Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Young scoffed at the idea that things were over now that Briggs was gone. “We all know Briggs was on the edge—but that doesn’t mean we weren’t on the edge when we weren’t with Briggs. Because there’s all kinds of stuff that happened when he wasn’t there that was definitely on the fuckin’ edge. He happened to be there for a lot of it—and contributed greatly to it—but to say we weren’t on the edge unless Briggs was there, that’s bullshit.”

  He brought up some of the more outthere Homegrown stuff as an example. “Listen to ‘Florida,’ a few of those things. There was no Briggs around for that. Briggs was great, and what Briggs brought to the table was fantastic, and luckily he left a lot of it on the table, but to think that we can’t continue or even go further without Briggs in the flesh—that’s a mis-judgment.

  “The past is gone completely—and it’ll never be like it was. It’ll be better than it was. It may not be as close to death as it was at certain times…. Like Tonight’s the Night is not a way of life—it’s a way of death.

  “There’s a long way to go. You can’t judge the future by lookin’ at the past. You can’t …

  “I’ve already told Pegi, I’ve told everybody—take a good look at me, because pretty soon I’m gonna be gone. I’m gonna be somewhere else for a long time. There’ll be another flow happening. I’m gonna go out, I’m gonna play, it’s gonna keep me alive, it’s gonna make us a lotta money. We can pay for our houses, pay for all the shit we got for the rest of our lives—but basically, what it’s gonna do is, it’s gonna make me happy. Make me more of myself. Get me in tune with what really makes things happen—which is music.

  “The idea is, am I into what I’m doing? I really want to do somethin’ that represents music the way I feel it. That represents me.

  “When other people are tellin’ me that I’m fuckin’ crazy and I’m out here in the woods and I’m growin’ bark and all this shit—I know what I’m doing. They don’t. They don’t know what it takes to fuckin’ keep the edge on the creative side of the thing.

  “Music’s like breathing out. Everything else is like inhaling, okay? So you gotta take a good deep breath in to let a whole bunch out somewhere.

  “But it’s not always on everybody else’s timetable, whether I’m making it or not, y’know?” Young looked at me.

  “Do you ever feel like the world’s tamed you?”

  “Yeah, I do. And that’s why I’m pissed off. I can feel it—and I don’t want it to happen. So there are certain things I’m gonna do: ‘This is the way I’m doing it, and if you don’t wanna do it that way, fuck you. Go somewhere else.’ ’Cause I don’t have that many chances to do this and get it right.”

  “So it’s not better to burn out?” I asked. “That’s the message I get from everything you’ve been telling me.”

  Young looked shocked. “No—it is. But you gotta burn out. I’m not burned out. I’ll go eventually—heh heh—but I’m gonna stretch this out as long as I can. And when I go, it’s gonna be a fuckin’ flash—the kind of thing you can’t look at.” He chuckled.

  We hopped in the Plymouth and headed down some dusty ranch road. One of Young’s pooches trotted alongside.

  “Type of guy you think I am, you probably think I’ll just run over that dog and get a new one.”

  “You know what? You would feel so bad that for the next six years you wouldn’t even tell anybody—but this dog motif would appear in fifty songs. You’d disguise it. Call it something else.”

  “So nobody would know it was the dog … Why should I share that? You’re right, Jimmy.” Young snickered.

  “Everybody has their own belief of what kind of music is the real me, and if I’m not doin’ that, I’m not being real.

  “I just do what I want to do—keep playing, keep going, keep moving—and it’s not as easy as it was. I’m a little bit shell-shocked. But I’m going … I can feel it coming.”

  For the time being, our interviews were over. I got the feeling there weren’t many left. “It takes a lot outta me,” Young admitted. “It ages me about forty years every time I do one of these. But hey—I’m still only fifty.” He chuckled. “A little music will go a long way with me.”

  The next day, a little before I left the ranch, the phone rang. Neil. He was hyper, barely able to spit the words out. He’d written a couple of songs, and more were on the way.

