Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  —Don’t you think the video …

  Would’ve made the difference? Oh yeah, definitely. I wanted to do a video album to go with Trans. They wouldn’t give me the money. I wanted to spend two hundred thousand dollars of my own money if they put up two hundred thousand so I could do it. Nobody wanted to do that many—“You only need one video.”

  I left Mo Ostin, left Reprise—a stupid fuckin’ thing to do. I got mad at them. Made a big mistake.

  I was totally fucking wrong. They were the greatest record company, and they’ve been good to me from the very beginning. They presented every fuckin’ thing I did with a lot of class—whether it was commercial or not.

  When Trans was released at the end of December 1982, it was a bit of a shock, but perhaps not enough of one. Young had hedged his bets—three of the nine songs were from the Commercial Recorders sessions, and each side of the record starts off with one of the bland, human-voiced numbers, giving the impression that Young was hiding the vocoder material.

  “My biggest problem is that I create songs that are so much against each other that they can never live together on the same record,” Young told Stuart Matranga, and it was never more true than on Trans. It felt like two completely different records that clashed badly, and without a video to set up the characters Young had devised, the vocoder songs made little sense. Then there was the fact that the record had been finished in a hurry. “I hated the mixes,” said Briggs. “I hated them all. I mixed the record—including the acoustic shit—in about a week, because they were goin’ on tour.”

  Despite it all, Briggs was very proud of Young for making Trans. “You tell me any established artist that did anything new and different in the eighties. Nobody was doin’ that vocoder stuff, and that’s what artists do—they go out there and plow new ground, and in rock and roll it’s hard to find new ground. Trans was a success in the fact that a major established artist took music to a place that was as abrasive and grating to listeners as Tonight’s the Night. When a major established artist puts his whole career on the line to go to new ground, the critics should at least applaud the guy—as opposed to dismissin’ it.”

  But dismiss it they did, and for fans who had grown comfortable with the raw expression Young had mastered in the previous decade, Trans was an unfathomable mystery. One had to put together the puzzle and a lot of the pieces were missing. When the record bombed, Young took the rejection personally.

  “Transformer Man” is a song for my kid. If you read the words and look at my child in his wheelchair, with his little button and switch on his head, his train set and his transformer, the whole thing is for him. And people … they missed it. Completely. They put me down for fuckin’ around with things that I didn’t understand—for getting involved in something that I shouldn’t have been involved in—well, fuck them. But it hurt me, because this was for my kid.

  —Let me play devil’s advocate: to do such a personal thing and in such an obscure way …

  Very obscure. They didn’t have a fuckin’ chance in the world. It was so well disguised, you could never fuckin’ recognize it.

  That’s the way it went. Like I said, I wasn’t gonna hurt. I was keeping it inside. But I dumped the load right there. I dumped the load on Trans and told the whole fuckin’ story—but it was so disguised that only I really knew what it was. So for me, it’s great. To me, Trans is one of my highest moments. Forget the acoustic things on it, get rid of those, get those out. Disregard everything except that computer thing.

  I know what those songs are all about, and maybe knowing this story, if you listen to “Transformer Man”—you gotta realize, you can’t understand the words—you can’t understand the words—and I can’t understand my son’s words. So feel that.

  —But what if you had addressed that directly in a song?

  No, that wouldn’t have worked. That’s not—that’s not my expression. That’s too direct. For me, even talking about this is very difficult, because I want my children to be able to read what I say and feel loved and know that everything is okay.

  The thing is, it’s communication, but it’s not getting through. And that’s what my son is.

  The Geffen years also inaugurated the era of Neil Young talking endlessly to the press. The less successful the records were, the more Young tried to explain himself, and Briggs thought it was a big mistake. He felt Young was selling his mystique by the pound. “Neil went chasin’. The one thing you can’t do is chase. You gotta keep standin’ in your spot, swingin’ that bat, hopin’ that other people will catch up to you sooner or later—but if they don’t, buddy, that’s what art’s about.”

