Special Deluxe

by Neil Young

  I kept thinking about Larry, processing the fact that he was gone. I saw him in the hallway of my hotel, heard his voice in the lobby. Pegi took it particularly hard. It took Pegi and me several months to recover and get back on our feet. Larry was very close to both of us in different ways. Ben Johnson, Larry’s son, took over finishing the Lincvolt picture with me and we kept on rolling. That’s what Larry would have wanted, so that’s what we did.

  You’re in heaven with nothing to do

  The ultimate vacation with no back pain

  And all we do is work work work.

  You’re on vacation

  We’re workin’

  You’re in heaven

  I’m workin’.

  —“YOU NEVER CALL”

  A while later, one night on the ranch, it was a full moon. Billowing clouds were rolling by and we had a good fire going in the junkyard. Ben Johnson and I were shooting a scene. Some Canada geese flew over, honking in the sky, as I was talking about Larry’s long history with the Lincvolt project with Dave Toms, an old Canadian friend of mine. Nearby, junkyard cars sat listening in the moonlight.

  I noticed the 1951 jeep pickup right where I had left it years before. The jeep pickup’s paint had worn over time to show the original construction-orange color in more places, giving it a rich patina. Weeds grew up all around it. The light from the fire played on the windshield. The jeep was talking to me. It was saying it missed Larry.

  One time on the road, Ben Johnson and I sat in Lincvolt’s front seat and talked frankly about how to treat Larry’s passing in the movie we were making. It couldn’t have been easy for Ben, yet he just kept looking and trying to figure out the best way for us to go forward. He had the same quality as his father, had the same focus, patience, and energy, and was born to do his own life’s work and, like Larry, he would do it in his own way.

  Again I hit the road on tour, doing a solo show across Canada. In summer of 2010, I was on the Trans-Canada Highway. While I was somewhere between Cypress River and Winnipeg, Manitoba, on that old road, a sweeping steel guitar came down from the clouds. I got the word from Pegi that my old friend Ben Keith had died on the ranch. It was the end of an era for me and my music.

  I was devastated by the loss of Ben, known as “Long Grain” to his friends. I played “Old Man” solo that night on the same guitar I had used on the original recording in Nashville the night I met Ben. I looked over to my right to where he always sat with his steel, still hearing his sweeping tones in my heart.

  With Long Grain gone, and his steel guitar silenced, it is hard for me to do all those songs we did together and not hear that steel echoing in my soul. Now I do them only as solo performances. I don’t want to hear anyone else attempting to play Ben’s parts on those songs with me.

  • • •

  LINCVOLT, now more than three years into the project, was equipped with a Capstone turbine at Brizio Street Rods. She was sounding like a quiet jet. However, as unique and cool as she was with her futuristic Batmobile-like sound, we could not yet go on a sustained journey, one of our primary goals. We had a maximum range of just over a hundred miles before we ran out of electric power and had to stop and regenerate. The system did not have enough power to regenerate more than what we were using when the car traveled at highway speeds. Everything we tried had taken a lot of time, and we still seemed to be aimlessly drifting, our lack of experience catching up with us.

  After climate change brought us Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil disaster, we were on a Gulf Coast benefit tour, playing concerts with super-low ticket prices, traveling along the Gulf of Mexico and working with Tyson Foods, gathering food that folks brought to the shows, and donating it to food banks to bring some help to the devastated area. The gulf had lost both its fishing income because of the oil in the water and the tourist trade because of the tar on the beaches.

  After the Gulf Coast tour, still filming Lincvolt, and carrying her in one of her tour semitrailers that doubled as a gym and garage, we headed north toward Milwaukee and Farm Aid, and then on to Michigan. We hit Detroit as the country continued reeling from the economic downturn that began in 2008.

  In Detroit, my friend Bob Krepsky, official historian at Ford Motor Company, introduced us to Bill Ford, and we were invited to tour the old Wixom plant, where our Continental was built back in 1959. There we were introduced to the man who had headed up all Lincoln builds at the factory for years, Gary Cooper, and he showed us the facility. Mr. Cooper rode shotgun with us as we eased Lincvolt through the giant multi-acre plant to roll along the Lincoln assembly line one last time. It was an emotionally intense visit.

  The giant Wixom Assembly Plant, where our Lincvolt Continental began her life of service, was being demolished around us. We moved slowly along the floor in the Continental. As we edged through the sparks that cascaded down on the cement floor from the metal torches of the demolitionists working above, giant pieces of steel fell from the ceiling, clattering loudly throughout the massive building. The welders did their work. Outside, Ben Johnson captured a shot of flocks of blackbirds circling over the plant. The sun was setting. It was a solemn day in Motor City. Times had changed.

  The “mound” was historic. It was used to proudly display the latest models coming out of the Wixom Assembly Plant and was located out at the far edge of the plant’s expansive parking lot. One of Lincvolt’s sisters definitely had had her big moment on the mound, as did many other seminal cars of the fifties and sixties. Mr. Cooper made sure the old spotlights were turned on as Lincvolt climbed to the top of the mound. We were exposed to passing freeway motorists, and cars were honking their horns in salute, witnessing the beautiful old Lincoln Continental resting in the bright spotlights below a windblown American flag. Everyone knew the plant was closing. This was a moment of pure emotion and sense of history. Larry Johnson would have loved to have captured it. His son, Ben, shot it.

