Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Time is beginning to heal the wounds caused by separation. “When you’re a little kid, you see Dad as ‘Wow! I wanna be with Dad all the time,’” said Zeke. “But when you get to be eighteen, y’know—I have a lotta things to do, and when I get older, I’m gonna have a wife and a house and a car, and I’m gonna go to work every day, and that’s the way it’s gonna be. He doesn’t see his dad every day. They live in different countries. So it’s the same thing—you kinda grow.

  “Now I understand who he is and how he works. In the past five years, I’ve seen him really calm down and be a lot quieter, more peaceful. Sit in front of the fire and play his guitar and not have to worry about so much stuff at one time. I know he does worry, but he’s learned to live with it better…. He’s a great dad and I love him a lot.”

  Zeke’s a great kid. I don’t know how he came out so good. I just thank God for the fact that he did. I’m so thankful.

  I wish I knew him better. Zeke had a real tough time growin’ up, with his mom and I fightin’ back and forth. And somehow he’s come through the whole thing as a kid that I’m really proud of. And I hope that he can find something to do with his life that he really believes in. That’s my hope. Because he’s very smart—he’s real focused and has an intuitive understanding of things mechanical and electronic and conceptual. I’d really like to see him make it on his own.

  Zeke’s done really well. He went to all these damn schools that we had to put him in and he started off bein’ such a hard kid to handle … I always blamed it on his mom, but it’s really as much my fault as hers. It’s just that neither one of us knew how to bring up a kid.

  We worked at it, tried different things, talked to him about it….

  He had to go through all this hell when he was a kid. Wearin’ this big brace, not being able to play with the other kids because he couldn’t keep up with ’em. Whoa, man. It would drive me crazy—see him come home with his foot all bloody ’cause he was running without his brace on and his toe was dragging.

  —Has your relationship with Zeke given you insight into your relationship with your own dad?

  Well, I hope Zeke loves me as much as I love my dad—or maybe even more. The insight? I don’t think Zeke ever had a dream that I didn’t try to help him do.

  The things that Zeke wanted, he didn’t get them right away, but he got them. I don’t want him to get things so easy, that all he thinks he has to do is wait and ask Dad. And he doesn’t. Actually, I wish he’d call me more now. But that’s okay. That’s what he’s supposed to be doin’ at this age—be out there, checkin’ things out. He’s a cool kid.

  —Do you see a lot of yourself in Zeke?

  Yeah, I do, actually. His tenaciousness. If he wants to find something out, boy, he’s gonna ask the questions. He’s gonna be on it—until he understands it, know what I mean? Zeke’s funny. He’s got a good sense of humor. He gets a good laugh out of things.

  —There were times you weren’t there. You were into your own thing. Just like you are with everybody.

  Absolutely. That’s tough for a kid. I didn’t even know he needed me, ’cause I was gone. I’d be off here and there, all around the world—at times when it was important to Zeke. I just wasn’t there. But that’s one of the tragedies of a broken home. There’s no excuse. The whole growing up thing without a dad is kinda a drag. But I couldn’t—I couldn’t live with Carrie. There was nothing that would make me live with her. I didn’t want Zeke to see me like that.

  But the way Zeke turned out, Carrie must’ve done a lotta stuff right. She must’ve, because the fact is, he turned out pretty fuckin’ good.

  For Zeke, as a person, to come out the way he did after all he’s been through—his fuckin’ family, crazy parents—I’m so proud of him. So proud of him.

  “I feel like I just woke up from a bad dream,” Neil Young would sing in “Kansas,” one of the great lost Homegrown songs, and it must’ve felt that way for him as 1975 led to another new life. He was single, living on the beach in Malibu, and best of all, his band Crazy Horse had regrouped with a new guitarist who would tip the music in a hard-rock direction—Frank “Poncho” Sampedro.

  *“Stephen didn’t want Drummond because Stephen couldn’t push Drummond around,” said Crosby. “Stephen fancies himself a bass player. Wanna know why Lee Sklar wouldn’t work with us? Because Stephen would go up, take his bass out of his hands and say, ‘NO, NO, play it like THIS.’ Leland can play rings around anything Stephen can’t even do on the fucking guitar.”

  *This event is described in Young’s own words.

  *Art was later shot while chasing sheep belonging to a neighboring rancher. When told the news, Young replied, “Well, at least he died with his tail in the air.” Quite famous in his time, the pooch moved Eagle Glenn Frey to declare in Rolling Stone that “Art is just a dog on Neil Young’s porch.”

