Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Briggs had a hard-on to record with Pearl Jam. He’d be floored by Neil’s decision. Three days ago Briggs and the Horse were all taking bows at the Hall of Fame; now they were fired. So was the crew. But Young wasn’t stopping to reflect.

  “That happens over and over again through my whole fuckin’ life with all these bands. That’s the reason I’m still here. Because as painful as it is to change—and as ruthless as I may seem to be in what I have to do to keep going—you gotta do what ya gotta do. Just like a fuckin’ vampire. Heh heh heh.”

  The plane turned, the moonlight throwing shadows across Young’s face. He looked like a lunatic. “How does it feel being a vampire?” I asked.

  “It feels great,” he enthused. Neil was morphing like Plastic Man—you could practically see the DNA reconstitute. Eight miles high and on a plain. It was exhilarating.

  “I still wanna be … part of what’s going on. I don’t wanna be an icon. I gotta get the energy, wherever it is. I gotta get revitalized, recharged from the momentum. I’m not a puller, I’m a rider.

  “So you gotta look at all these things … you gotta make calls that hurt people. There’s no way around it. It’s the only way to go. How can you succeed and make more music of a higher caliber without doing it? You can’t. You can’t go along from people to people, place to place, creating, changing, without hurting a lot of people. How can you do that? Can you think of an answer? I think I’m doing a good job—even though it’s painful sometimes.

  “And I know when I got a place to go, that I’ll create and it’ll be there. But if I don’t have a place to go and it sounds like a problem, what’s gonna make me write more songs? How am I gonna open up if I got nowhere to put it? And maybe they don’t realize how serious I am about every little fuckin’ thing, because I’m older now and I don’t freak out. Before, when I was a lot younger, I was doin’ a lotta drugs, and if things weren’t my way, I went fuckin’ nuts … I haven’t changed. Instead of goin’ nuts, I just go somewhere. And find it. So when I come back, they’ll remember.”

  “Is it easier for you to change than other people?”

  “I dunno. Maybe other people don’t have a reason to change. A driving force that makes them wanna do whatever has to be done. I know some people do. Look at Bobby Darin. There’s a guy who eventually had a heart attack, I think, because he was just so jacked up tryin’ to do all this shit. He kept tryin’ to do everything he wanted to do, whatever it was …”

  For a moment I thought I saw the ghost of Bobby Darin drift past the plane. He was all smiles, snapping his fingers in agreement. Lost in the clouds, singing “Mack the Knife,” Darin was one hip-looking apparition. Too bad Young didn’t see it. Picture that duet.

  By late February 1995, the album with Pearl Jam was just about done. Nine of Young’s songs and a pair of Vedder’s were recorded in two two-day sessions at Bad Animals, a studio owned by hard-livin’ seventies banshees Heart. “A cool place,” said Young. “Pictures of Heart all over the place—heh heh—but the room was great. Beautiful old rugs on the floor … just like one of my places. Recorded it analog, faster than it’s ever been done. I went full-on. They were up to it.”

  Mirror Ball was released in June after some intense wrangling with Epic, Pearl Jam’s label. Their name was not to be mentioned on the cover of the CD, the band was not allowed to promote the record and Vedder’s songs were not allowed on—they’d be released later in a companion EP entitled Merkin Ball. The Gary Burden cover had mutated out from a fax of a photo Joel Bernstein had sent Young. Appropriate. On Mirror Ball, the sixties still resonate. A dim signal, maybe, but still there.

  “The thing I loved about the sixties was this feeling that the bands and the audiences were together—a living connection,” Young told Robert Hilburn. “They believed in each other and the future. They shared a dream. That connection is back, though you don’t get that sense of optimism anymore. The kids think our generation let them down, and we did … we’ve made such a mess of the way kids grow up that they really need this music today.”

  “Personally, I’m pro-choice,” Young told Nick Kent concerning “Act of Love.” “But the song isn’t! People who say that human beings shouldn’t have the right to dismiss a human life—they have a point … but then there’s reality. There’s idealism and reality, the two have got to come together, yet there are always major problems when they do. Maybe that’s the crux of what I’m trying to say in this new album. It’s also a commentary of the differences between my peace-and-love generation and the more cynical nineties generation.”

