The performance brought to mind a lyric from “Eldorado”: “He comes dancing out / Dressed in gold lamé / He kills the bull / And lives another day.” Maybe Young wasn’t decked out in gold lamé, but a bull died that night.
I was trying to get to the place where I would be when I did “Rockin’ in the Free World” during my live show. To do that I had to ignore Saturday Night Live completely. I had to pretend I wasn’t there. I had a dressing room, a little place with an amp in it, in another part of the building. And I walked from there into Saturday Night Live—and then left. I developed a whole new technique for television.
I had my trainer, and we just lifted weights and I did calisthenics to get my blood to the level it would be at after performing for an hour and twenty-five minutes—which is usually how long I’d be onstage by the time I did that song. To perform that song the way it’s supposed to be performed, you have to be at peak blood level. Everything has to be up, your machine has to be stoked. You can’t walk on cold and do that or you’re gonna look like a fuckin’ idiot. So that’s what I did. I tried to warm up and come on, like, y’know, not part of the show. Like they changed the channel for a minute, heh heh.
There’s somethin’ to Steve and Charley that’s so great. It’s like Crazy Horse when they first got together.
—Did Briggs add something to that performance?
He was there. He added a lot to it.
The YCS&P band didn’t last beyond its first and only appearance. When Young returned to New York minus Briggs to finish up work on “No More,” one of the tracks from the Saturday Night Live broadcast, Jordan didn’t even show up for the first session. Perhaps it’s appropriate that they burned out immediately, because their debut would’ve been very hard to top. It was Niko Bolas’s shining hour. Although Briggs helped the band with their monitors during the performance, most everyone gives the production credit to Bolas, who picked the band, supervised the sound that went out over the airwaves and generally kept the vibe together. Whatever deficiencies he had as a drum-heavy nonfan of Young’s work had been overcome. “The point is, that performance was incredible—and it had nothing to do with Briggs,” said Jordan.
“Niko was trying to take Neil into the 1980s,” said computer guru Bryan Bell. “I think Niko was trying to take Neil commercially to a point where Briggs can’t take Neil. I think it’s a shame that Neil doesn’t work with Niko more, because I think he could sell a lot more records than he does, and I think he could do it without compromise. The only thing Niko wasn’t sensitive to was that the musicians Niko wanted to use because of their abilities were insensitive to Neil emotionally.” And Bolas had shut out the group most sensitive to Young emotionally—Crazy Horse. It would prove to be a fatal error.
YCS&P would turn out to be Young’s last dance with Bolas. In his strange way, he’d gotten close to the producer over the years. Bolas tells of driving across the ranch in one of Young’s dilapidated vehicles, confiding that he was having anxiety attacks over a failing relationship. “Dig it—that means you’re alive,” Young consoled him. But now it was over. Shakey was about to make another hard right turn, leaving Niko behind.
“After a while you realize you’re just one of the things Neil has to use on the ranch,” said Bolas, a touch of bitterness in his voice. “From noon till six you’re working, and then you’re back into the barracks until Neil wants you again. You just go crazy. It’s a lot of devotion. I gave up a lot to be there.
“I always knew Neil would work with other people—just when you think he’s your whole life, you get dumped somewhere. You know the interesting thing Graham Nash told me about Neil? He turned to me and said, ‘Listen, Niko, guard your heart with Shakey.’ It was pretty heavy. You know you can’t really get emotionally attached to Neil bein’ in your life, ’cause he won’t be around.”
Shortly after the Saturday Night Live performance, I interviewed Young. We met on the road, barreling down the highway in his ’59 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz. I gave him shit for his eighties records and told him if he ever sang “Sugar Mountain” again, I was buying a gun. He laughed. It was the beginning of a strange and wondrous relationship. A few months later, Young called to ask me to write liner notes for his Archives project. I wasn’t a liner-notes type, I told him. My gig was writing about lives. Whatever I wanted to do was fine with him. His only requirement was that it had to be written on an old, fucked-up typewriter that had been dropped a few too many times. The project mutated into this tome. “Some asshole’s gonna write a book about ya,” I told him. “It might as well be me.” Young liked that line of reasoning, so I joined the circus.
