Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Such extreme rock and roll brought out the maniac in Young. The byzantine configuration of amps and their settings changed between each number—and sometimes during a song. “It would be almost impossible for me to get everything replugged and repatched and not have a ground hum,” said Larry Cragg. Young went ballistic during a show in Sydney over a sound fuckup. “Neil said, ‘Well, we’ll just wait until Larry gets his shit together.’ He was being a total asshole to me, ’cause I was his only link to the outside world. He was getting really, really violent.” In his fury, Young kicked over a pile of amps. “The stack of Marshalls landed right on me—and he knew it was landin’ on me—so I didn’t appreciate that at all. After the show he was all apologetic, but the crazy man on stage really gets outta control.”

  In the meantime, Young tinkered with the Hit Factory recordings. Bolas had mixed the sessions, but Young hated the mixes and redid them himself (“Neil just bird-dogs every phase of the fuckin’ gig,” said Bolas). An album of Hit Factory/ranch sessions called “Times Square” was turned in to Reprise. “I don’t think they really liked the record at all,” said Bolas. “When we played it for them, they kinda stared at the ceiling.”

  Young pulled the record, releasing five of the Hit Factory cuts in April 1989 as an EP called Eldorado instead. The cover was a sad-looking piece of assemblage art by Young’s old Topanga friend George Herms, and for the first time since Rust, the title was scrawled in Young’s own handwriting. Finally Young had made a recording that matched the intensity of his live performances. But it was impossible to find the fucking thing—Young released it only in a limited-edition to coincide with the overseas tour. It was a strange message: “I’m back, but you’ve gotta find me.”

  Niko Bolas recalls playing the album for Graham Nash. “There were vile juices flowin’ from Graham’s mouth when he heard that record. He turned it off and said, ‘I absolutely hate this record.’ He didn’t just not like it, he hated it. I’ve never seen anybody with more disgust in their eyes…. I think Neil did that whole album just for that playback. I told him once how much Graham hated it, and he was like, ‘Fine.’ He was done. It did what it was supposed to do.”

  But Young maintained that there was a much more personal reason for such an angry record—he was exorcising the pain he felt over what had happened to his son in the patterning program years before.

  Some of the guitar playing on Eldorado … there’s a lot of violence and a lot of anger inside me for things that have happened. Injustices.

  I’m angry about what happened to Ben. I really mean that. It pisses me off. I don’t understand why that had to happen.

  Seeing him try so hard to crawl and not be able to, but wanting so badly to do it—just because we wanted him to, y’know. You talk about a struggle. People can struggle anywhere, but I have seen a real struggle, and I’m not impressed with superficial struggling, someone who’s trying to make something more than it is. And people do it all the time, who am I to judge … I just don’t have much patience. It never affects the way I am with anybody, but inside myself I make my own judgments.

  Bluenotes, Everybody’s Rockin’, Trans, Old Ways 1, Old Ways 2, on and on, all the stuff I did in the eighties—there’s all these things happening. Meanwhile, there’s another layer … and that’s Eldorado. That’s the other side. When I did those songs, I guess that was my true self—or something. But I didn’t want to do anything like that … for a long time.

  I put that out so people would know that I was still here. There’s something about the way things have gone for me—something about it that made me want to put that out and make sure my handwriting was on it, pick the artwork, do everything. And then I’m sick—I only made five thousand. I said, “That’s all. That’s it.”

  I tell ya why I made that record. First of all, there was a record called “Times Square.” I decided that if I put this record out, people were so used to me doing styles that they might think that I was just doing a style. And I knew that there was something special about that record. But I think it was a paranoid kind of a thing that I didn’t want to take the abuse for doing this, so what I did was take all the sweetness out of it, made it more abusive than it already is—and put it out of reach. So there it is. That’s it. That’s the weird workings of my mind. It’s self-defeating, but still makes its point in some weird way. I was reemerging from myself … to make that change, it had to be done in a special way.

