Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Among those lurking in the Malibu shadows, Dylan was the heaviest presence of all. Sandy Mazzeo remembers piloting his ’54 Pontiac hearse into town one day. “I hear bam! bam! bam! on the divider, and I’m thinkin’, ‘Oh my God, it’s a ghost.’ I look in the rearview mirror and it’s Bob.” Dylan had apparently crawled in the back to get some shut-eye, only to find his bed moving the next morning. “Dylan was in his turban stage, and he’d slept in his turban and it had come all undone—he looked like the mummy.” Mazzeo offered to drive him back to Malibu, but Dylan said he’d thumb a ride. “Last time I looked, he was straightening out his turban and getting ready to hitchhike back to his house. Those things happened in Malibu all the time.”

  Young would rent a house on Broad Beach Road before buying stunning oceanfront property on Sea Level Drive. Bobby Charles was with him the day he found it. “Neil wanted to go ridin’ around lookin’, and I said, ‘The way to do it is to walk.’ We saw this beautiful little wooden house, all these beautiful little flowers growin’ on it. Man, it just looked really nice.” Reputedly once the love nest of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheila Graham, the New England-style cottage was the last house on Sea Level, with its own private stretch of beach. Pulling into the driveway at the moment Young and Charles were looking it over was actress Katharine Ross, the current owner. On a whim, Young went over to see if she was interested in selling. It turned out she was, and Sea Level Drive became home, at one time or another, to Young, Briggs, Connie Moskos, Danny Tucker, Mazzeo, Zeke and David’s young son, Lincoln.

  The atmosphere was loose. As Mazzeo recalls, “We bought an old wedding dress, stuck it in the closet of the living room under a can of chocolate cherry bonbons and figured, ‘If we meet the right girl, we’ll open up that door—otherwise that’s where all that shit belongs.’”

  Along with Briggs and the Horse came a lot of women. As Kirby Johnson—producer of the Horse’s Crazy Moon album, said, “One thing that always sticks in my mind about Crazy Horse: For guys who I never thought were great-lookin’, they sure had the most beautiful women around.” “It was a ball of confusion, the Malibu time,” said member of the gang Tessa “Moosa” Gillette. “Everyone’s life had fallen apart, so it was like a big free-for-all. Compared to the ranch, it was a hundred and fifty miles per hour.”

  Many a late night spent raising hell at the Crazy Horse Saloon ended with a crash out at Poncho’s beachfront bungalow on Pacific Coast Highway. “We lived there a year and a half and never had a spoon, dish, pot or pan,” he said. Pal Steve Antoine lived with Poncho and, with a camera slung around his neck, posed as a photographer for Penthouse magazine to con women into joining the party. “We were invincible then,” said Antoine. “Shit rolled off our backs. Nothing slowed it down—women, the police—we just did what we wanted to do. Things were just moving.”

  David Briggs was the ringleader of the Zuma scene. At first he was living with Terry Yorio, a former Miss Something-or-Other alleged to have quipped, “Who’s this guy Art Nouveau?” while flipping through the pages of an art-history book. After she fled, Connie Moskos moved in (her curiosity about David had been piqued one night in the Crazy Horse Saloon when he made “some rude comment about my mouth”), and she recalls Young’s detached amusement over the circus Briggs created. “Neil would look out on the beach, and all these little girls would be sitting there topless. He’d go, ‘There they are. All the little nymphettes. And Briggs encourages it.’ Half the women in Malibu had Neil’s phone number because of David. He would just encourage all the insanity that life could bring.”

  Nothing was more insane than the way they cut Zuma. For eight hundred bucks a month, Briggs was renting a huge house directly across the street from Goldie Hawn’s. It had six bedrooms, but for some perverse reason Young decided to record the band in one of the tiniest rooms in the house. The confined quarters, combined with the tenuous ability of the Horse, created some challenges for Briggs.

  “Poncho didn’t know how to play, nobody had a tone, nothin’. The band was at an enormous volume in a terrible little room with a low ceiling and flagstone floors and picture windows all around—[ace mixer/producer] Bob Clearmountain couldn’t a made the drums sound good. We brought down the green board, set it up in the kitchen, I cut big pieces of foam for the windows, said to my neighbors, ‘Lissen, I’m gonna be makin’ records all night long’ and started rollin’ tape.

