Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  But the voice turns confessional, telling us how Young keeps “gettin’ younger / My life’s been funny that way.” He talked back to his parents and got tossed out of Bible school for giving the preacher the finger, but even this rebel must fall. Now he’s a fireman, doomed to prison for an unnamed offense. “Wish I never put the hose down,” shrieks Young. “Wish I never got old.” A painfully honest admission, and he meant it that night. Young wanged away on Old Black, interspersing fat, ugly riffs with short blasts of lyrical beauty unheard since ’76.

  “60 to 0” would mutate from concert to concert, acoustic to electric, with Young sometimes singing as little as four verses and, in marathon acoustic performances during the Midwest leg of the tour, as many as eleven. But none I’ve heard match the intensity of the seven-minute Jones Beach electric version (an acoustic take was released on Freedom, complete with unswinging sax. I think the song falls flat when lingered over as opposed to hurled in your face).

  But this “60 to 0” was an assault in the best sense of the word: Young pummeling you with a string of nightmare pictures, hammering them into your brain with screaming guitar. This was the most exciting electric music Young made in the eighties, and it would turn out to be only the beginning of the attack.

  Throughout the Bluenotes period, Young dabbled around with Crosby, Stills and Nash, which resulted in American Dream, the first studio album from CSNY since 1970’s Déjà Vu. The two factions had endured a somewhat stormy relationship in the press, with Young bashing them (and himself) during promotions for Trans. “Neil Young from the sixties and early seventies is like Perry Como,” Young told David Gans. “If I was still taking that seriously, I’d be where Crosby, Stills and Nash are today.” CSN would respond in kind, although one rebuttal was rather obtuse—the cover of 1990’s Live It Up, depicting four hot dogs on sticks flying through space, one of the weiners symbolically broken. Nash actually admitted to Joel Bernstein that it all symbolized Young and his nefarious interactions with the group.

  In the late seventies and early eighties, CSN had continued to record in various permutations with varying degrees of success, but they’d been plagued by personal problems, among them the fact that David Crosby was now a freebasing train wreck. The former prince of L.A. counterculture was now more at home on wanted posters. “Everyone always envied him—it was always like ‘David, does he have his shit together or what?’” recalled Elliot Roberts. “We all thought that David was so on top of what drugs did for him creatively, and that’s why it was all so incredible when David became an addict.”

  On March 28, 1982, Crosby had a “seizure from toxic saturation,” nodding out en route to an antinukes benefit and crashing his car into a center divider on the San Diego Freeway. When the police arrived, they found cocaine, a freebase pipe and butane torch, plus a loaded .45. According to The Washington Post, when asked why he was carrying a loaded gun, Crosby said simply, “John Lennon.”

  This was only the beginning of his troubles with the law. A few weeks later in Dallas, Crosby—appearing solo at a fleabag nightclub called Cardi’s—was busted again when officers burst in and found him sucking on his base pipe. On and on it went. Arrests, rehab, escape from rehab, interventions. Nothing worked.

  Young made attempts to help in his own way. In January 1983, right after Crosby had fled a detox that Graham Nash had sworn to authorities in Texas that David would complete, a meeting took place at Young’s ranch. “Neil had me and Graham bring David down to have dinner with him,” said Joel Bernstein, who recalls that Crosby was in ghastly condition, wearing a wool cap and heavy makeup over his open sores. Of the whole parade of concerned friends and loved ones Crosby faced, Bernstein said it was Young who terrified him the most. “David was just sweating bullets the whole way. I think he smoked crack on the way down while I was driving.”

  Young offered Crosby a house on the ranch where he could stay under medical supervision until he was better. Crosby declined. A short while later, Young tried to talk to him again. “Neil decided to come and see him—which never happens,” said Bernstein. “Never. I go an hour ahead of time—David was with his mistress. I said, ‘Well, Neil is at your house, he wants to talk to you.’ It was totally like the kid and the principal—David goes and freebases for forty-five minutes, gets totally fucked up so he can face Neil, because he knows he’s been a bad boy.”

