“Can I show you something?” I had a million questions to ask the guy and I never knew when and if I’d see him again, but he’d never actually seen Nirvana play. I stuck a tape into the bus’s tiny TV/VCR—Nirvana doing “Drain You.” I recited the lyrics: “It is now my duty to completely drain you.” Young loved it. We watched the end of Unplugged, where Cobain, surrounded by funeral lilies and candles, takes on the ancient folk ballad “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” made popular as a blues by Leadbelly in 1944, done bluegrass-style as “In the Pines” by Bill Monroe in 1952 and eventually sung by damn near everyone.
Only twenty-six at the time, Cobain may have topped them all with his tormented, world-weary, I-lived-this-song version. Near the end, he stops, stares into space like he’s ready to explode, emits a strangled cry, then rips into the finale. Young was transfixed. “That sound he made at the end—that ‘Yarrrgh.’ Unearthly. And that look! Like a werewolf or something. Unbelievable.”
Is rock and roll the devil’s music? When I’d asked Young back in November, he said, “I think that’s where God and the devil shake hands—right there.” I asked him the question again.
“When it’s really on the edge, there’s a lot to be said for that. The door is open anytime you wanna go.”
“Have you been there?”
“I think I’ve been there a few times but, uh, I must be too straight or somethin’. Because I keep returning—and going the other way. If I stay in one place too long, it’s not gonna work—it’s gonna be dangerous for me.
“When people asked me after Rust Never Sleeps, ‘Are you gonna do another tour like that?’ I said, ‘I have to wait three or four years, because it would kill me.’ I saw the film where my eyes are rolling back into my head … I couldn’t have gone on doing those things. There’s a point where it gets self-destructive—and see, I know that. Which maybe makes me straighter than someone like … that.” His eyes gestured to the television.
I handed him a clipping from the Seattle Times with a picture from the previous Sunday’s vigil at Seattle Center. A sea of traumatized faces, holding candles, crying. *
* A tape of Courtney Love reading Cobain’s suicide note was played over loudspeakers during the vigil. When she got to the quote from “Hey Hey, My My,” she prefaced it with “Don’t remember this, because this is a fuckin’ lie.” On Hole’s 1998 CD, Celebrity Skin, Love would offer the allegedly inspiring lyric in the song “Reasons to Be Beautiful”: “When the fire goes out you better learn to fake / It’s better to rise than to fade away.”
The press would erroneously report that Young had pledged never to sing “Hey Hey, My My” again; in reality he performed it at his second live appearance after Cobain’s death at the Bridge School benefit, October 1, 1994. “It just made it a little more focused for a while,” said Young. “Now it’s just another face to think about while you’re singin’ it.”
The song, of course, refuses to die. On April 8, 2000, Oasis kicked off their U.S. tour in Seattle with a cover of “Hey Hey, My My,” saying, “We’d like to dedicate this to Kurt Cobain, who died six years ago today.” NME noted that a “large section of the audience sang along” with Noel Gallagher on the line “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
“Amazing, huh?” said Young, staring. “Well, it’s the spirit … it’s the spirit.”
“It is. You can’t deny that.”
“No, no, it’s just right there… How did I make it this far?” He chuckled.
I brought up Cobain’s suicide note and Young cut me off, frowning. “Yeah. Well—that’s just another interpretation of it. It’s just one of those lines. There’s so many levels to take it on, I just can’t…. Y’know, I just feel badly to see it in that light, but it was appropriate in his situation. There was nothin’ else for him to do. There was nowhere else to go.
“When you see the way he was in those two performances, there’s no way he could ever get through the other end of it. Because there was no control to the burn. That’s why it was so intense. He was not holding back at all—and he never got to the point where he could control it.
“For me it works, because I’m different. It worked for me to stop playing really hard music and go the other way while I get my strength together, get my head back. Because if you run out of fuel—spirit and inspiration—then you’re just goin’ through the motions. I think maybe that when he ran out of fuel, he thought he was dead. He didn’t know that he could maybe go somewhere else and get some more fuel, come back and do it again. When he ran out, he thought that was it—because it was the first time he’d ever run out.
