Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Those are really good records. They got a vibe. Attitude dripping all over them. I played Zuma for Carole King. I told her we’d really been working hard at it and we really got somethin’ good—a real record. She just listened to it and said, “Neil, why don’t you really make a real record?” She was … nice about it.

  That December, Young embarked on a short tour of bars on the California coast near the ranch. Friends David Cline, Jim Russell and Taylor Phelps would search out small joints, then Cline would strike a deal with the owner: Neil Young will play your club this weekend—if you don’t tell anybody and if the already advertised band gets paid for the gig. This was the public unveiling of the new Crazy Horse: ragged, unwieldy, capable of jaw-dropping mistakes and great rock and roll.

  Young chose a set heavy with songs from the just released Zuma, plus a couple of numbers from a Crazy Horse album in the works, most notably a pair of Sampedro rockers, “She’s Hot” and “I’m a Man” (Poncho’s bone-headed reply to Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman”), which inspired wild guitar from Young. * There were also a couple of new numbers: “Country Home,” a tribute to the ranch that is surely one of Young’s most euphoric songs (and which wouldn’t make it to record until 1990’s Ragged Glory), and “Like a Hurricane,” a paen to desire that remains one of Young’s best.

  The past summer, Young had undergone an operation for nodes on his vocal cords and had to refrain from talking for a time—although it didn’t slow down his lifestyle one iota, according to Jim Russell. The duo would “go to bars, pick up on girls—and he couldn’t talk, so he and I would do this sign-language thing,” said Russell, laughing. “I knew Neil so well from hangin’ out that I was able to talk for him.” “Like a Hurricane” came out of one such escapade.

  “Neil, Jim Russell, David Cline and I went to Venturi’s in La Honda,” recalled Taylor Phelps. “We went in my hearse—Hernando Desoto, Harry D for short. We were really fucked up. Neil had this amazing intense attraction to this particular woman named Gail—it didn’t happen, he didn’t go home with her. We go back to the ranch and we are just honkin’ up a storm and it’s late, late, late at night. I remember Neil started playin’.” Young was completely possessed, pacing around the room, hunched over a Stringman keyboard pounding out the song. “He went back and forth,” said Russell. “He’d go and play some more, then he’d come back, talk some more. It was really crazy.”

  In the wee hours, Phelps, who had to be up the next morning to work a show with Stephen Stills, headed back to his neighboring ranch and got almost all the way home before realizing he had left something behind. “I forgot a bag, and the bag I had to have, because the bag was full of toot and it was going to the Greek Theatre in the morning and people were countin’ on me.” Phelps turned the Desoto around and headed back to Neil’s in a drugged haze. “I remember walkin’ in the door to Neil’s house—the sun was coming up—and there was Neil, all alone, over in the corner of the room playing the keyboard. It was just insane—he was just playin’ away like Beethoven. He looked like a fuckin’ maniac.”

  The original manuscript to “Hurricane,” with drastically different words, is dated July 27. Mazzeo recalled Young—who still couldn’t speak at the time—excitedly handing him an envelope with just two lines scrawled on it: “You are like a hurricane / There’s calm in yer eye.” Young took the song to Crazy Horse, and as Poncho recalls, they fought with it for about ten days on Young’s ranch with little success.

  “We kept playing it two guitars, bass, drums, but it wasn’t in the pocket. Neil didn’t have enough room to solo. He didn’t like the rhythm I was playing on guitar. One day we were done recording and the Stringman was sitting there. I started diddling with it, just playing the chords simply, and Neil said, ‘Y’know, maybe that’s the way to do it—let’s try it.’ If you listen to the take on the record, there’s no beginning, no count-off, it just goes wooom! They just turned on the machines when they heard us playing again, ’cause we were done for the day. Neil goes, ‘Yeah, I think that’s how it goes. Just like that.’ And that was the take. That’s the only time we ever played it that way.”

  “Like a Hurricane” is one of those songs that defines an era. “Rock is about a micro-moment,” said writer Richard Meltzer. “It’s not even about a year—it’s about, like, a day. These songs are almost time-coded with a date on them. Rock does not feel separate from its time, which I don’t feel about jazz, classical, any other shit. It was disposable stuff, and whatever these people did to make themselves important in the eyes of eternity, the stuff only works if it got under your skin in the moment. I hear it and smell the day I heard it.”