  Crosby wept on the drive over. Bernstein: “David starts whining, ‘It’s always, “David, you’re the bad boy, David, you’re the one who’s keeping CSNY from being together.” You guys just don’t understand.’ I heard this so much by this point, finally I’m so fucking pissed off, I say, ‘David, what would you have us do?’ He said, ‘Just forget about me, man. I’ve been in and out of seven hospitals—none of them have helped. I’m gonna keep doin’ this, and there’s nothin’ you guys can do to stop me. Just forget about me.’” Since Crosby had sprained his ankle, Joel practically had to carry him inside.

  Bernstein waited outside while Young and Crosby talked. Then Young emerged. As Bernstein recalls, “Neil just said, ‘We’re outta here. He just doesn’t get it.’”

  Crosby grew emotional recalling Young’s attempts to help. “He really did care about me when I went down the tubes. I said no. Stupid me … it was one of the dumbest things I ever did. But that’s what kind of friend he is. I’ll never forget that. I think he’s an exemplary human being, if you want to know the truth. Neil’s a real special cat.” Amazingly, after many more arrests and a stint in jail where he kicked both heroin and cocaine cold turkey in solitary confinement, David Crosby somehow survived. Nineteen eighty-six saw a much ballyhooed performance by CSNY at the Bridge School concert in October. Young had promised to record again with the trio if Crosby straightened out, and he made good on the offer, although it was delayed by David Geffen, who would gain a lot of unwanted press when reporter Fredric Dannen overheard him tangling telephonically with Ahmet Ertegun over the deal, demanding 50 percent of the take for Young’s services: “Crosby, Stills and Nash are fat old farts. The only one with any talent is Neil Young!”

  CSN wanted their longtime associate Stanley Johnson to engineer the sessions, but, said Niko Bolas, “Neil said he wouldn’t do the record without me. We did it on his turf, with his guys, in his style.” Once again, CSN came to Y. The results were disastrous. Said Bolas, “There were flashes of youth—and realizing that it’s over.”

  Despite being clean and sober, Crosby—who would later be diagnosed with hepatitis C, necessitating a liver transplant—wasn’t in the best physical shape. “Crosby spent the whole time lying on a couch in front of the console, struggling to get up to sing his vocals,” said Bernstein. “He was like this beached whale. Finally, Neil ordered the couch removed, but apparently Crosby wigged and the couch was reinstated.”

  Stills was no longer the driving force of the trio, musically or otherwise. “Graham is the real workaholic—first one to get there, last to leave,” said Bolas. “He stayed with me finishing the production until the last CD was pressed.”

  When I spoke to Crosby and Nash in 1990, disappointments lingered over the project. “Neil needs the three of us like a stag needs a hat rack. He needs even less the competitive thing from Stills,” said Crosby. “There were moments of intensely good music on Neil’s songs, Graham’s songs, maybe mine. But Stephen showed up expecting his usual larger-than-everybody-else’s portion of the record and didn’t have any songs—at least none that I thought were worth a damn.”

  Nash was equally blunt on the subject of Stephen Stills. “I have seen cocaine totally ruin his songwriting … I personally don’t think he’s written a great song for years,” he said. “I think unless he totally straightens himself out that his life is going to remain in this really sad state of affairs. I love him dearly—I’ll help him any way I can.

  “I don’t think he’s happy with himself, I don’t think he’s happy, period. I think in many ways, he’s clinically insane. I think if he hadn’t been Steph
en Stills, he would’ve been put away years ago.”

  Most everybody I talked to complained about Stephen’s lunacy. Not Young. “People don’t realize how easy it is to hurt him,” he told Laura Gross. “He’s a tormented artist, he’s like a lightbulb without any glass … a filament.”

  I just know I really like Stephen as a person. As a human being, there’s a lot there. Much more than the other guys have any idea of. They don’t even see it.

  The thing is, when Stephen was workin’ with me, he drove me nuts and I drove him nuts, but I still brought out the sensitive side in his music. Because I never once lost sight of the fact that he was my brother. Those guys don’t have that, and that makes Stephen very, very uncomfortable and extremely inhibited. In my opinion, they basically just wore him down and destroyed the very thing that made CSN great—which was Stills.

  That’s how it is from my eyes. And I wasn’t there, and they could say I’m totally wrong, but that’s how I feel about it. I don’t care how long they’ve been together, doesn’t make any difference—because I was there at the beginning. I know where he’s coming from. That’s the difference.

