Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Young’s slot at Bobfest turned out to be a dramatic one. He followed Sinead O’Connor, who tearfully fled the stage midsong to a chorus of booing, a reaction to her recent Saturday Night Live appearance, during which she tore up a picture of the Pope. * Young would later admit to a reporter that he was seriously nervous before the gig, but as he ambled out in a leather vest, shirttails out, he seemed in an unusually good mood, leading the band through an extraordinarily sloppy version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in which Young fucked up the order of verses—and which became more unhinged as it progressed. “Play whatever the hell you want,” Young had allegedly told the band before starting, and it was all over the place but, in the hands of these old pros, gloriously so.

  Bobbing and weaving around the stage, with “Duck” Dunn’s fluent yet rock-solid bass line the perfect counterpoint to his gutbucket guitar, Young seemed so caught up in Dylan’s lyrics he was practically laughing out loud. It was a shambling, wonderful performance, and the element that stood out the strongest was just how relaxed Young seemed. No battles to fight here; he acted like a man who had won them all.

  Bob Dylan’s music could receive no greater tribute in the nineties than the vitality Young imbued it with this night, particularly on a tough version of “All Along the Watchtower,” with Booker T.’s here-comes-Neil organ providing just the right bed for Young’s shrieking attack on Old Black. A grizzled old fuck just shy of forty-seven years old who should have known better and thankfully didn’t, Young once again reminded the world that rock and roll could still be something more than plug-in atmosphere for TV commercials.

  Young walked away with the show, and to one admirer, it was no surprise. “What makes Neil a hero to the grungers and what makes him valid to people like Booker T. or Dylan is the fact he’s an unpredictable, iconoclastic old guy who can still rock—the only old guy who can still rock. The rest should all retire.”

  These words were spoken by David Briggs shortly after the broadcast. He had made a dramatic return to Young’s life, bursting uninvited into the train barn one day and, according to his version of events, announcing he’d decided to forgive Neil instead of killing him. Briggs would produce the Unplugged album—his only solo production credit with Young—and mix the album/video version of the Bobfest performance. “I just smoked a joint, cranked it up and it was done.”

  Young embarked on a tour of Europe and the States with Booker T. and the MGs in the summer of 1993, with Jim Keltner on drums plus Annie Stocking and Neil’s half sister, Astrid, on backing vocals. Briggs was more than thrilled to be working with Young on a non-Crazy Horse project. “One of Neil’s biggest problems is that he doesn’t have any peers. He’s so forceful as a musician that he’s always the leader. These guys were big enough men to push Neil. It was a chance for him to take his music and expand it way beyond what he was ever able to do before.”

  After rehearsing very briefly, the band played a trio of warm-up gigs in California. The second night at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco was electrifying. “Mr. Soul” made a racket like a bucket of rocks, and Steve Cropper—whose clean tone is 180 degrees from Young’s noise—was especially soulful on a surprise unreleased song from the past, “Separate Ways.” One had to admire Young’s moxie: Not only did he have the audacity to perform “Southern Man” with these Memphis boys, he resurrected Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” tailoring the words to his own journey. Young was very high on the band, full of comparisons to the Buffalo Springfield, and the tour would garner him some of the best reviews of his career.

  Things usually mutate and change over the course of a Young tour, but this trip seemed to head straight downhill after the Warfield. There was something hollow about the affair, a whiff of Las Vegas. Young had few surprises to combat the natural polish that came from these pros playing basically the same set night after night. It reminded me of Dylan’s 1978 Street Legal tour—big “professional” band, little soul.

  Briggs felt Young was more interested in his new passion for Harley Davidson—he took his bike out cruising between gigs—or playing golf. It all left David deeply disappointed. He felt that the band was “good every single fuckin’ show—they were never bad—but they never took it to any new creative level. It was an oldies show. Neil didn’t make the most of it by a hundred miles.

  “What Neil told ’em was this: ‘Hey, man, you guys just play whatever you want.’ Period. But what he didn’t get was, none of ’em had ever heard his songs before. I mean, they weren’t his fans. When I sent them the tape of the songs, they’d never heard any of them, so they had to cop chops from the records, not just on one or two songs, but every single song.

