So much of Young’s time was taken up by other pursuits that I wondered how he could concentrate at all. Had his obsession with trains affected the music? “I don’t think you could say it affected the music directly, but you could say it takes up a lot of Neil’s time,” said Poncho. “Before he was in the train business, maybe he’d go to bed at night thinking about his next record or how he was gonna do a song. Now maybe he goes to bed at night thinking about ‘What HR2 protractor goes with the inside-out latch hitch connector and how can we beat that guy’s price?’
“That’s the way it is. You can’t say it’s bad, because if Neil didn’t have any of that, maybe he wouldn’t even be writing at all now—maybe he’d be burnt out. But it’s definitely different from the way things were before.”
The morning after the Vancouver show I joined Young for the long trip to Edmonton via the Canadian Rockies. The new bus was an impressive ride. “I love these big honkin’ windows,” said Young, inspecting every detail, driving his crew crazy. He was all jazzed up over a Tim Pope-directed video for “This Town” that featured Neil, the Horse and a pig. We watched it more than once, with Young cackling his approval.
After a few hours of questions, we took a break. An abrupt change came over Young, his mood darkening. He stared out at the mountains flying by for a minute or two, lost in thought, then informed me our interviews were over. The gates to Graceland were closing. A few more hours, he said, then no more.
I wanted it never to end. Young was an unsolved mystery, hermetically sealed. “I’d like to interview people who died leaving a great unsolved mess behind, who left people for ages to do nothing but speculate,” Dylan once said, and Bob, lemme tell ya—it’s not too late to head on over to Neil’s, notebook in hand. As Joel Bernstein put it, the layers of Shakey were like layers of an onion—just when you thought you’d gotten to the bottom of it all, there was another. And another.
Young had invaded every pore of my being, he was in my bloodstream. To cop a line from an old Edgar G. Ulmer picture, Neil Young isn’t just a man—he’s a way of life. He’d made me a whole lot more psychedelic—okay, a little more psychedelic—and he’d taught me there was more than one way to burn out. Somehow he’d made me question everything, just as his music had. He’d given me the adventure of a lifetime.
The next day I said goodbye to Elliot. He mentioned that a few days before, Neil—a little nervous about the end result—had inquired about buying the book contract back. “I said what we can’t buy back is four years of Jimmy’s life.” “Six years, Elliot,” I countered wearily. “Yeah, and who’s counting?” Roberts fired back. Was he bullshitting, just trying to keep me on my toes? I didn’t have a clue and I didn’t care. You never knew what was gonna happen next with these guys. How could you, given Neil’s nature?
Late the night before, as his bus raced down the highway, I’d been frantic, assaulting Young with last-ditch questions. After all, I had 5,765 questions left. I attempted to play him some of his own music to comment on—the scratchy acetate version of “Mr. Soul,” appropriately enough—but the tape player died. “I’m collapsing in front of you, which I suppose is a pretty good end to this fuckin’ affair,” I said. Neil chuckled. It was as if he was willing it all to end. Mr. Young and his mind over matter …
As the clock ticked away, I blindly asked Young for the motivation behind the whole ball of wax. “Why did you do all this?”
“Just follow your dream, that’s what I did,” he muttered, a Mount Rushmore in Ray-Bans. “It never turns out to be what you think it’s gonna be.”
At about four A.M., Young told me a story about visiting Rassy late in her life, trying to get her to open the blinds in her darkened room and look at the beautiful world outside. But she didn’t want to see the light. “It’s hard to change sometimes,” he said.
Tonight Young wasn’t interested in the past. As the bus wound through the mountains, he was pondering the future.
“Three generations are coming to my concerts—you look at that and think, ‘Well, what could I write now? What can I possibly write that is gonna get to somebody who is young and has all this openness …’
He stared through the bus window at the black night, those hungry hawk eyes scanning every inch of onrushing highway.
“Openness. I can remember openness, what it’s like to be a little kid and everything, but let’s face it—remembering is not the same as being.”
