Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Not that any of this mattered to the public. Aided by a huge publicity push, countless interviews, live performances and more television appearances than Young had done in his entire career, the album would go platinum in February 1993, just a little over three months after its release. Young was only too happy to confound those who felt he’d betrayed his new Godfather of Grunge hipness. “I’m entering my Perry Como phase,” Young told Manuel Mendoza. “I think its saving grace is that it’s genuine.”

  —How did Harvest Moon start?

  I dunno. I wrote a bunch of songs in Colorado. While Arc was playing back in another room, blasting, I was writing “Such a Woman” on the piano. Even I didn’t believe that. I sat down and started playing and it was there.

  —Did that record drive you crazy?

  A little bit, towards the end, because I was striving for something. I heard a sound and I wanted that sound. I built the echo chambers there so I could do that record. Not digital echo, real echo.

  —You’ve used digital echo—

  It used me. Digital echo is a drag. Convenience store. “Let’s go to the 7-Eleven and get some echo.” It’s very fast. You can get whatever you want—it gives you just what you ask for. But try to order up a surprise, it’s not there.

  They used to have a great echo chamber at Sunset Sound that I used on “I Believe in You,” “Oh Lonesome Me,” stuff like that. Then Prince started recording at Sunset Sound a lot, and they brought in a bunch of digital-delay units and turned the fuckin’ echo chamber into a lounge. Time marches on. Out with the old, in with the new, heh heh. The two best chambers in Hollywood—Gold Star and Sunset Sound—are gone.

  Tim Mulligan did Harvest Moon—that’s where the sound came from. Mulligan’s got good ears. I owe a lot to Mulligan. He rises to the occasion.

  —What do you think of “Such a Woman”?

  I haven’t listened to it in a long time … took a lot out of me when I did it, I know that … I had to go through a lot of changes.

  —Why?

  Uhhhhhh, I don’t know. It was like a lot of mental baggage went with it. It was not easy.

  —There’s a masochistic quality to that record. Am I wrong?

  You mean like “I’m hurting myself”? I know it made Pegi kinda uncomfortable.

  —You sound like a guy who would do anything for love.

  Yeah, I think that’s it.

  —Do you idealize women?

  Well, maybe I do—and I just can’t come to grips with it.

  —Did you always want a family of your own?

  It’s good to have a family. Keeps ya from goin’ nuts … don’t ya think? Families are good for that. When are you gonna sprout out a little Jimmy? Have a kid, that’ll fix ya up. Why not? “Little Jimmy, get that typewriter!” “Okay, Dad.” No matter what ya do—“You’re great, Dad!” They love ya. Ya gotta get one. It’s an experience you won’t forget.

  —What’s your idea of beauty?

  It’s hard to answer that question, because your idea of beauty is a forever changing thing … Yesterday I saw somethin’ that struck me as beautiful—and it was an old car. Sitting on a hill. And it just looked beautiful to me. Made me feel good.

  —No, no, not a FUCKING CAR. I mean, what sort of beauty in a woman do you respond to?

  Kindness. Not a word you hear very often, is it?

  Neil Young has a difficult time lending superstar magic to music other than his own. Listen to his lackluster performances on albums by Emmylou Harris, Ben Keith and Robbie Robertson, to name but a few. But now Rusty Kershaw had crawled back out of the muck, asking Young to play on his no-budget album.

  Kershaw came to the ranch during Harvest Moon, and while Young’s overdubs mangled some of Kershaw’s tracks (I heard them before the additions), a couple of songs were started from scratch, and one of them, “Future Song”—featuring just Kershaw, Young and Ben Keith—was equal to anything from On the Beach.

  After nearly twenty years, Kershaw was surprised to have his let’s-just-play philosophy thrown back at him by Young. “He goes, ‘Well, just play me about a verse of it—or just do it. I don’t wanna learn it too good, ’cause I’ll start fuckin’ it up then.’ Boy, I busted out laughing, ’cause I can remember when I told him that.”

  Rusty thumbed out his one-man rhythm on the acoustic, and Ben coaxed a few woozy slides out of a Dobro while Young wheezed along on harp, creating a careening, melancholy whine. “You just can’t go into the future / Without taking your past with you,” drawled Rusty. Young harmonized impossibly high above him, the voice of a ghost.

