Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  I wanted to get the record done. I was moving. I didn’t wanna wait around and do the CSN record next. I didn’t have time for that. We had done the tracks—why wait three months to put the vocals on? If we do that, is it a CSNY record? Should we do a CSNY record and scrap this record? What the fuck?

  See, that’s one of the problems. Public relations or art, y’know. You don’t know where to go. Probably they were right and I was wrong. Obviously Stills/Young was a complete bust. But I’m always goin’ for things that haven’t got a fuckin’ shit chance of happening. When they happen, it’s great, but they don’t happen very often. With Crazy Horse, they happen.

  —At times, when you changed directions, communication wasn’t always there. You weren’t so direct with the people you worked with.

  No, I wasn’t.

  —And that was really painful for them.

  Yeah, right. Well, that was an easy way of doin’ it—but I still did it. I still went from place to place, and I just left a trail of destruction behind me, y’know. But the older you get, the more you realize how much that hurts people. On the other hand, at that age, what I woulda had to do to talk to all those people and go through all that would’ve replaced three or four of those records in energy. Those records wouldn’t be there—and those people would still be as pissed off as they were in the first place. I chose to put the energy into the records.

  These are the decisions you have to make. They affect people’s lives every day—See, I have to put off every fuckin’ arrangement as long as possible, because every time I say I’m gonna do something, that means like ten or twenty people start counting on that. They start banking on that.

  It’s complicated when you have a lotta musicians and producers, you’re close to them all and you’ve gone through your whole life making music with these guys, and then all of the sudden I wake up one morning and I’m fucking singing some song that I wanna play with somebody with a harpsichord—I mean, y’know, that’s not these guys—you gotta be able to say, “Well, that’s the end of that for a while. I’m gonna do something else.” And know when to do it. It wasn’t fun firing guys in my band in high school, but I still had to do it—so the band would be better. So that we keep going. It’s never fun.

  In June, the Stills/Young tour got under way in Michigan. It lasted eighteen dates. The Young archives contain a PA cassette with a hopped-up version of “The Loner” from the Providence, Rhode Island, show that careens around like a roller coaster about to jump the track. By some accounts, Stills was out of control much of the time, and things came to a head in Charlotte, North Carolina, on July 18.

  David Cline: “Neil and I had talked about it a couple of days before, and he just didn’t feel like he was part of the band. They were having band conversations and Neil was not a part of it. It was Stills’s scene. It was like Neil was coming in and doing his parts.” Then Stills berated engineer Tim Mulligan during the Charlotte show. “Stephen didn’t like the way Mulligan was mixing it and—over the microphone, in front of a full house—said something about Mulligan,” Cline recalls. The remarks reportedly enraged Young, who, according to Elliot Roberts, had already warned Stills to stop badmouthing another crew member on the tour.

  That night Young got aboard his new bus, Pocahontas, and headed for the next gig in Atlanta. Also on the bus was Poncho’s squeeze Kevyn Lauritzen, who remembers an unhappy Young bringing up the Horse. “Neil was frustrated immediately. He said, ‘What’s Poncho doin’?’ I said, ‘He’s sittin’ in California freakin’ out, wonderin’ why he’s not on the road with you. They’re all bummed out.’ Neil said, ‘I made such a stupid mistake … I need to fix somethin’, I need to fix somethin’.’” What happened next was quintessential Shakey.

  New bus driver Jim Russell was in communication with Stephen’s driver by means of a CB radio. The two were bullshitting back and forth when Stills—sounding more than a little wasted—got on the CB, demanding to talk to Neil. Young wasn’t talking. “I could see the wheels turning in Neil’s head,” said Russell. “Neil just said, ‘Russell, hand me a road atlas.’”

  As the two buses lumbered down the highway, Stills continued to harangue Young over the CB. “Neil wasn’t in the mood,” said Kevyn. “He just ripped the CB outta the wall. I went to sleep, thinkin’ we were goin’ to Atlanta. When I woke up ten-thirty the next mornin’, I saw a sign sayin’, WELCOME TO THE GRAND OL’ OPRY IN NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE.”