  Doing “Don’t Cry” and “Heavy Love,” every night in Australia and Japan, I blew myself out. Those songs are incredibly intense. I felt the effects. I damaged my throat doing those songs. See, people don’t realize how fuckin’ physical my music is. Every fuckin’ note is my last as far as I’m concerned, so it better be fuckin’ good. It better be there. So that takes a lot out of ya. And there’s no way to breathe deep and sing “Heavy Love.” You can’t do that. Have “good technique”—get the fuckin’ technique out. Get rid of it.

  Those shows were very loud. That’s when I was using Marshalls. I would cut in with the octave divider, the whole thing would just go to shit … There’s a breakdown in the middle of “Heavy Love” where everything just starts distorting and getting more mangled-sounding… When I wanted the big loud explosion, we had to go there—turn everything up. It was incredible. I had a thing where I could change from one amp to another—where I could play along real quiet and then just hit one button and it was the loudest fuckin’ thing you ever heard. On “Don’t Cry,” that just kicked in, like, two more amps at full volume, all on one note. It was just big and bad.

  The reason I did the acoustic tour next is because it was a way for me to go out, play and get in touch with myself. See, I got in touch with my electric self out there with the Lost Dogs, but that’s only half of it. In the beginning, when I started playing acoustic, I was as intense with my acoustic as I was with my electric guitar, so I needed to get back to that point. I was rebuilding myself, and to do that I had to strip away everything. I wanted to feel myself playing without any distractions. Feel it.

  I love to play, and that’s what got me back, okay? That was the only way I could do it. At first, in the eighties, I wasn’t even going out and playing—I was just putting out records. Then I started going out on the road and putting out music—out of myself, live. Not so much on records, but live.

  And I started finding myself. I had to keep playing and playing and playing and not take a break to get back. I felt disconnected—I felt it, too. When I played my music, I went, “What’s going on? Where am I? Where is it?”

  Now that Young had taken his electric music to a new extreme, he immediately swung just as far in the other direction, embarking on two solo acoustic tours of America in June, August and September 1989.

  Outfitted with a wireless microphone, Young prowled the bare stage alone (outside of a couple of numbers where Poncho Sampedro and Ben Keith joined him). Young dedicated one song to the Chinese student who had captured the imagination of the world as he stood before a phalanx of tanks in Tiananmen Square, flowers in his outstretched hands. “It’s an old song—a song that should be forgotten,” muttered Young, launching into the doom chords of “Ohio.” The starkness of the presentation—and the bleakness of his newer material—made an impact on the critics. “Loss of innocence can hurt, but few songwriters have taken it harder than Neil Young,” wrote Jon Pareles in The New York Times. “His songs contrast an Edenic rural past with a brutal, corrupt present…. He offered little hope beyond the stubborn refusal to give up.”

  One new song in particular made an impression. Poncho remembers how it came into being. Sitting around with Young on the road one day, Poncho gazed at a newspaper plastered with pictures of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s body being carried to his grave. Frenzied mourners surrounded the corpse, some burning American flags.

  “I was goin’, ‘This is unreal, all these people just hate us.’ We were talking about playing Europe, and I said, ‘Whatever we do, we shouldn’t go near the Mi
deast. It’s probably better to keep rockin’ in the free world.’ Neil goes, ‘That’s pretty cool—is that a song you’re working on?’ ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, man, if you don’t use it, I will.’” (The line was “such a cliché … I knew I had to use it,” Young would tell MuchMusic.)

  A few days later Young had the song down and was running through it on the bus with Poncho. “He said, ‘Don’t tell the guys—we’ll do it tonight. We’ll initiate ’em.’ We used to do that to Crazy Horse all the time—pull a song out of a hat.” That night, February 21, 1989, at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, Young and the Restless fumbled through the very first performance of “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

  The song was a knockout, although the victim was a matter of perspective. George Bush, drug-addicted mothers, “Styrofoam garbage for the ozone layer.” “Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them / So I try to forget it any way I can”: Talk about a line loaded with meaning. Was Young talking about America’s presence in the Middle East, or himself and the wake of people he’d left behind? On a record like Tonight’s the Night, Young managed to convey many different and conflicting feelings in the space of an album; now he had distilled it down to just one song, and the ambiguity was exhilarating.

