Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  After attending the seminars at the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia in the fall of 1980, the Youngs began the program for Ben at the ranch. Many friends and workers helped in the process, and no one seemed particularly eager to reminisce. “I could never leave there without having cried,” said Elliot Roberts. “You have no idea how horrific it was.”

  Charlotte Stewart, an actress from Human Highway, also participated. “The days we’d be workin’ on Ben, I just remember wanting to leave Neil alone and be real quiet, because he seemed to be very introspective. He’d sit down at the piano … you just knew he didn’t want to talk. It was such a personal time. I just have the most tremendous respect for Pegi and Neil.”

  Released in October 1980, Hawks and Doves—Young’s first record since the Rust assault—was a strange one. Side one was a hodgepodge of Homegrown, Triad and Indigo material. Side two—recorded in Los Angeles at Gold Star with a one-off band assembled by Ben Keith—was throwaway country rock as unfocused as the Crazy Horse white-house sessions for Stars ’n Bars, with two curious exceptions: “Union Man,” in which Young savages the musician’s union, and “Hawks and Doves.” Over an ornery lick on his orange Gretsch, Young shouts out his patriotism: “Ready to go, willin’ to stay and pay / U.S.A., U.S.A.” It was an ominous, angry song.

  “I felt that way when I was thinkin’ about the hostages in Iran—‘Just push us one more fuckin’ step,’” Young told Bill Flanagan. “I wish Carter had … I’m glad that nobody got killed; that’s number one. I just wish we didn’t have to sit there and take it so long.”

  Appropriately enough, the track was cut on July 4, 1980. This was the first glimpse of yet another side to Young’s persona: hard-nosed redneck. This stance would infuriate many old fans and critics who felt Young had a duty to remain the stereotypical sixties liberal, but he was only too happy to frustrate everyone’s expectations. Little did anyone know this was just the beginning.

  Next came Re-actor, culled from Crazy Horse sessions in the fall of 1980 and early summer of 1981. Insiders felt the supremely minimal lyrics reflected the repetition of the patterning program, and while there were a few great songs—“Southern Pacific,” “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze”—Young’s heart didn’t seem to be in it. Sound effects and overdubs failed to mask the record’s deficiencies.

  “A lot of the takes didn’t groove all the way through,” said Poncho. “‘Surfer Joe’ sped up, slowed down, so we would spend time hittin’ everything we could find in there to play the groove through it—banging tambourine, banging pieces of metal together, doing handclaps. Everybody in the patterning program showed up and we banged everything we could find. Neil would say, ‘That’s good enough.’ We compromised.” Ralph Molina was succinct on the subject of Re-ac-tor: “A turkey. A one-legged turkey.”

  The Re-ac-tor sessions would begin a downward spiral for the Horse that would last a decade. “Neil didn’t encourage Crazy Horse during those years,” said Briggs. “He lost control of his personal life, and everything went along with it.”

  Written and recorded on the spot as an afterthought once the album was completed, the punishing “T-Bone” summed up Young’s malaise: “Got mashed potatoes / Ain’t got no T-bone,” yowled over and over—for nine minutes and fourteen seconds. “It’s very repetitive,” Young said on the Rockline radio show. “But I’m not such an inventive guy.” Despite Young’s humor, Re-ac-tor seemed impenetrable. The stark red and black jacket featured no pictures, and on the back cover was an Alcoholics Anonymous serenity prayer—“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference”—but printed in Latin, because, as Young told Rockline, “it was too much of a personal trip to lay on everyone in English.”

  —Did the program affect the music?

  Absolutely. Even the recording process. For eighteen months, the only time I could record was between two and six in the afternoon. I used to record only at night, the middle of the night. I couldn’t, because I was doing the program.

  After being programmed like that ourselves and doing it for eighteen months, it took years to recover. I’d feel guilty when I’d go out, because for eighteen months I wasn’t supposed to leave the house.

  The program affected everything. Every fucking thing.

  —How did you make the break with the program?