“I have a life. Now, whether that’s hurting my music, I don’t know. At his stage, it was all music. Kurt Cobain only had one world.”
Young continued raving about the performance we had just seen. I commented on how unusual it was to see real rock and roll on MTV. “MTV, it’s like regular TV,” I said.
“Well, it’s always been like regular TV. ‘TV is furniture.’ That’s what the assistant director at the Academy Awards said during the rehearsals. ‘Film is art, TV is furniture.’” Young snickered.
“You were on VH1, PBS, The Tonight Show …”
Young scowled. “It all goes with what I put out. It all goes with Harvest Moon. That’s what it is. It’s a drag.”
“Okay, what did you get out of Unplugged? That looked like—”
Young rolled his eyes. “They all look like that.”
“No. I’m sorry. When Cobain sings ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night,’ that’s voodoo, man. The rest is wallpaper.”
He paused. “Oh no, that’s great stuff … that’s right.”
“Okay, why did you do Unplugged? To me, the great thing about most of your TV performances is ‘You’re gonna fuckin’ remember it, Jack, ’cause I’m alive and I’m on your TV—dig it?’”
“Right.”
“Well, now you’re just … furniture.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes. What can I say? But I did a lotta things that if I had the chance to do ’em again, I wouldn’t. It’s like ‘File that under mistakes.’ It doesn’t slow me down a bit. I don’t take them with me, I’m filing them. The file is like outta sight, way back there, okay? I don’t wanna fuckin’ hear about it.” He stared holes through me. “I know when I make a mistake, I know when I do the right thing.
“I did the Academy Awards for musical reasons. I really wanted to sing the song, ’cause I thought it was a really good song, and I thought it would never get heard if I didn’t do it there. I never thought I’d have a chance at winning the Oscar.
“I believe more in the Academy Awards than I do the Grammies. The awards for editing and costumes are as important as the Best Actor award. They all realize how many people it takes to make a great movie. The other parts of making records—the smaller parts, the technical parts—these guys come in the middle of the afternoon and get their awards in the middle of fuckin’ rehearsals. That’s where the Grammies are at.
“And the Grammies don’t represent what’s really happening. So to be nominated for a Grammy is not a great honor. I went, I was the only song of the year that didn’t play.”
There were more personal reasons Young attended. “I’m married, right? You get very few chances where your wife gets dressed up, goes out and it’s a big thing. That’s part of having a relationship.
“On the way back, Pegi said, ‘Well, now we’ve done this. Now we don’t have to do that anymore.’” Young smiled proudly. “She already accepted the fact that maybe we shouldn’t have done it in the first place.”
Ben Keith, Young’s producer, was another reason he attended. “Why is Ben going? ‘My mom’s still alive and if I don’t go, my mom would never forgive me. I’m fifty-five years old, I’m doin’ it for my family, I’m doin’ it for myself, it’ll probably never happen to me again, it’s a great honor.’ He really believes this.
“What am I gonna do—try and explain to all these fuckin’ people
that everybody in the Grammies is an asshole and that the whole thing doesn’t represent anything and that I’m protesting by not going? How long can you keep doing that with people who don’t understand what the fuck you’re talking about?”
While watching Cobain, Young remarked on his eerie similarity to Danny Whitten.
“Do you ever think about that guy?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. Still comes back to mind every once in a while.” Again he gestured to the TV. “Looked like the same guy there. It’s all a waste. But y’know—that’s life. He was not invincible. You only think you are.
“What that suicide has done is return me to my roots. Makes me go back and investigate where I started. Where I came from. Why am I here and why is he not here? Does my music suffer because I survived? Things like that.
“See, I really love my family—I think if I ever gave up the whole rest of my life and dedicated everything I have solely to music, that it might work for a while—but in the end, it wouldn’t. That would be a destructive thing—I don’t mean just to my family. To the music.
