The session nearly collapsed when a drunken Bobby Notkoff—the great violin player from the long-gone Rockets—got pissed off that he wasn’t playing on the song. “I got the job of getting Bobby out,” said Poncho. “He pulled a U-turn in the middle of Cahuenga and ran over two meters, aiming for the studio. We got in the parking lot and there it was: Neil’s big shiny black Cadillac. Bobby just started goin’ for it. I was goin’, ‘Oh, shit!’ I had to grab the wheel—I took the keys out of the ignition while the motor was running.”
Nicolette Larson’s cover of “Lotta Love” would be a top-ten hit in 1979. “I visited Neil at the ranch, we were driving around in a pickup, there was a cassette on the floor,” she recalls. “I picked it up, blew the dust off it, I stuck it in the cassette player and ‘Lotta Love’ came on. He told me he wrote it on the boat ’cause his crew had been playing Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours for three months straight. I said, ‘Neil, that’s a really good song.’ He said, ‘You want it—it’s yours.’”
Plagued by sequencing and pressing problems that caused Young to buy two hundred thousand copies of the album back from Warner Bros.—a move that only increased his notoriety for quality control—Comes a Time was finally released in November 1978. In one month, the record would outsell all six albums since Harvest. “It came out outward, clean and appealing,” Young would tell reporter Tony Schwartz. “It’s the first record [cover] I’ve released where I’m actually facing the audience and smiling.” If Zuma was daybreak, Comes a Time was the sunset of his midseventies period and certainly a contender for the unlikely title of the happiest record Neil Young has ever made.
The Young/Larson union would last barely longer than the sessions, although she glimpsed some of the irks and quirks so central to Shakey’s makeup: “Neil lived in a house with two bedrooms, he used to say, ‘because fewer people could come visit.’ I remember Neil wouldn’t take Rassy’s phone calls. They had a peculiar relationship.” Tim Drummond recalls with some amusement Larson’s nickname for Young: Changeable Charlie.
“Neil and I had a brief relationship, probably no more than in a movie where a leading man and leading lady get a crush on each other. We sang together very well. He wasn’t involved, and I was in a relationship that was falling apart. It was pretty much over—whatever it was—by Christmas.” The two were making plans to visit each other’s parents over the holidays when Young abruptly vanished. For good.
Linda Ronstadt felt it wasn’t meant to last. “Nicki [was] a pretty straightforward, simple person, and Neil is just so complex—and, in his way, he’s extremely sophisticated. I think it would’ve been a disaster for both of ’em.”
Young’s disappearing act left Larson wondering what had gone wrong. “It was hard for me, ’cause the one question every interviewer in the world wanted to ask me was ‘What about you and Neil Young?’ It was awkward—I had to say, ‘I haven’t spoken to him.’” *
I’m just brutally fuckin’ honest about goin’ ahead and doin’ what I have to do. But it’s not that I can’t sense people’s feelings. People are hurt.
Whenever you move forward, you leave a fuckin’ wake.
—Yeah, and your wake’s a BIG one.
It’s a big wake. A lotta destruction behind me.
—Are you very good at saying goodbye to people?
No. I don’t like long goodbyes.
—HA HA HA. Sometimes you don’t like ANY goodbye at all!
Well … some goodbyes are more subtle than others. Sometimes only one of the people involved knows that it’s a goodbye. But that’s because—
—YEAH?????
I guess it’s because I’m chickenshit and I don’t want to hurt people. And that’s a weakness of mine. I could be more honest about certain things. See, these people that say I’m so honest—I’m not that honest.
—Well, I agree with ya.
So what the fuck’s the big deal? Why don’t they stop sayin’ that about me? I’m not a fuckin’ SAINT. I can be just as much of an asshole as anybody else—and have been. But y’know—I’m on my trip, I’m on my course, I make no qualms about it. I don’t say I’m not, y’know—I am.
—But could you see how with some of the people it might hurt twice as much to not know what they’ve done?
In retrospect I can.
—’cause there’s people out there who don’t know what they did. I’m sure you have great reason to say fuck off, but it might help even more if you told ’em why.
Yeah. Well, it’s true. I’m tryin’ to think of somebody else that I might’ve fucked over—like Nicolette.
