Special Deluxe

by Neil Young

  When I saw that Santa Ana Motors had a 1951 Willys Jeepster for sale for $750, it gave me an excited feeling, and I was interested in looking at it right away. The trip to Santa Ana took a couple of hours, and I went with my friend Danny Tucker, so that if I bought the car, I could drive it home immediately. Danny was a happy-go-lucky guy who I always enjoyed being around. He was an actor, a friend of Briggs, and a great conversationalist. Danny had helped me move into my new house the day the deal closed, and we had become good friends.

  The 1948 through 1951 Willys Overland Jeepster was an open phaeton, slightly reminiscent of the designs from the twenties and thirties. When we got to Santa Ana Motors, the faded yellow and black Jeepster convertible was visible in the front of the lot and I knew immediately that I wanted it. When I did drive it, I found it to be a pretty good runner, needing nothing. Its convertible top was a little raggedy, and the gearshift linkage was funky, making it so that you had to almost go into reverse to get to second gear from first, doing a maneuver that kind of reset the position of the linkage and allowed second gear to be accessed. I looked at that as a theft deterrent. If you didn’t know that little secret there was no way you could steal the car. You would be stuck in first gear.

  Aside from that quirky feature, the car was pretty straightforward. Things were well-worn, including the knobs and the chrome on the dash, which was very spotty and well-aged, but the car itself was a real beauty, soulful and open like a desert cruiser. Its jeep pedigree shone through as I stood back and surveyed my latest purchase. On the highway driving back to Topanga, I discovered the overdrive, which allowed a top speed of about sixty to sixty-five miles per hour when it was engaged. Without the OD engaged, the car was very sure-footed and the low gear ratio would make it perfect for the back roads of Topanga that I loved to traverse, so I was a very happy camper.

  • • •

  IN LATE SUMMER OF 1969, July or August, I released my second LP, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, playing with Crazy Horse for the first time, the beginning of the most fruitful musical relationship of my life. Crazy Horse is the easiest band for me to fall into a groove with. There is something about the beat of that band, Ralph Molina’s sensitivity to what I play and his knowing where I am about to go with the beat. About then, there was a screenplay in the works by Herb Berman and my friend Dean Stockwell, both Topanga dwellers and people I had met through Susan. Their story was set in the canyon and very loosely revolved around an artist carrying a tree from the ocean up through the canyon. An earthquake and tidal wave also played big parts, with the wave rushing up the canyon right to the edge of the little village. There was a lot more to it than that, with some characters who transcended the moment and carried some messages. Universal executives came to my house with Dean one day. Dean wanted them to meet me because I had written a loose soundtrack based on what I had read in the treatment. I think since my records were selling well that Dean thought the executives should know I was doing the soundtrack. Every bit helps when you are trying to get a movie supported. The title was After the Gold Rush. The screenplay was a very artistic endeavor, probably too far out there for the Universal executives, and the film was never completed, but I was influenced by it. I made the record.

  Briggs and I took a lot of rides in the Jeepster on the back roads of Topanga, listening to cassettes together, checking the mixes, and I took a lot of rides alone. During the After the Gold Rush sessions, I had just purchased a pound of Panama Red from someone in the canyon. A joint of Panama Red and a Jeepster ride made a really fine combination, and we experienced that often in those days, traveling to the tops of the mountains on old roads to stop there and just look at the beauty of California through our young eyes, our vision heightened and sensitized by the good weed.

  Dreams abounded as life rushed by.

  Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor comin’

  Sayin’ something about a queen.

  There were peasants singin’ and drummers drummin’

  And the archer split the tree.

  There was a fanfare blowin’ to the sun

  That floated on the breeze.

  Look at Mother Nature on the run

  In the 1970s.

