Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Punk rock—which, now, punk rock is passé, it’s all downhill, y’know, but whatever you want to call it—underground music before it becomes established—I like that music because the people making it are alive. And they don’t give a shit. They don’t care about being number one. They don’t care about a great-sounding, polished product. What they want is guts—and a good beat—and to say something that means something to them. And to say it in a raw kind of a way. That grabs you and makes you listen to it. But it doesn’t make everybody listen.

  It’s not for elevators… It’s not for your regular radio stations. It’s for the nighttime show. Where the guy plays what he wants. Not what the programmers tell him to play…. It’s tapes that get handed from people to people. Copies of bootlegs of appearances of these bands in clubs. This is the bloodline of rock and roll….

  I’m known around the world, so how can I be an underground type of person? I’m not—I’ve outgrown that. But my heart is in the underground.

  —Domino interview, 1987

  Young would align himself with one new band during this period—Devo. Hated by punks, loathed by critics, Devo were “sexy nerds with a sonic plan,” but beneath the “weird art band” surface lurked primate passion with a tragic edge, not to mention a sly, smutty humor that harkened back to the early days of rock and R&B. Devo was a world unto itself, and their prototypical music videos for songs like “Love Without Anger” and “Beautiful World” remain unsurpassed, everything MTV never became. “Out of all the bands who came from the underground and actually made it in the mainstream, Devo is the most challenging and subversive of all,” Kurt Cobain said to Kevin Allman in 1992.

  They came from Akron, Ohio. Cofounders Gerald V. Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were both students at Kent State in 1970 when the National Guard opened fire. It was “the turning point,” said Casale. “That’s what made us stop being hippies and what made us so down on human nature.”

  Devo, “the art of the high and low,” was born a couple of years later. “We started developing Devo as an art concept, not as music,” said Casale, and Devo soon became a philosophy unto itself. “The attitude was ‘People are absolutely full of shit and basically evil.’ And that the one thing you could count on was entropy—self-destruction. Forget evolution, there’s devolution. People are getting dumber. They’re getting more insane.”

  Casale and Mothersbaugh concocted a crackpot philosophy revolving around a raft of weird characters such as Pootman, General Boy, the Chinaman and the beloved Booji Boy—Mothersbaugh, outfitted in an absurd baby face and diapers, muttering psycho-poetic babytalk and blurting out such unforgettable numbers as “The Words Get Stuck in My Throat.” “Booji Boy would always sing these long, drawn-out songs,” he said. “It was kinda like throwing saltpeter on the audience.”

  By 1976, Devo had grown into a five-piece band, and eventually a tape got into the hands of Blondie’s Chris Stein, who gave it to David Bowie, who gave it to Iggy Pop, who gave it to dancer Toni Basil (or some variation of that order). Basil was attached at the time to Dean Stockwell, who then turned Young on to the band. “I had a little fuckin’ cassette player and I’m thinkin’, ‘Jesus, I’m nervy, tryin’ to ask Neil to listen to somebody else’s music.’ But I just knew. I said, ‘Man, you gotta listen to this,’ and I played him ‘Mongoloid’ and ‘Satisfaction.’” Stockwell also took Young to a Devo show at the Starwood. Festooned in rubber suits, novelty-store masks and “mixing fuck rhythms with science fiction sounds,” Devo were as geeky as any Winnipeg band, had a killer guitarist and a good beat. No wonder Young flipped.

  After the Starwood show Young and Stockwell invited the band to be in a movie they were shooting. “Neil said, ‘Give ’em a budget for wardrobe,’” recalls filmmaker Larry Johnson. “I called up—they were livin’ in Akron—and said, ‘Waddya need?’ They said, ‘Well, we need a hundred and thirty-six dollars.’ I said, ‘Just get receipts.’ When they came out, they had itemized receipts for the whole wardrobe—which they had bought at Kmart.”

  Devo landed on Warner Bros. and gained a manager, Elliot Roberts, whom the band managed to drive crazy with such absurd schemes as setting the poems of would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. to music. Devo would burn out quickly—the surprise hit single “Whip It” led to devourment by the music-biz machine—but early on, they were a key ingredient in Young’s next couple of projects, the Rust Never Sleeps album and his second motion picture, an epic production entitled Human Highway.

