, shit,” he purred in his syrupy Cajun drawl. But, he added, “I have a story about a monkey.

  “This was back in the late fifties, early sixties. New Orleans. My brother Doug and I was on a country-music tour, people like Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Jerry Lee Lewis—a whole slew of us. This chick, boy, she looked about as fuckin’ crazy as I was. She came right to me and we went to a Holiday Inn and we just did a whole bunch a fuckin’ ’n shit, ’n after we done a whole lotta that, I done me up a joint and drank me some fuckin’ whiskey ’n shit, and I flicked the TV on and it was one of these movies that have a monkey in it, and boy, she went, ‘Wooooh—look at that!’ And I said, ‘What?’ Y’know—I wanna know ’bout this.

  “And she says, ‘Well, when I was real young, my husband wanted to be kinky and he got this monkey. And this monkey had these great big soft furry lips and this great big, long tongue. I didn’t wanna do it at first, but he kept remindin’ me about these great big ol’ soft lips and that great big ol’ long tongue—and it worked out for a while.’ And I said, ‘Then what happened?’ She said, ‘Well, my husband started gettin’ jealous of the monkey’—hee hee. And I said, ‘Then what happened?’ She said, ‘He beat the shit out of the goddamn monkey.’ And I said, ‘Then what happened?’ ‘I ran off with the monkey. That’s the fuckin’ truth.’ I said, ‘Ahllll right!’”

  Rusty Kershaw is a wild man straight from the Louisiana swamps. Born into a musical family on February 2, 1938, Russell Lee Kershaw started performing at the age of nine, perfecting his formidable guitar style a few years later in a band his mother formed after his father shot himself. Rusty recorded with the likes of Lightnin’ Slim, and in the mid-fifties, he hit it big on the country charts as half of the swamp-pop duo Rusty and Doug, recording up-tempo hits like “Louisiana Man” and aching ballads like “I Can’t See Myself.” In 1964, after much touring and hell-raising, the brothers split. “I just couldn’t stand the grind of the tourin’ and the same set every night,” said Rusty. “I like to play from the top of my head. Once you practice and get all the parts stuck together, that’s what you’ve done—you’re stuck. It takes the life out of it. To me, it’s ‘Oh man, we gotta play this motherfucker again?’ Just do it—Nike’s got a good one with that.”

  Doug Kershaw would go on to solo fame as the hyperactive hippie fiddler; Rusty would wander down a much darker road. “Rusty’s amazing,” said J. J. Cale. “He’s so natural, man, that it hurt him.” In 1970, Cotillion issued a barely noticed solo album with liner notes detailing Rusty’s battles with the bottle. By the time 1974 rolled around, he had mutated into a big, hairy psychedelic swamp rat in bib overalls. Rusty would wield tremendous influence over Neil Young’s next album, getting everyone fucked up on a noxious concoction called honey slides and hurtling Young into a musical space even further out than Tonight’s the Night. Young had blown everybody’s mind on that record by recording material the band barely knew, but Rusty Kershaw would go one better—he wanted to record Young’s songs without knowing them at all.

  Rusty’s on to that thing. He wants to get that moment—just sit down and “I’ll start, then you start goin’ and we’ll get it.” Some people, once they discover that, they’re so into it that it’s all-encompassing. Nothing else matters. Rusty’s one of ’em. I was, too, at one point.

  He’s a cool cat, Rusty’s fine. He’s wild, boy—he probably never listened to Nirvana, but he probably woulda liked Kurt.

  —What kind of shape were you in at that point?

  Searchin’ for the muse, I think. Pretty dark. Not really that happy. I think it was a period of disillusionment about things turning out differently than I had anticipated. I think I was starting to realize what a fucked-up life I had chosen for myself with Carrie. It wasn’t really happening. So I was outta there.

  —When did that relationship end for you?

  Right about then. That was just about it.

  —What effect did that relationship have on your art?

  It had a good effect. Because I was able to get a lot of it out in my art. It was like adding fuel to the fire.

  Early in 1974, Young began recording new material with David Briggs at the ranch. In February and March he cut “Walk On,” with its great duckwalking guitar figure (a song allegedly inspired by Jack Nitzsche’s repeated trashing of Young; Young doesn’t remember), a hopped-up remake of “Tonight’s the Night” with Greg Reeves on bass; “Traces,” a ballad best forgotten; a sluggish “Winterlong” that was done far more successfully by the Horse with Whitte
n; a wonderfully inebriated “Bad Fog of Loneliness”; and, most significantly, on March 8, a surreal ballad called “For the Turnstiles.” The way others recall the song’s origin reveals a Warholian quality in the way Young would snatch art from anywhere: Carrie Snodgress remembers walking around the house whistling the tune Young copped for the melody. Sandy Mazzeo recalls telling Neil that day about his infamous friend and prostitution-rights advocate Margo St. James, who had invited all of them to her Hooker’s Ball, where tickets were a then exorbitant $10.