  —“AFTER THE GOLD RUSH”

  We were living our dream—making our music, conquering our goals, and celebrating every victory with the relish only a young soul can fleetingly know. We were truly there, on top of those mountains, rolling through those valleys with the women, love, and the songs we were singing, and that was just the beginning. The records Briggs and I made together are testimony to the love and pain, to the joy and sorrow, of coming of age.

  I was so engrossed in my music and art that I lost track of Susan and the sensitivity it took to protect our love. I must have been too young to hold on to her because soon she was gone and we were over. The success and fame wore on her, and on us, it was a strain on our young marriage. It buckled and fell.

  We went our separate ways. I was young and accepted change easily. I felt the need to move on, north to the trees and the rolling hills I had seen from the jet plane windows while flying over San Francisco’s golden peninsula as the summer ended and the green grass turned to wheat straw. I purchased my ranch up there and moved out of our Topanga house while the escrow passed, waiting for that September day when I could finally move to the North Country and the ranch I would call home for decades more to come. The future was much bigger than the past.

  When the winter rains come pourin’ down

  On that new home of mine

  Will you think of me

  And wonder if I’m fine?

  Will your restless heart come back to mine

  On a journey through the past?

  Will I still be in your eyes

  And on your mind?

  —“JOURNEY THROUGH THE PAST”

  Finally the escrow completion date arrived and it was time to move north. Johnny Barbata, our CSNY drummer and the former drummer for the Turtles, rode north with me. Following us were Bruce Berry and Guillermo Giachetti, two of CSNY’s roadies, in Bruce’s old 1958 Caddy limo.

  It was summer’s end. Raging wildfires burned on both sides of the freeway.

  Johnny and I drove along in the Jeepster, loaded with my guitars and gold records. We headed north on 101, out of LA’s San Fernando Valley. We left that crowded valley behind, climbing up the long grade that would eventually peak and take us to the coast, then through Santa Barbara, past the Earl Warren Showgrounds where Buffalo Springfield had played so many times, on through San Luis Obispo, north to San Jose, and, eventually, to the ranch.

  Traveling in the Jeepster was freeing; our hearts were eager with expectation as a new chapter began for all of us. Johnny was looking for a place to buy near the ranch, talking about it as he beat on his knees with a pair of drumsticks, and the other guys were going to check out the area as well, looking for places to settle. Briggs was planning to come up to try to find a house. It was a monumental transition happening in the blink of an eye.

  The Jeepster fairly flew along the road at about sixty miles per hour for nine or ten hours, burning about twenty-six gallons of gasoline. The sun had already set when we arrived at the ranch. The smells and sounds were so refreshing. The air was crisp and clean. We were in the country, far from the city. It was much less populated than Topanga. We didn’t know we had just put 520 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, laying a few more bricks in the foundation of global warming.

  We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of the little ranch house, and I was already talking about the walls coming down and the fireplaces I would build. I wanted to use redwood planking like my old house in Topanga had. Our lives were so full, and now we had moved to an area unknown to us, full of promise and disappointment, both in healthy amounts. A lot of discovery lay before us: love, hard drugs, more money than ever before, responsibilities of parenthood, more fame
, and even more fame.

  When we awoke, the sounds of hundreds of red-winged blackbirds greeted us from the little lake in front of the cabin. We needed food. Looking in the Yellow Pages, Johnny found a health food market that was located in Palo Alto, a town on the other side of the hill, near Stanford University. It was located on California Avenue and was in a big building shaped like a Quonset hut. NEW AGE NATURAL FOODS said the sign as we pulled the Jeepster into the side parking lot.

  Inside there was a newspaper called the Whole Earth Catalog. We picked one up and walked the aisles, which were crowded with Earth Mamas. These beautiful and wholesome-looking young women were everywhere, a different breed than the hippie girls I had met in Hollywood back when I first arrived in the Pontiac hearse. It was hard to believe that was only a few years before. Johnny stood, amazed, looking at the selections of granola in bins at the end of one of the aisles. Coffee beans and hand grinders were for sale in another area. Fresh fruit and vegetables were abundant. This was the healthiest store I had ever seen, not that I was in the habit of looking for health food.