  Released by Atlantic at the end of 1988, American Dream is a prime contender for the most wretched album Neil Young has ever lent his name to. The Volume Dealers’ production is awful, a digital nightmare completely ill suited to the folk-pop quartet.

  “It sounds completely artificial,” said Bernstein. “They were moving things digitally and bending notes in the Synclavier. The harmonies on ‘This Old House’ were unbelievably bland—it reminded me of Mitch Miller.” Besides cowriting a couple of forgettable tunes with Stills, Young contributed three songs: “This Old House,” “Name of Love” and “American Dream.” The title cut, a portrait of a fallen politician, seemed painfully relevant: “Don’t know where things went wrong / Might have been when you were young and strong.”

  Julien Temple directed a video for the song that featured the quartet playing roles he saw as wickedly appropriate. “I liked the idea of seeing David Crosby as a Larry Flynt guy in a wheelchair, Stills as a coked-out Oliver North and Nash as Gary Hart.” Temple cast Young in dual roles—a tabloid reporter and a teased-hair, leather-clad heavy-metal rocker who scares Nash to death.

  After the American Dream debacle, Young moved on to New York City in December for some of the wildest rock of his life, and for the first time in the eighties he would capture it on tape in a recording studio.

  When Young returned to the studio, it was as part of a trio, with Bluenotes Rick Rosas and Chad Cromwell on bass and drums. Young had compiled a double live set of Bluenotes recordings, but he squashed it. “He thought it sounded too good,” said an exasperated Niko Bolas. “That’s what he told me—too good.” Poncho recalls that while they were mixing at A&M, the album got nicknamed “This Shit Don’t Sell.” “Everybody started calling it that, and the joke got overplayed. I guess Neil started thinkin’, ‘Why am I doin’ an LP of shit that no one’s gonna buy?’”

  Young jettisoned the horn section. “They all got burned,” said Bolas. “They planned their life around this band that we knew was just another one of Neil’s toys. That’s what you have to remember: You’re just one of the things he toys with during the day, like a train set. ‘Next!’ Nothing personal, Neil just does what he has to do. Period.”

  Poncho felt he might’ve been to blame for the change in direction. One night on the road, he’d invited Young over to his room to watch the Who’s The Kids Are Alright on cable. Neil sat watching the band bash away, entranced. “Neil said, ‘That’s cool—I’d like to do that.’ A few weeks later he took off to record with Chad and Rick, usin’ all the big Marshall amps.”

  Young and the Restless (their new name) recorded at the Hit Factory, a New York City studio in the heart of Times Square. “The sessions went all night long,” said tech Anthony Aquilato. “It was very intense.”

  It was also some of the crudest, angriest music Young had ever made. “That record came about as a direct result of doing CSNY,” said Bolas. “Neil was so pissed off at having to do a record that he didn’t want to do—with pretty songs that he fuckin’ hated—that he just retaliated.”

  Young’s wacko equipment setup gave the crew big headaches. “Neil was using a PA in the room—he had a huge fuckin’ monitor system that was giving him his vocal back, which normally you don’t do when you’re making a record ’cause you want some sort of isolation,” said Aquilato. “He wanted to feel the vocal coming back loud.”

  Young coaxed brutal new sounds out of Old Black. “This is when Neil was getting into these strange combinations of amps,” said Larry Cragg. “Why? To get the wildest, most heavy rock sound you ever heard. But unlike just about anybody else, Neil does it without using stomp boxes—he does it with real amps.” Young took the signal from his battered old Deluxe and fed it through a Marshall stack. The result was, said Cragg, “The biggest, most distorted sound you ever heard. It was loud in there. Excruciatingly loud.” How loud was it? “Niko blew up a pair of huge Uri monitors—that’s how loud,” said Aquilato. “I remember literally not being able to sit in the control room. I couldn’t handle it.”

