Jordan had met his match. “Neil wore both of us out, man. Burning on every take,” said Kortchmar. “I never saw anybody wear Steve Jordan out.”
Did Young cut the songs live in the studio like he’d always done? Did he finally acquiesce to the let’s-overdub-it-to-death, build-a-perfect-beast method utilized by so many of his peers? Neither. The recording technique for these sessions was truly bizarre. When Joel Bernstein visited Record One, where Young was cutting, he noticed shards and shards of busted drumsticks scattered across the floor. It was a fitting image, for Young would take his obsession with the Big Drum Sound to absurd lengths on Landing on Water.
“Landing on Water was like a giant live overdub,” said Bolas. “Neil wanted to use demos he cut with a Linn drum next to the fireplace, playin’ acoustic. I made eight copies of each song on digital, and what they would do is go out and all play live to the demo. So you had all these live performances to the singer who wasn’t there.” Mistakes weren’t corrected by overdubbing; Young simply flew in sections digitally from other takes.
Instrumentally, the sessions would be dominated by Steve Jordan. “I had this really weird drum sound happening,” said Bolas, and that’s what one remembers about the record—drums, drums and more fucking drums. Young’s presence as guitarist was lost.
This was not a smooth time in Young’s life. In addition to his physical ailments, he was in court defending himself against Sally Kirkland’s charges over the Human Highway accident and fighting with his record company. “Neil would go to court at nine A.M., go through his scene there, come to the studio, get on the phone with Geffen Records and have screaming arguments with them,” said Kortchmar. “Then he’d come in the room with a shit-eating grin and burn the joint down. I never saw anybody rise above shit the way Neil does. He defeated it all.”
But Geffen Records never let up. Telling Young he was overbudget, they shut down the sessions. Young paid for the rest of it himself. “All the buffers didn’t work on this record,” said Jordan. “They were penetrating. We needed one more song and ‘Pressure’ came out.”
“Pressure” was the last song cut and the finest performance on the album. The rest of it was another matter. As Young continued to monkey with the record, Kortchmar left. “A lotta people think that Danny overproduced, but that wasn’t Danny—it was Neil,” said Jordan. “Neil wanted to record digitally, wanted to use the Synclavier, and this is the kinda stuff that doesn’t make rock and roll.”
The bulk of the material was resurrected from spring 1984: “I Got a Problem,” “Hard Luck Stories,” “Touch the Night” and “Violent Side,” which is massacred by a sampled boy’s choir. Much of the production is so overwrought that it makes your skin crawl. “Weight of the World,” with its pop synthesizer from hell, is particularly hard to endure. But two other new songs stood out of the muck.
“Hippie Dream” was inspired by David Crosby, who for the past few years had been sinking lower and lower into drug-induced psychosis. After a great opening couplet reprising and refuting “Tired Eyes,” from Tonight’s the Night, Young performs a disembowelment on the Woodstock generation, screaming that Crosby’s famed wooden ships are a hippie dream: “Capsized in excess / If you know what I mean.”
“I got chills when I heard it,” said Joel Bernstein, who had been actively trying to help Crosby out of his troubles. “‘Hippie Dream’ is a great portrait of David. So cutting.” But again, a flawed recording. Jordan said one thing that hampered the band was recording live in a small space where his drums immediately overpowered everything. “We recorded that in a room in L.A. you record jingles in. We played so loud that it backfired on us.”
“Drifter,” which closed the record, is as cold a confessional as Young has ever written. The drifter’s not a “quitter,” he’d like to “stay and see the whole thing go down,” but the tone of his voice is more frightening than reassuring. “Don’t try to rescue me, don’t try to rescue me,” he warns, then turns, as usual, to a motor vehicle for his getaway. “I like to feel the wheel,” he snarls over and over as the drums, guitars and synthesizers bashing away behind him congeal into one mighty, grotesque sound. What a self-portrait.