  Mirror Ball holds some pleasures, like the Springfield-esque three-guitar attack on “Big Green Country” and the fallen-hero musings of “Scenery,” but the bomb dropped here is “I’m the Ocean,” which Kent quite rightly described as one of the “most blantantly autobiographical songs” of Young’s career.

  As the band sets a great but precarious groove—it feels like they’re struggling to keep a grip on the song—Young tries to define the power of music and his place in it. “I’m an accident, I was driving way too fast / Couldn’t stop, though, so I let the moment last,” he sings, taking on the personas of different automobiles, spewing forth a mile a minute. It’s a thrilling ride: simultaneously boastful, insecure, tortured, deluded, messianic, mournful, high—in short, perhaps the greatest track Young has done in the nineties. And he did it with Pearl Jam.

  “People my age, they don’t do the things I do,” Young sings on “I’m the Ocean,” and he did a few more of them the summer of 1995. In San Francisco on June 24, Young bravely stepped in at the last minute for an ailing Eddie Vedder, warding off a potential riot. I had seen Young and the band play a one-off in a Seattle club on June 7, and while they played well, it never caught fire—again, it just wasn’t Neil Young’s crowd. In August, when a Vedderless Pearl Jam joined Young for an eleven-date tour of Europe—where the band isn’t nearly as popular—it was a different story.

  “The music had a consistency level that was staggering,” said Elliot Roberts. “One of the greatest tours we ever had in our whole lives. Neil got off every fuckin’ night.”

  Dean Stockwell remembers the show in Dublin, which was filmed by Jim Sheridan but remains unreleased. “I’ll never forget, before they went out to do the encore—there was a ladder leading up to the stage area. Neil started up the ladder, turned back, and the members of Pearl Jam came up to him. They all reached out, met their hands together in the center, like a high school basketball team—rocked them up and down and said, ‘Yeah, let’s go!’” Stockwell laughed. “I said, ‘Wait a second, what the hell is this? This guy is fifty and he’s got these kids goin’ out there like a team.’ It’s not just musical respect for him, it’s love.”

  After Young returned from the tour, another dream came true: In partnership with Martin Davis and Greg Feldman, he bought Lionel. Due to financial difficulties, Richard Kughn could no longer keep the company, and Elliot Roberts put together a deal. “We own the fuckin’ company now—three years ago, this woulda been a dream,” said Roberts. Was Young happy? “It’s all part of the program with Neil, he’s never satisfied. It’s never like ‘Hey, great, we got to this level.’ Never.”

  In addition to everything else, Young also began work on his first real film score (discounting a thrown-together Where the Buffalo Roam in 1980) for Jim Jarmusch’s surreal Western, Dead Man. Jarmusch is a likable con artist tenacious enough to get through the phalanx of handlers and on March 27, Neil, carrying copious notes from studying the movie at home, entered a San Francisco studio. As the film rolled, he laid down several passes on pump organ, detuned piano, acoustic and electric guitar. The result was minimal but haunting. Larry Johnson said the challenge of something new brought out the best in Young. “Neil gave a thousand percent. I haven’t seen him put out like this in a long time. He was really, really focused.”

  Within a few months, the project had turned into a full-fledged Neil Young album. “Kind of a hippie-beatnik New A
ge record,” Young told me. Dead Man was scheduled to be the first release from Elliot Roberts’s Vapor label. I thought Young’s work was great as accompaniment to Jarmusch’s movie; as an album on its own, a vanity project. This was the trouble with some of Young’s projects in the nineties—every little thing became a big, big deal.

  I shot off a fax to Young, saying just that. A few days later he called back. By that time I’d lost my anger and failed to put up much of a fight. Young’s timing had been impeccable, as usual, and I told him how frustrating it was.

  “Well y’know—a lotta songs are like that,” he said, amused.

  “Waddya mean?”

  “You write the song when you’re all full of piss and vinegar, and you record it, and somebody calls you three weeks later and says, ‘What the fuck were ya doin’ that for?’” He snickered. “Same thing.”