  After Kevyn had gone to bed, Young had told Russell to take the next right, which was not the way to Atlanta. “We’re sitting at the table,” said David Cline. “Neil sits down and writes a little note and said, ‘I want you to send one of these to each of the guys in the band.’ We disappeared from that tour.” They headed for Memphis, where Young could catch a plane.

  The official explanation would be that Young’s throat trouble had suddenly returned, but the note Cline telegrammed Stills and the band read, “Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach, Neil.”

  Even Elliot Roberts, left to clean up the wreckage, was stunned. ” ‘Eat a peach’—I mean, is that cold? Never called the guy … Stephen went to the next city, tried to do the show on his own, the promoter refused to allow Stephen to go on. I had to make good on twenty-one shows cross-country so we didn’t get sued—because all the shows were sold out.”

  But Roberts was not surprised by Young’s vanishing act. “That was Neil. They called Neil ‘Snake,’ and for good reason—if it wasn’t happening, Neil would fuck you in a second. He never thought he was fucking you, he thought he had warned you, if not in reality, in actions before it. Neil’s a cold guy, okay? Capable of being cold.”

  Long May You Run, the Stills/Young album, was released in September 1976 and made little impression aside from the title cut—an affectionate look back at Mort, Neil’s long deceased hearse. An FM-radio staple, it would later be covered by Emmylou Harris on a live album. “That’s an odd song,” said Harris. “It’s about a car, but I feel that there’s other things in there, too. He’s very economical, uses a few words to evoke a feeling or an image or a mood. I think Neil writes on other levels, whether he does it on purpose or not. I don’t think there’s anybody who writes like Neil—his songs are an odd combination of being straightforward and elusive at the same time.”

  It was in Miami that Young bought his first boat—a fifty-five-foot channel cruiser he dubbed the Evening Coconut—and crossed paths with a flamboyant character we’ll call Captain Whoopee. “Neil was looking for some male bonding, looking for a buddy to cruise with, and Whoopee was new blood,” said Sandy Mazzeo. “He was just jazzed out—gold chains around his neck, real flashy guy. Whoopee was also great with women. He had the magic touch.”

  Mazzeo thought Captain Whoopee was taking Young for a ride. “He’s strokin’ Neil and strokin’ Neil—and Neil’s buyin’ it. It was really sickening to see. I told Neil, ‘I have to leave. I can’t handle it—every time this guy kisses your ass, you bend over for more.’”

  Captain Whoopee moved in with Young aboard the Coconut, and Neil soon enlisted his help in finding another boat to buy. Young gave Whoopee carte blanche when it came to the finances, and his naïveté shocked David Cline. “I was so guarded with everyone else, and this time I was specifically told not to do my monitoring trip. Neil was trusting—the same way he would trust Elliot, the same way he would trust Briggs. It was amazing to me, because there was no reason for it.”

  As it turned out, Captain Whoopee knew little about boats and spent a fortune before he was shown the door. “The jivest people can come in and snow Neil in two minutes,” said Elliot Roberts. “Neil is very impressionable. His intuitive rightness always comes back at some point, but he is unbelievably impressionable.” David Briggs agreed: “Neil is a great artist, not a great judge of character.”

  Young would eventually find the schooner of his dreams—a 101-foot built in 1913 that he christened the W. N. Ragland—and with it came more
than a few adventures with Roger Katz at the helm. “Neil is a guy who likes to take it as far out on the edge as he can,” said Katz, who helped Young extricate himself from the Captain Whoopee debacle. “I’ve seen him do some unbelievable shit, especially in the face of authority. I remember one time when we had some authorities coming aboard looking for pot. We’d cleaned up pretty well, and Neil was sitting down below at the main table, and he had a couple of grass seeds he was rolling around on the table as these customs people sat with us. These heavy-duty DEA guys, and Neil’s just sittin’ there playing ice hockey with these grass seeds. So this other guy comes in, and he’s got this look like ‘Aha—I have you,’ and he throws this pack of rolling papers on the table and goes, ‘Now, what are these, Mr. Young?’ And Neil—who’s still poppin’ these little seeds across the table—goes, ‘Y’know, I really believe those are a relic from a time past.’ That’s all he had to say. It was like ‘Shit, Neil, how much closer do you wanna come?’”