I think I’ve just had an uncanny ability to escape. There’s no magic to it, but it’s like a little light goes on. And when the light goes on, I leave…. See, I don’t see change as a curse. It’s just part of my makeup. Without change, the whole thing would fall apart. I’m not talking about rock and roll here—I’m talking about my life. I’ve got to keep moving somewhere. I’ve written some of my best songs on the move, driving on a long journey, scribbling lyrics on cigarette packets while steering. I like that style, though I tend to get pulled over a lot by traffic cops for driving erratically, heh heh. They just pop into my head, these songs and ideas, while I’m driving along, and when I get home I move over to the typewriter, and sometimes what comes out is good and sometimes it isn’t … but it never stops.
In a sense, it’s all about running away. I’ve been running all my life. Where I’m going … who the fuck knows?
—Interview with Nick Kent
Landing on Water was released in July 1986. The cover revealed something of Young’s state of mind at the time: an illustration from an airliner emergency manual of crash survivors crowded into a hopeless little raft.
“It didn’t look as if they had a chance,” Young told Rockline. “I kind of felt that way myself.” Even Young, who will go to his grave defending Everybody’s Rockin’, didn’t have the stomach to defend this one. “It’s a piece of crap,” he told deejay Dave Ferrin. “Let’s be honest about it. If I was going to give one of my records to somebody, I don’t think this would be the one.” The album sank without a trace.
October 13, 1986, marked the beginning of a personal crusade for Young and his wife, Pegi: the first Bridge School benefit concert. The school is devoted to helping severely impaired children achieve their potential through individualized teaching programs, computer technology and integrated public school sites.
The California-based school was founded by Pegi Young, Jim Forderer and speech-language pathologist Dr. Marilyn Buzolich in the wake of that first event, which reportedly raised $250,000. Hosted by Robin Williams, it featured—in addition to Young—Bruce Springsteen, Nils Lofgren, Tom Petty, Don Henley, CSNY, J. D. Souther and Timothy B. Schmit. Over the years, the annual (save for 1987) concerts have raised millions of dollars, and the astounding lineups—put together with the assistance of board member Elliot Roberts—have grown more impressive each year. A twoday 1996 show featured Pete Townshend, Billy Idol, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Bonnie Raitt, Pearl Jam, and Neil Young with Crazy Horse. Neil defers all credit for the Bridge School’s success to his wife. “It’s all Pegi. I’m just the public relations man.”
Throughout the fall of 1986, Young toured the States with Crazy Horse to promote Landing on Water: another extravaganza. Larry Johnson remembers the call that started it off. “Neil calls me up—‘Johnson, I need some mechanical cockroaches. What can you do for me?’”
Some would criticize the new show as a retread of Rust, but as Young and company like to say, “Anything worth doing once is worth doing over and over again.” “Live from a Rusted-Out Garage” came complete with huge props, a couple of humanoid mice that chattered incomprehensibly and Johnson’s remote-control cockroaches. In between songs, the band was harassed by Young’s “mom” as well as by visits from exterminators. In a large picture window, a psychedelic slide show by Sandy Mazzeo clicked away.
Billed as the “third best garage band in the world,” Crazy Horse was once again dragged into technological nonsense. Young employed computer expert Bryan Bell to figure out ways to re-create the Landing on Water material live. The result was a morass of equipment that drove the crew crazy. “There was a lotta electronic hoo-ha on that tour,” said crew member Anthony Aquilato. “Ninety-six inputs and three submixers, a huge amount of gear—overkill in the extreme.”
“All of
a sudden we were thrown into this full-blown MIDI electronic techno-jive shit that we knew nothing about,” said Poncho. “The thing that bummed me out the most was, we were tryin’ to cop these other guys’ chops—Ralph playing like Steve Jordan, me tryin’ to play like Danny Kortchmar. What a joke.”
Poncho adapted, turning into a computer whiz in the process. But the rest of the Horse didn’t fare so well. Fans were treated to the mind-boggling sight of Billy Talbot tapping out rhythms on a keyboard bass (was this a problem for Billy? “No,” said Niko Bolas; “Billy can do one note on anything”), while Ralph Molina had to contend with a device called the human clock, which triggered prerecorded samples.