“Surviving has been a test. The longer you’re out, the more of a test it is to stay true to what you’re doing. There’s a lot of distractions.” He looked weary. “Too many distractions.
“I have no fuckin’ goals now, I have no laws. Nothing is right, nothing is wrong. I don’t give a shit what I have to do. Just so long as I can see it when it’s there and grab it. And that’s one thing that I have to do now after seeing that.” He gestured to the television. “I can’t not do it. And the door’s already open. I’ve already got a lot of it. But the key that holds it all together is still missing.”
Young saw what happened to Cobain, and it made him look inward, where he no doubt saw the same signs of rust I did. He wasn’t Cobain—he was a wealthy, Grammy-nominated, nearly half-a-century-old rocker with a family, a ranch, a lot of old cars and a lot of toy trains. He was far from burning out. To pretend otherwise would’ve been phony. And Neil Young was too astute for that. He was built to endure, survive—and deepen the mystery in his own way.
Two days later, Young was in Los Angeles with Elliot Roberts for a charity golf tournament organized by Eddie Van Halen. He started writing lyrics on a matchbook and continued to scribble away in his golf cart. Obviously inspired by Cobain’s death, the song “Sleeps with Angels” would be the final track cut for the album.
When Briggs, Young and the Horse returned to the Complex on April 25, Young was still working out the lyrics. A twenty-one-minute version with a long instrumental coda was cut, then Neil and Ralph overdubbed vocals. A week was spent editing the track, trying to finesse it, but along the way it lost the spook.
Then John Hanlon discovered that the second engineer had rolled a DAT tape as they were overdubbing, capturing an abrupt cutoff of the song when the vocal overdubs were finished. Which accounts for the odd way the released track ends midvocal. “When I heard that back I went, ‘That’s it in a nutshell,’” said Young.
Sequencing was another challenge. “The key to the whole thing was the running order. Because those same songs played back in a different order is very depressing,” said Young. “Very down. I remember a lotta the early playbacks were ‘Oh God—this is not gonna be something that people can listen to.’” Briggs came up with the final track sequence during an inebriated dice game with wife, Bettina, in the wee hours one morning.
Young went back and forth on the title. Mock-ups of the cover with various titles were made. I’m sure Reprise went nuts waiting for him to make up his mind. At the last minute, he went with Sleeps with Angels. “I decided that the original idea might be the best. Always turns out that way. I know it’s going to draw too much attention to the song, but that’s a stigma I’m gonna have to live with.”
Sleeps with Angels was a radically different direction for the Horse. How ironic: all my harangues that Neil Young was turning into Perry Como, while he’d quietly been making one of the least accessible records of his career.
Tack piano and vibes open “My Heart,” as naked a ballad as Young had ever written. How do you keep going? How do you remain open? Everything Young had talked about in the past few months was here, down to business observations from the train world. “Driveby” was a bleak new slant to Young’s automobile songs, car as messenger of death. “Change Your Mind” examined how relationships inspire and manipulate. Two songs—“Train of Love” and “Western Hero”—shared the same melody. “Like identical twins,” said Young. “The same song with two completely different stories. But it brings you back to this theme. It’s almost like a Broadway play.”
The title cut was just a thumbnail sketch, an elliptical observation, but musically it delivered. In an audacious touch, Young had the Sleeps with Angels CD done up with the old-style black label used for Tonight’s the Night, and if there is a moment when the new record comes close to that masterpiece, it’s at the beginning of the title track—Ralphie bashing away as Young fingers a trashy, distorto riff on his guitar. With disorganized, out-of-kilter vocals and a toilet-bowl mix, Young had created a chaotic patchwork that tied the album together.
The most adventurous number on the album was “Safeway Cart,” a minor-key look at life in the nineties that ranks among Young’s most original creations. Young played minimal guitar at a very low volume on the live track, then overdubbed “feedback harmonica”—his harp played through the Deluxe amp and all his guitar effects. I told Young that his muted playing on the album reminded me of J. J. Cale. It was the only time I’ve ever seen a compliment register.
