Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  “The theme of that album was basically the demise of his relationship with Carrie,” said Mazer. “It was intense, like trying to make a record in the middle of Forty-second Street or Vietnam. It was an extraordinary time. If you’re a documentary filmmaker and you’re gonna document a person, that’s when you’re gonna do it—at the most intense, emotional time of their lives. So here’s a guy going through hell, and this is like a fuckin’ catharsis for him—a chance to get these songs out. It was a great relief.”

  Throughout December and January, Young recorded both in Nashville and at the ranch, and the songs rolled out hard and fast. Some were stark acoustic performances—“Love Is a Rose,” “Love/Art Blues,” “Homefires.” Others were cut with a band: “Old Homestead,” a weird allegorical tale with allusions to the Horse; “Homegrown,” a goofy tribute to hemp recorded in a much higher version by the Horse; “We Don’t Smoke It,” an inebriated blues vamp that would’ve sounded right at home on Tonight’s the Night; and a killer “Vacancy,” featuring Young mangling guitar and harmonica simultaneously. In “Try,” a faint ray of optimism that perversely followed “Separate Ways” in one running order for the album, Young paid tribute to Carolyn Snodgress by adapting bits of her lingo into verse: “I’d like to take a chance,” yelps Young over a rollicking piano, “but shit, Mary, I can’t dance.” *

  Still in Chicago, Snodgress called Young and asked if she could return to the ranch for Christmas, but “he suggested that maybe it would be good if I stay with my dad, and I was sayin’, ‘My God, Neil, please—I can’t stay with my father, I gotta come home. Whatever’s goin’ on, let me come home.’” This time Young stood his ground. Carrie snapped after the call. “I threw the phone—and just shattered this whole goddamn plate-glass window. ’Cause it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair.”

  Things had gotten a little spooky at the ranch. “I remember Neil tellin’ me that Carrie’s mom—her ghost—was makin’ noise in the house,” recalls Mazzeo, who said Young asked him to stay over. “Sure enough, there was this one night when we were all hangin’ out in front of the fire in the living room. There was some sort of clanking and planking and booming around, and Neil went, ‘See? See?’”

  For Young, the best exorcism was through music. On December 16, he recorded the totem song of the period, “Give Me Strength.” The lyrics catch him struggling to make the final break from Carrie’s web. The bittersweet chorus is Young at his best: “The happier you fly, the sadder you crawl / The laughter in your eye is never all.” Nonsinger Ellen Talbot yowled along on harmony, providing a crazy edge more than suitable for one of the last Carrie songs.

  The sound is almost mystical. Guitar and harmonica, plus luminous overdubs of a tinkling piano and a finger tapping a paper cup, add glimmers of color that come and go. An impressionistic sound, precisely constructed without losing any of its spontaneous feel. Young was embarking on a musical experimentation that would culminate two years later on a song called “Will to Love.”

  It is hard to be enthusiastic enough about this period of Young’s work. The wordplay is magnificent, his singing never more impassioned. In terms of record-making, Young was at the top of his game. Pain, it seems, brought out the best in him.

  Toward the end of January 1975, Young and Ben Keith headed to Village Recorders in Los Angeles for the final Homegrown sessions and the results were way, way out. “Kansas” and “Mexico” were solo Young performances—short, fragmentary and hallucinogenic. “Mexico” was reminiscent of Brian Wilson at his ethereal best. “Florida” was some cockamamie spoken-word dream (printed out, for reasons no one can remember, in the booklet for Tonight’s the Night), set to the shrieking accompaniment of either Young or Keith drawing a wet finger around the rim of a glass (a trick they copped from Jack Nitzsche’s soundtrack for One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

  Young was spending more and more time away from Broken Arrow, renting a place on the beach at Malibu. “Neil left the ranch, had to get away,” said Mazzeo. “Too many ghosts—the ghost of Carrie, the ghost of Carrie’s mom and the ghosts of all the weird shit that had gone down.”

  Unable to locate Young, Carrie Snodgress soon heard from his mother, who told her to come to the ranch to pick up her things. Jim Love drove her to the house in his pickup. “He was the only friend left who would help,” said Carrie. “All the other ones had turned away.