  But Katz also glimpsed Young’s vulnerable side. On a boat trip in the Pacific Northwest, Katz and Young were furling a sail together when a big shackle whacked Neil in the head. “He was bleeding like a stuck pig—his face was obscured by a whole curtain of blood. He grabbed me and said, ‘Don’t let me have a seizure, don’t let me have a seizure.’ He just did not want that to happen to him again.”

  Young still keeps the Ragland crewed up year-round for spur-of-the-moment escapes. “There’s a big train behind Neil,” said David Cline. “He likes to get away, leave everything behind and be out on the ocean. That’s when he’s the happiest.”

  Mazzeo saw it a little differently. “I don’t really think Neil can say, ‘Fuck it—I’m just gonna go do this for myself.’ Even though he gives himself ranches and beautiful boats, it’s always with some extra value added to it. There’s always some reason for it. He justifies it by saying, ‘I can work harder by having this. I can go out to sea and write songs.’ It’s not just ‘I want to go to sea ’cause I have fun on boats.’ I don’t think Neil really knows how to have fun.”

  In November 1976, Young and the Horse blasted through a nineteen-date tour of small theaters that was essentially a makeup for the Stills/Young debacle. “People in the audience were yelling, ‘Where’s Stephen?’” recalls Poncho. “It was a bummer.”

  Joel Bernstein was shocked to discover that the audience was just as wasted as the band. “It was just a bunch of kids drunk and on reds for the first time. Not just beer and pot—it was reds and vodka, tons of beer. You’d look over at people who were vomiting on the red velvet seats. I think Neil was too fucked up to notice.”

  Bernstein was equally appalled by the crudity of the new Horse ensemble, believing it lacked any of the rhythmic finesse of the original lineup. “I’d marvel at the degree to which the band succeeded in bringing down Neil’s every attempt to soar,” he said. But Horse maniacs cherish the ’76 Europe/Japan/U.S. shows, mistakes and all. Young’s guitar playing was just out of control.

  Outside of a couple of clips, both the album and film from the Odeon/Budokan shows remain unreleased. The film in particular is quite a document: A hazy-looking Young muffs lyrics left and right while whipping out offhanded but painfully great solos during “Drive Back” and “The Losing End.” Joel Bernstein (with the assistance of writer Cameron Crowe) assembled a tape of acoustic performances from the tour (since widely bootlegged) that contains some tremendous stuff, like “Mellow My Mind” on banjo and, from the final night of the tour at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, a wild version of “The Old Laughing Lady” that remains the definitive live performance of the song. Also from the Fox comes an amusing rap in which Young enters into a bleary discussion of showbiz with the ghost of Judy Garland.

  After that show, Young flew to San Francisco to join Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and a host of others at Winterland for the Band’s final concert on November 25. The Last Waltz was documented by Martin Scorsese, who had put Young’s music to its single best filmic use with “Time Fades Away” in his little-seen 1978 sleazebag documentary, American Boy.

  Released the same year, The Last Waltz was to American Boy what CSNY was to Crazy Horse. Bill Graham, the show’s impresario, allegedly had the most passionate response to the finished product following a private screening: “That is the worst goddamn piece of shit I’ve ever seen in my life.” With lackluster performances, hokey interviews about “the road” and a general sense of self-importance, The Last Waltz furnishes conclusive proof that by the late seventies, rock’s elder statesmen had grown tiresome.

  The film does contain a few unparalleled moments—notably Rick Danko’s pained delivery on “It Makes No Difference,” a tubby, leisuresuited Van Morrison wailing away on “Caravan” and a studio-shot version of “Evangeline” performed by the Band and Emmylou Harris that in a few minutes captures more about the dynamics of musicians and their personalities than a dozen other rock documentaries in their entirety. Neil Young would not fare so well.

  Still wired from touring with the Horse, Young performed a couple of numbers with Joni Mitchell and the Band, and when the dailies were screened, it became painfully apparent in close-ups that a hunk of trouble was more than noticeable in Young’s nasal cavity.

