But it was Bob Dylan who had the ultimate comment on Everybody’s Rockin’. Calling Tim Drummond’s home, Dylan got Tim’s wife, Inez. Tim was recording with Young, said Inez, and Bob would never believe what Neil Young was doing—a rockabilly record. Dylan’s response was typically blasé: “That figures,” he muttered.
Perhaps the greatest thing to come out of Everybody’s Rockin’ was Young’s first music video, “Wonderin.” The clip was directed by Tim Pope, an upstart Englishman who had no idea who Neil Young was. “I thought he was this hippie fart with long hair who played at Woodstock. I was some git from North London. I was very into punk and we were against all that sort of shit. So I came up with the idea Neil was this old hippie bastard who lived his life at half-speed as the rest of the world shot around him.”
Pope quickly found out Young was one very atypical hippie bastard. “I once went out to meet Neil in Malibu, and he said, ‘Hey, do you fancy gettin’ some Kentucky Fried Chicken?’ That was the last thing in the world I thought Neil would do—I thought he’d be a fuckin’ vegetarian. And as we were going up Pacific Coast Highway—we had Ben sitting in the back, making his sounds—Neil said, ‘Start telling me about the video,’ and I start telling him about the ideas, but at the same time he gets it into his head to mix his album on the phone, so then over the speakerphone they were playing back his album. Meanwhile, we shoot past Kentucky Fried Chicken, so he’s doing this fucking U-turn in the middle of the freeway while mixing his album with me explaining the video idea. And then we rolled into KFC and just picked up our big tub of chicken.”
Pope slowed down the camera as well as the playback and had Young mouth the words in sync. When the film and soundtrack were sped up, Young—wearing a loud Carnaby Street shirt of Pope’s and with a bad five-o’clock shadow—appeared to be in a different time zone from everything he stumbled past, including such L.A. monuments as the Hard Rock Cafe and even All-American Burger, the grease pit that had provided culinary delights during the making of Tonight’s the Night. It all added up to a truly unique video.
“Neil said to me, ‘I’ve only seen the “Wonderin’” video once, and a lot of people tell me they like it and that’s cool,’” recalled Pope. “I thought that was very sweet. Neil’s very trusting to work with. If he likes you, if he feels you’re good, then he lets you do what you do.”
Pope would go on to direct a number of videos for Young, including a wild series for the Landing on Water album. In “Touch the Night”—done in one shot with no cuts—Young plays a TV reporter at the scene of an accident. During a video for the song “Pressure,” Young plays a bespectacled nerd who hits himself in the face repeatedly. “In the end he knocked himself out cold, because he was so into the part,” said Pope. “Neil’s the only person I’ve ever worked with who will jump completely in at the deep end. He really is an actor—he gets into stuff in a Method sort of way.” Young consistently tried to do interesting videos, particularly with Tim Pope, but they rarely made it onto MTV.
Tim Pope’s really a talented man—very innaresting guy. “Wonderin’” was all his idea, completely. I just did what he said. I remember at the end, he wanted me to look pretty wasted, like I’d been up for a while, and he took this Polaroid, and I saw him looking at it. He was goin’, “Fuckin’ great, fuckin’ great!” and his friend’s lookin’ at it, they’re both goin’, “Fuckin’ great,” and I walk over and it was like the most demented-lookin’ fuckin’ picture of me, heh heh. I knew where he was at.
Video is an art form. Video is an expression. You can do good videos. It can happen—it doesn’t very often. Videos are kinda passé, okay?
“Movies today are too real; you can see every speck of dust,” Young told Jonathan Taylor in 1983. “In the old days … it was all fantastic.” Having worked on Human Highway for the last few years, Young now decided to change the movie completely and create his own fantastic world to put on screen.
Filmmaker Jeannie Field recalls that Young’s dissatisfaction with the film dated back to a mixing session for the Rust Never Sleeps concert movie. “Neil said, ‘I wish I hadn’t chosen to play a musician in Human Highway. I don’t know what else to do with the character. I don’t want this to be a music film. I want it to go somewhere else.’” Russ Tamblyn recalls that Young was against portraying any version of himself on-screen: “After it was done, we had all this footage, it was great, fast-moving, on the road and all real—he hated it. He just didn’t want to be Neil.” *
Originally the movie was a Wizard of Oz-inspired fantasy in which Young’s Lionel Switch character dreams of rock-star adventures, but Field said that in the editing process, Young became “more interested in the front and back story. The dream kept shrinking.”