  For Cragg, it was a technical nightmare. The masses of wiring acted as antennae in the middle of New York City, where there were plenty of stations to pick up. “Amps don’t like to be connected together sometimes, so it was like ground-loop hell. I was doing crazy things to get this crazy, out-of-control rig quiet.” Young wasn’t used to waiting, so the record starts off with an ugly hum and a frantic Cragg yelling he hasn’t quite fixed the problem. Neil says, “Yeah, that sounds good, though,” as he plunges into the cyclone of “Cocaine Eyes.” Bolas said this violent declaration was provoked by the poor showing of Stills on American Dream: “Cocaine eyes won’t hide your face / It’s no surprise you lose the race again / My old friend.”

  “Heavy Love” has an attitude worthy of Bo Diddley and ends with Young barely able to scream the last few words. A bitter cover of the Brill Building standard “On Broadway” collapses after six punishing minutes into a funny, tasteless plea for crack.

  “Eldorado”—the title cut (and only acoustic number)—was a song Young had reworked lyrically and musically from the Crazy Horse “Garage” tour, and it became another eighties travelogue of greed, drugs and murder. One track hit Niko particularly hard. “I went to the hotel and Neil said, ‘I gotta play you somethin’—Roy Orbison meets heavy metal.’” The song was “Don’t Cry,” about a relationship of Niko’s that had crumbled en route to the altar. “I couldn’t mix that song,” he said. “I had a lot of trouble getting through that, ’cause I really loved the chick it was about. It fucked me up … I don’t like to listen to it.”

  “Don’t Cry” was the session’s centerpiece. The doomy clanking of a bell signals the description of a relationship just demolished. The offender is going to help her pack, walk her to her car—nice thought, but Young spits out the words with all the warmth of a stalker. After the second verse, a piercing shriek hits a wall of noise that’s more chaos than guitar solo. Forget the pretty, ringing tones of the past. This is the bottom—pure electric sludge. When it finally ends, Young’s voice slithers out of the feedback for one last howl: “Don’t cry, my sweet girl … you won’t really be alone.” Maybe she’d rather be.

  In the winter of 1988, Young and the Restless hit the road, blasting through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana, then up through the Northwest. I loaned fan Dave McFarlin a tape recorder to capture a couple of the shows, and he and a buddy drove around-the-clock to catch up with Young. They would be rewarded with one of the wildest gigs of Young’s career, at the Bronco Bowl in Dallas, Texas.

  The Bronco Bowl was an “old relic of a place,” said McFarlin. “It was just a hole—an actual bowling alley, with an archery range and a huge parking lot with grass growin’ through the asphalt. Neil’s name was lit up on a sign under a big bowling pin. I loved the place.” Pro wrestling had been there the night be
fore.

  At first, McFarlin was disappointed by a lackluster acoustic set. “Young played all these slow, old songs—mainly the hits, ‘Sugar Mountain,’ ‘Heart of Gold’—he sounded like he was about to fall over. He looked like the oldest man in the world.” But when Young came back out for the electric set, dressed in a JUST SAY NO T-shirt, he was “completely different. He looked twenty years younger.”

  The band change had been so hasty that McFarlin had been expecting the Bluenotes, and he was flabbergasted by the sonic abuse that ensued. “Young just thrashed around the stage, screamin’—he was goin’ like a nut.” Young’s mangling of “On Broadway” shook the building to the rafters. “He stood with his back to the amps, hit that low note, got that vibration going and let the feedback vibrate him. It was insane.” Young got so carried away during one number that he “jumped up in the air and landed on his ass in a sitting position—Indian-style, like a pretzel. I don’t know how he didn’t break his back.”

  It was total mayhem, and McFarlin was in heaven. Glued in front of Shakey’s amp the next night in Houston, he said it was the loudest show he’s ever heard Young play. “He split my brain open. His guitar was just deafening. You could actually SEE the sound waves.”

  In April and May, Young took the band—now christened the Lost Dogs—to Australia, New Zealand and Japan. There was a new song, “No More,” one of Young’s most evocative statements on addiction, which started with the tough opening couplet: “Livin’ on the edge of night / You know the sun won’t go down slow.” To enhance the musical mayhem, there was a new stage show featuring crunching loops of between-song industrial noise not to mention hard hats for the roadies. Mazzeo contributed another psychedelic slide presentation, giving the crew heart attacks when he and a buddy manned the lights one night in Darwin and managed to keep Young in darkness for most of the show.