  On March 18, 1996, Neil Young and Crazy Horse began a series of sixteen unannounced gigs that would sprawl into June, all but two taking place off Route 1, not far from Young’s home at the tiny Old Princeton Landing (OCCUPANCY 150, a handmade sign would exclaim above the door once Young and company had established residency). They were billed as the Echos [sic], after Young’s old Silvertone harmonica amp, on which a previous owner had scrawled “The Travelling Echoes.” That amp adorned the seven-by-twenty stage along with an Indian rug and candles. The vibe extended backstage, where Young assembled an enclave of tents and trailers dubbed “Echo Village.” The Horse had their own trailer, and Young spent much of the time before and after gigs huddled inside with them. Pearl Jam’s sensitivity to atmosphere and environment had obviously reminded Young of a few things he’d forgotten. “Those gigs were the best thing that ever happened to the Horse,” said Poncho. “We were a band again.”

  “The crew that I’m goin’ out with this time, there’s not gonna be any professionals,” Young had told me in February. “It’s not like ‘We’ve done this before, we’re great.’ Because that’s not it.” Longtime tour manager Bob Sterne was out—Tim Foster in his place—and Young had inherited one or two of Pearl Jam’s crew. Even Ranger Dave Cline was back. Twenty-dollar wristband tickets went on sale at the door, and most of the gigs were on weekdays. The end result was a joint packed to the gills with people who really wanted to be there. Young and the Horse usually played three sets a night, emerging from their trailer when they felt in the zone to play. A relaxed atmosphere, to say the least. One evening one of Young’s old jalopies ran out of gas on the way to the gig, and he walked the rest of the way with his engineer.

  The effect was, as one fan put it in Broken Arrow, “like having Neil in your living room.” The performances were all over the map, dependent on the mood of the band (perhaps, for some, on how much and what kind of weed was circulating back in Echo Village). Peaks and valleys, sometimes in the same song. But even if they sucked it didn’t matter—this was Neil Young and Crazy Horse, playing ten feet in front of your face. In an era when nearly all of his peers were squeezing fans dry with endless overpriced arena gigs, the fact that Young actually gave enough of a shit to go to the trouble of doing something as personal as the Princeton Landing series was inspiring.

  Aficionados were treated to uncommon performances of “Wonderin’” and “Danger Bird,” not to mention a particularly mournful “Stupid Girl.” “It’s a whole other thing,” Young said. “She’s much older now.” Material leaned heavily toward Briggs’s beloved Zuma, and Young contributed agonized vocals to another of David’s favorites, “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks.” “He was really pissed that we didn’t do a great record … it makes you wanna do it real well now.” Unbeknownst to everyone, Briggs was actually present at the Landing gigs. Poncho had copped some of his ashes at the wake and hidden them in an amp, telling me, “From now on, David’s coming on the road.”

  In between gigs, starting on March 25, Young recorded the Horse at the ranch, and very quickly they had an album, Broken Arrow, released in early July 1996. The deceptively sloppy record contains some of the Horse’s most intricate melodies ever. For the most part, Young plays FX-less guitar, and despite tambourine and Nitzsche-style one-note piano adding touches of color, this is the Horse in its rawest form. The spirit of Briggs is smudged all over the album, particularly on “Big Time,” a descending chord elegy and reaffirmation of purpose: “I’m still livin’ in the dream we had / For me it’s not over.” On “Loose Change,” the Horse repeat an E chord for so long you wonder if the player’s stuck. Wh
en Sampedro’s girlfriend asked why the band got hung up on the chord for so long, he said, “We were playing David on his way.”

  “Slips Away” is one of Young’s more curious depictions of a woman (this one vanishes when the music starts), and the barely-above-a-whisper “Music Arcade” is one of his more revealing self-portraits of recent years. As if to say, “This is where it all started,” the album ends with some plodding sludge from Princeton Landing, Jimmy Reed’s “Baby, What You Want Me to Do”: a one-mike recording that sounds worse than most of the bootleg-gig tapes floating around. “Not too many people were tellin’ me that was their favorite song on the album,” Young proudly announced.

