Special Deluxe

by Neil Young

  When I finished the ninth grade at Lawrence Park Collegiate, Rassy had just purchased a small English car. It was a four-door Ensign, light blue, made by Standard Motors. Rassy asked me if I would like to move to Winnipeg and make a new start. She painted a bright picture of her growing up there, the things she did, the people she knew, all the good times she had, and I decided it would be fine to move there.

  Bob elected to stay in Toronto when he heard about the planned move. He had friends there and did not want to leave and start again. I was used to moving, but this was the first time I had moved away from half of the family, and it felt different. I was fourteen. So that was it for our family living together in one house.

  Rassy and I packed up the Ensign, loaded a moving van, and began the long drive to Winnipeg. She elected to take a route across the northern United States because the roads were better down there. When we got below Manitoba, which is in the center of Canada, we headed north across the border back up into Canada and to Winnipeg. Gas cost us about 31 cents per gallon, and Rassy’s Ensign got a little more than 23 mpg, so during that trip to Winnipeg we put 1,139 pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere with that little car without our noticing. All the way there, she talked about the fun we would have, telling me how supportive and friendly the people in Winnipeg were. I think her time there was the best part of her life. When we stopped at motels, she would let me smoke a few of her cigarettes, Black Cat Plains, with no filter, which was very kind of her. Eventually we arrived in Winnipeg and set up house in an apartment in the suburb of Fort Rouge, on Corydon Avenue, kind of a main street.

  The Gray Apartments, 250 Hugo Street, apartment number 5, greeted us. Our apartment was in the basement and my bedroom was right on the corner of Corydon Avenue and Hugo Street. My window, at the top of the wall near the ceiling, looked out on the feet of people standing on the sidewalk at the bus stop, waiting for a bus. Traffic was fairly heavy. The buses came and went, shaking the room just a little, but they were electric trolley buses. I noticed that these buses were fast and quiet, not like the noisy and dirty buses I had seen growing up in Toronto. There was no exhaust or fuel smell, just electricity from the two wires that ran above the street. I had never seen buses like that before.

  Our building was not far from the Dorchester Apartments, an old apartment building where Grandpa and Grandma lived on Dorchester Avenue, and we would visit them about once a week for a while after we arrived. Rassy’s parents were old and the place was very quiet. We would sit and drink tea, and Mom would talk with them and smoke cigarettes while I fidgeted. Something about that place made me feel a bit nervous or sad or something. I didn’t know what it was. I wanted fresh air.

  At our apartment, the Ensign was parked in a lane behind the building, and it was a five- or six-block walk to school. I attended the Earl Grey School, taking grade nine for the second time. I had failed to pass it at Lawrence Park.

  • • •

  MY FIRST BIT of good luck in Winnipeg was in somehow landing the best paper route in the world. The route consisted of approximately one hundred customers, who were mostly in apartment buildings, and was only a couple of blocks long. The winter came right on time, and I could still feel that thing in my soul, that growing feeling that was still with me like an invisible, chilly coat I wore beneath my skin and that showed up on its own occasionally. Since the temperature was often way below zero, my paper route was a huge bonus in wintertime. While other paperboys were trudging through the snow in below-freezing temperatures, I was delivering papers in heated buildings.

  The route was a great source of income for me, and I was able to buy things. First off, I bought a Harmony Sovereign guitar with a DeArmond pickup added to it. This gave me a foothold as a guitar player, and I practiced night and day. I did not need an amp because the Harmony had F-holes and could be played acoustically at home.

  I had gotten into the habit of writing little signs and posting them on my bedroom walls. Most of them said WHO CARES? These messages were a great cause of concern for Rassy. She was upset by my posted wall messages. I had to keep writing them, though, and now I see them as an early indication of my need to write and express myself. I played my Harmony Sovereign guitar all the time and I began writing in that room, playing little songs I had made up.