  “I can’t explain this to you,” Young said of the Dead Man soundtrack. “It’s intriguing—to me. I think you’ll like some of it. And if you don’t like it—don’t fuckin’ buy it! Heh heh. I wouldn’t even bother to explain to anybody else, ya dickhead!”

  “Is there still room for all the crazy people in your life?”

  “I’ll tell ya what—I’m talkin’ to one of ’em right fuckin’ now!”

  “You still love rock and roll?”

  “Not today. Tomorrow.”

  Young turned fifty on November 12. He’d survived the Hall of Fame, toured with a mega-successful band half his age and bought the source of one of his childhood dreams. “I think he’ll end up making more with Lionel than anything else he’s ever done,” Roberts told me. “It’s already up seventeen million from last year. Neil was right—trains are coming back.”

  A phenomenal year, but it was about to end.

  “You never know when you’ll turn around and a member of the team will be gone,” Young told me in November 1994.

  David Briggs had been on a dark ride since the Hall of Fame induction. He’d had ongoing back pain, but by the spring of the following year he was in such agony that he could get through a recording session only by wolfing down prodigious amounts of painkillers. After consultations with various doctors, it looked like operation time.

  On August 2, 1995, I called Briggs a little before one o’clock in the afternoon. He had just returned from yet another trip to the doctor and didn’t sound exactly chipper. “Write faster, Jimmy. Finish the book.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to be here to read it.” There was a long pause. “It’s the big C. Lung cancer.” It wasn’t his back. Briggs was dying.

  David kept his condition to himself. He didn’t want to see anyone. Even talking on the phone was physically uncomfortable. Briggs alternately charmed the hospital staff and drove them crazy. The prospect of chemotherapy didn’t appeal to David, who asked the doctors, “Can I keep my rock and roll hair?”

  Mirror Ball had produced another period of silence between Young and Briggs. Young FedExed him a copy of the album; wife Bettina said he threw it in the trash.

  The two got back in contact in September. Days before Thanksgiving, Briggs reached out to Neil, who went to see him immediately. For several hours they talked. One thing that David stressed was that Neil had done so much, so many different things, in his music that he should pare down to the essentials—get closer to the source. Later I tried to pry out of Neil what else was said, to no avail. Briggs had told him things “I guess I’ll carry to my grave.”

  Bettina called a little before ten P.M. on November 26. David was gone. Together they’d watched Santa Claus: The Movie, then it was sayonara. He couldn’t take any more pain, he’d had enough. David Briggs, burned out at fifty-one.

  The music press, who had ignored Briggs his entire career, started calling immediately. Joel Bernstein and I each spent half an hour on the phone with a reporter from Rolling Stone, trying to make absolutely sure he understood that this David Briggs was not the Nashville session musician. The magazine still managed to run a picture of the wrong guy.

  The memorial brought out everyone, including many of David’s old Topanga cronies. It was a somber event.

  John Eddie, a New Jersey rocker with whom Briggs had cut an as yet unreleased album, started chuckling as we met, pointing out that in the first line of an obituary I’d written for David, I’d referred to him as a “legendary producer.” Eddie recounted for me a wild night in Bearsville, New York. Briggs had given him a ride home after ingesting his usual mind-numbing quotient of coke and Mexican coffee and was careening all over the road, driving faster than the speed of light. Eddie held on for dear life, sure that Briggs was going to kill them both. He whimpered for David to slow down. “What are you worried about?” Briggs barked. “You know how the obituary will read—‘Legendary producer killed with mediocre singer.’”

  “Y’know, you’re really writing a book about David,” Young told me after the memorial. It was a strange thing to say, but I understood. There was one line that had stayed with Young from my obituary: “No one pushed Neil Young further into his art than Briggs, and his death leaves a huge void.” “It really is a huge void,” Young muttered to me at the memorial. “Huge.”

  A few months later came a rare elaboration: “I think my one memory of David that stands out more vividly and said more to me than any other was up at Indigo Ranch Studios the night we did ‘Will to Love.’ He knew what was goin’ on—he’d seen all the records we’d done, all the places we’d gone to come to that record. What it was about and how we did it and just how fuckin’ out of it and fucked up we were. How that was wrong, but we just didn’t give a shit….