Young focused on the last day on earth in Linear Valley, a small town besieged by the modern world, namely the nearby Cal-Neva nuclear power plant. At great expense, Young constructed a massive set on a Hollywood soundstage, creating the town complete with a diner and a train running through it. Young played both Lionel Switch and a freebasing, limoencased rock star named Frankie Fontaine, who some insinuate was inspired by David Crosby.
Devo, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and the rest of the cast were brought back, as well as some nonprofessionals: Pegi Young was a mysterious motorcycle-riding character named “Biker girl”; Elliot Roberts was Frankie Fontaine’s pompous English manager. †
“We were all free to make up our own characters,” said actress Charlotte Stewart. “I was trying to play all of Neil’s songs—I had hearts of gold all over me.”
But making a loose, documentary-style movie on the road with a sixteen-millimeter crew was a different thing from shooting a narrative film on a soundstage in thirty-five millimeter. “We were committed to this stage,” said Stockwell. “Neil likes to operate through improvisation, yet he had set up a thing which was not conducive to improvisation. He had all these actors there, a set, everything to light—and nothin’ to improvise. There was no script, no story, so little stories were made up as we went along, and”—Stockwell laughed—“it wasn’t very good.”
Dennis Hopper, playing a deranged knife-juggling diner cook named Cracker, remained in character most of the time. “Dennis was jabbering, chattering and driving everyone crazy because he was doing this little knife trick—he didn’t just have a prop knife, he had a real knife,” said Jeannie Field. Opposite Hopper was Sally Kirkland, playing a weeping, Pepto-Bismol swigging waitress who’s been fired from the diner but refuses to leave. Hopper’s incessant knifeplay drove Kirkland over the edge, and on February 27, 1980, an accident occurred.
According to Hopper, Kirkland “couldn’t concentrate on her crying scenes, so she wanted me to be quiet—but in point of fact, she wasn’t in the fuckin’ scene. It was on me, and I was doing my thing. She grabbed the blade of the knife. I yelled, ‘Cut! Cut! Cut!’ and Neil yelled from outside, ‘Only the director yells cut.’ I said, ‘No, man, she’s cut.’”
Kirkland suffered a long gash that severed a tendon. After a quick trip to the hospital, she was back on the set, but she would later sue both Hopper and Young, claiming Hopper was out of control and had stabbed her. “She said I consumed an ounce of amyl nitrate, a pound of marijuana and drank three quarts of tequila,” said Hopper. “That was not true. I only did half that amount.” Those I talked to felt it was an accident that Kirkland had brought upon herself. The suit went to trial in 1985 and had its moments of unintentional hilarity. One of the actresses was asked what the movie was about during a deposition. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” she said. Kirkland lost the suit.
Human Highway officially premiered in Los Angeles in June 1983 (“I wanted to go, but I was in the insane asylum at the time,” said Hopper). The critics were unkind, the public indifferent. YOUNG’S NUKE FILM A BOMB, quipped the Daily News. After a handful of showings, it went unseen until its home-video release in 1995. (Young had the good humor to grace the video’s cover with a pan from his own booking agent, Marcia Vlas
ic: “It’s so bad, it’s going to be huge.”)
The film remains one of Young’s more perplexing creations, with the bewildered participants lost in his Americana landscape, straining to ad-lib their way out of a non-sequitur fog. Seeing Neil hamming it up as a squinty-eyed gas-pump jockey going gaga over a waitress is a spectacle not soon forgotten, as is the big “Worried Man” production number, featuring the entire cast dancing around with helmets and radioactive-waste shovels. “Never have so many people who aren’t funny done a comedy,” said Elliot Roberts. In one version of the end (there were many) the planet blows up and everyone ascends a staircase to heaven. Standing in the post-apocalyptic rubble, Booji Boy sums it all up: “The answer, my friend, is breaking in the wind. The answer is sticking out your rear.”