  The Seabreeze was set up in our living room, which faced out onto the Hugo Street sidewalk. Through the living room window, a regular parade of footwear could be seen traversing the sidewalk outside. I listened to LPs by the Ventures and the Shadows with a sprinkling of 45s by the Fireballs, Johnny and the Hurricanes, Bill Black’s Combo, the Viscounts, the Mar-Keys, and a great instrumental track called “Hide Away” by Freddie King.

  Cruising up and down the streets and finding the best ways to get to school and back, I got to know the new neighborhood. As soon as school started, I met a few guys who liked music, and actually got a band going called the Jades, my first band. Right around New Year’s, we played the Earl Grey Community Club. That was the only engagement the Jades ever had, but it was a start, and that’s all we needed. The group was made up of myself on rhythm guitar, and schoolmates Jim Atkin on bongos, congas, and vibes; David Gregg on bongos; and John Daniel on lead guitar. He had a real good Gibson Les Paul Standard. John was the real musician. I had one instrumental song called “Wendy’s Walk” that I played lead on. That may have been my first actual composition. On all the others, John played lead and I played rhythm. John had an amp, so I plugged into it as well. John was an accomplished guitar player who taught me a lot in the beginning at get-togethers we used to have in his house on Corydon, a couple of blocks from our apartment. His dad had a business there called Dot Transfer. Signs were all over the outside of John’s house reading DIAL DOT AND DOT DASHES. Those were my musical beginnings in Winnipeg.

  There was a guy at school named Koobie. His full name was Ken Koblun and he was about six-five. He was the tallest kid in our school and we quickly found out that we had a lot in common. Ken was a foster child who had become adopted and was now part of the Clayton family. I was from a broken home, and divorce was a rarity, even somewhat of a stigma at that time, so we had something in common there, but music was our real bond.

  Richard Clayton, Ken’s brother, was English. All of the Claytons were in touch with England and had the latest music and news from there. The Shadows were hot. They were an instrumental group that backed heartthrob singer Cliff Richard, who was incredibly popular in England. The Shadows released a lot of instrumental records, which were quite great, and we aspired to be as good as them. We read about the Shadows in Melody Maker and New Musical Express, two English music papers with the latest skinny on groups in England and around the world.

  Ken and I loved the Shadows, and the best band in Winnipeg, Allan and the Silvertones, had a guitar player who played all of the Shadows’ songs. He played them great! His name was Randy Bachman. He had an echo sound on his guitar that he got from a tape recorder that was just like the one the Shadows’ lead guitarist, Hank B. Marvin, had.

  We all need heroes to get started. Hank and Randy were mine. They used an Echoplex tape delay, and I started to as well, and still use mine today. The combination of using tape repeat while a Bigsby vibrato tailpiece bends the pitch of a note and adds a ton of depth. Because there is a delay, the delayed note is always a different pitch from the original note as you use the Bigsby, bending the pitch, widening the sound by creating two close pitches, varying from each other, manually, at your fingertip. One sound chases another, always a little behind, and the pitches are slightly different. Of course, back then all I had was my Harmony Sovereign with one pickup and it had no Bigsby, so I couldn’t actually play that sound. I had no echo. I just knew how to play it. Randy had a Gretsch guitar with two pickups and a Bigsby. I thought Randy’s was the greatest guitar sound in the world. All I wanted was to have a shot at being that cool, and playing that sound.

  In the North End of Winni
peg on Main Street there was an area that had a lot of pawnshops. It was the seedy part of town and there were always a lot of drunken Indians walking around, homeless. It never really dawned on me why that was. I just viewed it as a reality of life at the time. I didn’t think about them being here first, or how Winnipeg, where the Red River and the Assiniboine River came together, used to be one of the largest Native centers, a hub of their civilization. The artifacts that have been found at the river fork indicate that tribes from as far south as Arizona were trading goods there with the Canadian tribes long before the white man came. The river fork was a traditional meeting place where the Native peoples from North America came together regularly every year to trade. Now we don’t call them Indians anymore. We refer to them as First Nations people, which I like better because it is true.