  “And not only that, Neil did not wanna rehearse with them, and the bottom line was, once everybody learned the songs three quarters of the way through Europe, it became rote. They were repeating themselves, playing the same part. It became a no-brainer for them. There was no challenge, no new material coming in. Neil only had two new songs and that was it. To me, the fire to write and create was not in the guy.”

  But criticisms of the tour came with hindsight. When the band finished the tour of the States in September, expectations were high. Booker T. and the MGs were waiting to go into the studio, Briggs was anxious to record a great album with them. And then Young made another left turn.

  * This scene inspired Young to write the ultimate song on Horse neuroses, “Don’t Spook the Horse,” a seven-minute-plus number he actually recorded with one foot in a pile of cowshit he had Larry Cragg bring into the studio. Somehow the effect translated to tape perhaps the most broken-down, barely-a-song performance the Horse has ever unleashed on the public. Briggs was relieved it was released only as a CD-single bonus track. “It’s a condensed version of the whole album,” a gleeful Young would tell James Henke. “Especially for reviewers who don’t like me at all. Just listen to that and you’ll get all you need.”

  * Dylan—who shared the stage with his own fair share of youngsters in the nineties—could have cared less, telling David Gates in 1997, “The top stars of today, you won’t even know their names two years from now. Four, five years from now, they’ll all be obliterated. It’s all flaky to me.”

  * Warner Bros. was reportedly a little apprehensive over the Weld package, and Young sent a letter to Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker dated June 17, 1991:

  “The times they are a changin’….” My history is now my biggest competitor. As the year of my induction into the Hall of Fame grows too close for comfort, my own accomplishments hang on me like some beautiful coat I can’t take off.

  Let’s face it. There’s next to nothing on our album that will get any airplay and that makes it hard for you to do your job right and get my music to the public. We both like to win … the purpose of this letter is to assure you that my decision to go ahead and send Weld down the rocky road of commerciality is not taken lightly. I hope you understand. Peace, Neil.

  * Ironically, it was Young who suggested I reinterview him at this particular point, telling me via Joel Bernstein that I should “talk to Briggs now that Briggs thinks I’m a real asshole.” I hounded David for months before he agreed.

  * Rusty Kershaw died of a heart attack on October 23, 2001, two days after playing his last gig. He was sixty-three years old.

  * Young later commented on O’Connor’s actions in the press: “How often do you get the chance to play when people are booing?” he told Allan Jones. “The thing is, you’re getting to them. That’s the thing that matters … I think she just LOST it … she’s supposed to be in control. She’s supposed to know what she’s doing. So don’t ask me to feel any sympathy for her … I think she blew a really great chance to be brilliant. She let the audience get the best of her…. You want to protest, go ahead. Be my guest. But there’s a time when it’s gonna come back on you. You have to be strong, you have to be prepared to take that. She let it beat her … they put her to the test and she just wasn’t up to it.”
/>   big business, small scale

  I spent the first three years of the nineties chasing Neil Young. It was a cat-and-mouse game of absurd proportions—faxes, phone calls, lawyers, agents and managers. I was on Young like fleas on a dog, but he evaded me at every turn. During the June 1993 rehearsals for the tour with Booker T. and the MGs, he invited me up to hear the band—not to talk, mind you, just to hear the band. After one of the sneak pretour gigs, I caught up with Young as he got into his ’54 Caddy limo, Pearl. I let slip a few arcane facts I had learned about the car. This piqued Young’s curiosity, and he was suddenly in my face, asking who I came with and where I was going. My heart pounding, I thought, This is it! But he just as abruptly changed his mind. “Not tonight, not tonight. But this is the way it’ll happen—if you’re just hanging around.” He smiled slyly. “Hell, it almost happened right now.” He slid into Pearl, then drove off into the night.