Together the songs tell a story, although it’s hard to get a fix on. “There was something goin’ on—you can feel it,” Young said later. “Just somethin’, I don’t know what it was. But it wasn’t a hit, thank God.”
When Sleeps with Angels was released in August 1994, Ken Viola pronounced it one of Young’s “top five records. It examines the nature of dreams—both the light and dark side—and how they fuel reality in the nineties. Dreams are the only thing that we’ve got left to hang on to.” Dave McFarlin thought it sucked. That’s when I knew Young had really accomplished something—he’d made a Crazy Horse album that even Horse fanatics couldn’t relate to.
That summer brought tours from an assortment of middle-aged megabuck stadium acts: the Stones, Elton John and Billy Joel, the Eagles. Dylan licensed “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for use in a commercial by an accounting firm, and the Band sold “The Weight” to Diet Coke. “Jesus Christ—they actually used the recording!” exclaimed Young of the latter. The Woodstock twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration suckfest reared its ugly head. Thankfully Young would turn down a fortune to play there.
Already the alternative scene seemed to be choking on its own vomit. Everywhere you turned there was some pierced, tattooed crybaby fronting a four-piece. “Angst is fashion now.”
Young insisted that Sleeps with Angels stand on its own. No tour, no videos, no explanations. But Elliot Roberts would exercise his chutzpah by explaining it to the press himself: “Neil’s worst nightmare,” he said. “I’m uncontrollable.”
Young’s silence worked in his favor. The Los Angeles Times did a whole story on how Young wasn’t doing interviews. Even Elliot was dumbfounded. “Whatever Neil fuckin’ does, people go, ‘Wow, what a guy.’” Neil always comes off as this rebel who’s fighting for what he believes, right or wrong—and not only rightfully so, but even when he fucks up. People perceive him as Clint Eastwood.”
The day after playing the Bridge School benefit on October 2, Young and Crazy Horse went to Los Angeles to be filmed by Jonathan Demme performing songs from Sleeps with Angels.
Referring to Young’s promise of no videos and no interviews for the album, I told him I’d bet a fan fifty bucks he’d stick to his guns. Was he going to do press now, too? “I’ve already lost twenty-five,” I said.
“These aren’t videos,” Young said, annoyed. “These are performances, okay? A video is where you go in and l
ip-synch—that’s not what this is. So you oughtta keep your disappointment at bay until you see what the fuck is going on. Then you can let your disappointment just cream all over it.” He admitted that one of the performances—“Piece of Crap”—had been spiced up with zany comedy inserts, but feeling it was “tryin’ too hard to be funny,” he had asked Demme to tone it down.
“It’s just another way of presenting those songs. I didn’t try to do songs that are so heavy with the vibe in the original, like ‘Safeway Cart,’ ‘Trans Am,’ ‘Sleeps with Angels’—I didn’t expose them to that.” Aside from “My Heart,” a great solo performance, I thought the Demme stuff sucked. The Horse looked uncomfortable in Hollywood. Larry Johnson’s half-hour Sleeps with Angels documentary was far more interesting—you got to see the actual recording of the CD, footage of Young at work in the studio that conveyed a sense of what a strange guy he is. Shot in Hi-8, no-frills, it was so murky and haphazard that Young couldn’t give it away.
As for Demme’s “Piece of Crap” video, it was hokey beyond belief. Intercut with the performance were clips of the Home Shopping Network and a falling tree. “You’re gonna cut all that goofy shit down, right?” I asked. Young looked crestfallen. “That was the cut-down version.” Oops.
A little while later Young handed me a gift—one of the alternate-cover mock-ups for Sleeps with Angels. Inside he had scribbled, “TO JIMMY—THANKS, NEIL ’94.” What a guy. Tell him his videos suck and he gives you a present.
Later that night we fell upon that most banal of interview subjects, the “happiness” question. Those around Young thought he was driven to the point of mania; that he was continually restless. Most of his friends thought he had none.
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