  In the parking lot, we put the top down, sat in the car stealthily smoking a joint, and watched for a few minutes as Earth Mamas came and went. This place became a regular trip for us in the first few months. We got all of our food there except for bacon. For some reason I couldn’t understand, they had no bacon. We stocked up on supplies and one day went to an antique store, where I bought an ancient refrigerator that had a round compressor on top. It looked like something out of a science fiction movie and we got it delivered to the ranch. The narrow forest roads were too scary for the delivery service, so we had to lead them in with the Jeepster.

  I have always loved narrow roads, and the roads around the ranch were perfect cliffside one-laners, winding through the serene beauty of the redwoods. I would spend hours just driving around, learning the roads—where they went, how passable, how quiet they were—and I was in love with my new home.

  The first day I arrived at the ranch, the foreman, Louis Avila, and his wife, Clara, were living in a little house about two hundred yards away from the modest main house I lived in. A lake with geese and ducks, fish and frogs, and always red-winged blackbirds lay between my small house and theirs. Reeds surrounded the water. It was so beautiful, and every day I would walk down a little path from my house to a couple of huge redwoods right by the shore, sit down, and have morning coffee.

  Those legions of red-winged blackbirds sang to me in a loud chorus every morning and sunset. Sometimes I would sit there and toke on a joint at the end of the day, waiting for another song to come to me. The songs loved it there and came constantly, and on my birthday, I wrote a song for Louis.

  Old man look at my life,

  Twenty-four and there’s so much more.

  Live alone in a paradise that makes me think of two.

  Love lost, such a cost,

  Give me things that don’t get lost,

  Like a coin that won’t get tossed, rolling home to you.

  —“OLD MAN”

  I had gotten another pound of Panama Red somewhere and it was great weed. Pure bliss. There was a great dirt road, perfect for the Jeepster, I used often to get down to a grocery store from the hill. I always looked forward to the drive. I would light up a joint and get behind the wheel. The road was dusty as could be and we traveled it often, the Jeepster and me. As the years passed, it was closed off and paved, becoming a private road with an electric gate, but I knew the code. Eventually a security car patrolled it and I was not allowed to drive on it anymore. It was kind of symbolic of the growth that was taking off in the area.

  The country roads were getting paved over and what used to be wild was tame and private. Things were changing again, and I was starting to feel that it wasn’t for the better. Something else died with that dusty dirt road.

  Slippin’ and a slidin’

  And playin’ domino.

  Leftin’ and then rightin’

  It’s not a crime, you know.

  You got to tell your story

  Boy, before it’s time to go.

  Are you ready for the country?

  Because it’s time to go.

  —“ARE YOU READY FOR THE COUNTRY?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  s I settled in at Broken Arrow Ranch and continued exploring the area, I discovered a little place up on the hill called Alex’s, where I eventually found the next love of my life, Pegi Morton. A fellow Canadian, Alex Reid, had started a restaurant-bar and had a couple of local ladies working for him, making tip money. He was just getting started. If the ladies didn’t make enough in tips, Alex would give them a little money. The restaurant was mostly used by locals and was just starting to draw folks who weren’t from the mountain itself. I visited occasionally and that’s where I first saw Pegi. She was in her late teens. Her incredibly blue eyes and blond hair would have gotten anyone’s attention. She was the hostess at Alex’s and the main attraction for me.

  One evening while I was eating at Alex’s, I asked her for pepper and she looked directly in my eyes and said, “Sure, it rips through your system and takes seven years to digest.” I was pretty captivated and interested in her by then and tried in vain one night to get her to come down and check out my new hot tub at the ranch. She said, “No thanks.” That was the beginning of a four-year courtship that lingered off and on. One Halloween there was a party at Alex’s and Pegi came as Wonder Woman. I thought she was. Pegi and I were married in 1978 at my sea-level house in Malibu, in a private ceremony with a few close friends.