  It was 2010. In the elections, the politics of change were being tested. Many politicians were denying the scientific fact that global warming was a man-made problem. Some even maintained that it wasn’t happening at all, and they were gaining power in Washington, ignoring science and practicing their politics of denial. They ridiculed President Obama repeatedly for even trying to address the issue. That CO2 was threatening the climate’s stability was dismissed as a myth.

  When Lincvolt appeared at a trade show that year in Las Vegas called SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association), I spoke about the future of electric cars with batteries charged by clean, domestic biofuel. We had to transport the car there by truck because it could not handle the distance to make the trip. We had been working for three years to make an example of a successful electric biofueled car. I knew we could get there if we just kept at it, but costs were mounting and time was passing.

  The car was beautiful and it was electric. People were intrigued by it but its generator still ran on gasoline. We were still trying. It had proved to be endlessly fascinating, rewarding, and challenging, but we were definitely not there yet.

  Needing a rest, a few weeks later, Pegi and I were together at a retreat in the desert, a place Larry had shown us, where he had often visited for relaxation and rejuvenation. Very early on the second day of our vacation, the phone rang in our room. It was an anxious call from Ben Johnson, telling me that a fire had destroyed the car. The sound of his voice told the whole story. Sitting in bed, I Googled the news and watched TV coverage of Lincvolt burning on my laptop.

  The announcer did not know that Lincvolt had caught fire because it was left charging with an untested system. He was talking about me being a rock star and this being my warehouse, a much more interesting story, but I could clearly recognize the chrome and taillights of Lincvolt. Flames danced on the chrome as the plastic taillight lenses melted.

  I couldn’t believe what had happened, but I had seen it with my own eyes. I was in shock. Pegi and I left the r
etreat and headed home immediately to see the damage firsthand. A terrible fire had ravaged the warehouse. For a while I was hard on myself. I had really let the car down. Now Lincvolt had the stigma of being an electric car that had burned, but the fire was not the fault of electric cars. It was our own fault for not being careful and following safe procedures. No one was there to monitor Lincvolt in case a problem developed, and she was left charging with an untested system. It was our fault, not the car’s. It could have easily been averted.

  There was still a lot left in the warehouse that survived or only suffered a few paint ripples from the extreme heat, including Taylor Phelps’s 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse. That was November of 2010. It was a devastating loss and we were reeling from it. It was then that I realized the fire might have been a blessing in disguise. I learned that the insurance money was almost enough to rebuild the Continental completely, and with all of the new information we had gathered over the past three years and the people we had met, we could finally do it right.

  • • •

  MY SOUL MATE PEGI bought me a parts car, a 1958 Continental convertible with identical matching metal, as a birthday present to replace the melted and deformed parts of the original car’s body. After that, Roy Brizio named the car “Miss Pegi,” and we had a custom chrome plate engraved with MISS PEGI to replace the old Continental emblem that had melted into the original dashboard in the fire. Roy’s suggestion to name the car Miss Pegi was a very thoughtful and sensitive idea. He understood the connection between a guy’s car and his wife or girlfriend. Roy had probably learned that from many years of experience working with fanatical hot rod guys and people like myself.

  Starting over, I called Bruce Falls at AVL. Bruce was a professional when it came to building series hybrids, a person I knew and respected. Bruce, too, saw that the future of transportation was electric. He had seen it long before we did and had made it his life’s work. When we talked, Bruce explained to me that none of the generator systems we had tried over the years were anywhere near big enough to maintain the giant Continental’s energy needs, so the car’s range would always have been extremely limited. He suggested a Ford Atkinson four-cylinder engine as a generator, the same flex-fuel engine used in the Ford Escape Hybrid. I was excited. Now we were finally going to be able to build the real thing.

  • • •

  WHEN WE ADDED the next-generation biofuel to our new generator system, we finally succeeded in creating the system we had been searching for. I had done a lot of research and found cellulosic ethanol, a fuel of the future being made at a pilot plant in Scotland, South Dakota, by POET. This second-generation biofuel, made domestically, provided a very large reduction in CO2 emissions compared with gasoline. It did not have a negative effect on the world food supply. The biomass used for this fuel was corn stover, the waste of food crops, nonfood crops, and other waste. It was a sensible solution. Our world has an abundance of waste.

  I kept reading, probing, and learning about biomass. Interestingly, speaking for the USA at a world conference on biofuels in 2005, Thomas Dorr, the undersecretary of the US Department of Agriculture for the Bush administration, had said: “In fact, not too many years down the road, once we get cellulosic ethanol up to speed, just about everything on a farm except the machinery, the buildings, and the proverbial squeal of the pig will be a potential energy source. From the sunlight glinting on the fields to the wind rippling through the trees, to the corn stover that today mostly rots in the field; tomorrow it will be powering our vehicles.”