  “‘Will to Love’ was finished, mixed. I kind of slumped down into the console, and he took his hands and he rubbed my shoulders. That’s what I remember the most.”

  * “Missing that Hall of Fame thing was hard for me to do,” said Scott, who was exhausted from a book tour. “I just didn’t feel like bloody going to New York, I felt like bloody going to bed…. Despite the pride that I have in Neil—and the feeling that totems are his due—I suspect I have another part of me that is also part of Neil: that you’re not terribly interested in celebrating on somebody else’s ground, or for somebody else’s reasons. I just don’t wanna be—and this shouldn’t be taken as sour grapes—the tail to somebody else’s kite.”

  have you ever been lost?

  “Look around me—I’m a fuckin’ capitalist businessman! I’ve got all this shit. I’m a good businessman, right?”

  February 1996. Young and I were going at it again. I thought he was distracted by all the shit he was doing; Neil maintained that he was recharging his batteries, waiting for the inspiration to create. “You don’t have to keep the edge. The fuckin’ edge is not kept, okay—the edge comes and visits when the edge wants to. Regardless of whether you’re sittin’ on a fuckin’ throne or a bed of nails.”

  Under the alias of Phil Perspective, he’d been producing a solo Crazy Horse album. “That’s why I’m not doin’ my own stuff right now. Because they’re there a hundred percent, those guys, with their stuff. So that’s the energy I’m using right now. Like a parasite.”

  Coproducer John Hanlon had repeatedly put off a vacation during work on the Dead Man soundtrack. When it came time to do the Horse record, he announced that he was taking a break. Young informed Hanlon they’d continue without him. * He also tossed longtime friend Gary Davis out of the Horse sessions when Davis dared to show up with his bongos.

  “This time leadership has to be strong, ’cause this is when you set the tone for the way things are gonna be without Briggs. To protect who we are and what our music means. We have to be stronger in defending it than ever before, ’cause we don’t have Briggs, who would defend it when we were sleeping. I have to be a little harder than I was before.”

  I met Young at the train barn. He had recently bought some full-sized rolling stock—two freight cars, a flat car and a caboose. Into the side of a hill behind the train barn he’d dug a hole a
nd laid some track so it appeared that a train was disappearing into a tunnel. He was using one car as an office for his train business, and was preparing a hookup so he could do video conferencing with Lionel.

  Inside, Young was hunched over the layout. Now that he had conquered the train sounds, he wanted to branch out—audio for the layout environment. Baying coyotes, a bustling factory, all microchipped in with the fanatically realistic detail Young had lent to the Railsounds system. Young was bent on creating a Star Wars totality in miniature. The concept hadn’t gotten a big reception from Lionel.

  “They love the train sounds, but they just can’t understand that I don’t wanna stop at the train,” he said, frustrated. “And I can’t explain it, I just have to do it—then I’m gonna install it in the showroom layout at the factory. And then we’ll see if they want it, heh heh. It’s hard to tell people they need something when they can’t even imagine what it is.”

  As for music, Young had already devised a new plan of attack: a series of unannounced live gigs with the Horse. In a very small place. At one point tour manager Tim Foster called, suggesting Young’s favorite spot, the Catalyst in Santa Cruz. “Too big,” said Neil. “Over a hundred people.” He was itching to do it as soon as possible. “We don’t have to rehearse, I just want to play.” He wanted tickets sold at the door. His management company wouldn’t be involved. “We’re gonna run it ourselves,” he said. “Too small for Lookout.”

  Young was revving up. “There’ll be terrible nights and there’ll be great nights…. The fact is, we’re not doin’ it for money, we’re not doin’ it for rock and roll history, we’re not doin’ it for fuckin’ MTV … I don’t want to play in front of a whole lot of people—and I don’t want the high rollers to be able to get in unless they got the money at the door at the right time. They’ll have to stand there with the low rollers, the bottom-feeders. No special seats.”