Young’s next move would stun everybody around him. “I may come back to Crazy Horse, but it seems more and more doubtful to me,” he had told Rolling Stone in June 1988. But now, just a few months after the Briggs wig-out in New York, Young decided to reunite the producer with the Horse and make his first great rock album in over a decade. Niko Bolas and the Young, CSP band were history.
Rock was more bloated than ever in the nineties, a crowded, dirty aquarium. Grunge unleashed a gaggle of bands, most of which were as profound and original as Deep Purple at their worst, and a legion of over-the-hill rockers who refused to retire with dignity stripped themselves naked for the momentary amusement of the masses via the new elephant’s graveyard, VH1’s Behind the Music. “I used to care but … things have changed,” Bob Dylan would croak once the decade ended.
The nineties would be another decade of extremes for Young. He would make an astounding commercial comeback and record some of his best music in years. Busy with a million projects, he’d seem more isolated and weird than ever. Success would descend on him, proving more problematic than ever. As an officially sanctioned “legend,” he would win awards, endure tributes. He would also become a Lionel Trains mogul. And a few of those closest to him would die.
But that was all in the future. Freedom got rave reviews, but it was only the beginning of Young’s return from oblivion. “I just came out of it,” Young told Karen Schoemer. “Surfaced. It’s like trying to get to the top of the water so you can come into the air. Finally I broke through.”
* Young pointed out that different lyrics exist for the original 1974 version of “Bad News.” It would be an interesting undertaking to compile the various twists and turns of Neil Young songs (some changing over a period of years). The melodies of unreleased songs “There Goes My Babe” and “One More Sign” end up in the second half of the instrumental “Falcon Lake” (the first part of which became “Here We Are in the Years”). The unreleased Springfield-era track “Slowly Burning” begat the unreleased “Letter from Nam,” which transmuted into 1987’s “Long Walk Home”; the unreleased “Casting Me Away from You” mutated into 1968’s “The Emperor of Wyoming” and the unreleased Harvesters number “Leavin’ the Top 40 Behind.” Lyric changes within the same song aren’t as common as with Dylan, but there are those as well, one example being a 1989 recording of “Fuckin’ Up” (with the band Young used on Saturday Night Live September 30 of that year), which sports a great line not present in the released 1990 performance: “Big success shot full of holes.”
* Briggs despised the song. When Joel Bernstein played him a live version chosen for inclusion on the Archives, he ranted and raved: “Neil knows nothing about ordinary people.”
the velvet cage
NEIL YOUNG’S DREAM
I had a dream that I was in this hotel. Actually, sort of a school and hotel in one. And it was a big fuckin’ hotel, painted kind of pea green. On a golf course. And it had a huge fuckin’ gymnasium in it. This was an old forties or fifties stucco Spanish-type building.
I’m in this gymnasium type of room with David Briggs. And I say, “Briggs, you gotta hear these fuckin’ songs. I wrote these songs, I don’t know where they came from, here they are, listen to this.”
I put the cassette on, play him these fuckin’ songs and we were just blown away. They were so fuckin’ great I get shiv
ers just remembering what it was like. It’s so fuckin’ weird because I know they’re there—I know they’re there—because I sang them in the dream. I have glimpses of something, it’s like they come and go—just a chord progression, one word, but I can’t find it … It just hasn’t been able to come out.
Tall and rangy, with long black hair and a Cro-Magnon brow, John Hanlon could play Neil Young in the TV movie. The engineer had worked with Briggs on and off for the last ten years, and the one gig he coveted was working on a Young record. Briggs wasn’t encouraging, telling him, “Neil doesn’t like working with strangers—he doesn’t like being around strangers.” But on Ragged Glory, Briggs insisted on using Hanlon, who was elated. When would they be starting? “Well, that’s another question,” said Briggs, who suggested Hanlon turn down gigs and wait indefinitely. Months went by, but in April 1990, the engineer finally headed up to the ranch to join Young, Briggs and the Horse. David had one final piece of advice for him: “Find a rapport with the Horse. That is the most important thing that you’ll do.”