—How’d you fuck her over?
Well, I just kinda walked out on her. She’s a nice girl. But I just kinda disappeared from that relationship.
I just get to a point with things where I leave. Either I leave—or I make someone else leave. It’s happened a few times. Like I left the CSNY sessions in ’74 when we were recording at the Record Plant. I was drivin’ there and I just fuckin’ turned around and went home. I called ’em up and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” Y’know, those things happen.
I left the Stills/Young tour because it just wasn’t fun anymore. It was a fuckin’ drag. Too many weirdnesses goin’ down, and it was just gettin’ to be too fuckin’ strange. Couldn’t do it. In some ways that’s honest, and in some ways it’s dishonest. In some ways you follow what you feel, in other ways you follow what you feel to the point where you won’t even talk to anybody else and you leave them all out there. That’s not honest. Define honest—going with your inclinations to the exclusion of all else? Is that honest? I don’t know.
*“For all Poncho’s sexual exploits, I didn’t think he was sleazy,” said Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, who toured with the Horse in 1990. “I just thought he was insane.”
*“Born to Run” remains unreleased, although Young would record it for his next record, Zuma, during the sessions for Freedom and most successfully during the Ragged Glory sessions of 1990. Sometime during the stay at Billy’s, Young also finished a lyric he’d started many years before at Briggs’s Topanga ranch house, “Powderfinger,” later to be a key song on Rust Never Sleeps. A tape exists of Young and the Horse running through “Born to Run,” “Powderfinger” and Poncho’s joyfully misogynistic “Get Over Here, Woman.”
*Charles received a co-writer credit (along with Tim Drummond) on Young’s 1977 song “Saddle Up the Palomino,” and Young played on an as-yet-unreleased second Bobby Charles 1977 album for Bearsville as well as 1994’s Wish You Were Here Right Now.
*When I played “Danger Bird” for the enigmatic guitarist Link Wray—in his seventies and still giving his all—he was stunned by the similarity in feel to one of his own recordings (and one that I’m sure Neil has never heard): the doom-laden late-sixties album cut “Genocide.” Wray was moved by Young’s guitar work. “It’s pure, honest music,” he said. “No bullshit.”
*Sampedro recalls Dylan leading the ragtag group in songs from Blood on the Tracks. He also remembers Dylan tapping the keys on a version of Young’s “Danger Bird.” The mind boggles. Said Sampedro of Dylan, “he was quiet—more inward than Neil, if that’s possible.”
*Young’s most revealing comments concerning “Cortez the Killer” came during a show with Crazy Horse in Manassas, Virginia, on August 13, 1996. Upon introducing the song to the audience, he claimed not only to have written it in high school, but that the main inspiration might have been gastrointestinal: “One night I stayed up too late when I was goin’ to high school … I ate like six hamburgers or somethin’. I felt terrible … very bad … this is before McDonald’s … I was studying history, and in the morning I woke up and I’d written this song … I never told anybody else that.”
*Young would contribute some of the most over-the-top guitar playing of his life to five Crazy Horse songs on their 1978 RCA album, Crazy Moon.
*“Look Out for My Love” remains close to Randy Newman’s heart due to its rather idiosyncratic view of relationships. “It isn’t
like a love song,” he said, laughing. “It’s like, ‘My love, it’s really heavy. Watch out! It’s in your neighborhood.’ Like a stalker.”
*After cutting “Will to Love” on the cassette recorder, Young would somehow stumble on to a plane headed for Miami, where Crosby, Stills and Nash were cutting a record at Criteria Studios. “Somebody said, ‘Hey, there’s this weird old guy in the parking lot peeing in the bushes,’” recalled Nash. “And we go out there and it’s fucking Shakey.” Young tried to get the trio to work on “Will to Love,” but Crosby told him to stick with the version he’d just recorded. Nash recalls playing him some of their new record, but Young “didn’t say anything … he disappeared.”
*When reviewing the quote from this interview, Young elaborated: “This session was Briggs and I all the way. I couldn’t have done it without him. He ordered all the instruments for me and walked through the concept with me at the beach house. Then he booked Indigo and totally prepared the studio. Then stayed up all night finishing the record with me. It was one of our finest moments. It defined Briggs and Young as record makers. I miss that guy. There is no one on the planet that compares to him. Not a day goes by without a thought of David.”
