Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  The finished album was a knockout. Young stripped away all the useless crap he’d encumbered the Horse with in the eighties and finally let them play. Sonically, the only misstep was the overblown synthetic-sounding backing vocals (taken to absurd, Spectorian lengths on “Mother Earth”). Three of the newest songs—“Love and Only Love,” “Over and Over,” “Love to Burn”—were long, lyrically minimal jams that featured some of Young’s best recorded guitar work in years. “Those songs are the solos as well,” Briggs would remark to me, and what strange songs they were. Young used the band like the vessel in Fantastic Voyage, taking a trip deep inside.

  Ragged Glory opened a new chapter in Young’s songwriting: murky, sometimes convoluted songs that often seemed to involve inscrutable, mythologized figures from life on the ranch. As odd as Young’s eighties records are, I think his nineties records will seem much more bizarre in years to come. “Fuckin’ Up” is self-loathing at its most naked; the ultradark “Love to Burn” sports the venomous line “Where you takin’ my kid? Why’d you ruin my life?”—seemingly directed at one ghost from Young’s past in particular.

  But the general thrust of the album is optimistic, expressing not only the pains but the growth that change can bring. “Take a chance on love,” he wails during “Love and Only Love,” a declaration so desperate it sounds like he’s addressing himself in the mirror at three A.M. Freedom might’ve had the songwriting edge, but Ragged Glory was the comeback in terms of sound.

  —Why is this record so important?

  ’Cause you only get one chance to make a good impression—straight from the Horse’s mouth.

  I told you I dreamt that I wrote some songs? I think they all came out of the dream. Hope that doesn’t mean it’s a wrap.

  —Can I take a shot at summing up the album?

  Okay.

  —It seems to be about a self-obsessed asshole who’s trying to deal with his feelings and become a human being.

  Yeah, heh heh. That’s pretty good.

  —It doesn’t get more personal than “Love to Burn.”

  Painfully personal. It’s that moment when you’re sittin’ there goin’, “God, I got a lot to give.” You just gotta stay open and not shut down because of all the bad stories, life stories, bad news movies … Ya gotta open up. That’s the deal.

  —Have you shut down at times?

  Fuckin’ A. Shut down and boarded up.

  —Pegi keeps you open, whether you like it or not?

  Yeah, right. She keeps jarrin’ the door back open.

  “I guess Neil Young is the king of rock and roll,” declared MTV talking head Kurt Loder in the opening of his Ragged Glory review for Rolling Stone. “I don’t see anybody else on the scene standing anywhere near this tall nowadays.”

  Released in October 1990, Ragged Glory would turn out to be a profoundly influential album. A long list of new, young artists would either sing Young’s praises or imitate him outright—among them Dinosaur Jr., the Smashing Pumpkins, Giant Sand, Bettie Serveert, Pete Droge, the Black Crowes, Son Volt, Sparklehorse, the Jayhawks, Spiritualized, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Counting Crows, Everclear, Matthew Sweet, Cowboy Junkies, etc., etc. Nineteen eighty-nine also saw the release of The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young, with Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, the Pixies and other hipsters all crooning Young’s tunes. Even elder rockers would jump on the bandwagon. Tom Petty (with the help of producer Rick Rubin) would create the ultimate ersatz Shakey record (right down to the Ralphie drumbeat), “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” For the next few years, Young’s name would be omnipresent.

  “My generation was pretty much the end of the existential hero who had started with Dostoevsky and gone through Sartre and Camus,” Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader told the Knight Ridder news service. “And that was the lonely hero, the outsider hero. My work and my generation fed off that hundred-year tradition. Quentin Tarantino’s generation is completely different. The ironic hero has replaced the existential hero…. It’s the difference between Jack Paar and David Letterman. Everything’s a wink and a nod and a jab … Nothing matters. All that notion of soul-searching, redemption, life and death … it’s all irrelevant now.”