But as hard as Human Highway is to fathom, it’s pure Neil Young: the geeky dreamer floating through a sea of unhinged humanity, bemused by both old and new ways but somehow remaining unaffected by it all. And still dreaming. Human Highway “was very experimental,” said Larry Johnson. “That, to me, is the strength of Neil—and why he’s great to work for. He will try stuff that people more knowledgeable would never think of trying because they know all the pitfalls. He doesn’t. He’s the naïve explorer.”
From July 1 to October 1, 1983, Young resumed his solo tour. The Shocking Pinks came along but took the stage only after the solo performance was finished. “Neil decides he’s gonna take a band out for an encore—who does that?” asked Tim Drummond’s wife, Inez, who was enlisted—along with Pegi Young—to perform in the show as one of the band’s gum-chewing cheerleaders, the Pinkettes. The Pinkettes were a force to be reckoned with. “We got paychecks, we had dressing rooms, a wardrobe person,” said Inez. “We even had two bottles of champagne we demanded in our rider. We lived and breathed the Pinkettes. It became reality.”
Everybody got sucked into the Pinks’ dimension. “Wow,” said Ben Keith at the memory. “It was all an act—like playin’ a part in a soap.” Even Keith’s lawyer, Craig Hayes, got involved in the circus. As Vito Toledo, the newly appointed manager of the Pinks, it was his job to whip the audience into a frenzy as the years rolled back to 1954.
But it was not enough for Young to have a nonperformer emcee; Hayes had to play in the band as well. “By the fifth gig, he wanted horns,” said Hayes. “I’m a guitar player, maybe, a piano player, a bass player—I’m definitely not a horn player.” Hayes was joined onstage by two other Definitely Not Horn Players—guitarist Ben Keith on sax and singer Larry Byrom on trumpet. Whatever the deficiencies of the Shocking Pinks were on record, the live entity was surreal theater. Band members carried pink combs to toss into the audience. “Gonna get any pink tonight?” a lascivious Young would query the crowd. *
While out on the road, Young wanted to pull into a studio and record, and Geffen Records denied him permission. Young—an artist who thrives on creating when the spirit moves him—was stunned.
I was gonna record “Don’t Take Your Love”—I mean, that was fresh and ready to go, I had the fuckin’ thing happening. I was in New York—I wanted to go in, just cut this one fuckin’ song. They wouldn’t give me the fuckin’ studio. They wouldn’t support me. That really blew my fuckin’ mind.
I think there was some sort of problem with Everybody’s Rockin’. I think they only pressed a few of ’em, and out in the field, nobody paid attention to it. It wasn’t worked to the radio stations. It wasn’t pushed. They didn’t wanna do that.
That was a low point for me. Everybody was writing me off like I was gone. Like “Neil Young—he was happening in the seventies, but he’s not doing anything useful now. So, no—we better not let him record. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” I wasn’t gonna make music and hand it in to those fuckin’ assholes—they didn’t know what the fuck music was.
According to Elliot Mazer, Geffen Records received Everybody’s Rockin’ warmly—at least initially. “I delivered that LP, Eddie calls me up and congratulates me: ‘This is a really good record.’ I mean, they get into it—they go out and buy a pink Cadillac to do an MTV contest, they do everything.” Still the record flopped.
It had not been a groovy couple of years for Neil Young. Trans had tanked, the European tour was a disaster, Old Ways had been rejected by Geffen and Everybody’s Rockin’ was another commercial nonentity. Young had even been prevented from recording. But none of this prepared him for what happened next: His record company sued him.
Things had reached a boiling point between Neil Young and Geffen Records. Eddie Rosenblatt had gone belly-up with Young since the Old Ways squabble. “Eddie didn’t really have a relationship with Neil,” said Roberts. “He’s a wonderful man—but he didn’t know how to read Neil. To him it was dollars and cents.” And Young had been given $1 million each for two weird albums nobody wanted.
Communication with David Geffen was another problem. Young had gotten used to picking up the phone and getting Mo Ostin at Reprise, but direct contact between Young and Geffen, Roberts said, had evaporated since the failure of Trans. And per Young’s wishes, no one at the label knew of the complexities involving his son. All these factors made for a situation rife with misunderstandings.
Geffen felt that Young was intentionally giving him substandard material. “He felt Neil could turn it around like that and was refusing to—‘Neil’s giving me all these esoteric albums to fuck with me,’” said Roberts. “David took it personally.”