  I would visit those pawnshops often, looking at guitars and amps, trying to find something I liked. I would look at the Kay and Supro electric guitars in the window. National guitars were there, too. Lots of guitars from Japan or other Asian countries would be on display, some with many pickups and features like tremolo arms. They were flashy-looking and caught my eye. I was listening to Jimmy Reed, the blues player, a lot then, and he played a Kay guitar on his album cover.

  You don’t know me, baby,

  Like I know myself.

  I couldn’t live if you should give

  Your love to someone else.

  Better get some insurance on me, baby,

  Take out some insurance on me, baby.

  ’Cause if you ever, ever say good-bye,

  I’m gonna haul right off and die.

  —JIMMY REED, “TAKE OUT SOME INSURANCE”

  Silvertone guitars were sold at Sears, and Jimmy played one of those, too, in a picture I had seen on one of his album covers. I would leave those album covers on display, standing up on top of the Seabreeze, so I could look at the pictures. Jimmy’s guitars were all inexpensive ones compared to the Gibsons and Fenders from the USA. Those Gibsons and Fenders always caught my attention. I dreamed of owning one.

  Around Christmastime, Ken got a guitar from his dad. This was very good, and I talked to Ken about our band needing a bass. He decided to trade the guitar and get a bass. With the help of Jimmy Kale from the Silvertones, Ken got a Danelectro bass from Cam’s Hardware in the area of Winnipeg known as St. Vital, near where Jimmy lived. Hardware and appliance stores were places you could order amps and electric guitars back in those days.

  Once Ken and I had good instruments, we started playing with more people in little bands at school. We had a band, the Stardusters, and played a little at the community clubs and churches near our school. After Christmas, I did a couple of shows with a band called the Esquires, but I was not good enough. The Esquires were ahead of me. I was struggling to play the chords and remember the fingerings for their songs. I guess I wasn’t thinking so much about the beat. That’s not too good for a rhythm guitarist. It didn’t last. They dropped me. Those were some of my first performances.

  Linda Fowler was a girl in the neighborhood. She did not go to our school and I never found out what school she went to. She was always dressed up. She was a pretty girl, very reserved, and usually wore all black—black dresses, jet-black hair—and red lipstick, all perfect. Her house welcomed us and it seemed that anything musical was welcomed there. Linda was fascinating and mysterious, nothing like other girls I knew at the time. She was more like a beat poet or something, very bohemian. Linda played piano and she really played it beautifully. Jim Atkin introduced her to me and we played with Linda under the names the Classics and the Stardusters. We had a vocalist, John Copsey, and Jim Atkin on vibes and bongos and congas. Ken was on bass. We had no drummer. We practiced and tried to get some engagements but couldn’t get any, so we just kept on practicing, working at arrangements, trying things. With no style of our own, we tried everything we could think of, from “Summertime” to “Be-Bop-A-Lula.”

  Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.

  Fish are jumpin’

  And the cotton is high.

  Your daddy’s rich

  And your mama’s good lookin’.

  So hush little baby,

  Don’t you cry.

  —GEORGE GERSHWIN, “SUMMERTIME”

  In November of 1962, I was seventeen years old and starting to write instrumentals on a new guitar I had gotten for my birthday from Rassy, a Gibson Les Paul Junior with a sunburst finish and a single black Gibson pickup. A real electric guitar! It was my first one. The finish was cracked a lot but I thought it looked great. It had a little case that was pretty flimsy, made of cardboard or something, but with an alligator skin–looking finish. It was not the deluxe hard-shell case that John Daniel had for his Les Paul Standard, but I was extremely happy just to have a real electric guitar, simple as it was.

  Rassy and I eventually moved out of the apartment on Corydon and Hugo to 1123 Grosvenor Avenue, close to River Heights, a better neighborhood. We were about halfway up the social ladder compared to the super well-off River Heights and neighboring Tuxedo communities. I started going to high school at Kelvin High but stayed in touch with Ken. Our musical link remained strong even though he had moved as well and was now going to a different high school, Churchill High, in another part of town.