  As all of this was taking place, the ranch continued to develop. The Jeepster was always there with the family, sort of a local resident. There were a few assorted ranch equipment barns. One of these barns was made into my first car barn, which held about four or five cars. After I married Pegi and our son Ben Young was born, it was converted into a gym and train barn where I built a large train layout. Ben used to travel over there in his bassinet on the Jeepster’s front seat with me. I would put him on the train table and talk to him as I laid track and built scenery out of stumps and moss from the forest.

  Paul Williamson, nicknamed “Wog,” was a local guy from Pescadero, a nearby fishing town. His family was an old respected coast-side family. Paul became a good friend, and he started to take care of my cars in the seventies. Wog found Jon McKeig and introduced me to him after an accident damaged one of my cars around 1975, and I hired Jon to do some bodywork.

  Jon was a master body- and paint-man from Scotts Valley, another nearby town. He worked with metal like no one I had ever seen. He would put stress on a piece of bent metal by pulling on it with a counterweight and watch it straighten for a week, then adjust the stress until it was perfectly straight, letting time do the work. Metal seemed to move in his hands while time stood still. One day after a few years, he came to me and said he would like to work for me. So, in the mid-eighties, I hired Jon McKeig to take care of my car collection. I loved Jon’s work and thought perhaps he could manage the restorations of the vehicles that needed it and touch up the ones that didn’t. That was my plan. Jon was a veteran of the Vietnam War and was always there to help our family any way he could. The way he was with our children, especially Ben Young, showed his true colors, and Pegi and I both love Jon very much. He was one of the kindest people I have ever known.

  Paul had brought him in and now he took over Paul’s job, but Paul kept driving my tour bus. He was a great guy to have on the road. We had a lot of fun, and he was a safe driver. Wog continued being my good friend and drove my bus on the tours I did in the eighties, and there were a lot of them.

  At one point I had to store all of my cars down in Pescadero near Paul’s house because I didn’t have enough space on the ranch to hold them. Unfortunately, extensive damage happened to some of them down there when moths got into the interiors, resulting in the use of mothballs, further ruining many
of the cars by making them smell bad. I felt bad that I was responsible for the damage. I really needed a good place for them to live. It was not enough to have the cars if I couldn’t take care of them.

  The ranch grew again with another parcel in 1980, by some 1,200 acres, and after cruising over the expanded ranch in the Jeepster, I found a perfect location to erect a big prefab metal building to house my collection of clunkers and classics. There were a lot of them because I never sold anything.

  Finally my cars would have a place to live.

  With cars, collecting and obsession walk a similar path. There is a fine line between the two and I was close to it. I was beginning to wonder about myself, but luckily for me, the feeling passed.

  I quickly found a musical use for the big car barn. I had to break it in. I love new spaces to play music. Initially it had a gravel floor and a great big sound, so before I had concrete poured, which would be better for the cars but would ruin the sound, I had Larry Cragg, my super-talented guitar technician and amp specialist, come and set up my amp rig there.

  With Old Black and Gold, my two Les Paul Gibson guitars that I used the most with Crazy Horse, I was ready to begin. Larry had set up my full-stage rig—a Fender Deluxe amp, a Magnatone amp, and a Baldwin Exterminator amp—along with my custom foot pedal made by Sal Trentino (the electronics) and Johnny Foster (the woodwork). Johnny was Tim Foster’s brother. Tim was my tour production manager.

  Sal Trentino was a master guru of electronics, designing, tuning, and repairing tube amps, among many other talents. He was a legend with the musicians in the area. He kept Carlos Santana and many other guitarists from Bay Area bands sounding good. Both he and Larry Cragg came from Prune Music in Mill Valley, one of West Coast rock and roll’s legendary spots. It took a lot of talented people to create my big, creamy, distorted sound. I told Sal what I wanted and he built the innards of the pedal board for me.