  Young worked fragments of the conversation into “Turnstiles,” and by that afternoon he was in the studio, playing banjo opposite Ben Keith’s Dobro, both singing twisted harmonies that sounded positively Appalachian. Keith recalls, “I’d sing these off, weird harmonies, and Neil’d go, ‘Oh, that’s cool—do that.” I didn’t know I could sing that high—I still can’t. I must’ve been sittin’ on a crack and got my balls in there.”

  The downbeat mood of “For the Turnstiles”—which for me has always suggested Young’s disillusion with the faceless arenas of the Time Fades Away tour—would set the tone for On the Beach. Unfortunately Briggs, who coproduced the cut with Young, didn’t make the rest of the sessions. “I got so deathly sick the second day—sickest I’ve ever been, hundred and five temperature—and they just kept recording. Just threw me away because Neil was hot. Pissed me off so much that I didn’t have anything to do with him for a long time.”

  Ben Keith would make the rest of the On the Beach journey, guiding Young into a strange scene with heavy players. Keith brought in the Band’s rhythm section, Rick Danko and Levon Helm, and last but not least, Rusty Kershaw, whom Ben had met when he first came to Nashville back in ’56. Some were apprehensive about the direction Keith sent Young in. The steel player would “steer Neil into the weird,” said Elliot Mazer. “Ben can go to the moon.”

  According to Tim Drummond, On the Beach officially began with a Lincoln Continental and a bottle of Mateus Rose. Drummond was in Los Angeles working with Graham Nash when Young showed up. Young and Drummond left the studio together and spent the night cruising around Hollywood in the “Confidential”—a big white pimpmobile Young had rented—while demolishing a bottle. When Drummond returned home the next day, he found a message from Young. It was time to make some music.

  The sessions took place at Sunset Sound and the players began to congregate at the Sunset Marquis Hotel. It was a nonstop sleazefest, with odd visitors popping in and out. One night it might be one of the Everly Brothers, the next a Playboy bunny or two. Even porn star Linda Lovelace—whose picture graced the back of Drummond’s Fender Precision bass—made an appearance. “We were all crazier than shithouse rats,” said Drummond fondly. “Hollywood Babylon at its fullest.”

  The nucleus for the L.A. sessions was Ralph Molina, Ben Keith and Tim Drummond, plus a motley array of guest stars. George Whitsell, the Rockets’ old guitar player, was summoned out of the blue. “April Fool’s Day 1974, I get a call at midnight sayin’, ‘Neil wants you to come down and record with him right now.’ I stayed for a month.” But almost before Whitsell knew it, his sole musical contribution—guitar on a demented number called “Vampire Blues”—was over. “We played that song for about fifteen minutes. I said, ‘That was pretty good. You wanna try one?’ Neil said, ‘You wanna hear the playback?’ He took the rehearsal and spliced it together.”

  These were loose, foggy sessions, with musicians trading off on instruments they had far from mastered: Ben Keith played bass, drums, organ, piano; guitarist Rusty Kershaw played lap steel and fiddle.

  Hanging over everything was the furry shadow of Kershaw, and with him came the honey slides, cooked up by his wife, Julie, at the rate of a pound a week. “I think me and Rusty came up with it,” recalls Keith, who said you start off by frying some weed in a skillet just until it starts to smoke. “When that stuff started smokin’, boy, it would stink like hell. The studio smelled like a marijuana farm!” Then you add the honey, and “it just all looks like cowshit, heh heh. You take a spoonful of this cowshit and you eat it. And in about twenty minutes you start forgettin’ where you are.”

  The high was debilitating. “People passed out,” said Elliot Roberts. “This stuff was, like, much worse than heroin. Much heavier. Rusty would pour it down your throat and within ten minutes you were catatonic.” This might account for the ultra-low slow-motion D-chord drone of the L.A. sessions. None of the songs were under four minutes, and two—“Ambulance Blues” and “On the Beach”—were seven minutes plus.

  “It was Kershaw’s record, not Neil’s,” said Willie B. Hinds. “This is a funny thing to say about Neil—people have had influences on him, like Danny Whitten or Kershaw. Ralph and Billy didn’t, Rusty Kershaw did.” Roberts, to whom On the Beach would be dedicated, watched Young float away with understandable concern. “Ben’s advertising Rusty as the new messiah—and Neil, if he has a problem, it’s that he wants to be a good ol’ boy too much. Too much.”

  Once on the expense account, Kershaw made himself right at home at the Sunset Marquis. “One morning I saw this guy pushing in cases of wine and boxes of Fritos, shit like that,” Drummond recalls. “I said, ‘Wow, you gonna have a room-service thing here?’ He said, ‘This is going to Mr. Kershaw’s room.’ I mean, Jesus Christ!”