  There is an unearthly depth to the song that suggests interplanetary travel is not only possible but has been achieved by this trio. Three psychedelic, battle-scarred survivors. They’d been through decades of shit but were still standing, spilling their guts on tape for all the world to hear, and it felt more real than all the smoke-and-mirrors of Harvest Moon. Rusty’s record, Now and Then, went nowhere but, for me, contained the best Neil Young music of 1992. *

  Young made peace with another character from the distant past during the Harvest Moon sessions. Writer John Einarson located Young’s old friend Ray Dee, and when Young found out Dee still had tapes from the sessions they cut back in Thunder Bay three decades earlier, he called out of the blue, and invited him to bring the material down to the ranch.

  Dee mulled over his feelings on the flight down. He was still hurt that Young had never once contacted him after his abrupt exit from Thunder Bay. “All this stuff started comin’ back. I had put my soul out for this guy. I was pissed off. Very, very upset. I felt that I had been betrayed.”

  At the ranch, Young had his engineers cue up the tapes. Neither Dee nor Young had heard the material in nearly thirty years. “I’ll Love You Forever” came wafting out of the speakers, and when it got to the point where Dee had covered Squires drummer Bill Edmunsen’s fumbled beat with a sound effect, Young and Dee turned to each other. “At exactly the same time we said exactly the same thing: ‘The thunderclap version!’” Dee recalls. “It was like we’d discovered oil! I just about had a shit fit.”

  A little later Young took his friend for a drive across the ranch in a beat-up old truck. As Dee took in the mind-boggling beauty, Young pulled the vehicle over for a moment. “We were watchin’ the sunset,” recalls Dee. “Then Neil looked me in the eye and said, ‘Look, Ray, I’m sorry. I apologize. You probably have been pissed off at me all these years.’” Dee asked Young why he hadn’t come back or even bothered to call.

  Neil’s explanation was a humdinger: It was all because of the death of his beloved Mort. “He said, ‘Look, when the hearse broke down, I didn’t have the money to fix it. It died. That hearse was my identity. That machine was my soul. That was me. I couldn’t come back and face anybody there.’ It was like a weight off his shoulders. He had to tell me what happened. I was choked up. I sat there, holding back tears … who the hell woulda thought a fuckin’ hearse would mean that much to somebody?

  “What was really strange about that meeting at the ranch was, I don’t think Neil’s really changed at all. It’s absolutely incredible. I hadn’t talked to him in how many years, he’s been through all this shit—the man should’ve been dead a hundred and ten years ago—and when I looked him in the eye, you know what? It was like we had never left each other. You could just see the twinkle in his eye. It was like I’d never been away.”

  Dee was further moved by a heartfelt speech Young gave when he returned to Thunder Bay on May 23 to receive an honorary doctorate from Lakehead University. Young recounted his days in Thunder Bay, thanking Ray Dee and telling the story of Mort. “I just didn’t think I was anything without my hearse,” he told the crowd. “So I just kept going.”

  “It was a helluva good speech,” said Scott Young, also in the audience. “Neil was a wise man talking to a lot of people who were disposed to listen. It was wonderful. I was so proud of him.”

  From January to November 1992, Young embarked on a s
eries of solo tours, playing largely Harvest Moon material for audiences who wouldn’t hear the record until the tours were almost over. It was a loose and ragged affair. As time went on, the set list seemed to disintegrate, and fans were treated to rare solo-piano versions of “World on a String,” “Speakin’ Out,” “Tonight’s the Night” and “Mansion on the Hill,” plus older unreleased songs such as “Homefires,” “Hitchhiker,” “Depression Blues” and “Train of Love.” One performance that made an indelible impression on many was a slowed-down, creepy pump-organ version of “Like a Hurricane.” Hunched over the keyboard, wisps of hair wafting in the breeze, Young looked lost in some impenetrable reverie—truly the Phantom of the Opera.

  You know what that tour was good for? It was good for me. It wasn’t really good for anybody else.

  It was good for me to realize how completely fuckin’ out of touch with the audience I was. I went out there and played all new stuff—songs that really meant somethin’ to me—and they were still lookin’ at fifteen, twenty years ago, even though they were teenagers. These were young people who wanted me to do my hits. Wanted me to do Ragged Glory, wanted me to do “Rockin’ in the Free World.” They wanted me to get out there, get real intense. They didn’t understand that I don’t always do that.