  Then I was to meet him on his boat, the Ragland, which Young was taking out for a day cruise. Now I’ve got him, I thought. We’re on a fucking boat—he can’t escape. Unfortunately, I’d never been out to sea and spent the whole trip bent over the rail, puking. Every once in a while I’d crawl back and mutter a question to Young, who was hunched over the wheel, cackling like Captain Ahab.

  Our first real interview for the book finally took place in the middle of the night, headed for Houston in a Learjet crammed with Booker T. and the MGs plus Elliot Roberts. The next night on the bus Young and I did another four hours. But in Dallas a couple of nights later, he stood me up again. It was hopeless. I commiserated with Briggs.

  “I’ve talked to everybody, done all the research,” I told him. “But I feel like I’m chasing a ghost. I’m writing a book about a guy I’ve never hung out with.”

  “I feel for you, bro,” said David. “The guy you’re writing about just doesn’t hang out.”

  But Young called me one evening shortly before his forty-eighth birthday in November 1993. Sounding a bit frantic, he immediately began ranting about how, in the wake of Harvest Moon’s massive success, people wanted him to do all sorts of ridiculous things—like contribute a live recording of “Rockin’ in the Free World” with Pearl Jam and Booker T. and the MGs to the soundtrack of Wayne’s World 2. Elliot had started the ball rolling, and now Briggs was at the ranch frantically mixing away, with Warner Bros. hot to put out the single. At the eleventh hour, Young was having second thoughts. “This kind of pressure is unusual for me,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, get used to it,” I told him. “You’re the comeback kid. Everybody thinks this is the last go-round and they’re trying to squeeze out every drop they can.” I had been at the Portland performance under consideration, thought it was all-star celebrity crap and told him so.

  “Well, Briggs is gonna play it for me at the studio on Wednesday. You should be there.”

  A day and a half later I was in the back of a limo snaking up the road to Young’s ranch: a couple thousand acres of northern California wilderness filled with redwoods, lakes and all manner of creatures, as well as several groups of buildings, all of which bear Young’s eccentric imprint. His home—originally a small, old ranch house—has ballooned into a never-ending wonder that has made more than one contractor break into a sweat.

  There’s the Broken Arrow Studio; a large white house for visiting band members; and the cavernous equipment barn where he recorded Ragged Glory with the Horse. Separate buildings house his model-train and car collections, both such monuments to obsession that they seem more like artworks than a rich man’s investments. Young has created his own Xanadu. Once you pass through the gates, you feel like you’ve seceded from the union.

  Arriving at the woodsy patch of land surrounding the studio, I leapt out of the car, bounded up the steps and through the door. Back in the control room I could see Briggs, hunched over the mixing board, pushing faders and thrashing his head to the beat. He looked ready to keel over from exhaustion.

  Briggs set up the mixes for Neil’s imminent arrival while I wandered around, scanning the walls for a favorite piece of memorabilia: a mid-seventies photo of Young renewing his deal with Warner Bros. Neil had requested that the signing take place on one of Warner’s old Western movie sets. There they all were—Mo Ostin, Elliot Roberts and Neil, hovering over the signed document like million-dollar desperadoes. If you look closely you can see Ostin had his hands around Young’s neck. Neil must’ve gotten what he wanted.

  Suddenly I heard the clatter of an old automobile, and John Nowland, in charge of running the studio day to day, glanced out the window: “Neil’s here.” As always, everybody came to attention—except Briggs. Young shot through the door, scraggly hair flying, wild-eyed, his dog Bear padding behind him. “I don’t think we’ll put this out, but let’s hear it.”

  Briggs played him the Portland mix and an alternate, unmixed performance from Toronto. Afterward, everybody engaged in some halfhearted enthusiasm. Turd-polishing, I thought. “Well, nobody asked my opinion, but if you need to put a new addition on the car barn, put it out. Otherwise keep it on the shelf.”

  Young flew across the room and got right in my face, his laser eyes locked on mine. It was like staring into an active volcano. “Well, y’see, Jimmy—we already have an addition on the car barn.” Neil proceeded to make a case for a loud feedback drone near the end of one of the takes. Resembling the sound of a dying whale, it was impressive.

