by Neil Young
I re-signed with Reprise. It was the fourth quarter of 1987 and I could actually record in a studio. So we went back to SIR (where we had recorded Tonight’s the Night) to try to find the feeling again.
I was having trouble with the Crazy Horse guys, Billy and Ralph, too. I love those guys, but it was not working, or maybe it really was and I couldn’t see it. I probably missed it. The band was not grooving for some reason, so I started mixing it up, trying another bass player, George Whitsell, the original guitarist from the Rockets. In December we got a few good takes, “One Thing,” “Midnight Blues,” and “I’m Goin’,” all at SIR. George was really cool, but it still didn’t have that something I was looking for.
Chad Cromwell and Rick Rosas, the rhythm section from Joe Walsh whom I had seen recently at Farm Aid, had become available. I asked them to come in. When they did, they finally made the Bluenotes into a great band. A great band is all about the chemistry and the way the musicians relate to one another. When Billy and Ralphie did not slip into the groove with the things I wanted to do, I did what I had first learned to do in Winnipeg with the Squires. I followed the music until I found the sound. Billy and Ralph understood what that was all about as well as I did. I still play with them in Crazy Horse today.
We completed the recording of This Note’s for You, the first Bluenotes’ LP, and even did a few videos, but the video for “This Note’s for You,” rebelliously directed by Julien Temple, was banned from MTV, because mentioning products in songs was against MTV network policy, but we knew it was really banned because of what we were saying. Shit. What can you do? When we discovered what had happened, Elliot had fifteen hundred copies of the video made and sent them to news channels around the country. That resulted in a lot of exposure for our song and video. Our message was pretty straight-ahead.
Ain’t singin’ for Pepsi
Ain’t singin’ for Coke
I don’t sing for nobody
Makes me look like a joke
This note’s for you.
—“THIS NOTE’S FOR YOU”
Ironically, although the video was banned by MTV, it also won the MTV Video of the Year in 1988 in a vote by actual viewers. It was brilliant management of a bad situation by Elliot Roberts. Some may not believe it, but I know I would never have gotten anywhere without Elliot, who is absolutely the best friend and manager ever. Friend first. He and Pegi are my best friends now.
• • •
I RETURNED to my Canadian home in 1987 for a Kelvin High School reunion as well as for a celebration of the Winnipeg music scene called “Shakin’ All Over,” in honor of the Guess Who’s first big hit. I jammed with Randy Bachman and a bunch of other guys, and we celebrated our unique musical beginnings and the time when the community clubs were rockin’ every weekend with local bands. After hanging out and playing with Randy, the Squires got together and jammed late into the night for a small crowd of beer-drinking Canadians at a little club on Main Street called the Blue Note Café. All the original members got up on the tiny stage and played together one more time. A local blues harp player, Ben Darvill, got up and jammed with us as well. He was really hot. The only thing missing was Mort parked outside.
Wog got behind the wheel of Pocahontas, my tour bus, and the Bluenotes continued traveling through the country for months, playing old auditoriums and clubs, promoting the This Note’s for You LP, and recording Bluenote Café. This was a great time, with the music flowing and the big band playing night after night.
When we got back to California, a lawyer for Harold Melvin called and said that he and his Bluenotes, whose great song “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” was a hit in the seventies, were suing me for ripping off their name. To me, that record is one of the best songs and recordings ever made. The soul of that performance is just great; anguish, truth, and desperation calling out from the first note. I stop what I’m doing every time it plays and listen to it. I was surprised that they were suing me, and I felt bad. I had not heard of anything from them in years and thought it would be okay to use the name. After I settled with them, I renamed the band Bluenote Café, but things were changing and we never played together again. That period was over, ending as spontaneously as it had begun. I was moving on. No reason required. Just following the muse.
All the things that we’ve been through
You should understand me
Like I understand you.
Now, baby, I know the difference
Between right and wrong
I ain’t gonna do nothin’
To upset our happy home.
Oh, don’t get so excited
When I come home a little late at night
’Cause we only act like children
When we argue fuss and fight.
—“IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME BY NOW”
1930 Rolls-Royce Shooting Brake “Wembley”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
t Wembley Stadium in 1974, at the end of the tour, CSNY had performed on a bill with the Band, Joni Mitchell, and Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods. We had just about everything we needed, probably a lot more, but the last show was a fiasco, a blown-out drug-fueled performance that stands as one of the low points for CSNY. We were all guilty. Self-indulgence and selfishness were the rule of the day. We should have fired ourselves after that and, looking back, we might have.
The day after Wembley, I was looking for a reward for my diligent efforts. As I walked through a large showroom of antique British motorcars, a 1930 Rolls-Royce shooting brake, what we in North America call a station wagon, beckoned to me. It seemed to be speaking my language. English. With huge, round headlights gazing right into me, I thought I heard the old woodie ask me if I needed a ride around Europe. I whispered yes to myself and walked toward the salesman.