  There was great material on the album, although I thought it might’ve worked better as an EP. Young anticipated bad reviews. “They’ll shit on this one. I’ve given them a moving target—there’s enough weaknesses in this one for them to go for it … it’s purposely vulnerable and unfinished. I wanted to get one under my belt without David.”

  People magazine declared Broken Arrow one of the worst albums of the year, and Spin—the same magazine that had declared Neil Artist of the Year in 1993—said the album “makes you wonder whether Young has grown so confident in his complacency that he could play out his career as solidly and unceremoniously as, say, Muddy Waters—never dismissed, but taken for granted.”

  Young’s streak as a critical favorite was over. I thought it had less to do with the music than the fact that in the past few years he had been in the spotlight without a break and people were a little worn out. Young, of all people, had let himself get overexposed.

  On May 13, 1996, Young took a flight to Florida. Dressed in baggy shorts, Ray-Bans and straw hat, he looked like the tourist from hell, and was all wound up on his latest innovation for Lionel—Railvision. Tiny video cameras on the train and track, hooked up to a monitor. The operator sits in front of the monitor with stereo headphones on, immersed in the layout from multiple angles.

  “When you see Railvision, you are going to know that I am the toy genius of all time—even though it’s probably gonna cost seven hundred bucks. I have a new motto for Lionel: ‘Big men need toys, too.’ Railvision’s not a toy for cheap guys. What’s the thrill? Hey, well, if you fuck up and run into something with your railscope engine, you might destroy your fuckin’ seven-hundred-dollar engine—it’s more than having a good tilt, y’know? A crash is a fuckin’ trip—not only might it cost you, but when the power goes off, you go to snow and white noise.” Young grinned. “It’s the ultimate video game.”

  It had been an emotional few months for Young. Not only had he lost Briggs, he’d lost two other close friends—neighbor Taylor Phelps and ranch foreman Larry Markiegard. Neil had just come from a memorial for Markiegard. “Heavy-duty. It’s like some great Western icon has died. He was such a great man … I’ve lost more friends in one fuckin’ year than Aphrodite has water holes, y’know.”

  These weren’t the only tragedies. The reason for the trip to Florida was to check out Young’s new tour bus. Pocahontas had caught fire out on the road many months before. Bus driver Joe McKenna, the only one on board at the time, escaped intact, but the bus was history.

  Young didn’t waste time mourning. “First thing I thought of was what a great opportunity to build a really great bus, y’know?” He was like a kid on the flight down: “This fuckin’ bus is gonna be great.”

  We talked about Young’s new projects, “downsizing” the ranch among them. Not long before, he’d shut down operations temporarily, sending his employees on an impromptu paid vacation while he readjusted his priorities. Among those directly affected were the three crew members working on his endlessly delayed Archives retrospective. Young was angry that work wasn’t moving faster, yet he was the one who pulled the crew to work on his new music.

  Apparently he’d stormed into the studio one day and let everyone have it before sending them home. In the end, nobody got fired, but they were pretty shook up. Young was unapologetic.

  “I had to wake everybody up to the fact that this is not a fuckin’ country club, that they’re workin’ for a living. The main reason for the studio is having the Archives done—but the Archives weren’t done. Why? Let’s stop the studio and see what happens. Everybody knew that it was too loose to be right, I wasn’t getting what I wanted done. I had to get people focused on doin’ what they do best—and nothing else.”

  Shakey’s actions didn’t make his crew any less jumpy. I reminded Neil of the apocryphal story from his days at Lawrence High, when he knocked out the bully by whacking him with a dictionary. Swallowing deeply, I said, “Well, these days it sometimes seems like you have a dictionary that weighs five hundred fuckin’ pounds.”

  Young didn’t feel like he’d hit anybody with it lately. “Sometimes I act irrationally—but it’s instantaneous, it’s not a preconception or anything. And in a lotta ways it’s not acceptable—”

  “Yeah?”

  Young chuckled. “I look at that as a plus…. I think that when you blow

  your stack—being completely unacceptable, going way over—in there is an essence of something. Maybe it’s completely overreacting and blowing it. Sure, you destroyed the problem—you destroyed the entire fuckin’ state. I don’t do that very often. I used to do it a lot more. The less ya do it, the more weight it carries.”