  “Shooting rock and roll films, you have to have your good time when it happens,” said rock-film veteran and Human Highway cinematographer David Myers. “Don’t count on having a good time when you see the movie. Get off on the trip.”

  Neil Young has spent a lifetime creating mind-bending trips, but Human Highway would prove to be a doozy even by his standards. The film would start out as a sixteen-millimeter rock and roll road movie and wind up an end-of-the-world nuclear comedy, eating up four years and $3 million of Young’s own money in the process. The movie was “maybe the only notsmart financial thing Neil ever did,” said one of the stars of the film, Dennis Hopper. “It went on and on and on—it was like once a year we knew what we were doin’—we were gonna go make Human Highway. It was just a great fuckin’ party.”

  Young had been discussing another movie project, called The Tree from Outer Space, with Dean Stockwell. Stockwell laughed uproariously recalling the idea, which he said was “coming out of After the Gold Rush—flying the ‘silver seed,’ right? It was gonna be a fuckin’ tree and change to a rocket, it was gonna be really bananas—of course, it was too bananas.” Young, Larry Johnson and Russ Tamblyn actually went on an expedition to check out trees. “I believe I introduced Neil to the sequoias, which is not a negligible thing,” said Stockwell, still laughing. “But as a practical matter, ‘The Tree from Outer Space’ wasn’t gonna be a movie.”

  Started when these guys hypnotized a chicken. And the chicken somehow—somehow he had a vision—that he had to go to this tree. Then the people that hypnotized the chicken started seein’ that they’d have to go to the tree, so they left the chicken behind and they tooko ff.

  Oh, the tree was great. They decided to go up it by going inside it, and when they got inside, then they found these beds. Envision a big long boat with hammocks hanging in it on the side. So they got in the hammocks and the hammocks started swayin’ and the tree started comin’ out of the ground. And it took off.

  And the people discovered when they got up there that you didn’t need space suits. They’d go outside, walk around … this guy had a barbershop he opened on top of the tree. People would come out through one of the big holes in the tree and walk down the bark to this barbershop. They’re in outer space and Saturn’s out there ’n everything and they’re gettin’ a haircut.

  I mean, there were all these planets. There was a watery planet, and that was where the song “Lost in Space” was kinda from—the tree’s floating in the water, and this guy in a rowboat is rowing and rowing and rowing to get there. And ya look down and there’s all these cities and everything he’s rowing over to get to the tree … there’s a lotta things like that that I had written out—all these stories of all these people and the way they interacted. It was meant to be loose enough to adlib a lot.

  And all the people on there—everybody on the tree—was an extremist. And finally what happened was they had trouble getting along. And the tree would land here and there on different planets, people would get off—and every time they went somewhere, everything would seem to be pretty good, the place would be beautiful and really nice, but all the people that they’d meet would be very jealous, very possessive. It kept happening with all different emotions and character traits—they’d go to the planet that represented that and they wouldn’t know it. They would just get to this place and get off, go out and experience things, and things would start goin’ wrong and they’d realize everybody was y’know, really two-faced liars and nothing was true.


  Finally they started goin’ crazy. At some point there were very few of the people left. It was getting down to the core group…. And then in the end the tree was being circled by this huge black ship. They were running out of power, going slower and slower, the tree was slowing down and this huge fuckin’ ship was circling them, but it was really like a big X-Acto knife kind of a thing with a blade on it, saws ’n things coming out of it and ominous black smoke coming out of the back of it….

  And they powered the tree by playing this organ—and somehow the music would be converted into this thing that gave them power. It would start glowing from the music, and that was what they used to power the ship and go on.

  So finally the way they got away from this black ship was the guy playing the organ—he was playing and playing and playing and he’s not getting it—he’s trying, but he’s not getting enough power to get away. I think he ended up getting a blow job while he was playing, and that did it—when he came, the tree just fuckin’ took off!