  *Both “Try” and “Star of Bethlehem” would benefit greatly from the overdubbed harmonies of Emmylou Harris, who recalls few details of the blurry session. “It was me, Ben Keith, Neil and a bottle of tequila.”

  harpoon dodger

  Poncho laughs. And when he laughs so do you. There is something insane about his cackling. I remember Poncho teaching me how to drive. I nearly killed the two of us when I putted onto the Ventura Freeway for the first time. He laughed extra hard. That’s the thing about Frank “Poncho” Sampedro. He just doesn’t give a fuck.

  If Poncho likes you, he’ll catch a bullet with your name on it in his teeth. But I wouldn’t care to be his enemy. Beneath the happy-go-lucky exterior lurks a ruthless mind. “I am a hippie,” he said. “I just happened to make some money along the way—and had to carry a gun to make it. Money, drugs and women got me everything. That’s how the mob did it, that’s how the government did it and that’s how I did it.”

  Sampedro can get people to do the most unlikely things. He once talked his reclusive, phobia-ridden pal Richard “Bonzo” Agron into an impromptu adventure south of the border. “I’m claustrophobic, agoraphobic,” said Bonzo. “Next thing I know we’re in some crazy ’64 Ford Falcon station wagon with a chicken foot taped to the speedometer, drinkin’ El Presidente brandy on the beach in Mexico.”

  Filling the void left by Danny Whitten’s death, Sampedro plays second guitar in the Horse. With his long hair and beard, pro-wrestler physique, flashy gold jewelry and baggy shorts, Poncho looks like a dope dealer. A Detroit boy, he digs the old cats like Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, but he also has a taste for the greasy depravity of Leslie West’s Mountain. “Rock and roll—I thought that meant Loot the Village and Rape the Women,” he said, laughing again.

  Once a doper, Sampedro surprised everyone by living. “I watched him piss away hundreds of thousands of dollars on absolutely nothing—it was literally live for the moment,” said his friend Danny Doyle. “Frank has fallen on his face more times than anybody I know, but he’s been a success in spite of all the screwups. He’s always led a charmed life.” These days Poncho lives the straight life—suburbs, kids and a day job. At times he seems a little wistful over the lack of action, just like the Henry Hill character at the end of GoodFellas: “I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” But Poncho remains a desperado at heart. “Frank just wants it all,” said ex-wife Kevyn Lauritzen. “He wants it all. Too much isn’t enough.”

  Poncho lives minutes away from his Crazy Horse bandmates Billy and Ralph, but he rarely sees them. Although he’s been in the band since 1975, they still treat him like the new guy. Sampedro’s been a financial success in various endeavors, which leads to the complaint you hear most: He’s more businessman than musician. Stung by the-Horse-can’t-play criticisms, Sampedro once paid for an album’s worth of sessions in which pro musicians cut the tracks and the Horse contributed vocals only. The idea was more plain crazy than crassly commercial, knowing Poncho. The fact of the matter is that Sampedro has been able to play with Shakey in a variety of projects outside the Horse. “You can
’t do a Neil Young record without Poncho,” said producer Niko Bolas. “He’s like glue. There’s no one thing he does, but if he wasn’t there, it’d come apart.”

  Neil and Poncho are like brothers—sometimes distant, sometimes competitive, but the bond is always there. When Neil’s dog Elvis died, it was Poncho who helped dig the grave. He’s one of the deepest, most psychedelic figures around Neil Young. “Frank has incredible insight into people,” said Doyle. “He can get right into their souls and figure out who they are—for real.”

  “I’m the first generation Sampedro not to be a fisherman,” said Manuel Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, born the son of Spanish immigrants on February 25, 1949, in Welch, Virginia. His father worked in a coal mine to save enough money to move the family to a tough neighborhood on the southwest side of Detroit, where Frank played guitar in a band called DC and the Coachmen. We were bad, man. More like a gang than a band.”

  Poncho lived for playing live. “I think that’s one of the big differences between Billy and Ralph and myself. All their early years were in a vocal group, then they played instruments—all my experience was playin’ in bands. No matter what goes wrong on a gig, you’re gonna make it through it—I think that’s something I have that they don’t.”