  “Then just put out the one fucking note,” I argued. “You can out-Arc Arc. Or leave it in the can. You already did the definitive version of this song on Saturday Night Live three years ago.”

  That got to Young, who was now pacing the room like a madman. “Yeah, right,” he said. “I did it on TV.” He left some room for a final decision, but everyone knew what it would be. This is one reason I love Neil—some nut shows up with an opinion and he’ll listen. It drives those who attempt to control him crazy.

  The Wayne’s World 2 brouhaha settled, Young shot across the room to whisper conspiratorially in my ear: “I have to check out some things over at the train barn. Wanna go?”

  “Lionel makes a boy feel like a man and a man feel like a boy,” trumpets a 1934 ad, and this philosophy has changed little over the years. Joshua Lionel Cowen, the Jewish immigrant who formed Lionel in 1900, described the company’s goal in 1946 as “creating a lifelong comradeship between a boy and his dad.”

  The image of a united, happy family was obviously a potent one for Young. “An innocent endeavor” is how Young described his work with Lionel to Mary Eisenhart. “It gives me a lot of relief…. At the core of this thing is goodness. That’s really what I like about this whole idea. That I might be responsible for something that enables families to come together more in some way.”

  In 1992, Young entered into a partnership with Richard P. Kughn, the owner of Lionel Trains. Their company, Liontech, was now developing a sophisticated sound system and handheld controller that promised to revolutionize the industry. “I’m tryin’ to do a lot in a short period of time, bring this company from the past into the future,” Young said proudly. He was a singular presence at Lionel. “I’m unthreatenable, because I have nothing to lose. I don’t have a position. I’m like a fuckin’ mirage, and that’s where I like to be.” Within a few short years Young would own a significant share of the company.

  In recent years Lionel had lost some of its luster, and both Kughn and Young were determined to revitalize the operation. Most of Liontech’s innovations were based on concepts Young had been exploring for over a decade, and in a little over a week he would be going to Lionel headquarters in Chesterfield, Michigan, to show Kughn and the rest of the company refined prototypes of the new sound system—Railsounds II. Young had two research-and-development labs working around the clock to prepare for the demonstration.

  For Young, the train world was a diversion—like making movies or acting—that revitalized his music. “My dad said he could understand why I would need an obsession to distract me f
rom my work. How can you miss something if you don’t go away? If you’re not really into music and excited to be there, it sounds like it. You can’t hide that. So the only way to do that is to starve yourself. Get to the point where you have to play.”

  That November, Neil’s conversations would always meander back to his twin obsessions of the moment: Lionel Trains and Crazy Horse. An ultra-conservative toy company and a stoned-out rock band, each firmly at opposite ends of the spectrum. I got the feeling it suited Young just fine.

  Neil and I jumped in his green 1950 Plymouth and rode the potholed roads to the train barn, a spartan thousand-square-foot redwood box nestled in the trees. Like many around Young, I had been a little condescending toward this grown man’s passion. But his friend Roger Katz set me straight: “If you wanna talk to Neil, go to the train barn. It holds a big key. Something happens to Neil in that space. Whether it’s tied into childhood or another outlet for creating fantasy, this is the inner sanctum. This is Neil’s world.”

  Young led me up the redwood wheelchair ramp into the building. Harshly illuminated from a couple of skylights, the huge layout—set low enough for a child’s grasp—overwhelmed the room. Long ribbons of track nestled in a natural landscape of redwood, rock and living plants that fed off a mist-irrigation system installed largely by Young himself. There was a pond with real goldfish, wooden trestles handmade by Mazzeo and arcane touches like a factory complex made out of an ancient vacuum cleaner. Knick-knacks found around the world by Young and his family dotted the landscape: tin cars, billboards, an incense-burning tepee. Through it all ran track, and Young changed the layout continually. “It’s a real modeler’s dream, mixing realities,” he said with a grin. His engineers had rigged the phones so that a train whistle announced incoming calls.