  “Wasn’t a lot of work on those records, man—we just set up, recorded, and I mixed ’em on the spot. That’s why those records sound so crude and elementary. We did a lot of editing, ’cause they’d free-form and I’d edit out the flat parts. Some takes would be ten minutes long. That whole album is a lesson in making Neil Young records. If he’s great, I don’t give a shit about anything … Neil’s a lot better in houses than he is in studios.”

  Of all the records Briggs made with Neil, he seemed fondest of making this one. “Neil was the happiest I’ve ever known him during Zuma. He was a great guy to be around. A happy, happy guy … we were just out cruisin’, havin’ a good time … the recording was just an extension of our everyday life.”

  No one was having more fun making Zuma than Poncho, stunned to find himself in such heavy musical company. “I didn’t even know why I was there. I was in dreamland. I’d go to the bathroom, do a bunch of smack in between takes and go, ‘Hey, I’m playin’ with Neil Young—holy shit.’ For months I was in that state. All he had to do is look at me sideways and I’d stop playin’.”

  Sampedro believes his limited abilities inspired Young to—as the late great cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller put it—“dumb it down.” “I think Neil kept writin’ simpler songs so I could play ’em.” And most of Zuma is crude—simple songs with big chords, bad attitudes and no extra stuff.

  While Poncho might’ve been insecure as a musician, he wasn’t lacking in attitude. “I dedicated my trip into makin’ Neil have fun. He had On the Beach out, and I teased him—‘Look at the titles. It’s “This Blues,” “That Blues.” Here we are in L.A., there’s beautiful chicks everywhere, we’re high out of our brains havin’ a great time—isn’t there something else to write about?’”

  Maybe so. With Poncho and Briggs as role models, Young seemed to cut loose and have a little fun for a change. The joyous abandon on Zuma is palpable. If his last few records were so low they were subterranean, this one was daybreak hitting the water.

  “Don’t Cry No Tears” sets the stage. Two guitars, bass, drums—shimmering electricity, blockhead lyrics, anguished vocals and a big fuck-you to the past. It’s a reworking of “I Wonder,” Young’s tale of boy-girl woe from his Squires days, and at least one person took the message personally—Carrie Snodgress, living in Santa Barbara and still in sporadic touch with Young via telephone. “I would be so overwhelmed with my feelings I would start to cry,” she said. “It made Neil crazy. He would say, ‘I’m not gonna do this. This is what’s keepin’ me from callin’ you—because you cry.’ I’d say, ‘Just let me get over this for a few minutes,’ but he wouldn’t. Crying is a big thing for Mr. Young.”

  On Zuma, women are mainly betrayers or ghosts best forgotten. Tired of hurting, Neil spends a good deal of the album telling them to get lost. “Stupid Girl” marries a sneering, double-tracked vocal—menacingly low and ridiculously high—with lyrics of casual hatred. “It was as if the Stones had never even done a song called ‘Stupid Girl,’” said writer Richard Meltzer. “It was the stupid-girl song.”

  Sampedro recalls the craziness that produced “Stupid Girl.” “I had a gram of blow—I put it out on the table, and Neil did the whole thing. I looked at Neil, he was so high I thought, ‘He doesn’t even know what he did, man.’” Unaware of his opiate intake, Poncho’s jacked-up companions were speechless when he went off to the other room to nap while Young overdubbed. “What a band!” he said, laughing.

  If God asked for a definition of beauty, I’d play him “Barstool Blues”: the shambling “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” melody, Ralph
ie’s bashing away on the cymbals, the exquisite pain of the lyrics, the pathos of the singing—surely this is one of the most tortured vocals Young ever committed to tape—but the GUITAR playing! Languid, glistening, tube-warm and transcendentally high. So melodic, so simple and so emotional—it’s as if the instrument is patched directly into his heart. From Zuma until Rust, essentially 1975 to the end of 1977, Young embarked on journeys with his guitar that remain unequaled.