  “I’ll tell ya, leavin’ that ranch was scary. I come walkin’ into the house and Rassy’s there. She’d gone through the entire house and piled all my stuff up in the living room. I was in shock. I said to Jim, ‘Just back the truck up to the porch.’ And I just started takin’ handfuls of stuff—my whole life—I just hurled it over the side of the porch into this pickup.

  “Rassy became enraged—‘Look at you. Look at the way you are behaving. You think this is a normal way for a person to behave, to just throw their things?’” Then Rassy picked up a slinky, sexy dress from the pile and suggested that maybe if Carrie had worn more of this sort of thing, she’d still be with Neil. “Never forgot it,” said Snodgress. “The person he disliked being around the most in the world, he allowed that person to be in charge of extricating me.”

  With tracks from Nashville, the ranch and Los Angeles—plus a bittersweet song called “White Line” that Young had recorded as an acoustic duet with the Band’s Robbie Robertson in England a few days before CSNY’s Wembley show—Homegrown was shaping up to be a major work. After some mixing was completed, Elliot Mazer headed off for England, where he played a tape of the album for the head of Chrysalis Records, who then told Mo Ostin he was sure they had another five-million seller. But then a funny thing happened. Young changed his mind.

  Blame it on that blurry evening at the Chateau Marmont, where Young had played Homegrown back to back with Tonight’s the Night for a bunch of stoned musicians including Rick Danko. “At which point Rick the Prick said, ‘Go with the raw one,’” said Mazer, who was devastated when Young decided to jettison Homegrown in favor of Tonight’s the Night.

  There was another factor involved in the decision. Young had pulled back from the emotional nakedness of Homegrown. “It was a little too personal … it scared me,” Young told Cameron Crowe a short time later. “I’ve never released any of those. And I probably never will. I think I’d be too embarrassed to put them out. They’re a little too real.” To his father he would describe the album as “great songs I can live without.”

  “He expressed to me he couldn’t listen to the whole thing, it was so intense,” said Elliot Mazer. “I said, ‘Don’t listen to it—you don’t listen to your own albums anyway.’” In the next few years, Young would parcel out various cuts from the Homegrown sessions: “Little Wing” and “Old Homestead” to Hawks and Doves, “Star of Bethlehem” to American Stars ’n Bars. “Love Is a Rose” and “Deep Forbidden Lake” would be released on Decade. But to hear Homegrown in its entirety is to hear Neil Young at his best.

  Pretty honest. Heh heh. It’s an honest album. Never came out, hardly any of it. There’s a cover for it somewhere. Me with a corncob pipe. Tom Wilkes did it—same guy who did the Harvest cover. Homegrown is the missing link between Harvest, Comes a Time, Old Ways and Harvest Moon.

  I think I was on the edge makin’ Homegrown. I was pretty outthere. Kinda lost. But at the same time, I had a lotta freedom to go wherever I wanted to go and do whatever I wanted to do—that’s why so many songs were written and so much traveling was done.

  Breaking up with Carrie and losing my family … It was my first family. It was my son. I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. That doing it was wrong. I hadn’t judged correctly. I’d done something without thinking about it—everything I did was working, so why not this? I was really torn between what to do and what was the right thing to do, but I knew I didn’t want to do that. I just went purely on my feelings at the time—there were some beautiful moments at the beginning of the relationship, but there was always this uneasiness that something was wrong. From the v
ery beginning. I don’t know why, but it was a little claustrophobic. Pegi doesn’t make me feel claustrophobic. Now I don’t feel I need to escape.

  But I kept ignoring it, and y’know—I was on a roll. Didn’t really have much to make me think twice.

  —You did later?

  Yeah, because I knew that I’d altered her life and my son’s life in a way that was less than it could’ve been … this is a painful period.

  —What is it about Carrie? She gets under your skin. I hear it in all those songs.

  “Revolution Blues”?

  —Well, that’s a weird one to pick!

  Well, if you’re talking about intensity and you’re talking about somebody who you don’t know why they get to ya—look at Charlie.

  —There’s a similar vibe?