Molina was, in Bryan Bell’s computer lingo, “on the fringe of reality when it comes to interfacing.” In other words, the human clock was frequently in another time zone. “We lost it almost every night,” said Poncho. “Neil was yellin’ and screamin’.” Ralph was driven to the edge by Young’s nit-picking. “You’re up there onstage to have fun. I don’t wanna think about ‘On the sixteenth beat, I hear a little ta-ta on the snare.’”
Relations with Geffen Records had sunk to an all-time low as well. According to Elliot Roberts, not one of Young’s albums for the label had sold over two hundred thousand copies. “It became a game where they enjoyed finding Neil being esoteric,” said Niko Bolas, who recalls a visit from Geffen executive John Kalodner. “He comes on the remote truck and just starts laughing—‘I can’t wait to tell David he’s using two digital machines and a remote truck, ha ha ha.’ Y’know, like he caught Neil playin’ with toys.” Poncho recalls that Geffen representatives were banned from the backstage.
Young openly attacked the head of his label in the media. Geffen “missed his calling in life,” he told Much Music in 1986. “He should’ve been a dictator in an art colony.” The cover of the next album, Life, would show Young behind bars, the number of records he’d made for Geffen scratched out on the prison wall.
Briggs was brought in three weeks into the tour to pull an album out of the mess. “When they called me, they had already done fifteen shows and it was already in the shitter. Neil was an angry, angry guy—he was in a rage at everybody, and everybody hated him for it. It was a tour with a bunch of people that hated each other, hated what they were doing, and it showed. There was years of bad baggage never resolved goin’ in. Neil took Crazy Horse and used ’em like sluts, like a component—and they went along with it.”
Niko Bolas was summoned to engineer the live recordings. “I show up in Miami, and David Briggs drags me into this remote truck, and it’s the biggest piece of shit you’ve ever seen—this fuckin’ console duct-taped to the walls. It was just horrible. Nothing was working. I’d never done a remote date in my life, so I had no idea what was going on at all, and I look at Briggs and I say, ‘What the fuck is happening?’ And Briggs hands me a couple of grams of blow and said, ‘Welcome to the road,’ and walks away.”
Sandy Mazzeo and Poncho Sampedro became running buddies. “Poncho and I decided not to join the tour—just show up for the gigs. We had a briefcase full of money, everything we needed. It was the very last of our wild days.” They made friends with a couple of women appearing in a Walt Disney on Ice production apparently suffering from a lack of heterosexual males. “Their tour correlated to our tour, so we were roughly in the same towns at the same time. It was wild—I was dating Goofy, and Poncho was dating Minnie Mouse.”
Things were so insane on the Horse tour bus that they got a visit from the boss, a story that illustrates just how estranged Young and his band had become. “Neil pulled us over in the middle of the night and came on the bus,” said Poncho. “All the heavies were there—Briggs, Mazzeo, Niko, the band. Neil walked all the way through to the back. It was like the warden came. We were all just standin’ there really quiet, all stoned out of our minds. Neil didn’t talk to anybody—he walked through, walked on out—and Niko goes, ‘Well, did we pass the inspection, Dad?’”
Things degenerated even further a few months later on the European leg of the tour. Some gigs were canceled due to poor sales, others rescheduled to smaller venues. “We were playin’ good, then some radio guy told Neil they thought he was dead,” said Poncho. “I guess Geffen didn’t distribute the records over there.” Briggs left the tour a day before it was over, and he and Neil would not work together again for another two and a half years. Young made a murky eight-millimeter documentary of the tour called “Muddy Track” that has yet to be released.
Life, culled mostly from performances on the American tour, was released at the end of June. It wasn’t a terrible record but was like most of Young’s eighties albums, something of a halfway case. The Horse blasted a hole in the roof on “Cryin’ Eyes,” a song dating back to Young’s tenure with the Ducks, and the aptly titled “Prisoners of Rock ’n Roll” was a response to record-company meddling, its numbskull chorus a Crazy Horse reaffirmation: “That’s why we don’t wanna be good.” But overdubs and sound effects couldn’t create excitement where there was none. “Mideast Vacation” was too muddled to even get mad over and “Inca Queen” was a pale imitation of “Cortez.”