  After that, they got goin’ way too fast, too much power, the fuckin’ branches were scorching off the tree, anything left on it was startin’ to burn … it gets into the 2001 thing with the sheets of color coming at you, and you see things goin’ by in space and it’s gettin’ really fast ’n crazy and the music is building…

  And finally this silent shot of the forest with nothing where the tree was—and then the whole fuckin’ thing starts rumbling, and the tree starts coming out of the ground and grows to be this gigantic redwood. And that’s the end. “The Tree That Went to Outer Space.”

  —You loved cheesy monster movies growing up—a big influence on Human Highway?

  Yeah. Cheap Japanese horror-movie kind of things? I like that vibe. I like something that’s so unreal that you could believe it—where the set is obviously phony. Jerry Lewis movies, Japanese horror movies, The Wizard of Oz—it’s all in there.

  What was I trying to do with Human Highway? I was tryin’ to make a movie. A story about a guy—Lionel, his situation, just one day in this guy’s life—just some people who are basically innocent bystanders on the day the earth came to an end. Just people who happened to be there. That was what that was supposed to be about, heh heh heh. Got carried away.

  We knew Devo didn’t comprehend it and it was a completely different thing for them. That’s why it was perfect having them there, heh heh. We knew they weren’t like us, that’s for sure.

  “This movie was made up on the spot by punks, potheads and former alcoholics,” said Young proudly of Human Highway in 1983. “The plan was, there was no plan, no script,” said Dean Stockwell. An impromptu egg fight involving Young, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and Larry Johnson somehow “gave birth to Human Highway,” said Tamblyn. “We decided we would all write our own parts. Neil, Dean and I were the nucleus…. We had a scriptwriter who would write the script after we’d do a scene.” Joel Bernstein recalls, “Neil at one point said to me, ‘Charlie Chaplin used to do his films without a script.’”

  Young assembled an impressive cast consisting of Stockwell, Tamblyn, Sally Kirkland and Dennis Hopper, but this was years before the actors were rediscovered by David Lynch or Kirkland got an Oscar nomination for Anna. “It seemed like an unhappy time,” Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh said about some of the cast. “They were all drinkin’ heavily, doin’ lots of drugs. Neil was the most grounded of all … they had attached their egos onto him.”

  The young upstarts from Ohio weren’t prepared for the surreal scene around Young. “Devo was like the crew of the starship Enterprise—we just watched the behavior of people in Los Angeles and couldn’t believe it,” said Gerald V. Casale. “It was really like observing another reality as an alien being, like the nerd that finally gets let into the prom.”

  Well into the substance abuse that nearly finished him, Dennis Hopper was a little unhinged during much of the filming. “Hopper I remember as being totally frightening, like the guy in Apocalypse Now—a little Frank Booth, too,” said Casale. “He wouldn’t let you alone. He’d chase you around the set givin’ you his rap, whether you wanted to hear it or not—‘Devo, you think yer shit doesn’t stink, don’t ya.’ And Dean Stockwell would be behind him, laughing at everything he said—‘heh, heh, heh’—this evil laughter, like Ed McMahon. You never knew what the hell was going on. A lotta mind-fuck games.” (Hopper sighed when I brought up Devo. “They’d say, ‘Oh, remember him—he’s that old actor.’”)

  Not even easygoing Russ Tamblyn escaped Devo’s wrath. There is a scene where Devo, accompanied by Booji Boy, pull into a gas station to get gas from Tamblyn. “The way Tamblyn played it was like a clown in the circus—tumbling, twisting, turning, fighting with the gas pump, falling down with it,” said Casale. “In every successive take, he would ham it up more and more. I couldn’t take it anymore. I went, ‘You’re a fuckin’ evil clown!’ Suddenly Russ gets real serious—‘I don’t have to take this from that fuck.’ That’s the take Neil should’ve used, because everything … stops.”

  In the spring and early summer of 1978, filming of Human Highway would take the crew to San Francisco, where Young was performing, then to Taos, New Mexico, a few weeks later, where the cast and crew communed with the local Indian tribe. Tamblyn recalls a disillusioning meeting with a local dignitary: “White people aren’t even allowed on the land, and we were gonna go down to the chief’s house,” he said. Young and his cronies expected some sort of countercultural summit meeting, but once inside the chief’s home the band of hippies looked to the wall “and there’s this huge picture of Nixon,” said Tamblyn, laughing.