  “Was it noticeable?” exclaimed Elliot Roberts. “Neil had this huge rock dangling from his nose. Huge—like a white &. Some guy was weighing it, saying, ‘Two grams!’” Both Scorsese and the Band’s Robbie Robertson wanted to leave the shots unretouched, but Roberts balked. “I’m in a room with Marty and Robbie. And Martin Scorsese is going, ‘Yes, Elliot, it’s perfect, it’s rock and roll, it’s the real thing.’ Robbie’s going, ‘The moment—is it captured or isn’t it captured?’ They’re giving me the rap, the rap, the rap, and I’m going, ‘Oh my God. No. I want it out. Period.’”

  The offending nugget was rotoscoped away at a cost of thousands of dollars—“The most expensive cocaine I ever bought,” Robertson quipped to Mazzeo—but it still couldn’t save an inept performance of “Helpless.” The Band struggles to follow Young on a song they obviously aren’t familiar with, blowing changes and backup vocals. It wasn’t one of Young’s finest moments.

  It is what it is. It’s a three-chord fuckin’ song—I mean, what’s not to know?

  It’s no wonder I wasn’t dead after that show. The things we did—Jesus Christ. The abuse. Staying up forty-eight hours before the show, I saw fuckin’ Judy Garland—and I was still up when I got to The Last Waltz. I’m a bad druggie. When I do drugs, I do too many and I’m all fucked up and then I don’t do them for a long time. Drugs don’t play that important a part, really. They really don’t. They were there, and a lotta people did drugs and I did drugs and there’s nights where I did way too many drugs and I was stupid. Now I’m glad I’m still here and I realize how stupid I was. It would be even better to be here and think I was smart, but y’know, you gotta take it as it comes.

  —How did things change in the seventies compared to the sixties?

  They didn’t change that much. Drugs changed.

  —How?

  Well, the drugs got harder. People got bored with grass. Started turning to cocaine. That was kinda the drug of the decade—for me.

  —So what role have drugs played in your trip?

  On my trip? Minor and major roles throughout—different times, different things.

  But now I just get really happy about the things that I’m doin’ on the natch. It’s amazing how I get. I haven’t done any drugs in a long time—I’ve smoked some grass, but I try not to smoke too much. I don’t wanna set a bad example for the kids.

  —Are the highs of music and drugs similar?

  Well, music is much better. You don’t come down. Music is like, fulfilling … the next day you feel better. Drugs, the next day you feel terrible—unless you have more drugs.

  But cocaine and music don’t really go together, and they never did. It may be a good writing tool sometimes. I think I said some things at some point that I tho
ught that cocaine opened your mind to different things … it gave you kind of a sense of power that you wanted to explore and expand your horizons or whatever, I think it worked—for a while. Drugs are great until you discover that they work against you. Then when you start taking them knowing that, you’re in trouble.

  —What affect did cocaine have on CSNY?

  Screwed up the pitch. Made everything sharp. Made ’em play too fast. Cocaine is a destructive drug. It takes you in, you need more of it all the time. It’s addicting—marijuana’s addicting, too—I mean, I’m addicted to marijuana … but I can stop if I want to. I don’t really want to. But when I have wanted to, I have.

  Cocaine’s a strong drug. Kinda got a grip on me for a while. Not innarested anymore. Haven’t done it in, I don’t know how many years. It’s a scary drug—but it was pretty prevalent in the seventies.

  —How did it change the vibe?

  Well, you can hear it in the music. It was still really good music and good people and everything—it just got polluted a bit. By the drug. But then the drug passed like a bad dream. It’s gone. All it leaves is a little memory. A little shadow. This feeling you have of what could happen. What did you do to yourself? When will you pay for that? Karma. Self-karma. That’s an innaresting thing.

  I’m lucky to be alive. I am. There are several places where I could’ve stopped—because I know how jacked up I was, how my nervous system was so completely jangled. I pushed myself so far … I don’t understand it. When I look around, I see what’s happened to different people, I don’t understand it. I’m happy about it. I don’t know how it got worked out this way—because I feel like I’m out here—and a lotta people aren’t.

  —What can you tell me about “Like an Inca (Hitchhiker)”?

  Bob told me it was a very honest song. Bob Dylan. I sang it for him, he said, “Well, that’s an honest song.” Because it’s like this confession of all the fuckin’ drugs an’ everything that I took that I felt like I had to do for some reason.