A few days later, crossing the English countryside in “Wembley,” our newly named 1930 Rolls-Royce shooting brake, we found ourselves in Harwich, a seaside village where we would board a car ferry to Europe. Graham Nash, his girlfriend, Callie, and Leslie Morris (Elliot’s secretary at the time, and later Larry Johnson’s wife and the mother of Ben and Hannah Johnson) had joined us, and were traveling in a second car with Joel Bernstein, our official photographer and friend. There was a small amusement park in Harwich and we went in and looked around, finding a room full of clocks that was very photogenic. Joel took a series of photographs, one of which was later used in the Tonight’s the Night album foldout.
In Essex, we stayed the night in a hotel while waiting for the morning ferry. I was still driving with RD (Ranger Dave) and Mazzeo, who had been with me for the whole tour, and we did our best beatnik-lifestyle interpretation. Finally, after crossing the channel in miserable weather and traveling along a gray freeway for a few hours, we arrived in Amsterdam.
Coming down from the big tour, we went out in the evenings and partied quite a bit. One night I will never forget: We went to a place called the Paradiso. I smoked a lot of hashish from a big joint being passed around and got extremely high. My condition was complicated by the fact that the hash was blended with a strong tobacco that made me very dizzy. I think that might have been the most stoned I have ever been. I was not high, having a great time with everything accentuated by the good weed. I was stoned, just trying to maintain well enough to get home before I crashed face-first into the sidewalk.
Walking back to the hotel, my feet would lift off of the ground quite easily but I was having trouble setting them back down to earth. RD helped me along and back to my room, where he stayed with me for several hours until I had come down enough to actually go to sleep. Every time I laid down, the room would begin to spin wildly and it would take a few minutes after I sat up again for it to stop circling.
Our little party walked around Amsterdam for a few days, exploring different areas. We eventually found a great hotel, the Memphis. While we were leaving the hotel, I saw a party of people that in
cluded a beautiful young lady. So striking was she that I walked right up to her and introduced myself without a shred of my usual shyness. Her name was Melody. She was from England, and we arranged a way to connect sometime. I wrote down her number and address on a notepad and put it in my coat pocket.
During our stay in Amsterdam, we spent most of the days looking for a barge to rent or buy so that we could live in it on one of the canals that ran through the city. No one wanted to give us one. I don’t think we looked right. We never had a chance. The amount of money didn’t seem to matter. We struck out completely.
We also had to have Wembley repaired twice. It was becoming rather obvious that the old Rolls was not in the pristine mechanical condition the salesman in London claimed it was in.
Amsterdam was beautiful in the fall, and we loved walking in the city looking in the shops and museums, so Wembley’s repairs were not much of a burden on our activities. Back at the Memphis, I was writing all the time. Every day a new song, a new melody, or further ramblings in the meandering, free-form typewritten book appeared as if by preordainment.
After staying at the Memphis for a couple of weeks, we finally grew tired of visiting museums, talking poetry, and planning fictitious events, like taking Wembley to Africa.
Graham and Callie had elected to leave for California, but the rest of us wanted to continue on, looking for some sun. Pressing on with our European vacation, we attempted to drive across Europe, heading toward Spain and the elusive sun, ignoring the fact that it was October already. Our first day on the road concluded in Belgium, where we left the grayness and foreign signs of the freeway to head toward the big city for the night. It was there that Wembley, at 9 miles to the gallon and putting 975 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, finally gave up and wheezed to a stop right in front of the Brussels Hilton Hotel, where valets stood shaking their heads. We had motored about 450 miles since London. Ranger Dave and Mazzeo stayed with the car and arranged to ship it back to America.
I soon returned to Malibu and my new life as a single man who only saw his kid on weekends. I had finally played out all of the possibilities, successfully delayed the inevitable, and looked reality in the eye unselfishly for the first time in a very long stretch.
1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz “Nanu the Lovesick Moose”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
he old Caddy was on a corner lot in a small neighborhood, the kind with little flags and a small shack in the middle of all of the cars. It stood out like a lighthouse on the shoreline. I liked what I saw and bought it for $2,500, which I felt was a real steal. It was a guzzler, but the price of gas was only thirty-nine cents a gallon, so that didn’t matter much. A Chicago car, this 1959 Eldorado Biarritz convertible had a little rust from the salt on the roads in winter, but it was all there, solid and original with a black-leather interior, bucket seats, stainless-steel trim, and all the options. It had been painted metallic blue somewhere along the line, decidedly not the original color.
About that time, I called Crazy Horse and asked Billy, Ralph, and Poncho to come to Chicago, where I was visiting with Carrie after her mother’s death, to record at the Chess Records Studio. I had located it in the phone book and booked studio time. I needed something to do and a reason to disengage from Carrie’s dad’s house. Poncho Sampedro was new in the group and we had only jammed once in Echo Park at Billy’s house, so I thought getting the band to Chicago would be a great way to feel it out in the studio. I called Nashville and asked Ben Keith to come up as well. I had a new song I had written called “Changing Highways.” The guys soon arrived and we checked into a hotel downtown.