  And then there is “Danger Bird,” perhaps the most unsettling song Young has created, a soundtrack worthy of one of those tencent portraits of Hell found in a Coffin Joe flick. Precariously compiled by Briggs from two very different takes cut weeks apart, this nearly seven-minute piece contains so many twisted pleasures that the mind races trying to decide where to begin. The notes of dread that open the song? What Briggs calls the “windshield-wiper guitar,” building to worm-burrowing solos with roller-coaster twists and turns, right up to the insect-frenzy Link Wray-style fade-out had even avowed hippie-hater Lou Reed praising Young’s virtues in Rolling Stone. The jive-talk lingo about a jailbird and a danger bird determined to fly, “though his wings have turned to stone”? The heavy group-harmony counterpoint, singing an entirely different song containing excruciating details of the Hawaii disaster? “Danger Bird” is a masterpiece, a trip inside the darkest recesses of Shakey’s mind. *

  “Cortez the Killer” is one of Young’s most evocative time-travel songs, culminating in an emotional last verse in which the sudden switch to first person lends a three-dimensional depth. The lyrics conjure up a ruthless conqueror undone by love left behind, though listening to it, I think of not only Cortez but Howard Hughes, Orson Welles, Michael Jackson and … Neil Young. Just twenty-nine years old, Young had already realized that dreams can cost you everything—and that even the great ones can morph into nightmares.

  It’s amazing that this band of lunatics ever got through “Cortez.” Poncho: “I had some angel dust. Conned Billy into smoking it with me. We recorded ‘Cortez,’ I’m sitting there nodding out. That was the take. I had the song all turned around—I thought the second chord was the first chord. It’s only three chords.”

  Young was going to a lot of places you couldn’t get to on the A train. This band would also record a wild electric version, as yet unreleased, of “Ride My Llama,” a song in which the llama-riding Young would meet a martian who got him stoned.

  The band had a visitor during the sessions. “David and Crazy Horse were recording,” said Terry Yorio. “I was making lunch, standing at the kitchen window. I see this blue van in the driveway. I said, ‘David, somebody’s out there!’ David was already chasin’ the groupies off the front porch—he goes, ‘Goddamn it!’ Took off running out the front door. The guy in the van had his back to him. He went and grabbed him by the front of his coat and it’s Dylan … David apologized.”

  Dylan and Young had played together at the SNACK benefit in March. Roadie Johnny Talbot recalls that the moment in rehearsal when the two musicians started to jam was literally electrifying—they went to switch guitars, and in the heat of the moment, each forgot to let go of the one they were holding, which resulted in a huge shock. “On their butts, BAM! Before I could get out there, they picked their guitars up off the floor and did it again. They were so in awe of each other they weren’t thinkin’.”

  Dylan, who lived around the corner from Briggs, shuffled in and joined the Zuma sessions, first on piano, then guitar. “He didn’t talk, just nodded,” said Sampedro. “He was dressed in Sears clothes—I didn’t know it was Bob Dylan.” (“I didn’t know he was so short,” mused Ralph.) The actionpacked lineup fizzled when the Horse inevitably fell apart. “We did a bunch of his songs, never got one right all the way through,” said Poncho. “Neil told me later Dylan said, ‘Your band has a good beat, but they can’t play,’ and Neil replied, ‘Yeah, but think about it, Bob—you could play with them.’” *

  Zuma was released in November 1975, just four months after the resurrected Tonight’s the Night. The Zuma cover was another stroke of genius. I can remember being in an Indianapolis head shop the day the album came out. Sixteen at the time, I picked up the cover and stared at it forever. Some sort of bird flying an ugly naked chick over pyramids, a cactus giving the finger beneath them. It was so … demented. I thought it was a bootleg, a really cheap bootleg—I even rubbed the print to see if it was homemade. I had never seen such an outlandish-looking record. I bought it immediately.

  “Neil told me some images he had in his mind of birds flying women over the desert, pyramids and stuff,” said Mazzeo, who dashed off four crude sketches and then asked Young which one he wanted him to develop. Grabbing one, “Neil goes, ‘No—this is it! You’ve done it! It’s perfect!’ And boom! All of a sudden I had a check for two thousand dollars. Those four sketches took me ten minutes—that’s two hundred a minute. I’m thinking, ‘Finally art is beginning to pay.’” A billboard soon appeared over Sunset Strip. “It was very cool,” said Mazzeo. “The Zuma bird, eighty feet long!”