  We were just wore out, couldn’t take it anymore. We saw a lot of pain—and a lot of stress—but not much progress. I took films of us doing this program. I’ve never been able to look at them.

  Then we went to this seminar for the National Academy for Child Development, which was a similiar type of thing, but the guy took us in and said, “Listen, you only have to do this four hours a day. You have to live your life.”

  So one night Pegi and I actually went out, and we were driving home feeling, “Wow, look at us—we’re out and about.” We both decided we were gonna do this other program that took half as much time. We were so happy—I can remember both Pegi and I were just sitting in the car together. We were ECSTATIC. We were like little kids, just the two of us.

  The National Academy for Child Development would later honor Neil and Pegi Young as parents of the year in 1983, and Neil would play his first solo benefit concert for the cause on October 1 of that year. “I like to keep my music separated from political causes,” he said to a local paper at the time. “But I put this cause ahead of the music because this is personal; it has touched me and is important to me.

  “It’s been like a gift that has enriched my life. I see everything through different eyes because of Ben. I’ve learned that you just can’t take everything for granted. When you have a brain-injured child, you realize how much everything means.”

  One song on Re-ac-tor hinted at Young’s next direction: “Shots.” A driving, paranoid vision Young had unveiled at the 1978 Boarding House shows in an altogether different acoustic version, the electric recording on Re-ac-tor “just didn’t have the spook,” said Briggs, because it was drowned in heavy-handed machine-gun and plane overdubs, all created with a new synthesizer that Briggs had discovered in Texas—the Synclavier.

  A computerized synthesizer with a giant memory able to hold an army of instruments and sounds, it was the ultimate one-man band—undoubtedly appealing to Young, with the situation he was in. He was among the first to purchase one of the incredibly expensive machines, and it would be utilized in a number of projects throughout the eighties.

  “We liked color on our records,” said Briggs. “I thought it was the ax that Neil could use to come in himself and do what Jack Nitzsche would’ve done … of course, like everything else, he went overboard.”

  With Re-ac-tor finished, Young continued to record with the Horse. Poncho recalls Young—all jacked up after seeing the Rolling Stones play San Francisco—coming in with a song sporting Stones-like riffs entitled “Computer Age.”

  Around this time Young also purchased a vocoder, an odd device that enabled him to mask his voice as a variety of characters, none of which sounded too human—imagine robotic voices from fifties science fiction movies. Young then took the mutated vocals and played them through the Synclavier keyboard, which essentially turned it into music.

  “When we got the vocoder, we started listening to Kraftwerk,” said Briggs. All this would plunge Young in his weirdest direction yet: what would eventually become Trans. Even a version of “Mr. Soul”—complete with backward guitar—got the machine treatment. And the further Young got into the new music, the less company he took with him.

  “Trans started like we do always—two guitars, bass, drums,” said Poncho. “Next thing we knew, Neil stripped all our music off, overdubbed all this stuff—the vocoder, weird sequencing, and put the synth shit on it.” Briggs felt no one around Young tried to understand. “Billy and Ralph and Poncho, all the other participants, they dismissed it. They played on the stuff, but they didn’t think it was music.�
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  I was looking for ways to change my voice. To sing through a voice that no one could recognize and it wouldn’t be judged as being me.

  When I first heard the vocoder, I realized, “Hey, I can take the Synclavier, take somebody’s voice going, ‘Ah—aaah—aaah’ through the whole song, enter it into the keyboard, play the melody and enunciate the words—and have the melody come out through the vocoder.” That’s how it works. So I figured, “Hey, I could fuck with it—I could be singin’ with somebody else’s voice, or make it my voice.” It’s really weird and kind of unmusical.

  —Was the appeal that you could do it on your own?

  I think that might’ve had something to do with it. I hadn’t really discovered how pointless that was. Well, it isn’t pointless—you can do some things by yourself that are great. But only to a point. My first album’s like that—and I stopped doing it. You can’t make a living that way.