  I know what Meltzer’s talking about. Hearing “Hurricane,” I can smell the past—in particular, a woozy night at a friend’s house. This gal I was obsessed with had just shown up. She had torn down from South Bend to Indianapolis in a green ’76 Grand Prix hijacked from her oblivious mother. We met in my friend’s living room, Midnight Special blasting out of the TV. Wolfman Jack announced, “NEIL YOUNG!” in that garbage-can voice of his, and on popped a live film clip of Young and the Horse flailing away at “Hurricane.”

  Standing in the blast of a wind machine, Young looked more simian than human, the band barely visible. The whole thing was so dark and murky it was like peering into a dirty aquarium. It didn’t look like the rest of The Midnight Special, I’ll tell ya—it looked real. You could almost feel the storm. We stood in the darkened room, eyes riveted to the glowing TV. Once it ended, we two young lovers waltzed out into the cool, dark summer air, hopped into the Grand Prix and blasted down the highway, headed for a cheap motel. I had a dame I was crazy about and she was crazy about me—we felt as invincible as gods. Of course, it all went to hell in a handbag, but for a moment there it seemed like anything was possible, and “Like a Hurricane” was the soundtrack fueling our dimestore dreams.

  I wrote “Hurricane” in the back of Hernando—Taylor Phelps’s Desoto Suburban. On newspaper. We were all really high, fucked up. Been out partying. Wrote it sitting up at Vista Point on Skyline. Supposed to be right near the highest point in San Mateo County—which was appropriate, heh heh. There I was … the highest point in San Mateo County … I wrote it when I couldn’t sing. I was on voice rest. It was nuts—I was whistling it. I wrote a lotta songs when I couldn’t talk.

  The Horse got it the first time—that’s the first time we recorded it. Then three or four weeks later we were tryin’ to get it and I said, “I think we already did it—but there’s no vocal on it. Let’s go back and listen to that one.” An engineer was in the truck, rolling on the green board, all our practices and everything—in case we did something. The real recording room wasn’t even on.

  —It wasn’t a live vocal?

  It sounds kind of meek and mild, doesn’t it? It was a sketch. I went in and I sang both harmony parts, the low one and the high one—and that’s the way the record is. It’s all me singing.

  —What’s the similarity between Del Shannon’s “Runaway” and “Hurricane”?

  When “Runaway” goes to “I’m-a walkin’ in the rain,” those are the same chords in the bridge of “Hurricane”—“You are …” It opens up. So it’s a minor descending thing that opens up—that’s what they have in common. It’s like “Runaway” with the organ solo going on for ten minutes.

  —How has the attitude of “Hurricane” changed over the years?

  It’s not as pure and innocent as it used to be.

  —Why?

  Because I’m not as pure and innocent as I used to be. I’m a different person now, so I interpret the song differently. I have to be who I am now.

  In March and early April 1976 came a tour of Japan and Europe with the Horse. The lunatic tone of the tour would be set by the last thing cut at the ranch—“Look Out for My Love,” the first recorded acoustic performance of the new Horse (Young would later add some windshield-wiper electric guitar overdubs in England). After Young helped the band with some cuts for their
own album, they launched into his new song, but it didn’t come easily.

  “It was marathon,” said Poncho Sampedro. “Girls were there, makin’ us Mexican coffees, choppin’ lines. We stayed up that whole night but never played it all the way through—we played it a little bit at a time. We kept gettin’ higher and higher and crazier. I had some blow up there to last a week—we managed to stay up until it was all gone.”

  “There was coke everywhere,” said Ralph Molina. “We started to come down and that’s when we cut the fucking song, man. We were right at that place to play it.” Briggs recalled the moment they all gathered to listen to the playback: “Outside the studio,” he said. “You couldn’t listen inside, we turned it up so loud. We started at six o’clock at night and finished at six o’clock the next morning—it’s the only cut I ever did with Crazy Horse that we worked on all night long. Take after take. When we got it, I’ll never forget. Six o’clock in the morning with the sun up. We knew we had drilled it. It had the spook.” *

  Sampedro smiled as he remembered the grizzled warriors driving back to the band’s house in somebody’s pickup. It was a time when music flowed effortlessly out of Young and the Horse. “It was a whole thing where we all hung out more than we actually played.”