  Room One at the Sunset Marquis soon registered the effects of Kershaw’s debauchery. Red-wine stains covered the carpet, which was also dotted by cigarette burns commemorating the Cajun’s drug-induced nods. Visitors were awestruck by the extent of the wreckage. “It was like cannibals had been livin’ in there,” said Drummond, who witnessed Elliot arguing frantically with the hotel manager over a settlement price for Kershaw’s demolition job. Julie Kershaw said her husband’s vibe was intensified by the fact that he’d been on a six-week jag without sleep. Finally he just collapsed—after attaching a one-word note to his bedroom door via his pocket knife. “It just said DON’T,” said Rusty. “Not ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that’—just DON’T.”

  Kershaw hated the cold, impersonal studio atmosphere of Sunset Sound. “I said, ‘Shit, this is too spiffy. We gotta get this like your livin’ room, man, sittin’ real close together. Like we’re at home. Either that or let’s put on some suits.’” Hinds was sent out to scour thrift stores for furniture, inaugurating another Neil Young tradition.

  Old overstuffed chairs and floor lamps were arranged in a circle, the room’s non-lighting limited to a few candles wrapped in tinfoil. Kershaw had one last request—that he be in close physical proximity to Young when they started. “I said, ‘Neil, when it’ll move me the most is the first time you play it. You’re gonna do it your very best then—and I can play it with you the first time. We only have to sit real close together.’”

  Young was blown away by the fact that Kershaw didn’t care to rehearse a song before recording it. “Neil said to me later, ‘How in the hell do you know how to play this thing the first time I play it? You don’t know what I’m gonna do.’ I said, ‘Neil, you carry a heavy vibe, and if I’m sittin’ close to you, I can feel what you feel before you play. I know where you’re gonna go.’”

  It was a lethargic, drug-addled scene. “We didn’t work every day, we only worked when we felt really inspired,” said Kershaw, who describes how “Motion Pictures,” a below-sea-level downer dedicated to Carrie, oozed out on the spot. “Me and Ben and Neil were sittin’ in Ben’s room. Neil started hummin’ somethin’, and I started playin’ along with the melody on the steel. Ben started playin’ bass, it sounded so goddamn pretty. Neil picked up a pen and just wrote the words right then.” The players all squeezed into the Confidential, rolled into Sunset Sound “and put that motherfucker down while it was still smeared all over us.”

  The ensemble sound was plain beyond, like some spectral jug band backing Jimmie Rodgers. Keith, anchoring the song from beneath the sea with a bass tuned “way down low”; Kershaw, farting out a few sad, kazoolike notes on steel; Molina patting out a minimal, only
occasionally audible beat on the bongos; Young strumming bittersweet chords on the acoustic and bleating forlornly on harmonica. “I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow,” croaks Young in a desperate ghost-whisper that Tim Drummond said was conjured up just for these sessions. “Robert De Niro gained fifty pounds for Raging Bull, Neil did the same thing for his music. He was smoking two packs a day to get a late-night, frog-in-his-throat voice.” Young was deep into it during On the Beach. “That’s when Neil got the downest he could get,” said Hinds.

  Perhaps the most deranged moment of the On the Beach sessions came during the recording of the song inspired by Charlie Manson, “Revolution Blues.” Rusty didn’t feel like the musicians were living up to the song’s title. “I said, ‘Look, man, you don’t sound like you’re tryin’ to start a fuckin’ revolution. Here’s how you start that.’ And I just started breakin’ a bunch of shit and Ben jumped right in there. I said, ‘That’s a revolution, muth’ fucker.’ Goddamn, that sparked Neil right off. He got it on the next take.”

  Apparently possessed by animal spirits, Kershaw got down on the floor during the recording, to the amazement of observers like Billy Talbot’s brother Johnny. “Here’s this big fat tub in Lil’ Abner overalls—one side undone, with dirty long underwear—thinking he was a snake, slithering around on the floor.”

  Young’s superstar buddies were especially spooked. “Crosby and Nash, they couldn’t handle it,” said Hinds. “It was too grungy for them.” David Crosby, usually the high priest of any scene, left Rusty Kershaw particularly unimpressed. “Kershaw just fuckin’ laughed at him,” said Hinds. “He’d get on the floor and start howlin’.” At some point, Stills also had a run-in with Kershaw. “Me and Neil were playin’, and it was such heavy magic, I think Stills thought if he picked up the guitar, he’d have it. Man, you don’t take a guitar from somebody’s hand, and it just pissed me off.” Kershaw pulled a knife on him in response. “I said, ‘Stephen Stills, who in the fuck is that? You better git back, you motherfucker.’ Neil was sayin’, ‘Go ahead—do it! Do it!’” Young doesn’t recall the incident.