  “I have so many opinions that come out during my music that it’s a battle for me,” Young told MuchMusic. “I try not to be preachy about what I’m sayin’. That’s a real danger, because as soon as you start preaching, then nobody wants to hear ya, ’cause you’re a jerk … I’ve slipped into that position many times and it’s a danger of doing what I do … I just want to be a reflection of what’s going on. Let people make up their own minds.”

  What about a song like “Rockin’ in the Free World,” which really socked it home at the right time in this country, was it a celebration or an indictment?

  “Well, kinda both, you know?” Young said. “Depends on how you look at it … it’s all there together. That’s the picture that I saw. Is it a celebration or an indictment? Or is it ironic? People can sing it like an anthem, and yet, if you listen to the words, it’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ You know?”

  But that’s the question!

  “That’s it,” barks Young, laughing. “That is the question. You asking the question means you got the song.”

  —Interview with Dean Kuipers, 1995

  Having jettisoned “Times Square,” Young continued to record songs for what would become his next album.

  He recorded a bunch of material during this period, much of it as yet unreleased, including a new version of “Born to Run”; a great little rocker with Sampedro on mandolin called “Your Love Again”; and “Diggin’ My Bad Self,” a jazzbo scat exercise that has to be heard to be believed. Once the album was completed, Young waffled on the title. Finally, at the last minute of the mastering, he decided. As Poncho recalls, “Just before we went out the door Neil said, ‘Y’know what, man? Put down Freedom.’”

  Freedom was released in October 1989, from sessions stretching back over the previous few years. Some of the songwriting dated back to the mid-seventies. Bookended à la Rust with acoustic and electric versions of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Freedom was a collection of songs, not a genre concept record. “I just wanted to make a Neil Young album per se,” the ever self-aware Young told Rolling Stone. “Something that was just me, where there was no persona, no image, no distinctive character.”

  The album overflowed in terms of writing, with hardly a weak cut. But sonically it felt like Young had acquiesced a little too much; it sometimes sounds hopelessly square. One of the older songs, “Too Far Gone,” was abysmal compared to the original unreleased recording, and an abbreviated acoustic version of “60 to 0 (Crime in the City)” featured turgid jazzy touches and omitted some of the best verses.

  Young also included two cuts from Eldorado, and on one of them he committed a sin that was unconscionable as far as fans like Dave McFarlin were concerned. Pressured by both Bolas and Sampedro, Young edited down some of the more maniacal guitar work.

  “It was all that fuckin’ noisy, outta-tune shit,” said Bolas. “That’s one of the only times Neil listened to me. I had him clean up the guitar so it’ll stay in the groove. If you’re a Neil Young fanatic and you like explosions and all that out-of-tune bullshit, great. But if you’re just some kid playin’ air guitar you gotta have something to play to, not some ‘what the hell is this and when is it gonna be over.’”

  Surprisingly, the definitive version of “Rockin’ in the Free World” came via the idiot box. Television has occasionally been the site for some explosive moments in popular music: Elvis’s early appearances and his 1968 special. Jerry Lee Lewis on The Steve Allen Show, his country comeback appearance on Ed Sullivan. Hendrix on the Lulu show. Al Green on Soul! Ike and Tina Turner on anything. Dylan crooning a mournful but still defiant “Restless Farewell” to Frank Sinatra on an otherwise ludicrous 1995 tribute.

  As rock has gotten bigger and slicker, moments like these have gotten increasingly harder to find, but brief blips sometimes manage to raise dust on the vast, bland wasteland. On September 30, 1989, during an otherwise forgettable Saturday Night Live, Neil Young gave what is easily his greatest electric live broadcast performance in front of that voracious TV eye. “Most people stay on the other side of the glass,” said Mazzeo. “Neil came right through.”