  The 1976 overseas tour is best seen through the eyes of the new kid on the block. “Japan was unbelievable,” said Poncho, who remembers looking out the airplane window at the waiting crowds and thinking “some political thing was goin’ on. Then I looked closer and noticed all these Japanese kids with plaid Pendleton shirts and long hair parted down the middle. They greeted us like the Beatles.”

  The show at the Nippon Budokan Hall in Tokyo on March 11 was being filmed for a documentary and recorded for a live album, and—without telling their bandmates—Billy and Poncho dropped acid before going on.

  “We did ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ and Billy and Ralph went up to sing the backgrounds,” Poncho continues. “I opened my eyes and saw big mandalas comin’ out of the back of both their heads, all these colors ’n shit. I couldn’t even look up, I was so high. I’d hit the strings of my guitar—they were like eighty different colors—and they bounced off the floors and hit the ceiling. At the end of the second song Neil came runnin’ over, stuck his head between me and Billy and goes, ‘Man, we’re psychedelic tonight!’ I just looked at Billy, thinkin’, ‘He told him, he told him.’ The whole rest of the night I don’t even think we made a mistake. It was unbelievable.”

  Getting out of Japan after the show was chaotic. “Neil gets so out of it by the end of the show he doesn’t know where he is anyway, Billy and I are stoned on acid, Ralph’s not much of a leader, so there we are—the four of us goin’ to Europe.”

  At the airport, Young got into a tussle with a Japanese man who kept trying to give him a package. Poncho paused from hallucinating long enough to help. “I said to Neil, ‘Maybe we should look in here’—and it was our passports and tickets! Neil goes, ‘You’re in charge.’

  “So I’m holdin’ the tickets, totally fried, tripping my brains out, with three longhairs trying to figure out where to go—all the writing’s in Japanese. All of a sudden I see these guys with machine guns, and I do a three-sixty out the airport.” It took some fast talking to convince Poncho it was only the film crew and their cameras.

  Once the Horse hit Amsterdam, they were able to score some serious pot after a long dry spell. “Billy’s so excited we’re gonna get stoned, he jumps up and doesn’t know it’s a low ceiling and smacks himself in the head—blood everywhere. We’re all standing around for the doctor, and the dealer shows up.” That night Poncho and Ralph were playing patty-cake with a hatcheck girl at some club when Young emerged from a backroom hookah session “walkin’ on sponges, takin’ these big steps,” said Poncho. “Neil said, ‘Man, I gotta get outta here.’ I ran over to help and fell down the stairs! Neil went back to the hotel. Ranger Dave had to stay up all night givin’ him backrubs.”

  Flying from Germany to Paris was another experience for Poncho. “I had a bunch of hash, so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just eat it,’ but I still had a little stash I figured I’d eat on the plane. So we walk through security at the German airport, all these guards with machine guns and shit, I got on board and I think, ‘Cool, I made it,’ and boom! These guys come back on with machine guns—‘We want you off the plane, all you four guys.’ I’m tryin’ to get this hash out and stuff it in the plane seat—I couldn’t do it, so I stuffed it down my pants, and I’m totally paranoid.

  “This one security guy takes his hat off and I realize he’s an eighteen-year-old kid. He said, ‘Can we have autographs?’ They just wanted autographs! I’m so tripped out I eat all the rest of the hash, I close my eyes and turn to Neil and go, ‘Man, I’m hearin’ a whole orchestra playin’ in my head!’ Neil goes, ‘That’s good.’” Poncho wandered off to the bathroom to throw up.

  A show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon at the end of March was also being filmed and recorded, and Billy and Poncho dropped acid again. “I can vividly remember ‘Southern Man,’” said Sampedro. “It was wildly out of control—fast, slow, up, down, everywhere. At the end we were singing, I had my eyes closed and I hear this little tiny voice and I turn around and it was just me. Everybody else had quit even playin.’”