  The results, however, were often entertaining. Young invited a French TV journalist to the ranch for a taste of Trans, playing “Computer Cowboy” for the bewildered reporter with the gusto of a man who had just discovered fire. With a wild look in his eye, Young gleefully expounded on his own synthetic music, at the same time exposing how seldom he really did listen to new music by championing new wave inanities like Human League and Flock of Seagulls.

  Young was emerging from hiding, ready to conquer the world, but plans went awry. In August he would head to Europe for his first major tour in four years, and it would be a total disaster.

  After severing ties with the program in Philadelphia, Young was suddenly antsy to get back on the road and a tour was hastily thrown together. Seeing a massive Rolling Stones show afflicted Young with what “Ranger Dave” Cline—who by this point had become thoroughly enmeshed in the musician’s affairs as a sort of mini-manager—called “Stonesitis.” “This show made a big impression on Neil in terms of the size of the stage. Neil wanted to do this gigantic stage all throughout Europe.” Chip Monck was called in and given carte blanche to execute Young’s whims.

  Monck, a flamboyant character who outdressed many of the rockers he worked for, had a reputation for being extravagant and hard to control, and the last time he had worked for Young on the 1976 tour of Europe, he hadn’t endeared himself to many in Young’s camp. “Chip helped make Woodstock, and that was the only buzz there was,” said crew member Bob Sterne, chuckling. “I never was sure if Chip had any technical skills—what he really was, like all of us on some level, was a good bullshitter.”

  David Cline, who had no real experience in such matters, was sent overseas to advance the tour. “Elliot was going through a difficult time with his wife at that point, and he said, ‘Look, just go ahead and take care of this,’” said Cline. “I’d gotten the authorization to do it.” Little did he know it would lead to a fall.

  Management had told Cline they expected a $2.3-million gross from the tour, and he planned accordingly but soon discovered that the projected gross was actually $1.6 million. With $1 million already committed for the massive production—plus a bunch of expenses back home, including a large tax judgment coming due—Cline felt disaster looming and told Neil he should reconsider.

  “When Neil told Elliot I’d said that, Elliot called up and said, ‘Listen, David, when an artist like Neil wants to do something, he does it no matter what the cost, and you’re never supposed to say no. Never tell Neil he can’t do something. You have no right to.’ We were about to go a million into debt and I was pretty concerned about it. I said, ‘If I don’t, no one does—are you gonna pay it?’”

  Well, you know what? I’ve heard R.D. say that before, too, and it’s possible that he did say that. But it didn’t register.

  I don’t think Cline said it as plainly and as fully as it needed to be said. Outlined—“This is bullshit. This is not going to work.” If he knew that, he should’ve been saying that. I think he saw some things that were wrong and he said, “This doesn’t look very good”—and everybody just kept going. I think that mighta happened. But I don’t think he sent up any big red flags and said, “Listen, this is just too wasteful.”

  But, y’know, I’m hard to deal with when I get an idea in my mind and I wanna do somethin’. So I don’t blame R.D.

&nbs
p; Cline and Elliot—well, Elliot had to have somebody to blame other than himself at that point. Cline was not just takin’ care of the little things, Cline got into everything. Cline is a great guy. If he was my manager, it would be like having the Ralph Nader of managers. In other words, if there’s anything that smells the least bit fuckin’ off, it’s gotta be exposed, brought out into the open, everybody’s gotta see it for what it is—instead of having someone that keeps things away from ya so you can create, like Elliot tries to do.

  I like to have those things handled, taken care of, but I can’t deal with all that fuckin’ information. I’m not a businessman. I’ve created this incredible fuckin’ business thing goin’ on around me—but the artist in me doesn’t wanna deal with what I’ve created. So constant fuckin’ chaos and confusion have been the order of the day.

  Cline, whose actions had ticked off all of Young’s handlers at one time or another, was summoned to a meeting at the ranch. Present were Young, Roberts and Young’s accountants.

  “Very painful things happened at this meeting,” said Cline. “Neil basically looked at me and said, ‘Y’know, R.D., when you come into my house, it’s like a weight comes into my room. You’ve gotten so involved in this stuff that we’ve lost touch of you taking care of the ranch. You’re like an amoeba—you just absorb more and more and more. You’ve gotten involved in Elliot’s area, the attorney’s area, the accountant’s area. I pay these guys to do what they do—and you’ve gotten in the way.’”