Naturally, Geffen put pressure on Roberts to get his client in line. “David came to me and said, ‘Listen, you gotta talk to Neil. You gotta make the Neil Young record that we all know he could make at will. At will. Why won’t he make it for me—I need it now.’ David thinks Neil has this album in his pocket and is capable of taking it out at any time—everybody does, incidentally—‘You can always do Harvest Two anytime. What does it take?’” Caught between the iron wills of Young and Geffen, Roberts tried to make peace, but he knew it was hopeless.
“The one thing that I could never tell Neil—or even talk to Neil about—is what he should record. I’ve never in twenty-six years suggested the kind of material he should be writing. It doesn’t work like that. If I thought it did, maybe I would, frankly. It just doesn’t. If you just say, ‘Boy, that’s a hit single’ to Neil, not only is it not released as a single, it’s off the album. And so I couldn’t help David.”
The longer the situation went on, the more venomous it became. “David’s getting mean-spirited,” said Roberts. “Now he thinks we’re fucking him. David really felt betrayed by Neil. He stopped thinking of Neil as a friend—and started thinking of him as somebody who was actually trying to be injurious to him or mocking him.
“Finally David understood I had no idea what Neil was gonna do—that I couldn’t tell him what he was gonna do, and that I sure couldn’t tell him it was gonna be commercial in any way. It sank in. That’s when the lawsuit happened.”
The squabble demolished the decades-long relationship between Geffen and Roberts. “We used to hang out, we were inseparable. We had the exact same friends and went to the same places—it was Geffen-Roberts,” said Elliot. “We stopped hanging out at that point. I couldn’t trust him anymore, he couldn’t trust me anymore. Horrible. It ended our friendship.”
And so, in November 1983—approximately a week before his thirty-eighth birthday—papers were served on Neil Young. The documents requested damages in excess of $3.3 million, terming both the Trans and Everybody’s Rockin’ albums “not ‘commercial’ and … musically uncharacteristic of Young’s previous recordings.”
“Why the lawsuit?” muttered Eddie Rosenblatt, his weary voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t know. It was a very difficult time. Neil was at the end of his rope personally, just in a bad place, we’re this young record company trying really hard to make a fortune …
“I think there were too many strong feelings as it relates to Neil and David, Neil and I, and I just think the lawyers got in the way. Nobody wanted to go t
hat far.”
See, Geffen Records thought I was gonna be a megastar—like Eric Clapton. They didn’t know the route I was taking. They paid for me—they didn’t pay for me to do something. But I could understand where Geffen was comin’ from. He had a rough row to hoe. He wanted to make a million dollars—and I was in another world.
I got the papers right at my house. The guy came right to my door. I thought it was pretty funny—sued for being “noncommercial.” Playing “uncharacteristic performances.”
But the realities of not having the money and wanting to make music and not being able to record and all that shit—that was a force play, tyin’ me up. It was an ego thing. David took it personally that I was making records on his label that weren’t selling—he took it personally. Geffen regrets it. We’ve talked about it several times. He was doin’ the right thing—he thought. He was gonna shock me back to reality. He was hurt because it was his record company and he thought I was gonna be a big star and I just wasn’t into it. I was more into bein’ me, doin’ what I do.
It was a bad situation. Couldn’t make records, didn’t have enough money to do this or that, had to go out and play and make enough money to make records, and the kind of music I was playin’, I couldn’t get much money for playin’ it.
It was definitely rough on Elliot, ’cause Elliot had to listen to me. I was fuckin’ hysterical. I was goin’ nuts.
Young responded by filing a countersuit. “David handled it badly, Neil and I handled it badly,” said Roberts. “It was ‘Oh, fuck me? Hey, fuck you!’ We all handled it badly.” The case never went to court, but for the next year and a half relations weren’t exactly cordial between record company and artist.
Elton John understood Young’s predicament. “I had a very uncomfortable time at Geffen. I hated it. It went sour, and then I had so many more albums to do—it was ‘Oh my God, what am I gonna do?’ I got through it, I survived it, but I can definitely sympathize with an artist who has a clash with somebody at the record company. It’s a fucking miserable existence, because you’re putting down what you think is good stuff—and they don’t care.” Years later, R.E.M. would let it be known that the lawsuit was a factor in their not signing with Geffen.
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