  I think you mighta hit on somethin’ there. Heh heh heh.

  Things only got crazier in Carrie’s life after she left the ranch. In the mid-seventies, she was back in Los Angeles, involved with the man who had criticized her so relentlessly: Jack Nitzsche. “She took me by surprise,” said a somewhat chagrined Nitzsche, who, after having badmouthed Snodgress so viciously, was deeply embarrassed whenever he had to face Young during this period. Jack said he and Carrie went out for three years, but they managed to live together for only a little over a week. Neither party was in the best of shape at the time. “I was drinkin’, so I was playin’ a lotta games with him,” said Snodgress. “Whenever he’d be a bad boy, he’d turn around and give me money anonymously in envelopes in the mailbox. Weird. Sick.”

  Most observers found it a diabolical union. “Neil got lucky—she just left,” said Jack Jr. “My father went through a little heavier deal.” The “heavier deal” Jack Jr. is referring to unfolded the night of June 29, 1979, when Jack showed up at Carrie’s Hancock Park home to find her asleep in bed with another man (who fled upon Jack’s arrival). Nitzsche had a gun, and while accounts of what happened next differ drastically, Jack faced five felony counts when the smoke cleared: burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, assault with intent to murder, false imprisonment and a truly lurid last charge—rape by instrumentality. “Bullshit! I wouldn’t do that to a gun,” Jack said. Snodgress also accused him of threatening Zeke, who somehow slept soundly through the brouhaha in another room.

  Snodgress later disavowed the rape accusation on the stand, saying that police had written her account wrong. “I think Carrie had every right to press charges,” said Nitzsche’s friend Leslie Morris. “She had enough on Jack, but she wanted more. Was it press? I think she’s never benefited from these dramas she’s developed.” Nitzsche pled no contest to the assault charge. He was fined $3,500 and placed on three years probation. Snodgress got $60,000 in a settlement but, oddly enough, Nitzsche claimed she refused to take all the money. “Carrie went to my business manager and canceled the last payment of fifteen thousand. She said she couldn’t live with herself, she felt so horrible.”

  Unbelievably, Snodgress and Nitzsche have continued to see each other off and on in the years since. Early one morning I received a call. It was Carrie. Seems she and Jack had compared notes on their interviews with me, and Snodgress was upset. “Did you call me ‘dangerous’?” I heard a familiar voice in the background: Nitzsche’s. Where are you? I asked. “Over at Jack’s,” she said, which was a bit of a shock after her fearful tales of Nitzsche’s abuse. I hopped in my car and drove over. There was Carrie, sitting in Jack’s lap, the stale aroma of booze hanging in the air. Just another couple of lovebirds.

  Carrie put a spell on me. She’s NEGATIVE … a lotta head tripping, lying. I never had anything like that. It changed me forever. I mean, I hardly trusted anybody after that. Pegi still mentions some things about how removed I seem to be. I try to open up as much as I can for her, because, y’know, she’s the whole world for me. I want her to be there with me all the way. I want to help her, and be with her through my whole life and take care of her. But she still feels that from me. I can’t quite shed it. But I’m getting better—more and more—it goes away.

  All you have to do is look at the songs that came before, before I met Carrie—“Old Man,” “Heart of Gold,” “Tell Me Why.” Then check out what came after.

  The bright spot in all this insanity was Zeke. After the split with Neil, Snodgress returned to acting in such films as The Fury, but her main obsession was finding the best path for her son. “I had absolutely no interest in going back to work. I knew that I was responsible for a human being’s life, and I took it real serious.”

  Cerebral palsy had left Zeke with his right side shorter than his left and a pinched right hand. “Zeke was always his worst enemy from the get-go,” Carrie said. “When he was little, he used to hit his hand with a spoon and say, ‘I hate you! I hate you!’”

  I asked Zeke to describe himself as a little kid. “A little shithead,” he said, laughing uproariously. “I was an alien from hell. I couldn’t accept myself as being—y’know—different…. Turning doorknobs, turning on lights, stuff that I couldn’t do like other little boys my age, would frustrate the hell out of me, and I’d cry—cry until I fell asleep.”