  The fun ended once the band returned to the States. A huge eighty-show summer stadium tour of America evaporated when Young—who, unbeknownst to the Horse, had recorded in Miami with Stephen Stills back in January—decided at the very last minute to dump the Horse and go on the road with Stills. The Horse were the last to know.

  “No one even told us,” said Poncho. “We stayed up at the ranch waitin’ for Neil to come back.” Poncho broke his thumb playing basketball about a week before they were to go out and, concerned about how it would affect his performance on tour, called Elliot Roberts to break the news.

  Twenty years later, Sampedro still remembers Elliot’s reply. “He said, ‘Lucky it wasn’t your face. You don’t have to worry about the tour—Neil’s going out with Stephen. He doesn’t need you guys. See ya.’ And he hung up. I didn’t even know what that meant, I was so naïve—I finally had to get together with Billy and Ralph to figure it all out. We were so stoned, so innocent, we didn’t know shit. We didn’t know what hit us.”

  Sampedro said some of his “underworld” friends were so angry they suggested bumping Young off. Fortunately Poncho was able to dissuade them. Would they have really carried it out? “For a six-pack of beer,” said Sampedro, who smoldered over the incident for a very long time. “This was a major fuckin’ heartbreak for me. I was never so hurt in my life. And after the first time Neil hurt me, I always made sure I had somethin’ else goin’ on for myself. I never sat around and waited for him. It was the number-two gig.”

  In the summer and fall of 1975, Young had popped up at a few Stephen Stills gigs. In January of the following year, the pair met at Criteria Studios in Miami to cut some tracks using Stephen’s band. Participants recall the album was more like a pair of simultaneous solo albums than a group effort.

  “It was two superstars that were walking the same golf course, but they weren’t playing the same game,” said engineer Tom Dowd. “There was a lotta friction from the start,” said Guillermo Giachetti, who worked for Stills at the time. “Stills would stay in the studio all night, and then when Neil came back the next day, everybody would be wiped out.” Lifestyles were also at odds. “Stephen had this majestic mansion with a pool, Greek pillars and a fleet of rental cars,” said Giachetti. “Neil stayed on a funky boat down in Coconut Grove.”

  Tempers flared when Dowd tried to get Stills into the studio earlier to work with Young. “I scolded Stephen during that session. Stephen spoke to Ahmet about it, and Ahmet called me at home that night and gave me hell. I said, ‘Ahmet, you don’t realize how out of control things are,’ and to my surprise, the next day at five o’clock who walks in the studio—Ahmet.” Ertegun caught an average working day. Young came in a
nd did some work. No Stills. Young left. No Stills. They waited. “Late that night, here comes Stephen, and he had half a bag on. Ahmet and Stephen spoke. And I think it was a week later that Stephen was on Columbia Records.”

  After Young returned from the overseas tour with the Horse, the Stills/Young sessions resumed, evolving briefly into a CSNY project after Young showed up at Graham Nash’s San Francisco home and played him some of the songs. Nash and David Crosby left a recording project of their own to head for Miami that April to cut new songs and overdub vocals on the Stills/Young material. And then Young was gone.

  “Neil would get up and we’d have breakfast every day,” said Nash. “So one day I call him at about ten o’clock—no answer. I thought, ‘Well, that’s strange.’ I go down to the front desk and they say, ‘He’s gone, he checked out last night, he’s in L.A.’ Then I get a call from Neil. I say, ‘Are we having breakfast, Neil?’ He said, ‘No. I’ve left. It’s too much for me.’ That’s the way Neil does it. He doesn’t like to face people.”

  Nash and Crosby returned to Los Angeles, and with a Stills/Young tour coming up fast, the decision was made to complete the record without them. Crosby and Nash were furious, trashed their buddies in Crawdaddy! magazine and, a little down the line when Young sought permission to use the CSNY recording of “Pushed It over the End,” Nash refused.

  In hindsight, Nash regretted the decision, but remained angry over the way Young handled the situation. “Neil coulda turned to us and said, ‘Hey, this ain’t fuckin’ workin’, I don’t like this, I’m gone.’ No, he ends up in L.A., like a schmuck. That’s not a manly way of dealin’ with things, and that’s the way Neil’s always dealt with things—he runs away. That’s the truth. Neil does what Neil wants to do, and unfortunately it hurts people.”