  It almost didn’t happen. Originally the band was supposed to be Rick Rosas, Chad Cromwell and Poncho Sampedro. But Cromwell was touring Japan with Jackson Browne. In order to salvage the gig, Niko Bolas convinced Neil to go with a new rhythm section—drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Charley Drayton. Jordan had played on Landing on Water, and the two Afro-American rockers had made a name for themselves on Keith Richards’ solo projects. “Producing Neil Young is, you pick the cast of characters and hope he gets off on it,” said Bolas, and this time he hit the jackpot. The lineup of Jordan and Drayton, plus Poncho (which Young drolly christened YCS&P for Young, Charley, Steve and Poncho), would be equal to any Young has ever encountered.

  The plan was to record some new material at the Hit Factory, then head over to Saturday Night Live. Bolas was not to produce the session, merely engineer, for this marked the return of Mr. Briggs, but tensions surfaced early on. When Briggs and Bolas had last met during the recording of Life, Niko had been the new kid on the block. Now he’d coproduced Young’s last two albums. “Briggs was already on edge,” said Poncho. “He couldn’t tell Niko what to do.” In addition, both Bolas and Sampedro were now clean and sober and proud of it. One night Bolas tried to give Briggs some Alcoholics Anonymous literature. He tossed it in the trash.

  The band managed to record a couple of tracks, most notably a powerhouse version of a new song entitled “Fuckin’ Up.” But the chemistry wasn’t there. “Everybody had a fuckin’ weird attitude, and we were lucky to get what we got,” said a glum Bolas. “It just wasn’t supposed to happen, I guess. It was too good for Neil. Too correct.”

  And yet it would all come together days later with millions of people watching. Jordan, well aware of television’s limitations from years of playing in David Letterman’s house band, picked his weapons carefully. “We had a stacked deck, man. I picked the biggest drums, the biggest cymbals I could find—I’d been workin’ TV long enough to know that if I didn’t have cymbals that big, nobody would hear ’em.” The warm-up was so punishing that Jordan had to change out of his leather duds into something looser, which he took as a good omen. “I almost couldn’t get through the dress rehearsal,” he said.

  Showtime was serious business from the first note. Introduced by celebrity big shot Bruce Willis, Young didn’t even look up to acknowledge the camera. Against a backdrop of rugs and antiques, Young—dressed in a leather jacket, sneakers, decomposing jeans that were more patches than pants and, most appropriately, a black Elvis T-shirt—resembled a brainsick Rip Van Winkle. His fuzzy mange of hair had now receded so far that his forehead looked like a landing strip, beneath which lurk
ed seen-it-all eyes whose thousand-yard stare was more foreboding than ever. The twisted, disapproving face spoke of some terrible journeys. This was not the feral Harvest-era innocent who had made such an indelible imprint on the American psyche so many years before; this was a survivor—older, harder, but with craggy spirit intact. He looked, forgive the word, young.

  Poncho oozed a particularly menacing vibe, all pumped up and greased back, while Drayton, in flashy leathers and ripped jeans, tumbleweed hair obscuring his sullen face, slowly lumbered around like a prehistoric mutant marking territory. Jordan pounded the drums with the desperation of a man about to be buried alive. Halfway through the performance, Young flashed a look at his little collection of creatures, and for a moment he seemed ready to burst out laughing. What a band. Two black guys, a Spaniard and a crazy Canuck. They looked, as my colleague R. J. Smith put it, like a bunch of car thieves.

  You want your heroes to stay amazing, but the older they get, the more likely they are to fail you. Mortgages have to be paid, diapers changed; hunger gives way to complacency, chances don’t get taken. I had been listening to Young’s music most of my life, but on record, at least, it seemed like he’d spent the last decade crumbling. Now here he was, jumping around the stage shouting out lyrics like a pissed-off teen. The camera had to struggle to keep up with him—twice he lunged right out of range, leaving, for a blissful moment, that rarest of television miracles: a big, beautiful empty screen (for subsequent broadcasts, the offending emptiness was edited out).

  The relentless touring had paid off, because whatever his records might’ve lacked, Young was at the top of his game as a live performer. As his contorted face spit out the words, it felt like all the frustrations and disappointments of the last ten years were bleeding out of his vocal cords and fingers. Most other rockers from his generation were ready for Madame Tussaud’s; here was Neil Young, just shy of forty-four, more frighteningly alive than ever.