* Ironically, the Crazy Horse album never got finished. “Our producer, Phil Perspective, didn’t stick around for the end,” said Poncho. “He turned back into Neil Young and did a Neil Young record.”
a solo trip
In June 1997, Young released Year of the Horse, a 2-CD live set from the previous year’s tour. A Jim Jarmusch documentary of the same name featured footage from those gigs. The album, outside of a few Princeton Landing recordings, was a lackluster affair, the film hopelessly soft and full of phony camaraderie. The band came off looking like a bunch of gladhanding chimps. Said Poncho, “It was the Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver Crazy Horse, I’m not sure which.”
Starting July 11, Young and the Horse headlined the hippie-extravaganza HORDE Festival for a little over a month. Young cut his hand while making a sandwich before the start of the tour, affecting one of his main playing fingers. I caught up with HORDE in Portland. Seeing Crazy Horse in festival sunlight just didn’t feel right, and while there were a few new songs, the whole affair seemed even less vital than the shows of the year before.
“There was nothing left to say,” said Poncho. “We weren’t expressing anything—we were just copying what we’d already done. It’s not like we had another new album’s worth of material to take out there. It might’ve been a good deal financially—but for our kind of music, it was a bad deal.”
Following Broken Arrow, Young took the Horse into the studio with producer Rick Rubin, jammed with CSN at the Fillmore and suffered through a dismal reunion with Jack Nitzsche. * None of it seemed to lead anywhere. It felt like Young was treading water. I took it all personally, of course.
September 30, 1997. Time out of Mind, Dylan’s first album of original material in years, had been released earlier in the day. I stuck it in the CD player. It was like receiving a telegram from the last man on earth. The picture on the back of the booklet said it all—a blurry, lost Lugosi, stepping out of the ether to confront us with his withering, scornful gaze. Now, when just about everybody counted him out, Dylan had delivered a TKO. “The old guy comes clean,” declared Richard Meltzer.
Steeped in the sort of musical history Young had studiously avoided, Time out of Mind had the spook, which was more than enough in 1997. For those of us who felt that everything was going down the shitter, Dylan’s album was invigorating—a requiem for a dream past.
Now Dylan would be the comeback kid. The following year, he’d make Spin’s list of Top 32 Rock Gods We Haven’t Turned On Yet (or whatever it’s called) while Young, voted Artist of the Year in 1993, was nowhere to be found. It was all bullshit, really. Just like Neil said, it comes in waves. Dylan’s was coming in, and Young’s was receding for a while.
The last song on Time out of Mind was “Highlands,” a rambling, sixteen-minute-plus piece of psychobabble that became even more curious when Dylan threw Young’s name into the stew.
For a moment I thought I was going nuts. I had chased Dylan for years to talk to me for this book and he’d agreed—I’d even submitted a lengthy list of questions, taken the urine test and passed the credit check. But despite scores of faxes and phone calls, he evaded me. Somehow it made sense. And now here he was, mentioning Neil Young in the same breath as Erica Jong.
Funny, but I wasn’t laughing. How do you finish a book about a guy when you feel in your heart he’s ignoring his muse? To be around Neil Young you had to give your all—he demanded it. Yet I felt he was far from giving it himself these days. Neil had always been important not just for the things he did but for the things he didn’t
do, and now he seemed to be doing them all.
Arrogance on my part? Lack of respect for a lifetime of achievement? I don’t think so. I had believed him when he proclaimed that if you weren’t willing to “go right to the end of the candle … you shouldn’t even be there.” And however clichéd or troubling or ridiculous the idea might be, I had believed him when he said it was better to burn out than to fade away. Was it all just lip service? Did he even give a shit anymore?
Right then, not two minutes after Dylan crooned Young’s name, the phone rang. It couldn’t be, I thought. But of course it was. “Jimmy, it’s Neil.” It had been nearly a year since the last interview. I was thinking maybe I wouldn’t hear from him again. But it’s never over with Neil.
Strangely enough, he was ranting about Dylan. He hadn’t heard the album, but he recognized the significance of its arrival. “When I saw that Bob put this album out, I thought, ‘Look—it’s comin’ around. It’s comin’ around again.’”