  “Sample and Hold”—a wry lyric about designing a new mate—was partially inspired by Young’s burgeoning work with toy trains. He had rekindled his childhood love a few years before, which resulted in a monster layout that threatened to take over his home—until he constructed a building to house the locomotives alone. As usual, the interest couldn’t remain just a hobby. Young began to have all sorts of crazy ideas on how to change the world of toy trains and hired Sal Trentino and Harry Sitam to work fulltime on the project in 1980. Plunging into all the technical jargon obviously colored the lyrics of Trans. Trentino recalls work on a digital system for controlling the speed of trains: “We were talking ‘sample and hold, sample and hold.’ Next thing I knew, there was a song.”

  Young also wanted to investigate ways to make the toy more accessible for the disabled, for his son. “Sooner or later you’ll have to see / The cause and effect,” he sings in “Transformer Man,” his vocodered vocals making him sound like a lost, lonely spaceman. Whatever one thinks of the Trans material, this was surely one of Young’s gentlest, most beautiful love songs.

  Outside the train barn, though, this was difficult music to understand: coded, minimalist lyrics sung by voices that didn’t resemble Young’s—or anything human, for that matter.

  I think human emotion—and selling a sad personal story … it’s valid, but it’s been done so much … who cares? It’s like Perry Como … it’s like Frank Sinatra, it’s way back there now. Now people are living on digital time, they need to hear something perfect all the time or they don’t feel reassured everything’s okay. Like when you get in the elevator and go up and down and all the numbers go by, everyone knows where they’re going. And the drumbeats today, the computerized drumbeats? Everyone is right on the money. Everybody feels good. It’s reassuring. I like that.

  Electronic music is a lot like folk music to me … it’s a new kind of rock and roll—it’s so synthetic and antifeeling that it has a lot of feeling….

  Like a person who won’t cry. You know that they’re crying inside and you look at them, and they have a stone face, they’re looking at you, they would never cry. You feel more emotion from that person than you do from the person who is talking all the time.

  So I think that this new music is emotional—it’s very emotional—because it’s so cold … I have my synthesizers and my computers and I’m not lonely.

  —French television interview, 1982

  While Young was tinkering in the laboratory with Trans, Re-ac-tor was released to an indifferent world in October 1981. With Young unable to promote the record due to work with Ben’s program, Elliot Roberts asked Reprise to work the platter, and when it flopped, tempers flared. No one at the label really knew the extent of Young’s personal situation. “Neil didn’t want anyone to know, didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for him,” said Roberts. “So I never said anything to anybody.” The matter apparently came to a head over a triangular-shaped single release Young had requested. “Neil had asked them to do a series of things which they didn’t do, and so one thing led to another,” Roberts continued. “We were very upset with them.” So upset that after thirteen years and seventeen albums, they left Reprise.

  David Geffen was in the process of starting his own label and made his move. “I had a very big deal at RCA—bigger than the Geffen deal,” said Roberts. “And then David said, ‘Listen, I’ll give you a million dollars an album’—which is what we were getting at Warner’s—‘and you want an ad, you’ll make up an ad. Whatever you want. You’ll get total control, one hundred percent control.’”

  It seemed like a safe, obvious choice. Geffen was Elliot’s friend and former partner. Young, who never seems comfortable dealing with unknown quantities, already had a relationship with him. Even though Rassy and David Briggs argued against Geffen, Young made his decision. He didn’t even want to meet with RCA.

  “David has worked with Neil for a very long time,” Elliot Roberts told Paul Makos in May 1982. “He totally relates to Neil as an artist and has no preconceived notions. He knows that he’s capable of doing anything at any point at any time… Neil’s not concerned with selling large numbers of his records, he’s concerned with making records he’s pleased with. Unfortunately they are not always commercial from the record company’s point of view. David Geffen relates to that.” These words would come to haunt Roberts a very short time later.