  After repeated brushes with the law, Poncho left Detroit. “I was just stealin’, thuggin’ and robbin’—and playin’ music. I came home one day and my amp and guitar were gone, and my parents said I couldn’t have ’em anymore. I moved to California with my sister and went to Hollywood High.”

  “Frank came out here and he was Mr. Slick from Detroit—slacks, T-shirt and pointed shoes,” recalls Doyle. Poncho soon became psychedelicized in the California sun. His greased-back ducktail grew into a long mane, his fashion turned heavily tie-dye and he opened a head shop in the valley.

  But despite all the groovy hippie vibes, Poncho would never lose the Motor City edge that many of his friends found terrifying. “This is the kind of aura Frank puts out,” Bonzo recalls. “We’re at a party at Danny’s house. Frank is stoned on about four hits of acid—real good acid, you could see his eyes go in different directions—and these guys come in and threaten the party with a gun. Frank, as stoned as he was, all five-eight of him, walks up, said two or three words and these guys just slinked away. Poncho just vibed ’em away.”

  Depravity was the order of the day around Sampedro, and it frequently involved women. “Frank was a charmer, Mr. Smooth, the quintessential full-blooded Spaniard,” said Bonzo. “I would get all the leftovers—he’d have a girlfriend at his house and bring some other girl over to my house. We’d all get fucked up and he’d hide her clothes. He’d say, ‘Well, if you don’t do the same thing to Bonzo, you don’t get your clothes back.’ He’d split, and they’d wind up bein’ my girlfriend.” * Sampedro seemed invincible. “If a girl hurt him, he’d have a new girl an hour later. You never knew if he was hurtin’ or not. He would always be totally in control.”

  Sampedro wandered between California and Mexico, dabbling in a variety of endeavors of dubious legality that gave him great insight into the human condition. While Poncho wasn’t in a band in the early California years, a guitar was never far away. Both Doyle and Bonzo vividly recall the one record he used to jam along with most: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. “Poncho used to play it over and over again and play along on guitar,” said Doyle. “He said, ‘Someday I’m gonna play with those guys.’”

  It was either in late 1973 or early 1974 when Sampedro first encountered Billy Talbot at the house of actress June Fairchild—as Poncho recalls, “the chick who snorts up all the Comet in a Cheech and Chong movie.” Sampedro was relocating to Ensenada, Mexico. “I got busted. Been living in my truck for about three years.” He asked Billy to join him for the trip down.

  “We barely knew each other and we went to Mexico,” said Talbot, shaking his head. While in Mexico they jammed on the beach on a couple of acoustic guitars. “Poncho was so open, free,” said Talbot. “We played a tune for half an hour and went through all these different emotions. I knew he was the guy we could use.”

  When Neil Young was in Chicago in November 1974, he summoned Billy and Ralph to Chess Studios. Talbot had a surprise for him when he called. “I said, ‘Hey, man, I got this guitar player. I wanna bring him with us.’ Neil was taken aback, ’cause I never said anything like that before. I didn’t even tell Ralph—we’d been playing for a while, and Ralph didn’t think he was that good. I kept saying to him, ‘Don’t worry, Poncho can do it—you’ll see.’”

  At Chess, Sampedro got a newcomer’s welcome from engineer Tim Mulligan, who got right in his face and barked, “Where did you come from?” But Poncho was oblivious. “I was drinkin’ heavy, doin’ blow and smack, gettin’ really crazy—that’s how I was when I went to Chicago. I got Ben Keith so high he puked all over his whole room, hee hee.”

  Poncho was equally loose upon meeting Neil Young for the first time in his hotel room. “The night before we went to the studio, he showed us about seven or eight songs. I was playin’ along on about three of ’em, and then I handed the guitar to Ben Keith, goin’, ‘Here, Ben—you play some.’ He said, ‘No, you play.’ I didn’t realize Neil was showin’ me the songs we were gonna record the next day. It didn’t even dawn on me I was supposed to be learning these tunes, ha ha ha. We went through all these songs. I was tired of playin’ guitar … I wanted to go back to my room and do another bump.”

  The Chess sessions were a washout, and back at the hotel the Horse began to freak. “Billy and Ralph were going through conniptions—‘Neil’s not gonna use us,’” recalls Poncho, who was feeling it might be his fault. “I said, ‘Let’s call him and tell him, and then he can do what he wants.’ Everybody was like ‘Oh, no, man, you can’t talk to Neil like that.’ Finally I said, ‘Fuck it—I’m going up to his room.’”