  “We lived right with the Indians,” said bus driver Paul Williamson. “This guy Carpio, it was my job to take him home. We were fucked up, partyin’ for days … Neil said, ‘Take the Indian home.’ I get in the middle of this reservation, I drove around in circles for like an hour and couldn’t find my way out. Fuckin’ Indians were lookin’ at me like, ‘This white boy don’t belong.’ I was like ‘Fuck, when are the arrows comin’?’”

  Things grew extra tense one day when Young decided to film an obtuse scene that involved the burning of some special cameras of Hopper’s, which had somehow been to outer space along with a few of Young’s wooden Indians—one of which, according to legend, he had previously given to Robbie Robertson (“You might say I’m an Indian giver,” quipped Young upon reclaiming it). It was a bizarre event. “Neil burnt his Indians and I burnt these Mitchell cameras,” said Hopper. “Everyone danced around the fire.” Elliot Roberts recalls that the actual Indians were completely nonplussed. “It was ‘These fuckin’ white people are really nuts.’”

  “It was weird, weird,” said David Myers. “Strange vibes. I felt a certain degree of uneasiness before the tequila took hold.” Myers felt that Young was more than entertained by the unwieldy spectacle he’d surrounded himself with. “Neil always looked like he was gonna break into a smile any minute at some secret joke about the whole thing.”

  When Neil Young stepped onto the stage of the Boarding House in San Francisco on May 24, beginning a five-night, ten-show solo run, it was clear the stoned Pendleton caveman of the Crazy Horse era was gone. Shorn of his locks, looking spiffy in a white jacket and bolo tie and sporting the usual batch of new songs, Young had only a trio of wooden Indians for company onstage at the three-hundred-seat club. The shows were filmed in their entirety for possible use in Human Highway.

  After the late show on May 27, Young headed for the Mabuhay Gardens, a nearby punk club where he was filmed onstage with Devo, dressed in their Kmart cowboy boots and hats. Devo already had a rabid following at the Mabuhay. “Girls would take off their tops ’cause they wanted to breastfeed Booji Boy,” said Mothersbaugh. Young stumbled onto the stage and wound up being tossed into the audience, just another old hippie to be devoured. “The punkers chanted ‘Real Dung! Real Dung!’ over and over,” said Larry Johnson. Booji Boy mangled “After the Gold Rush” for an encore. Out of this meeting of the minds came much amusing pre
ss, with Devo dubbing Young the “Grandpa of Granola Rock” and “Ancient History Up Close.”

  The Devo/Young experience reached its apex the next night after Young’s final show at the Boarding House. Young and Devo crowded into Different Fur, a tiny studio that David Briggs made clear was more trouble than any of the other dusty corners he’d recorded Young in (“They didn’t even have take-up reels,” he grumbled). Festivities really got under way when Human Highway actress Geraldine Baron gave Young a milk bath for the benefit of the cameras. “It was my idea. I went and got fifty-one milk cartons and put ’em on. I had straws sticking out of these little containers—Scotch-taped in. I was holding Neil in the tub, and he started to suck on one of the straws. I didn’t know Neil was gonna take off all his clothes.”

  In the wee hours of the morning at Different Fur, Young and Devo collaborated musically for the only time on an ultra-twisted version of a new song called “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” “The first guy we ever jammed with was Neil Young,” said Mothersbaugh, a fact that is instantly apparent on listening to the cacophonous hash this bunch created—leading Briggs to dub the ensemble “Neil Young and his All-Insect Orchestra.” Sitting in a hijacked baby crib (“We had to get a crib from the woman next door,” said Johnson, “she took the baby out”) and dashing off lyrics in a shrill, tuneless yap, Booji Boy is the star of the performance. After abusing the song for over twelve very punishing minutes, Booji Boy sticks a knife into a toaster and Young gets squashed under the crib, still bashing away on guitar.