*The teenaged Young had actually briefly met Roy Orbison outside a gig in Winnipeg in 1962. “His aloofness influenced me profoundly,” he told Nick Kent decades later.
*Accompanying the bootleg is an official-looking Warner Bros. memo giving the impression Young had titled the acetate Chrome Dreams, but Joel Bernstein said the document is a fake inspired by rumors in the press at the time of a proposed Young album with that title. “What Chrome Dreams really was, was a sketch that Briggs drew of a grille and front end of a ’55 Chrysler, and if you turned it on its end, it was this beautiful chick,” said Young. “I called it Chrome Dreams.”
*Joel Bernstein revealed a completed solo Comes a Time exists, one side labeled “Oceanside,” the other “Countryside”—yet another Young album version not to see the light of day.
† When I asked Ben Keith what Bobby Charles’s contribution was to Comes a Time, he had a succinct reply: “Rolled joints!”
*Although his presence is undetectable to my ears, Comes a Time would also mark the first and as yet only collaboration between Young and one of his favorite musicians, the very underappreciated Oklahoma City-born singer/songwriter/guitarist J. J. Cale, best known for writing the Eric Clapton staples “After Midnight” and “Cocaine.” Young actually cut what could be considered the first Comes a Time session at Cale’s Crazy Mama Studio in May.
*On December 16, 1997, Larson passed away unexpectedly at age forty-five due to complications from cerebral edema.
a bigger flash in the sky
“The sad thing about music is—any musician, if they break up with their wife or whatever, usually their next album is a fuckin’ unbelievably great album,” Neil Young told me in 1989. “Knowing that is so destructive to a relationship. But that’s a fact, y’know what I mean?”
A typically hard-core attitude from the man who wrote “Time is better spent searching than in finding” (“No One Seems to Know”), “You leave her first, then you come out on top” (“Peace of Mind”), “I’m free to give my love, but you’re not the one I’m thinkin’ of” (“Homefires”), “You could have been anyone to me” (“Like a Hurricane”), “Every good thing comes to an end” (“Drive Back”).
But one woman has captivated Neil Young like no other. A beautiful blond California girl who waitressed at a couple of hangouts not far from Young’s ranch, Pegi Morton had been friends with Young for some time before they got involved in 1978. * They would marry on August 2 of that year at Young’s Malibu home. Son Ben was born on November 28, 1978, and daughter, Amber Jean, on May 15, 1984.
Pegi is the inspiration for some of Young’s most intense ballads: “Such a Woman,” “Once an Angel” and “Unknown Legend,” which is perhaps the most empathetic portrait of a woman he’s ever created. He has dedicated two albums to her, and virtually everything else since their union thanks Pegi first. All our interviews meandered back to her, and she always seemed to be on Neil’s mind one way or another.
I was around Pegi only a handful of times. She struck me as a rugged individual who had maintained her identity in her husband’s often overpowering world, and whose life has been a journey all its own. Definitely a survivor, and one who’s made it with her soul and sensitivity intact. If she ever decides to tell her story, I think it would be an inspiration for many. But I didn’t interview Pegi Young for this book, and I’ve included just what Neil chose to share concerning their family. Pegi is a private person, very protective of her family, and at times I got the feeling she was, understandably, less than thrilled with someone excavating her husband’s life. I respected her privacy.
“It’s very hard to be married to Neil—when you go out, people are rude and trying to knock you down to get to him,” said Elliot Roberts. “And Neil is a space case—he’ll forget to introduce her, he changes his mind nineteen times and won’t tell her. He travels a lot, has to be alone a lot. Neil’s life is very involved, and Pegi seems to have it organized to the extent that Neil has a base. He’s very comfortable there and always wants to get back home as quick as he can.
“I think that Pegi’s strength has been a source of inspiration to Neil. Neil is a very, very difficult man. He’s very self-absorbed. He’s a true artist. It’s a very hard balance, their life and their family—and I think Pegi has done a heroic job of handling the pressure. She’s done it with great grace.