We got together the night before the sessions so Poncho had a chance to learn the songs with us. He remembers that I was playing the songs and he would say, “Hey, Ben, you try the guitar,” then he’d smoke some weed and dig the song. Poncho thought we were just hangin’ out, didn’t see that we were woodshedding for the sessions so he would know the songs when we got into the studio. It didn’t matter, though. We got it down. Poncho’s laid-back attitude is a big part of who we are today as a band.
We arrived at Chess, and Tim Mulligan, who has been with me since the seventies, when he came to the ranch with Gigi, one of Carrie’s best friends from Chicago, was already setting up. The Chess studio was a place where all the blues legends had played, and I admit to having been a little intimidated. I liked the funkiness of the place. The monitors were not true and you had to compensate for that in the mixes, but the local engineers knew exactly how to do that. No high-tech solutions here, just local knowledge, born of years and years of recording. I was reminded of my times at Hitsville U.S.A., recording the Mynah Birds with Rick James for Motown back in 1965. It was that kind of place, although we were not at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, where Chess started and the real beginnings of the Chess legend were. In the mid-sixties, Chess had relocated to a much larger building at 320 East 21st Street, the label’s final Chicago home. That is where we recorded, but we were still feeling the vibe. We were soaking up Chess’s history and using it ourselves, feeling the legendary bluesmen we knew had recorded there.
The sessions went well and we got a funky take of “Changing Highways,” which is still unreleased today. We were there for two or three days. I loved recording wherever I was and whenever I could. That’s how we did it best. Crazy Horse returned to LA as Ben and I drove the metallic-blue 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible south down the highway, relaxing in a pair of leather bucket seats as the world flew by, south to Nashville and the rest of my new life.
We’re changing highways
In heavy traffic.
I see the lights change
to something graphic,
And is this your exit too?
—“CHANGING HIGHWAYS”
This was the car I had dreamed of owning ever since high school in Winnipeg, since the Flamingo Club, since forever. When we arrived in Nashville, we went right into the studio and started recording. At the time, Nashville was the right place for these songs. We had a lot of great musicians in the studio, because Ben knew everybody. None of it could have happened without Ben Keith.
We set up at Quadrafonic Sound on Sixteenth Avenue, with Elliot Mazer at the board. Quad was a little studio, built in a house, like many studios in Nashville, with an intimate feel and sound. It was a favorite among singer-songwriters like myself. The first day there, we recorded with Kenny Buttrey on drums, Tim Drummond on bass, Ben Keith on steel, and me on acoustic guitar. These musicians were known as the Stray Gators on the Harvest album and were all soulful, first-class players. Drummond had played with James Brown, Conway Twitty, and others. Ben had played with Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and many more. Buttrey had given his beat to Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, and countless country artists and hits. I was fortunate to be in their company.
We recorded a song called “Frozen Man,” which I had written in Amsterdam.
When anger has closed the door,
My eyes go blind and I can only see inside,
And I drown myself some more.
Cool water is what I need
And time and space
To help me understand,
But it’s alright.
Who could live inside this frozen man?
—“FROZEN MAN”
Kenny had other sessions booked, so he had to leave after the first one. A couple of days after, we returned to the studio with one of the greatest musicians of our time on drums: Levon Helm of the Band.
Far from the sparkling blue waters,
Where the fish and the canvases play,
And the waves are as calm as my father
And the daughters are dancing all day.
—“DAUGHTERS”
Later the same day, we recorded a song that used a few of the favorite expressions that Carrie’s mom loved to say.
I’d like to take a chance
/> But shit Mary I can’t dance
So here’s lookin’ up your old address
Ollie what a mess
We got to take the rest and Try.
And I Try to wash my hands
And I Try to make amends
And I Try to count my friends.
—“TRY”
But time was running out, so we recorded just one more with Levon before he had to go.
Up and down the old homestead,
The naked rider gallops through his head
And although the moon isn’t full
He still feels the pull.
—“THE OLD HOMESTEAD”
After one of the takes, Levon looked at me and asked, “What’s happening with the groove there?” He had noticed that I was holding back while he was pushing on, and it was creating a rub. I said, “I think we’re going too fast, so I was holding us back.” He looked at me with that look, those two eyes of his, and drawled, “Don’t do that. Don’t fight the groove.” I’ll never forget that. Those are the moments where you learn. You never know when they are coming.
Levon had some gigs and moved on, and the next day it was our good fortune to have the great Karl Himmel in town—the man who put down a big groove for JJ Cale—and Tim Drummond on bass. We put down a lot of songs. I decided to call the album Homegrown. It was completed and is still unreleased because I was making so many records at that time and there wasn’t enough time to release them all. One of the last songs I did was with Karl, Tim Drummond, and Ben, with Emmylou Harris and Ben singing harmony. It was called “Star of Bethlehem.”