For Briggs, the biggest disappointment was “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks.” An aching ballad Young had written in the middle of a fever dream in Florida, it was “a monster song—it should’ve been the ‘I Believe in You’ of the eighties for Crazy Horse—so pure, so simple,” said Briggs. “But they had no desire to make anything out of it, never played it good, never put anything special into it. It was a shame.
“I can see why the band hated Neil for the way they were bein’ used and I can see why Neil hated them, ’cause they were playin’ like monkeys. A marriage made in hell.”
The Horse should never be forced to do covers of things they didn’t originate. Crazy Horse has to be dealt with on its own terms, and I really didn’t do them justice.
But you gotta dig my problem with Crazy Horse. As much as I loved the guys, I would do the song and lay it out and they wouldn’t remember the arrangement. So I’d be halfway through delivering the master, and one guy would stop playing or wouldn’t know where to go. Y’know, that’s really hard to deal with after you’ve done it over and over and over again.
Listen to “Around the World.” One of the reasons I split up with Crazy Horse is that song drags so fuckin’ bad. It’s so behind, like thousands of people carrying this huge weight up a hill—will they make it? The beats are all way behind. I love that record, but it coulda been better, and it pissed me off.
Europe was fuckin’ terrible. Awful. Billy was fuckin’ outthere. Nobody knows what it’s like to be the fuckin’ leader of that band, okay? The guy who decides if they’re gonna get advances or not, all that shit—as well as being the guy that’s playin’ the music. Seein’ the guys in different lights all the time and lovin’ ’em all all the time, but just tryin’ to balance it all out. And knowin’ that people weren’t fuckin’ comin’ to the shows.
That was a rough tour. We were really kinda passé. We were at the end of a low ebb before people started thinking we were cool again. We’re goin’, “What the fuck are we doin’ this for?”
“Muddy Track” is not a documentary. I don’t know what the fuck it is. It’s got some great fights—me and Billy Talbot. And then there’s a riot—we’re playing “Down by the River” and they’re gassing people in the audience, people are throwin’ shit, they got machine guns ’n shit outside. Milan. Italians, man, they’re wild.
I just wanted to make a tour movie, give me something to do while I was out there. So I bought these cameras—one for Briggs, one for me. Mine was named Otto. Otto was on the scene everywhere, running all the time. I recorded everything, so therefore everything happened and nobody gave a shit. A lotta times the camera’s just been put down somewhere. Y’know—it’s askew. It’s outthere. There’s an attitude to “Muddy Track” that’s definitely down.
All those interviews I filmed, where all those guys were askin’ me t
hose stupid questions? That’s my favorite part—y’know, you have some ridiculous scene, feedback, wild traveling music—then it would cut deadpan to some jerk askin’ me if I’d made any records in the last eight years. What have I been doing?
“Muddy Track” is the most distorted thing you ever heard in your life. Completely distorted. Instrumentals, traveling music. Beginnings and endings of songs with feedback. No beat, nothing. Just Ralph going crazy, everybody banging.
It’s very hard to get a distributor for something like that. I tell ya, it’s hard to get a marketing scam together when they won’t even put the movie out.
The summer of 1987 found Young wandering. For a while he reunited with Jack Nitzsche, who coproduced one track for Life—a ballad called “We Never Danced.” Young wanted to use the demo vocal he’d recorded; Nitzsche made him do it over. “Neil said, ‘You’re the only guy who could make me do this.’ He went back and used the first one anyway.”
Nitzsche quickly grew impatient with the Horse’s limitations. “They couldn’t get their parts right and Neil was digitally using the same chorus again and again. I’d come up with an idea for a bass line like ‘River Deep,’ Billy couldn’t remember it. Neil said, ‘Well, y’know, you either use really good musicians and put that kind of record together … or you use Crazy Horse.’” Nitzsche fled.
Then, with Bryan Bell, Young began planning what some felt was a joke, a final assault on Geffen. “An album of crickets farting,” said Poncho. But Bell maintained that it was for real: “That’s when I thought he was close to something special. It wasn’t the material for Crazy Horse, it wasn’t the material for Geffen, it was totally different. The closest thing to it on the radio is called ‘New Age.’”
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