  “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me,” went the oft-regurgitated chorus of Beck’s “Loser.” “I think my whole generation’s mission is to kill the cliché,” Beck told Rolling Stone’s Mark Kemp. “I think it’s one of the reasons a lot of my generation are always on the fence about things. They’re afraid to commit to anything for fear of seeming like a cliché. They’re afraid to commit to their lives because they see so much of the world as a cliché.”

  In the early nineties, Neil Young was the one sixties rocker who remained valid for this bunch. * He’d never sold his songs for beer commercials, still played guitar like a maniac and, in a certain way, had made a career out of ambivalence. Particularly ballyhooed in the media was his connection to the so-called grunge scene in Seattle that exploded after the monstrous surprise success of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Suddenly the world was full of young bands recording live on vintage equipment and sporting long hair, flannel shirts and jeans, a look that was a Xerox of Neil Young circa 1971.

  Young was dubbed the “Godfather of Grunge” and at times the connection was absurd: Many of these bands tended toward a pomposity and pretension reminiscent of the worst excesses of the seventies—Pearl Jam, for example, the band Young would align himself most closely with in this period. I saw nothing of Neil in their music until after they worked with him and consciously began aping his style.

  At least Pearl Jam’s heart seemed to be in the right place. They shunned interviews, videos and went to war with Ticketmaster, but it was all so painfully earnest: dreary Complaint Rock, U2 a decade later. Rebels? “A real commercial rock band” was Kurt Cobain’s summation.

  Pearl Jam had taken to playing “Keep On Rockin’” in concert, and during Young’s 1993 tour with Booker T. and the MGs, the band would join Young several times to play the song in shambolic all-star encores. And on September 2, 1993, Young and Pearl Jam would perform the song together on the MTV Video Awards. Plagued by monitor problems, the band ended the angry performance with some rote guitar-smashing. Vedder’s bombast and Young’s subtlety seemed mismatched—there were two heads to this music instead of one. It never gelled.

  Pearl Jam to Neil Young in the early nineties was what CSN was to Young in the seventies, a connection that was more hype than music; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The new artists who had the most in common with Young were the ones who sounded nothing like him—sharing instead a certain spirit, humor and sense of originality: Richard Buckner, Pavement, Nirvana. But Young would eventually squeeze the right juice out of Pearl Jam, and I’d be standing there to see it happen.

  —You don’t find Pearl Jam’s music a little pretentious?

  I notice it in the things people write about Pearl Jam, but to tell ya the truth, I haven’t picked up on it at all. I think it may be genuine and look pretentious. Because I haven’t seen any pretension when I’ve been around these guys.

  —Eddie Vedder’s a real guy?

  Oh, I really think so, yeah. He’s a unique kid. There’s nothin’ false about him. He’s a little unbelievable in his naïve ways, his openness—but it’s real. Music is his religion, that’s what he told me. He came in after we were playing with tears in his eyes. This is just the way he is—it’s not just when he’s onstage. Plus he records everything, did you know that? He records everything. There’s something slightly Chaplinesque about him. He’s a very innaresting character.

  Pearl Jam are interested in bein’ in the space to play—mentally. Surviving that trip from the dressing room to the stage and back, remaining intact with what’s goin’ on. That’s why they have candles around. That’s a reminder—and the crew keeps those candles coming, they keep them lit all the time. Because they know that the candles have something to do with the music, what’s goin’ on.

  —Aaaaah,
they’re just Jethro Tull without the flute.

  I’ll tell you what: If all I had was Pearl Jam, and I didn’t have another band in the world, I would not be worried. Because in there is the essence of making great music. You don’t have to use it all at once, but it’s there.

  Elliot almost went onto a feeding frenzy with Pearl Jam, heh heh. He wanted to put me and Pearl Jam and Crazy Horse together. I told him, “No chance. You think we’re gonna do that to Crazy Horse? No fuckin’ way.” He said, “They’ll rise to the occasion.” I said, “What is this—a fuckin’ prize fight? What about the music?” I said, “You gotta question your own motives with this fuckin’ idea.” So I haven’t heard anything more about that.