  Cline was crushed. “It was like Neil took a red-hot iron spear and just jabbed it into my guts and pulled it out again. I said, ‘Neil, I only did it because you asked me to.’ Eight times out of ten it was Neil’s personal direction to investigate and report to him.”

  The result of the meeting was “devastating,” said Cline. “I was stepping down. Chip Monck ended up getting absolute control of the tour expenditures.”

  Young had other problems to mull over. The Royal Pineapples—now christened the Transband since Young had returned to the vocoder material—weren’t exactly shaping up to be the next Rolling Stones. Bruce Palmer was the wild card. He’d been bouncing around the ectoplasm since the Springfield days, and now the formerly reed-thin bass player was overweight, off his game and not the easiest guy to make music with. “I used to spend a lot of time with Bruce, goin’ over the songs,” said Nils Lofgren. “Neil went to all this trouble to bring a guy from his past into his life—with all this confidence and faith in him—and the guy wasn’t deliverin’. I used to stay up nights going over every song, over and over. He kept flubbin’ up.”

  After a warm-up club date in July, Palmer was briefly replaced by Bob Mosley, the bass player from Moby Grape, with whom Young had worked in the Ducks. But Mosley, nicknamed “Moonwalker,” was even further into the twilight zone than Palmer. “Mosley would stand in front of a window and stare,” said Joe Lala. “For hours.” Mosley was let go, and much to everyone’s surprise, Young took Palmer back. “It’s the guy who plays great on a great day, bad on a bad day—that’s the guy I want,” Young told David Gans. “Peaks and valleys, as opposed to deserts, that’s the way I look at it. Long, flat expanses of professionalism bother me. I’d rather have a band that could explode at any time.” Young would get endless valleys, very few peaks and at least one major explosion out of the Transband.

  In Europe, it immediately became apparent that the Trans tour was out of control. The stage—which included a forty-foot runway thrust out into the audience, a mountain of lights and a backdrop that resembled the yellow brick road to the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz—was impressive to look at but impossible to transport. “Monck had this grandiose plan, tryin’ to leapfrog shows,” said Tim Foster. “We were draggin’ around five tons of steel that never made it off trucks.” It took three trucks just to carry the stage, and tour personnel had ballooned to 116 people. “Our expenses were running about thirty-eight thousand dollars a day, whether we went onstage or not,” said Cline.

  In addition, there were three Synclaviers to baby-sit and they didn’t respond well to the slightest manhandling. “Computer equipment is over the edge,” said Bob Sterne. “You find people walking a wide circle around it, ’cause they don’t wanna be there when it quits. All that shit’s viewed with apprehension, ’cause Neil’s always tryin’ somethin’ with it that’s not normal.”

  It made for a grueling tour, and production people I talked to were particularly unhappy when recalling Chip Monck. “A megalomaniac,” said Foster. “Chip Monck ran up bills that were ridiculous,” said another source. In Verona, power problems nearly caused riots and forced cancellation of the second show. The band had to be smuggled out to Genoa. Riots in Rome resulted in teargas.

  Bob Sterne, who had flown over to lend Cline a hand, couldn’t believe what he saw. “Chip had probably made one of the biggest messes out of a major tour that you could possibly make. Not only had he made a mess of most of the production, he’d fucked up the attitude of most of the employees. The whole thing was a mess.”

  Sterne was not about to get stuck aboard a sinking ship. “In Nuremburg, I happened to walk by a tent, and Elliot, [booking agent] Barry Dickins, a whole raft of people were standin’ there, and I just decided to stop by the crack of the tent and listen—that’s how you stay afloat. And they’re all saying, ‘Well, this thing is really fucked up—Chip’s made a train wreck of this thing, David Cline doesn’t understand the touring biz enough to deal with it. How can we get it sorted out?’ And I heard somebody mention my name. I took a shower, dumped all my European money out, got in a car and was on a plane outta there before anybody realized I was gone…. I didn’t say goodbye to anybody. I grabbed my fuckin’ suitcase and left.”