Hanlon proved to be one of those rare individuals the Horse could warm to. Establishing a rapport with Shakey was a bit trickier. The first day Hanlon walked over to check out the amps. “Don’t you ever walk in front of my amps while we’re playin’!” Young snarled. Hanlon was crushed. “Great intro. I wondered if I still had the gig.”
By 1990, Crazy Horse had split into two camps: Neil and Poncho, who had been working together with various combos, and Billy and Ralph. There was little communication between the two factions. In the wake of the Bluenotes brouhaha, Billy and Ralph had picked up two new members, Matt Piucci and Sonny Mone, and made the unlistenable Left for Dead—the title obviously directed at Young for the way he’d abandoned them.
But now that Young had set his sights on a new record with the Horse and Briggs, he brought everybody together and made it work. In February, a meeting was called at the Harris Ranch Restaurant, approximately halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Young and Briggs drove down in one car; Billy, Ralph and Poncho drove up in another.
Briggs laid out a set of demands on the drive down. “I said, ‘Look, man, I want you to understand you’re just one of the band. You produce the record, I’ll leave, you arrange the record, I’ll leave. I’m gonna take every hat off your head except for three: songwriter, guitar player, singer. That’s your only job, dude. That’s all you gotta be.’”
Things were equally tense in the Horse car. Poncho, having worked with Young for the past few years, got a predictably chilly reception from his old bandmates. “I was surprised with the attitude they had—‘If Neil doesn’t say the right shit, we’re not gonna work with him.’ They were real cocky.”
Once at Harris Ranch, Young apologized for the way he’d misused the band and excitedly told them how, for the Archives project, he’d been watching films of all of them playing back in 1976. They were loose and free and he wanted to get back to that space, whatever it took. As an amazed Molina recalls, Young told them to “do whatever you gotta do—if you were smoking pot then, fine, go ahead, do it.” The Horse made one stipulation: They didn’t want to record at Broken Arrow—“Young Country,” as Ralph called it. Whatever it takes, was Young’s attitude.
Young took all the blame for the problems in the past, and it blew Poncho’s mind. “Neil was painting himself as the bad guy. After I saw what was happening, I just put my head down and kept my mouth shut. I thought, ‘This guy’s trickier than a fuckin’ robber’s dog.’ Neil just said everything they wanted to hear. Neil greased ’em, man—he made it sound like it was his fault and he was sorry and he was ready to be committed and take his time and not do it on the ranch….” Poncho laughed. “We ended up on the ranch and doin’ it as quick as possible.”
Briggs was pissed that Young had reneged on recording elsewhere. “For three months I drove home every night. Because the bottom line is there’s too many distractions for Neil at the ranch, too many side trips.”
Except for Briggs and guitar tech Larry Cragg, no one was allowed into the Ragged Glory sessions. The crew working on the Archives were nearby; Briggs banned them. “I don’t want Neil lookin’ back. I want him lookin’ forward.” But on the third day of the sessions, Briggs himself got thrown out. “After he walked in, we played like shit,” said Poncho. “Neil made Briggs go away. Billy and Ralph have this funny thing—they just get spooked by anybody.” *
The band recorded live in Young’s equipment barn. Briggs showed up hours early to rehearse the band before Young arrived. John Hanlon was stationed in a remote truck outside, his only visual link a tiny video camera. Briggs laid down the law: Record everything. “If you miss one note Neil plays, I guarantee you that will be the opening note of the song he wants to use. And if he walks back here three weeks from now and you can’t play it back, you’re gone.”
Hanlon would find recording the Horse live in a barn vastly different from the sterile confines of a recording studio. As Briggs instructed him, “You’re gonna find out everything’s gonna happen at once—there’ll be very little if any overdubs; there’ll be no time to fix or improve anything; you won’t be able to get some nice, great sound. Just capture what’s there to the best of your ability.”