He’d read an interview in the newspaper the day before. Dylan had come across so real in the short Q&A that it moved Young enough to call me. “You can tell there’s a tunnel and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and Bob’s basking in the fucking light, okay? He’s got a clear vision that a child would have. There’s some kind of awareness of where he’s at—”
“And he doesn’t overdo the fuckin’ interviews, either,” I snapped, unable to control myself. “That’s somethin’ you should try, okay? You’ve talked to everybody—and I don’t think you’ve gotten anything out of it.”
Here we go again. Off to the races. It’s gonna end just like it started.
Clucking like a chicken, I told him everything he’d been doing lately was inconsequential. “You’ve done too much shit—you haven’t gotten closer to the source, okay? All the stuff I warned you about has come true.”
“Yup,” said Young blandly, unfazed and unimpressed. “Well, we all knew it was coming. Whatever happened, it isn’t that big of a deal—heh heh. It came and it went.”
I socked it to him. It felt good to get it off my chest. And I gotta tell ya, it was a million laughs—we’d been through it so many times before. Tickling the whale’s belly. But you know what? It didn’t matter. He’d known valleys before. Along with more peaks than anyone could ever imagine. The important thing was to keep going. And Young was already on his way.
Just days after he returned home from the road, Neil started recording again. Nothing fancy—just a few new songs, by himself with an acoustic guitar. “It just made me think about Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin—all those guys that I used to really like when I started as a songwriter and did a lot of things in a coffeehouse-vibe kinda thing. You could just write it, sit down and play it for somebody—and they would get it. There was nothing missing.”
Not only had Young started on a new project, he shut down everything else—disconnected his voice mail, changed his phone numbers, stopped just about everything. He was even swearing off computers, a tall order since he had become a full-fledged computer nerd during his recent trainbusiness activities. “It’s just escapes from reality, all of it—and reality’s more innaresting if you can be there for it,” he said. Lionel had simmered down to a more manageable enterprise, perhaps a little too much so for Young’s taste. “The closer you get to the ultimate goal, the less exciting it is,” he admitted. For once I knew exactly how he felt.
Young spent the rest of the year sporadically recording, overdubbing himself playing different instruments on the tracks. Then, in March 1998, he switched to recording with a band. A new band—“Duck” Dunn and Jim Keltner from the Booker T. tour, plus Spooner Oldham on keyboards. And Ben Keith had come back to coproduce and play steel. In addition to this, Neil returned—after endless delays—to the Archives project, concentrating on a multi-CD Buffalo Springfield set. To some insiders, it seemed Young was making peace with the band—and his turbulent role in it—by giving his all to this definitive collection of their music.
As far as the outside world was concerned, Young was an invisible man in 1998. He didn’t tour, didn’t appear on TV, didn’t do interviews or anything else. He just disappeared. For the first time in years I didn’t have a fucking clue how to reach him. It brought a smile to my face.
I knew Shakey was lurking out there somewhere, and it was a good feeling to have in this $1.98 world. Young had found a new way to do his thing, just like he had so many times before. And he’d done it the hard way, the only way he knew how. By changing.
* Jack Nitzsche died August 25, 2000, due to cardiac arrest brought on by a recurring bronchial condition. He was sixty-three years old.
(Very) Selected Bibliography
Crosby, David, and Carl Gottlieb. Long Time Gone: The Autobiography of David Crosby. Doubleday,
Downing, David. A Dreamer of Pictures: Neil Young, the Man and His Music. Bloomsbury,
Dufrechou, Carole. Neil Young. Quick Fox,
Einarson, John. Neil Young: Don’t Be Denied: The Canadian Years. Quarry Press,
Einarson, John Richie and, Furay. For What It’s Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield. Quarry Press,
Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dylan: Behind The Shades. Penguin, Updated as Behind the Shades Revisited. HarperCollins,
Hopkins, Jerry. The Rock Story. Signet,
Hoskyns, Barney. Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles. St. Martin’s Press,
Kent, Nick. The Dark Stuff. Penguin,
Long, Pete. Ghosts on the Road: Neil Young in Concert. The Old Homestead Press,
Neil Young Appreciation Society. Broken Arrow. Wales, United Kingdom.