  Poncho offered to leave the sessions if it wasn’t working out, but Young—who was making plans to leave for Nashville the next day to work on Homegrown—had already formulated in his mind some sort of future for the Horse and told Sampedro, “This is really cool. I recognize this whole thing from somethin’ I’ve done before. We’ll play again, don’t worry.” Said Poncho, “I didn’t really understand, but Neil could see we could be Crazy Horse then.”

  Sometime after the Homegrown sessions—Billy Talbot put the time in the spring of 1975—Young and the band got together again. Talbot was renting a place in Echo Park, and in terms of wretched ambience, the residence was legendary. As Billy’s soon-to-be second wife, Laurie, recalls, “Poncho told me, ‘Oh, you’ll love where Billy lives—he has a little cottage in Echo Park.’ I pull up and there’s an empty field with one little shack.” “I don’t even think there was a driveway to it,” said roadie Guillermo Giachetti. “Just a dirt road, puppies everywhere, dogshit.” A woman raised goats down the hill, and not far away, the Hillside Strangler had dumped the nude corpse of one of his victims. “We used to play till four in the morning,” said Poncho. “No one would call the cops on us.”

  Young, who rarely stays with anybody, let it be known that he was coming to visit. Laurie Talbot was in charge of getting his accommodations ready. “One room they never opened—it was like Charlie Manson,” she said. “I had to paint the whole room and get the chickens out of the coop.”

  Neil pulled up in an old Buick armed with a new song, “Born to Run,” and there in a cramped room in Echo Park, the second incarnation of Neil Young and Crazy Horse really began. “It was great,” said Talbot. “We were soaring. Neil loved it, we all loved it—it was the first time we heard the Horse since Danny Whitten died.”

  “I see the light of a thousand lights burnin’ in your eyes / Still I have to turn away from you to stay alive” was the knockout opening of a song that cataloged all the awful weirdness of the last few years. A long, tense rocker with a dreamy stop-time chorus reminiscent of “Pushed It over the End,” “Born to Run” made clear he was breaking with the nightmares of the past and
ready to live again, even if living meant running away from ghosts. *

  The vibe was electrifying. Sampedro’s then-girlfriend Kevyn Lauritzen recalls Young pausing from the music only long enough to catch a few minutes of Rebel Without a Cause flickering on the living room TV. But he soon disappeared. “Neil only slept over one night—said he had to go home and get something,” recalls Billy. “He didn’t come back. He couldn’t take it anymore. It was too funky.” Kevyn went with him—with Poncho’s blessings. “I had so many girlfriends at the time, I didn’t care.” The wheels were turning in Young’s head. Soon he would reconvene the band in Malibu and, with Briggs at the helm, record what ranks as perhaps Young’s finest hard-rock album to date: Zuma.

  By the mid-seventies, nouveau-riche rockers were thick as flies around Malibu. Rod Stewart was flitting about alongside David “Kung Fu” Carradine, the Band had built their Shangri-La studio just down the road, and Rick Danko was a constant visitor at Young’s. “We used to call him ‘Quick Rick,’ ’cause he used to pull his car up, back in, keep it running, say what he had to say, then leave,” said Connie Moskos, living with David Briggs at the time. Actor Danny Tucker remembers going for a stroll on the beach and finding “a guy in full Nazi gear passed out on the beach with his feet in the water.” The comatose figure was Keith Moon.

  Heavyweight songwriter and singer Bobby Charles, aka Robert Charles Guidry, would also float in and out of the Shakey circus over the next few years. Born in Louisiana on February 21, 1938, Charles had his first hit in 1955—“See You Later Alligator.” As a songwriter, he’d penned “Walkin’ to New Orleans” for Fats Domino and in the sixties cut such heartbreaking ballads as “I Hope” and “Everyone Knows.” * An old crony of Ben Keith’s, Charles made quite an impression on the Malibu scene, specifically during the rehearsals for the Dylan/Young/the Band SNACK (Students Need Athletic and Cultural Kicks) benefit in Golden Gate Park. “We were in an echo chamber,” Briggs recalls. “Neil and Dylan across from each other on chairs, playin’ acoustic. Neil would sing a song, then Dylan, then Neil. All of a sudden Neil went, ‘Hey Bobby—why don’t you sing a song?’ Bobby sang ‘The Jealous Kind,’ and that was it. Nobody sang after that.”