  “It turned right away—right away,” said Roberts. “The first two clients were Neil and Joni, then Elton and Donna Summer—David gave everyone the same deal. They were all million-dollar deals, and everyone’s first album stiffed after all their other albums had been successful. That’s really when everything changed.

  “David started feeling real pressure—he had given out a fortune to these artists and no one was selling any records, and David felt it was like reflecting on him. That he was a failure. That he couldn’t handle it. That he wasn’t as good as Mo, because Mo made successful records with these people and he didn’t. I mean, there’s a million things that go through your head when you’re David Geffen—I can only imagine. David is not used to losing—and he’s not a very good loser.”

  Geffen’s artists began to feel the heat. “David’s a very controlling person, a very powerful person, and he’s got his own ideas about what people should do and what they shouldn’t do,” said Elton John. “And no artist likes to be told what to do. They can be told what to do if someone knows what they are talking about—they’ll listen to a producer, for example—but if they’re being told what to do by someone they have no respect for on a musical level, I think then things start getting a little uncomfortable, to say the least.” For Neil Young, things would soon get more than a little uncomfortable at Geffen Records.

  For the first Geffen sessions, Young set aside the vocoder/Synclavier Trans material and headed to Hawaii, concocting a band that drew from nearly every lineup he’d ever played with.

  “I really wanted to put together the people that I had played my best with,” Young told Cameron Crowe. “I wanted to take it further with all those people.” One from column A, one from column B. The Royal Pineapples, as they were known for half a second, consisted of Bruce Palmer from the Springfield on bass, Ralph Molina from the Horse on drums, Ben Keith from the Harvest band on steel and Nils Lofgren from Gold Rush and Tonight’s the Night on guitar; last but not least was Joe Lala from the 1974 CSNY tour on percussion.

  “Can you imagine—Ralph and a bongo player?” said an exasperated David Briggs. “How would you like to play with a fucking bongo player? Neil knows nothing about chemistry or producing—he knows how to play and sing and write. Anytime he tries to do anything other than that, that band is how it comes out, dude. The less hats Neil Young wears when he does his art, the better it is.”

  The May 1982 sessions at Commercial Recorders—intended for an album that was to be called “Island in the Sun”—were mellow in the extreme: lightweight love songs and odd acoustic numbers, the most outthere of which was “Big Pearl,” a South Seas love story complete with faux Hawaiian guitar cou
rtesy of Ben Keith’s steel. The only rocker, another song entitled “Like an Inca,” shared a verse with the original “Like an Inca (Hitchhiker)” but possessed none of its pizzazz. David Geffen came to Hawaii to hear what Young was doing and was underwhelmed.

  When Geffen first heard the record, it didn’t have any of the vocoder stuff—it was all the Hawaiian stuff, and Geffen thought it was okay, but he didn’t think it was good enough. “Neil, you can do more with these songs—keep going.” It was healthy what he was telling me. But instead of going forward, I went back—to all the stuff that had been buried. I really did all the Trans stuff at the end of Warner Bros., not at the beginning of Geffen.

  Trans is definitely outthere. It went way over everybody’s head. I thought it was really good shit. The only thing wrong with it is that I tried to hide it a bit by putting the things from Hawaii in there and making it seem like a transition—a transition from a real person into a machine, or something like that. I didn’t stay all the way through with “Here’s a guy trying to tell you something and you cannot understand it.” I mean, I coulda put out the Trans EP with only the vocoder shit, and that woulda been a cooler thing. But I wasn’t really thinking that clearly.

  Geffen wouldn’t give me the money to put out a video for Trans because videos were just starting. I had a big concept. All of the electronic-voice people were working in a hospital, and the one thing they were trying to do is teach this little baby to push a button. And that’s what the record’s about. If you listen to all the mechanical voices, if you read the lyrics, listen to the voices, it’s clear that it’s the beginning of my search for a way for a nonoral person, a severely physically handicapped nonoral person, to find some sort of interface for communication. The computers and the heartbeat all have to come together here—where chemistry and electronics meet. That’s what I was getting at. And that was completely misunderstood.