Hanlon recalls Briggs trying in vain to help him achieve some separation on the instruments by sticking Plexiglas sheets on the sides of the drums. “All it took was one verse for Neil to go, ‘Lose ’em—I can’t hear Poncho’s guitar,’” said Hanlon, who was left with a nightmare so loud and uncontrollable he compared it to “a giant amp that starts into feedback—it would start swimming, the whole room, everything just came together. I had vocals coming out of the kick-drum mike, feeding back into the PA, everything else. It was an exercise in leakage, swim and wash.”
Young gave Hanlon one clue to the sound he was after. “Neil told me, ‘I want the drums to be a picture frame for the guitars and vocal—I want the cymbals and top-end brass of the drum kit to be the top sides of the picture frame. I want the bottom end to be the kick drum and bass, and the guitars will fill out the picture.’” After so many years of abusing Ralph, Young would really let the drummer shine on Ragged Glory.
It was decided that, as with Tonight’s the Night, no one would listen to playbacks until the project was finished. “Neil wanted to forget about the recording process,” said Hanlon. Poncho, who hadn’t been around for Tonight’s the Night, thought it was bizarre: “We just kept going in and recording and recording.” Briggs stayed in the barn with the band, leaving Hanlon to fend for himself in the truck. It all concerned Hanlon a bit, to say the least. What if they hated the sound he was getting? He suggested they all take a listen. “No,” said Young. “It better be great. Briggs hired ya.”
Back in November, Young had mused over how he would approach recording with the Horse again. “I have to write, like, fifteen songs and never play them for anyone, never play them for myself. You can only get it to a certain point—maybe enough of a sketch of how it goes and then not even finish the fucking thing until I’m with them. You can’t even finish the fuckin’ song, okay? That’s how particular it is.
“And then you go in there with them, it all happens at once, and when you sing it, they actually fuckin’ play it—because they only play it once, too. So then it’s over, it’s got, like, five mistakes in it, ya gotta fuckin’ fix all the mistakes and edit and do all this shit to make it sound good—but it’s great.” This would be Young’s method of working with the Horse in the nineties, and it would grow sketchier and sketchier with each session.
Briggs felt the Horse floundering as Young struggled to develop the Ragged Glory material. “The band was learning songs that didn’t have any lyrics to ’em, any structure, any form, and almost all of ’em were in E minor.” He suggested they play a couple of older, unreleased songs as warm-ups, which led to a couple of classic album tracks—“Country Home” and “White Line,” the latter in particular one of the band’s finest performances.
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br /> When Briggs begged Young to cut the unreleased song “Interstate,” the musician would only cut it acoustic. “It was that much of a snap to get him to do “White Line” and “Country Home,” but because I wanted ‘Interstate,’ he acceded—but perversely.” (The haunting performance of the song, with Ralphie playing a chair for a drum, would eventually be released as a bonus vinyl-only cut to the 1996 Broken Arrow sessions.)
On the final day of recording, they got four songs. An earthquake caused a momentary power failure during one of them, which Young no doubt took as a good sign. One of the last things recorded was an impromptu, one-take-only cover of sixties garage dementia—“Farmer John.” “When you’re forty-two, singing, ‘Farmer John, I’m in love with your daughter,’ it’s going to sound like dirty old men,” Billy Talbot noted to one interviewer. But these were joyous dirty old men. As Poncho yelped in the background, one had to laugh out loud, it felt so wrong.
With the recording completed and the band ready to listen to what Hanlon had done, the engineer said, “I kept my bag packed and in the rental car, ready to go. I thought, ‘This stuff is so raw, I’ll never work again in Hollywood.’” But Young’s methods were starting to sink in. “Just take the fuckin’ snapshot. It’s the Polaroid of his performance, not a retouched Scavullo.”
Briggs and Young would clash over where to mix the record. Young wanted to finish it on the ranch; Briggs, who hated the equipment in Young’s studio, wanted to go down to Malibu, to the site of many of their past triumphs, Indigo Ranch. “I said, ‘That’s it—I want off this fuckin’ ranch. I feel like I’m in a fuckin’ prison here. You can do whatever you want—I’m taking them to Indigo to mix ’em.’” Young reluctantly agreed. “After all the good feelings, it was like ‘Okay, man, we’ll go there, we’ll do what you want—but you better be right.’ That was the implication to the max.”
Shakey Page 79