  But lately, more than ever, Elliot has just been a sensational manager. It’s really Elliot who decides who all these groups are that I play with—not me. It’s not my idea. I don’t keep track of all that shit, I don’t have time. I’ve never heard a Pearl Jam record, except on the radio every once in a while. But I never listen to anybody’s record—I didn’t single them out not to listen to, heh heh.

  That fall, just a little over a month after Ragged Glory was released, Rassy Young passed away at her home in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

  She was bedridden, suffering with cancer. Even on her deathbed, Rassy refused to forgive Scott. At one point, he sent her flowers. She rejected the peace offering. Rassy died on October 15, 1990, a day after her seventy-second birthday. Neil spent the last weeks by her side, but she died just before his return from a quick trip to California.

  Rassy had gone out fighting. “Right up till the end she spoke her piece to the nurses and everyone,” said Joe McKenna, Young’s bus driver and Rassy’s neighbor. That weekend, Neil and Joe packed up all her belongings, taking down the gold records she had so proudly displayed on her living room wall. “She left everything to Neil,” said McKenna. “Everything.”

  Not long after, Young was back at the ranch, rehearsing with Crazy Horse for the Bridge School concert on October 26. On a shelf sat an urn containing his mother’s ashes. “This is the first thing I’ve done without Rassy,” he told Poncho. “It feels like I’m starting over again.”

  —You ever think about Rassy?

  Yeah. Comes across my mind about once a day. Little things.

  —You see a lot of Rassy in yourself?

  Yeah, sometimes. Mannerisms. Caustic comments.

  —At times it was hard for you to talk to her.

  Yeah. I think so.

  —What was the hardest thing for Rassy to accept?

  I think any kind of separation was the hardest thing for her to accept. Right near the end of her life, she accepted it—but then she turned on me.

  —You too?

  Heh heh heh. This was like when her brain wasn’t even there. It was like she was speakin’ to my dad and she was seeing me. She was calling me unfaithful and all these things, y’know—but with a lotta hate.

  My dad sent her somethin’ on her birthday. She didn’t wanna have anything to do with him. He’s a lot like me. I don’t hold grudges. It takes a lot for me to turn on somebody completely—they have to fuck me up pretty badly. And my dad’s like that. When a relationship ends, he tries to see the bright side. You can harp on the negative, but there’s no reason to. There’s no gain.

  —Still have Rassy on the shelf?

  That vase, there’s nothing in it. All that stuff’s gone. I held on to it for about six months after she died. Then I remembered what she said about this one place on the ranch that she thought was the most beautiful place. She said once, “I’d like to spend eternity here.” So I took her at her word. That’s where she is. The vase, I just couldn’t figure out what to do with that. Now I know what I’m gonna do—I’m gonna take it up to where I threw all the stuff out, where I put it all in the wind. And I’m just gonna bury it up there.

  Y’know, every morning on weekends, Amber has Eggs Rassy. Cut off the top of a soft-boiled egg, stick a piece of toast down in it. So now every weekend I say, “Well, waddya want for breakfast?” “Eggs Rassy.” So that’s my mother. She’s there all the time … comin’ out of my daughter’s mouth.

  For demented zealots like Dave McFarlin, the Ragged Glory tour was nirvana: all-electric mayhem and louder than God. Larry Cragg walked fearfully in front of the huge amp mock-ups left over from the Rust tour, knowing what lurked behind them. “Inside those amps, Neil had his own private PA with two thousand watts of power. Really loud. A couple of times I had to take the earplugs out to hear what was going on, and it just killed my ears—and here Neil was with the thing aiming right at him.” Young would later describe the tour to Tony Scherman as “a completely exhausting experience.”

  Cragg snapped the picture that adorns the back of the Weld CD, culled from the tour that sums it all up: a dazed Young holds his guitar in feedback position, his tangled hair sitting atop his head like a dead poodle, his waxen face more chiseled than Mount Rushmore. By the time the grueling three-month, fifty-four-date tour and live album were history, his band would want to kill each other, Briggs would curse his name and Young’s hearing would be shot.