  When Zeke wasn’t taking it out on himself, he was making life exciting for everybody else. “He bit people in markets if he wanted somethin’,” said Carrie. “He’d pick up cans of applesauce and hurl them at people.” “I remember a time when me and my mom were takin’ a walk and I fell down,” said Zeke. “And it pissed me off, so I went over and kicked somebody’s car door.” He grinned sheepishly at the memory. “My mom had to leave a note.”

  Snodgress gave Zeke a lot of leeway in growing up and said she was “ridiculed for not being harder on him … if a kid hits another kid, you can’t be hittin’ him, sayin’, ‘You can never hit another kid!’ I was convinced that the only way to teach love is to show love—and patience.”

  After Zeke had a petit mal seizure at age three and a half, Snodgress took him to the Mayo Clinic. The doctors considered cutting a tendon inside his heel to drop his foot down, but they suggested Zeke build up his muscle first. The next few years were filled with a succession of braces, hip casts and physical therapy. “Zeke hated his shoe brace,” said Carrie, who would sometimes have to wrestle with him for half an hour to get it on.

  School was another challenge. “There was one quality that Zeke did not have, and that was a basic adherence to the rules,” said Snodgress. Kids teased him and called him “Bigfoot.” Zeke fought back. “Most of the kids hated me because I bit ’em all or kicked ’em. One girl started teasin’ me about the shoe brace and I took it off and whacked her across the head with it.”

  Through all of this, Snodgress stuck by her son, searching everywhere for help. “It’s a credit to Carrie that even with her own madness and her own foibles and frailties, she was steadfastly Zeke’s mother,” said Graham Nash. As can be expected, Young and Snodgress didn’t always see eye to eye when it came to Zeke. Gary Burden, one of the few people who has remained friends with both of them, felt that at times Young “was a force against what Carrie was trying to do. He was not kind to her sometimes.”

  Zeke finally found the guidance he needed in a man named Jack Weaver at the Morning Sky School in Idyllwild, California. One of the first things Weaver did was separate mother and child. As Carrie remembers, Weaver told her, “You’re not gonna be able to see Zeke for a while. We think that the removal of you may be part of what’s gonna make this kid okay.” For the next few months they were apart. “It was a rough deal,” said Snodgress. “And Zeke kicked and screamed all the way, but he was there two years—and he came back a different kid.”

  “Jack Weaver was an extraordinary fellow,” said Zeke. “He’d do anything he could to give me a hand, explain something to me or just help me with problems that I had. In my hard times, when I was mad and wanted to kill somebody, he held me on the ground in the dirt with my hands behind my back. It changed me a lot.”

  Although Zeke still has his moments, the alien monster from hel
l is gone, and he feels a lot of it has to do with accepting himself. “Epilepsy—it’s not as hard for me now as it was, because it’s easier for me to understand myself. This is the way I’m gonna be the rest of my life, and I know that now.”

  A few years after breaking up with Carrie, Neil Young married and started another family, further complicating the situation for Zeke. “When Zeke was having his hardest times, Neil just wasn’t there,” said Snodgress.

  In the last few years Zeke has joined his father in the model-train business and sees more and more of him these days. When he visits the ranch the best times are the moments alone with his dad, riding in his father’s monster truck, Stretch, or heading off for walks to find sticks for the train layout. “Those walks,” said Zeke, shaking his head at Neil’s stamina. “I can’t walk across the ranch. I’ll die before that happens.”

  Zeke loves going out on the road with his father. His room on the bus is down underneath, a spot cherished for its smooth ride and porthole window. Zeke’s favorite time is cruising the highways late at night. “Everything’s real quiet. Joe’s driving, Dad’s sleepin’ in the back, I’m just down there eye-level with the cars until I pass out.” Whenever they pull over for a pit stop, Zeke comes back with food or little gifts for everybody.

  Zeke’s “just a good kid,” said bus driver Joe McKenna. “I’d go fuel the bus—he’d want to get out and help me. He’d meet fans at the show, next thing you know he’d go on the bus, find a T-shirt and give it to ’em. He’s got all kinds of energy, and he spends it on helpin’ people.”