  Cline was sent home and replaced by road manager Glenn Palmer. His welcome would be David Briggs kicking down his hotel-room door in the middle of the night, screaming about rental cars.

  Despite the catastrophe unfolding around him, Neil Young—sporting newwave hair, wraparound black shades, wireless headset, black shirt and pants plus a tie—gave his all.

  “Transformer Man” live was a surreal event, with Young and Lofgren prowling the long runway acting out the narrative. “Here I am singin’, and every time I open my mouth, it would trigger a synth version of Neil’s voice,” said Lofgren. “It was so wild. Neither of us had instruments, so we were like walking videos.”

  It was almost the only thing unpredictable about the vocoder/Synclavier material. Because of the synchronization the two instruments required, this was some of the least spontaneous live music Young had ever played. The best that could be hoped for was a Xerox of the record—which the audience hadn’t even heard, since Trans wouldn’t see release until the tour was over. The computerized material—while only a fraction of the set—went over like a lead brick, but Young was unrepentant. “I was booed in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, everywhere,” Young told Allan Jones. “Wherever I went, they booed me. But they never made me run.”

  “It was a loadful working with those guys,” said Briggs of the Transband. “They had to be so fuckin’ drunk and stoned just to walk out onstage, I’d say to ’em, ‘Man, you guys should get yourself a new fucking gig if you gotta get this fucking twisted to go out in front of twenty-five thousand and be adored.’ I thought their performances sucked. It was always awful. Only Nils played great every night.” In recent years, Joel Bernstein waded through the tour tapes for Young’s Archive collection and didn’t find a single usable performance.

  Understandably, Young came unglued. “In France, Neil went off on [soundman] Tim Mulligan about the wimpy house sound,” said Nils Lofgren. “He was just ranting, and he picked up a bottle and threw it into a plate-glass wall. Unbeknownst to everyone, Ralph was on a chair right flush on the other side of the wall—and it rains glass over Ralphie. Thank God he wasn’t hurt.”

  The inner workings of Bruce Palmer remained a mystery. “All of a sudden he’d fire off the most incredible, unusual lick that would
be so fuckin’ great—and then he’d miss the chorus chords of ‘Down by the River,’” said Briggs. “And miss it again. And miss it again.”

  Things came to a head in Genoa, when word got to Young that Palmer had been wandering the hallways of the hotel looking for alcohol after guzzling down everything in his room. (“I thought myself quite the drinker,” said Joe Lala. “But Bruce could empty a minibar in a minute.”)

  “Next morning Neil wants to have a meeting with the band,” said Cline. “There’s the band sitting there, and Briggs, and Neil’s sitting over on this little bed. He said, ‘Look, I’ve worked my ass off, I’ve trained for this, I’ve paid for this—I’m what’s making this happen. And I want you guys here, but you have to give a hundred percent. If you’re out fucking or drinking or doing anything else to jeopardize the quality of my show, you’re outta here.’

  “Then Neil goes, ‘And Bruce, I don’t want you to touch another goddamn drop of booze. No more drinking.’ And Bruce—who’s a big guy—made the mistake of saying, ‘Neil, I wasn’t drinking.’ Neil snapped. He bounced off the bed, flew across the room like Superman, landed on top of Bruce, knocked him over and started strangling him.” Young was pulled off Palmer as Ralph Molina watched in amazement. “Neil was kinda fragile back then,” he said. “No shit, man. We were afraid he was gonna have a heart attack.”

  People calmed down somewhat as the tour progressed, but nothing about the shows really improved. The last date of the tour, October 19 in Berlin, was recorded for an HBO special and home video, but even this performance was a bummer. Young got an unwanted suntan from Monck’s overpowering lights. And Palmer was his typically wacky self. “We’re about to do a song—‘Berlin,’” Lofgren recalls. “Bruce asks Neil, ‘What song is this?’ and it was a song we learned that day. You can see on the tape Bruce has no idea what we’re about to play. Neil’s like ‘Don’t worry, it’ll come back to ya.’ And it did.” “Berlin”—a forgettable ditty Young would perform only that night—had a telling chorus: “Help me, help me, help me find my way back home / After Berlin.”