  When we made the record, the [Gulf] war was raging, and the album reflects my anxieties, and an attempt to exorcise the demons of my own comprehension of the people who were dying as we were playing. So it was a serious thing. You can’t go out there entertaining. It was a delicate time to be on the road. “Powderfinger,” “Love and Only Love,” “Cortez the Killer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” were songs that related to the conflict, how people have dealt with it. I figure that the guitar playing was a soundtrack for CNN. That’s what Arc, the feedback album, is really about: the brutal energy that comes from hearing the women screaming and seeing our own coffins.

  —Interview with Jon Pareles, 1991

  In keeping with Young’s allegiance to the alternative-music scene, Elliot Roberts picked a gaggle of young bands for tour support slots, most notably the New York artso-noise outfit Sonic Youth. They were fans, and Kim Gordon had her own peculiar connection, having known Bruce Berry back in the seventies.

  “Neil’s a triple Scorpio, isn’t he?” she said. “I think he’s a really good manipulator of people and intuitively right on about a lotta things.” She found the scene around Young surreal, populated by “male-chauvinist sexist pigs. It was all the stuff I heard about rock and roll but never really believed still went on. It was fascinating.” Sociological appeal aside, Sonic Youth had something of a rough time on the tour. Young’s crew despised their sound, giving them very little use of the full PA system. “We need a certain amount of volume to do what we do—even if people hate it,” said Gordon, claiming they felt particular hostility from Tim Foster, dubbing him “The Doberman.” Young took the band’s side in the matter when word eventually trickled back to him.

  “Neil was totally aloof from his world,” said Thurston Moore, who found that just getting a message to Young was like trying to arrange lunch with Jimmy Hoffa. Their contact with him was limited to an abrupt dressing-room appearance in which he issued a frenzied appeal not to do the David Letterman show (“Tell him you’re out on the road with me,” he barked) and a dinner on his bus during which Moore would find out just how little Young knew about punk rock. “He doesn’t listen to music. He really doesn’t give a shit. The one thing he said that was kinda startling was that real rock and roll has gone totally underground.” At least Sonic Youth got to hang with him, if briefly. Amusingly enough, many of the bands who played on bills with Young in the nineties would complain they never got to meet the Godfather of Grunge at all.

  The Gulf War was definitely on Young’s mind; Poncho recalls him spending every spare moment glued to CNN, watching the coverage. Playing a gig at West Point the night the ground war erupted, Young not only agreed to take down the stage’s giant peace symbol and broadcast a more traditional version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” than the Hendrix deconstruction, he also turned over all proceeds to charity, although�
�disinterested in being seen as a do-gooder—he refuses to name any organization. But the war in the Gulf wasn’t the only fighting going on during the Ragged Glory tour.

  There was a postgig altercation in Philadelphia. Young had been furious over problems with the show’s sound, and Briggs took the heat, knowing full well that Billy Talbot had been monkeying with the onstage monitors. Finally Briggs went ballistic on the bass player, reducing him to tears, and was sent home.

  “Neil realized Briggs was creating more turmoil than he was doing good and just let him go,” said Poncho at the time. “He’s hard to work with, because you never know which Briggs you’re gonna get—the bighearted Briggs or the guy who stayed up all night drinkin’, did a half a gram, ‘FUCK YOU!’ Briggs.”

  Things weren’t much better within the band. Billy and Ralph were growing tired of Young’s preoccupation with the Lionel business as well as Poncho’s insider status—staying on the bus with the boss and cooking his meals. Things came to a head following a lackluster performance in Vancouver, during which Young berated his rhythm section and kicked Billy in the ass during “Love and Only Love.” Back in the dressing room, Molina got nose to nose with Young, screaming, “This is gettin’ to be like a CSN fuckin’ Y tour! Separate buses … ! If fuckin’ Frank stops thinkin’ about pork chops and you stop thinkin’ about trains, we could start playin’ some fuckin’ music!”

  Compounding the problem was the fact that Young became ill toward the end of the tour. After a short postponement, it resumed in April, but the vibe had gotten strange. “Neil was really in a good mood until he got sick,” said Poncho. “From then on he was never the same. He just got weirder and weirder.”