  “You like confrontation?”

  “Not that much. But—I wouldn’t want to be in a confrontation with me.”

  When we arrived in Florida, workers were incorporating what was usable from the carcass of Pocahontas, plus making changes that would make the new bus more accessible for Young’s family, particularly Ben. As usual, Young had a million new ideas. Instead of the BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD sign on the rear, there was a license plate reading ZUMA, and he’d changed the two cartop molds that stuck out of the roof as skylights. The new ones were based on Young’s ’47 Buick, better known as the Black Queen, aka the Santa Monica Flyer. The significance? “David’s favorite car of mine,” he said. “So every time I see it I think of him.”

  Young inspected the ’59 Buick taillights that were to be installed on the back. One of the workmen suggested adding old Buick portholes on the side. Young flipped over the idea. “What a stroke,” he said later. “Ozzie’s way into it.”

  Young was paying crews to work around the clock so the rig would be ready for his next tour of America. “I want to put a good fifteen years touring on that bus, maybe twenty,” he said. “By then I’d be like an archive, a walkin’ fuckin’ museum—they’d be building buildings around me just to preserve me when the wind blew too hard.”

  Six inches wider, five feet longer and seven inches taller, the new bus looked monstrous, like something out of Road Warrior. It was too much for me. Neil must’ve caught me staring at it, because on the plane home he said, “I saw you sitting there, and I must confess at one point I wondered to myself, ‘Does Jimmy think that this is a good thing? That this bus is here?’ There’s something about the bus that scares you, right?”

  “Yeah—there’s somethin’ about you that scares me … you’re more intense than ever.”

  “When I made that first bus, I put a lotta work into it, so this time I wanted to make somethin’ that was just as cool—different, but related. I really wanted to show myself how much I’ve learned about how to do somethin’. And how to stay on top of it and get it done.”

  “It reflects all that,” I said wearily.

  “So what’s scary about that? Is it the fact that the bus burned to the ground and I built a new bus to replace it so fast—is that scary? It’s like I don’t care about the old bus anymore? What could be more positive than rebuilding something that has gone down?

  “Think of the people who have seen me for years in that other bus, come to all those shows,” he said. “And it’s something that all my crew guys depend on. The bus makes it, that means the show’s gonna happen … they have a connection to the bus.”

  Shit, even I
had a connection. Some of my best times had been on that bus, sitting around the wooden table with Neil in the wee hours of the morning, arguing over Pearl Jam or CSNY or whatever. I mourned for Pocahontas—a fucking bus. Young creates these things, and when they go, it’s like somebody died.

  “But what scares you?” Young was like a dog with a bone. “Is it like when you try to kill something and it comes back kinda scary? Like when it should be gone but isn’t? ’Cause there’s something about it, somethin’ you can’t kill, that seems to come back over and over again, no matter how bad things are—”

  “—And that’s YOU!” I laughed. “You’re unrelenting!”

  Young and the Horse spent a little over a month in Europe, starting in Zurich on June 20, then returned for a five-week swing through America. On September 4, near the end of the tour, Young pulled the new bus into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame lot and, before his Cleveland show that night, appeared on the MTV Video Music Awards via live hookup. Surrounded by photos of the requisite dead rockers—Hendrix, Joplin and Cobain—Young performed an abbreviated solo acoustic version of the ubiquitous “The Needle and the Damage Done.” Was this how Young was going to grow old—periodically dusted off and wheeled out on awards shows as Mr. Integrity?

  On October 22, I headed to Vancouver, British Columbia, to join Young, back out on the road with the Horse for a two-week stint through Canada plus a few neighboring states. Familiar faces greeted me—Elliot Roberts, Tim Foster, the Horse—but for the first time, no Briggs. The show struck me as weak, as did others from the tour that I saw or heard tapes of. The Horse played great, everybody was into it, the people were there to see ’em, but it felt like Young was going through the motions. Big gestures, big noise, little soul. Whatever fire had been lit in the Princeton Landing seemed to be down to embers at the larger venues.