  They didn’t get what they wanted—but I got what I wanted.

  Because I went out and did the songs and got in touch with what it’s like to play and communicate to an audience just with guitar, with songs they don’t know that well. That’s really where it lives. To get out there with new songs that no one knows and make them known, make them hear them. That’s the challenge.

  I got the same reaction to the Harvest songs before they came out on the record—people were goin’, “What the fuck’s goin’ on—why doesn’t he play some songs we know?” That was great. See, that’s what I was trying to do again. Go out and tour like that.

  People didn’t have that much of a concept of what I was gonna do in 1970, they were just innarested. Now they think they know what I’m gonna do, and if I don’t do it, they’re upset. So I have to overcome that when I play.

  My biggest enemy is my own history. That’s my biggest fuckin’ problem. People compare me to what I’ve done. Whenever they start writing about me, half of the fuckin’ review is about my life. Who gives a shit—if you’re gonna read a Neil Young review, you don’t need to know all the fuckin’ history. What the hell’s the fuckin’ deal? We gotta go through this whole thing about the hippies and the grunge every fuckin’ time?

  People don’t know what’s great and what isn’t great. They never know. People need to have a name—they can’t understand why I’m still here, so they call me the Godfather of Grunge. That’s easy to relate to.

  Fuck reviews. Reviews don’t really matter. You can’t believe ’em when they fuckin’ praise you, and you can’t believe them when they criticize you. Because if I believe them now, that means I should’ve believed them the other times—and we know that they’re wrong all the fuckin’ time.

  The Stray Gators would play only four live gigs with Young following Harvest Moon’s release. After brief appearances at the Bridge School in November 1991 and Farm Aid Five in March 1992, Young brought them together to tape a concert for MTV’s ersatz acoustic series, Unplugged. Young was reportedly so unhappy with a first attempt in New York City on December 5 that he ate the cost of the taping. The second attempt, on February 7 in Los Angeles, was a total nightmare.

  Adding Nils Lofgren to the band, Young changed the set considerably, adding a number of older songs they had never played (he’d even written a new verse for 1968’s “I’ve Been Waiting for You” in hopes of performing it in the show). Joel Bernstein recalls, things deteriorated quickly during rehearsals. Young’s vibe was “deathly,” he said. “On the second day, they went to do one of the songs, and Neil flipped because everybody was fucking up. He started yelling: ‘I can’t fucking believe this! You guys have not remembered anything from what we learned yesterday!’” Bernstein was amazed that after their dismal performance in December, the band—aside from Nils Lofgren, who was always ready to follow Young anywhere musically—hadn’t gotten their chops together. “Neil was a terror, on their case—but they deserved it.”

  Then Tim Drummond and Elliot Roberts got into a screaming match over money just minutes before showtime. Word got back to Young and demolished whatever vibe was left. His foul mood was immediately palpable. As Roberts recalls, “By the second song, it was like ‘This fuckin’ band is totally unsupportive, this music is now fake and phony. Now I’m Neil Diamond and I can’t believe I let this happen to me—-fuckin’ Elliot.’”

  Despite whatever shenanigans took place on the band side, everyone that I talked to agreed on one thing: Young’s heart didn’t seem to be in the project. Did he want to do it? “No,” admitted Elliot. “It was another one of those things that I forced him to do.” Drummond recalls that Young almost backed out of the first taping. “We’re in the limo, me and Nicolette, goin’ to LAX. We get a call on the phone—‘Neil doesn’t wanna do it.’ So we turn the limo around. Then the call comes in, ‘Get back in the car, make the airplane.’”

  Incredibly, Young agreed to release the second MTV show as an album in June of 1993. The cover featured Young trademarks—a fuzzy photo and scribbled title—but none of it could disarm the MTV logo on the back cover. Yeccchhhh. Back in 1988, Young had kicked MTV’s ass all over the map with “This Note’s for You”; now he had conceded. “I don’t know how comfortable Neil seemed in that context,” said James Taylor. “It was definitely an assault on who he is.” The album went gold that November, and Dylan soon followed Young’s lead, taping his own Unplugged and looking just as miserable.