  Zuma’s one of my favorite album covers. They thought I was nuts at Reprise. It was a concept thing. Everything everybody was doing was getting really slick.

  —What can you tell me about that Zuma sound?

  It’s pretty sparse, innit? Real sparse. Pretty dry, too. No echo hardly at all on Zuma. I remember some echo device just hanging on the wall in David’s house, heh heh. Typical David…. It’s a hard and hittin’ you kind of a sound—especially if you turn it up.

  —What’s the secret to the Zuma guitar sound?

  Old Black, Fender Deluxe with the reverb unit … might be a Gretsch pickup. “Drive Back” is just the Deluxe all the way up.

  —David said that period was the happiest he ever saw you.

  It was probably the happiest I ever saw him, too. I was doin’ a lot of drugs then—heh heh—and so was he.

  We did a lot of illegal things, and I’m lucky to be around today to talk about it, I’ll tell ya that, heh heh. There were some times at Zuma—Poncho told me that he’s surprised that I made it. That my head didn’t blow up. That I didn’t freak out completely.

  —Didn’t you and Briggs wreck your bus somewhere around this time? Key West to San Francisco. I was drivin’. That was the last time I drove. Ninety thousand dollars in damages. We were crossing over Independence Pass—like, fourteen thousand feet—and I’m comin’ around the corner and I see this other car comin’. So to try and miss that car, I hit the rocks on the side. The other side was the cliff, and I didn’t wanna go that way … that’s when I knew I shouldn’t be drivin’.

  Then we stopped. Briggs and I were doin’ quality-control test-pressing checks of my albums on vinyl. We stop in like, Kingman, Arizona, at a stereo shop—the guy’s got a Realistic dealership—and play the thing and listen, and Briggs and I are goin’, “Well, have you got anything that sounds a bit more … realistic? “Fuck. Let’s face it—we were a couple of wild guys.

  —What was Poncho’s vibe like when he first showed up?

  He was … happy.

  —What did he offer the band?

  Well, he offered me about an ounce of really good grass and some toot, heh heh … Poncho was a resource to be reckoned with. He made it possible to play with the Horse. We had two guitars, bass and drums again. He just brought the band back together—because Billy and Ralph related to him. At the time he didn’t know how to play that well. He was perfect … for me.

  Poncho’s such a cool guy. He had a lot of songs at that time. He was WILD—his hair was long, he was wearin’ big tie-dyed shirts and shit. He was doin’ stuff in Mexico, so I went down to Ensenada with him and we had a great weekend. Drinking beer and tequila at Hussong’s Cantina. Got completely shitfaced. So drunk we could hardly walk. My hair caught on fire. Jesus Christ.

  —Why the intense attitude towards women on Zuma?

  That was sort of the attitude of the day. Briggs, y’know… he was there with us.

  —What attracted
you to Cortez?

  I dunno … until that night, I never thought about him.

  —Do you identify with Cortez?

  When he’s on the boat, on his way over … I don’t think he knows what’s gonna happen yet—I’m not sure Cortez might’ve felt like he was doin’ the right thing at the end. Killing all those people. Might not have felt as good about it as he did when he was just dancing across the water in his boat. I have to think that changed his life, that experience. That he was not able to sleep well. *

  “Barstool Blues”—we came home from the bar and I wrote that song. I woke up and I went, “FUCK!” I couldn’t remember writing it. I couldn’t remember any of it. I started playin’ the chords and it was so fuckin’ high—I mean, it was three steps higher than the fuckin’ record. “Danger Bird”—that’s a wild song. It’s so slow and great. Isn’t it slow? Briggs always wanted to remix it. I like the mix. A combination of two songs. “L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys” I never recorded, but it’s part of “Danger Bird.” Hey, sometimes that’s what happens—one song doesn’t come out, I’ll be writin’ another and say, “Oh, that fits.” Bang! Drop it right in.

  —Do you get a picture in your mind when you do “Danger Bird”?

  Sometimes I get a picture, but mostly it’s just flapping …flying …

  Depends on the instrumental, where you go, what you see. That’s the beauty of it—it’s not like there’s a picture, there’s a series of pictures. You never see exactly the same thing. You go to new places … it’s too bad that there’s not some way to project what’s in your mind as you’re thinking—picture, sound, everything—so you could record that while the live playing’s happening.