Robertson, John. Neil Young: The Visual Documentary. Omnibus Press,
Rogan, Johnny. Neil Young. Proteus,
Rolling Stone, editors of. Neil Young: The Rolling Stone Files. Rolling Stone Press/Hyperion,
Solnit, Rebecca. Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era. City Lights,
Williams, Paul. Love to Burn: Thirty Years of Speaking Out. Omnibus Press,
York, Louise Armstrong. The Topanga Story. Topanga Historical Society.
Young, Neil. Complete Music Volume I, Volume II. Warner Bros, Volume III, Silver Fiddle,
Young, Scott. The Flood. McClelland & Stewart,
Young, Scott. Long May You Run. Toronto Life,
Young, Scott. Neil and Me. McClelland & Stewart, Updated 1997, McClelland & Stewart.
Young, Scott. A Writer’s Life. Doubleday Canada,
Zimmer, Dave. Crosby, Stills and Nash: The Authorized Biography. St. Martin’s Press,
Source Notes
Nearly every quote in this book (other than those I have tied to their sources—apologies for any errors or omissions) are from author interviews that took place from 1990 to 2001. They were both recorded and transcribed by the author.
Interviews with Neil Young took place on November 13, 1989; two days in August 1990; a week in November 1993; April 16, 1994; June 22–24, 1994; November 16, 1994; January 16, 1995; February 12, 1996; February 26, 1996; May 13–14, 1996; October 22–23, 1996; in addition to a number of phone calls.
The manuscript was reviewed at least twice by Neil Young in 2000—and various factual corrections/minute deletions were made—but the author would like to state for the record that this required no significant changes to the original manuscript he delivered to Mr. Young on December 4, 1998.
All recording dates were verified via Joel Bernstein, Young’s archivist, although they are, of course, subject to whatever new information comes to light. All lyric quotes were read by Neil Young and verified by Joel Bernstein. Actual lyrics may not be as printed elsewhere. Circumstances beyond the author’s control prevented the inclusion of a discography as well as many photos that the author unearthed, both from the Archives and other sources—such as the remarkable early-seventies work of Joel Bernstein or Nurit Wilde’s stunning 1966 close-up shot of Neil Young in the shadows, which says more about the troubled Buffalo Spri
ngfield days than any words can evoke. My apologies to the reader; and somebody please publish a monograph of Bernstein’s work—it’s long overdue.
The following people ignored or declined repeated requests for interviews: Bob Dylan, Stephen Stills, Susan Acevedo, Robbie Robertson, Ry Cooder, Johnny Rotten/Lydon, Jerry Napier, Brendan O’Brien, Rick Davis, Bruce Springsteen, Courtney Love, Sally Kirkland, Irwin Spiegal Osher and Beck. I declined to interview David Geffen, Jean “Monte” Ray, members of both Booker T. and the MGs, Pearl Jam and, for reasons explained in the text, Pegi Young.
Special thanks to Frank Zychowitz for providing tape after tape of Young’s in-between-song remarks from live gigs. Thanks as well to Dave Zimmer and Pete Long for last-minute press excavations. The author also made use of a large personal collection of radio and TV interviews, clippings, letters and photographs, and also reviewed all press clippings found in the Neil Young Archives. Only third-party interviews that have been directly quoted in the book are referenced below.
innaresting characters
Author interviews: NY, John McKieg, Joe McKenna, Paul Williamson, Bob Sterne, Tim Foster, David Cline, Roger Katz, Tim Mulligan, Graham Nash, David Briggs, Bryan Bell, Larry Cragg, Sal Trentino, Zeke Young, Joel Bernstein, James Taylor, Willie Nelson, Elliot Roberts, Richard Fernandez, Randy Newman, Link Wray, Linda Ronstadt, Elton John, Bryan Ferry, J. J. Cale, Dean Stockwell, Emmylou Harris, Townes Van Zandt, Thurston Moore, Gary Burden, other sources.
12 “Rock and roll is just a name …” NY, 1982 press conference, Italy.
13 “You have to be ready …” NY to Laura Gross, Rockstars radio interview, 1988.
13 “Neil likes playing in groups …” Danny Whitten to Ritchie Yorke, Winnipeg Free Press, 1/9/71 (Whitten’s only known interview).
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