  We practiced and got better. That’s what I was focused on. I failed my first year at Kelvin and had to repeat grade ten. I was so distracted by music. While I was supposed to be studying, I drew little diagrams of stage setups, imagining how the equipment and amps would sound in different configurations. I was studying, but not my lessons. After two repeated grades in a row, my dad was writing letters to Rassy about my grades being bad and it was upsetting to both of us, but mostly to Rassy. She would go around the house talking about what an ass my dad was.

  About that time, my grandma died and Grandpa moved in with us. He stayed in what used to be Rassy’s bedroom and she converted our dining room into her new bedroom. Grandpa spent a lot of time at the club with his old pals. It was called the Carlton Club, and they used to play cards and go curling. Grandpa, W. N. “Bill” Ragland, spoke with a deep southern drawl and was very nice to us, contributing to our rent, but stayed mostly to himself. I don’t remember us eating together much. Grandpa ate at the club.

  There was a nightclub out on Pembina Highway called the Sugar Shack, named after a hit record of the day by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, and I remember going there to see Bill Black’s Combo. Bill Black played bass with Elvis back in the day, and the guitar player in the combo had a crazy unique sound he made by banging on the strings with his comb. This is how the guitar sound with Bill Black’s Combo got its percussive edge. It was very original and had a boogie bass line to it. There was also a sax, a cool smoky piano, drums, and Bill Black’s electric bass in the combo. There was no singer. It was a strictly instrumental group.

  When Ken and I went out to the Sugar Shack, I stood right in front of the band for hours, watching every move they made. When they played their big hit “Smokie—Part 2,” it was really impressive because they sounded just like the record. Exactly like it. I had played that record over and over on the Seabreeze. Slack-jawed, I stood there watching them. There I was, this wide-eyed kid, blocking their view, gawking at them from ten feet away. They were probably looking for women in the audience.

  Around March of 1961, Rassy got a job on a TV show called Twenty Questions and she became very happy. It was a quiz show. Rassy was pretty occupied with her new job. It took a lot of her time and she was getting into the swing of things. She had a few dates with Bill Trebilcoe, who was one of the panelists on the show, and I remember how she started wearing bright colors and looking really happy and different than she had looked in a long time. That made me happy, too. Something went amiss, though, because she reverted back to her old self after a while.

  Then I remember her drinking more and more. It was not
like she was drunk, but she seemingly always had something with her to drink. She was gone to the club a lot, the club being either the Niakwa Golf and Country Club or the Curling Club downtown. She would send me out in the Ensign to get her beer, after calling and making arrangements with the store. When I got there, they would carry out a case of Labatt’s pilsner beer and put it in the trunk for me. All I had to do was carry it up the stairs at the back of the house from the garage when I got home. I found I had more time to myself then, and I spent a lot of it listening to records on the Seabreeze and practicing on my guitar.

  Marilyn Nentwig, my girlfriend about that time, was very pretty, had a twin sister Jackie, and they were both a lot of fun to be with. Marilyn and Jackie were regulars on a TV show named Teen Dance Party. Besides being beautiful, they were great dancers, too. I went to a show once but I didn’t dance; I was too shy for that. Marilyn liked me anyway and we had a really good time together. We were just a couple of kids growing up. I used to visit their house all the time and we would play the electric organ they had in the living room. Ken Koblun visited their home with me, too, and he would get down on the floor and play the bass pedals with his hands. We must have been quite a sight! I loved their house and family. Everything was fun and happy. The whole family was together and they were all so mellow, no fighting or bad feelings that I ever saw, always having a good time.

  Marilyn helped me write down the music to one of my first songs, “I Wonder,” on a sheet of paper so I could send it to myself and not open it, protecting my copyright in a basic way. The theory was that the envelope would remain unopened and the postal stamp would show the date it was mailed, proving that I wrote it and when. She wrote the notes from my singing and I wrote the chords over the words. That kind of reminds me how my mom used to edit my dad’s manuscripts with him.

  Well, I wonder who’s with her tonight,

  And I wonder who’s holdin’ her tight.