“And the things she’s accomplished, with very little bravado. She doesn’t look for press, she doesn’t look for recognition—in fact, it’s the other way around. She shies away from that shit, and she’s very unique that way. Other people are ‘How about me, I’m on charities, I do this.’ And Pegi does more than any of those people and doesn’t want any recognition. She feels it gets in the way of what she can accomplish. I have a lot of respect for Pegi. She’s a helluva fuckin’ woman.”
I got a great wife. She’s just a beautiful, beautiful woman, and we have an exciting relationship—she’s always stimulating me one way or another. Our relationship is real. There’s interplay, there’s a lotta things goin’ on and we have a lotta things to take care of between the two of us. She’s a great mother to the kids—does a great job with that. Real good mom. She’s also this wild rock and roll motorcycle girl. She’s got a lot of different sides, heh heh. She’s a lotta fun. Bein’ with me hasn’t cut her off from the rest of the world completely. She’s got a lotta things she’s doin,’ and I’m glad. She’s got a lot to give—everybody.
I love Pegi. She busts me for bein’ an asshole all the time. If I get all macho, she goes, “Oh, you fuckin’ asshole, Neil. You gotta hear yourself.” Good governess. Pegi’s very, very, very smart. And she retains information like a vise. She knows what’s goin’ on. The longer I know her, the smarter she is. I get to know her better and better the more I open up.
Pegi changes all the time—she changes how she feels about things. Some things remain constant, but she changes all the time. I find that fascinating. It keeps me completely confused. I don’t know what’s gonna happen next. I’ll tell ya one thing—my relationship with Pegi is good because she keeps changing. I think that’s good.
And as hard as it is to keep up with all of the things that, as a woman, she brings out of me—and it’s hard for me to keep up with and be right there with her all the time and be, y’know, who she wants me to be—all of a sudden I’ll turn around, it’s another day and there she is. And everything’s fine.
Pegi’s shown me kindness in so many ways. She’s great to me. She keeps me kinda straight—without really holding me down. She’s very sensitive, very fragile, yet she’s still very hard, very strong. It’s beautiful. She’s got all the qualities that a woman should have. She’s very much a woman. Words don’t really do her justice.
—How well do you think you understand women? Better eve
ry day. I understand ’em well enough to know I’ve got a good one, heh heh. That’s for sure.
“I always change to what I see around me,” Neil Young said in a 1982 Italian press conference. The sound of California rock had not changed much in the five years since Neil Young had recorded Tonight’s the Night, and by 1978 the airwaves were heavy with predictable gunk. “Fleetwood Mac, Doobie Brothers, the Eagles—it was all such overdone, six-months-in-the-studio, arena-rock crap,” said Richard Meltzer. “The sound just became unlistenable.”
But something else was festering outside the mainstream: punk rock. The Ramones and Sex Pistols might have sold diddly in America, but they changed everything. “Punk was very much how rock was once described by its founders, but which it didn’t sound like anymore—didn’t even wanna sound like anymore,” said Meltzer. “Punk did not sound like the music of the founders, but it had the attitude. They were absolutely rejecting the prevailing aesthetic, cultural, moral values of rock as this fascist thing, this means to control people. It was an effort to just absolutely not be the hand-as-dealt, to not be Fleetwood Mac.”
Punk had no use for slick production values; Meltzer compares the results to low-budget exploitation movies. “Films like Detour and Mesa of Lost Women are so good because they have no budgets—the quirks of their imagination stick out like a sore thumb, they have no means to cover it up. The music of punk was handmade—and it was handmade with pride.”
Neil Young knew a thing or two about the joys of nonproduction and had never lost sight of the teenage rebellion and angst that spawned rock in the first place. As peers like David Crosby and Jackson Browne expressed an outrage over punk that seemed disgustingly parental, Young—just as he had picked up on “Walk on the Wild Side” five years before—voiced his approval in interview after interview. Did Neil attend a dozen punk shows? Study the complete oeuvre of the Germs? I doubt it. But in a sidelong glance he got the picture: out with the old guard, in with the new. A bunch of upstart kids were spitting at rock dinosaurs, and Neil Young was the one elder reptile cheering them on.
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