  At any rate, Young hasn’t worked with the Stray Gators since. “They played like former band members,” Young quipped to one member of his crew after the show. The resentment ran both ways. “Neil does not have enough money for me to work with him again,” said Kenny Buttrey. “It was just a nightmare. I never want to hear his name again. I never wanna see the guy … I will never, ever play a Neil Young album on my stereo again. I want it in capital letters that he is the HARDEST PERSON TO WORK WITH I’ve ever worked with in my life, bar none.” (Despite these protestations, Buttrey has worked with Neil since.)

  First the explosions with Crazy Horse and Briggs over Weld; now the bad feelings over Unplugged. It seemed the characters around Young were finding it harder and harder to weather his wrenching shifts in direction. They’d been through it so many times before that they’d gotten a lot more sensitive. They were older now; more was at stake. It was a tough situation for everybody.

  Then there was Ben Keith. He made a Christmas album, Seven Gates, featuring Johnny Cash, J. J. Cale, Rusty Kershaw and Young. It was partially recorded, mixed and mastered at Young’s studio, and he got the album released on Reprise in 1994. But troubles arose over the promotion of the album, which disappeared immediately. Some observers feel that its failure—following the Unplugged debacle—was just too much for Ben, the one musician who, since Harvest, had stood by Young’s side, always supportive of whatever direction Shakey took. Keith retreated to Nashville.

  I’ve hurt Ben Keith’s feelings so much I don’t know if it’ll ever be the same. I got pushed into doing this Christmas record. It was all on me. I don’t think I was very good.

  The people working with Ben gave Johnny Cash the idea that he was workin’ on my record. That was not a good idea. I got this call from Johnny Cash—he thought I was gonna be in his video. I said, “I think we’re bein’ taken advantage of.” He said, “I think you’re right.” They did that Nashville thing to me, and I fuckin’ freaked out and I think it really hurt Ben’s feelings.

  I probably overreacted, and a lotta my frustrations about other things came into that. That’s real possible. But I’ve always felt badly about that with Ben.

  I get so hurt when people do things I don’t understand. I just don’t do anyt
hing, I let it go, it builds up … that’s really a bad weakness of mine. But I’ve got a long time left to improve.—Any regrets about the way things have gone down? Well, I wish that the people I like, the people I work with—Briggs, Mulligan, Ralph, Billy, Poncho and Ben Keith—that’s the core, and maybe some others I’m not mentioning—I wish these people liked me as much as I like them. That they didn’t harbor resentments about me.

  I mean, I really did try to give everybody what they wanted and what was fair. When I looked around at what others were giving in similar circumstances—I think I did better, yet I don’t think it was enough for these people.

  Somehow I mismanaged the way that went down. And through my own inadequacies—the inability to face up to certain things and, when I was younger, being unable to be forthcoming when I should’ve been and really say how I felt about things—my immature reactions to things hurt these people. So they resent it. They still feel this way about me—and they probably always will.

  After Unplugged, Young swerved off in another direction with a completely different band. On October 16, 1992, he had appeared at Bob Dylan’s thirtieth-anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden in New York: “Bobfest,” as Young dubbed it. The event was broadcast live and released on album and video, and it would prove yet another triumph for Young. It was an easy victory. Other than Young, an interesting reading of “Foot of Pride” by Lou Reed and the always idiosyncratic Dylan himself, it was a dubious affair, a manufactured-event snoozefest.

  The band that backed Young was an odd choice for someone who has mostly gone out of his way to avoid “real musicians,” roots or otherwise: Booker T. and the MGs. The Memphis-based quartet—Booker T. Jones on keyboards, Steve Cropper on guitar, Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass and Al Jackson Jr. on drums—was the bedrock of the Stax studio sound, having played on landmark recordings by Otis Redding, Ruby Johnson, Sam and Dave and many others, as well as their own hit records as a quartet, beginning with “Green Onions,” a number-three pop hit in 1962. Together or individually they’d worked with everyone: Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson, Muddy Waters, Dylan. Unfortunately, Al Jackson Jr., as essential to the group as Ralph Molina is to Crazy Horse, was murdered in 1975, and at Bobfest, session men Jim Keltner and Anton Fig augmented the original trio. Young and the band had already met, having jammed on an impromptu version of Jimmy Reed’s “Baby, What You Want Me to Do” at New York’s Lone Star Roadhouse in January 1992.