  Paul Wolfowitz, former leader of the World Bank Group and an early Bush administration proponent of the war on Iraq, added: “In the long term, the manufacture of ethanol from cellulose offers one of the greatest hopes. This technology, which is so far only developed on a pilot scale, uses new catalysts and enzymes to speed up natural processes. The advantage is that it does not rely on valuable crops. It can use waste products such as straw corn stalks or agriculture debris.”

  The discovery that people connected to the Bush administration had been advocating cellulosic ethanol seven years before I knew it existed was a real eye-opener for me. I was surprised. It goes to show that the world is not black and white. The farther you look, the more you see.

  With the help of Ford Motors, we had the motor specially set up in Detroit to run on one hundred percent cellulosic ethanol for our generator. Setting the engine to run on this specific fuel got a lot more energy out of it than the compromised E85 vehicles. They sacrificed energy to be able to also run on gasoline and E85. Both fuels suffered from this idea. Our generator did not. This biogenerator, coupled with a larger fuel tank, gave Lincvolt a range of well over four hundred miles. Because it was maximized for second-generation biofuel, the motor would barely run on normal gasoline at all. It didn’t want to anymore. Neither did I.

  Although I had no interest in using gasoline myself, I did see the immediate need for a carburetion system that could recognize the type of fuel and adjust automatically, allowing several different fuels, including gasoline, to be used freely. I saw that as a key piece in the mass transition to renewable fuels, allowing people the freedom of choice they deserved.

  Brizio Street Rods brought it all together. Roy Brizio organized the rebuild. We used my birthday gift from Pegi and repaired the fire damage to Lincvolt’s body at Camilleri’s Auto Works in Sacramento. Shavers Auto Interiors created a masterpiece. When the car went back to AVL for a last tune-up and calibration of the new electric drivetrain, Miss Pegi was born.

  It was the end of 2012. During the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, President Obama’s support of electric vehicles became a political issue for his adversaries, who got most of their funding from the oil company lobbyists. They said uninformed and negative things about electric cars in general. They painted the president’s conviction as folly, a waste of time, something America was not ready for. Obama cars.

  After Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast that year, the realization of global warming’s effects and the fears of more storms started to take hold. People in New England states actually started cutting down the beautiful, big trees around their houses in fear of the next superstorm, prompting a front-page news story in the New York Times.

  Climate chaos continued to produce unprecedented tornadoes in Oklahoma, historic flooding in Europe, the US, and Canada, and record-breaking heat waves around the world. The predictions made by scientists of the world and Al Gore’s 2006 documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, were resonating.

  Weather forecasters on television discussed the extreme conditions as proof that the worst winter on record was right now, but they stopped short of mentioning climate change and drawing a connection—the connection science had verified—and were followed by a commercial that was for a gas-burning, CO2-spewing car. It wasn’t until 2014 that I saw a major television network fully acknowledge climate change and its impact. It was ABC.

  On our journey across America we visited Utah, and in Canyonlands National Park we met inspiring and dedicated activist Daryl Hannah, who traveled with us on part of our journey. Daryl had been studying biofuels and carbon abuse for longer than I had, and had taken a similar path, with some of her own cars running alternatives to fossil fuels, to make an example of what could be done with the kinds of cars America loves; a Trans Am and an El Camino. She was interested in Canyonlands because oil companies were looking at that national treasure as an oil sands opportunity. After a few days of meeting people and learning about the history of the oil companies in the area, we traveled on, discussing the challenges and wondering about the solutions. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, all of us together, enjoying the beauty of Canyonlands, and continuing our dedication to preserving and protecting Mother Earth.

  • • •

  WHEN WE RETURNED to California, during post-trip maintenance by Bruce Ferrario at Four Star Automotive, something very weird happened. Bruce finished his w
ork and washed her for the drive back to Brizio’s, but Miss Pegi would not start. Turning her key would result in a normal start but then her power would go dead. Click, click. CLICK. The first two clicks meant she was on. The third click meant she had turned herself off. It was like she changed her mind. When he finally got her going for the short trip back to Brizio’s, Miss Pegi stalled right on the road halfway there. This was highly unusual and totally unexplained. The next day, when we came into Brizio’s shop to see how she was, everything was fine. She was running perfectly.

  After we drove to Southern California, Bruce Falls looked for the problem, but there was nothing obvious. He would have to see the car while it was exhibiting the problem, to locate and diagnose it. It was an unsolved mystery.

  At that time, we changed fuels to straight cellulosic ethanol, rather than the E85 blend, and completed testing Miss Pegi on one hundred percent cellulosic ethanol, finding even more CO2 emissions reductions compared to gasoline, and we had improved again. Miss Pegi had gotten even cleaner!

  As a reborn E-Lincoln she was very fast and sure, handling the tight curves and mountain roads near the ranch incredibly well. She was as ready as we could make her for the fossil fuel–free journey to Washington and the final filming of segments of our movie. We were all in high spirits, anticipating a great finish, although that unsolved mystery was still there.

  The first day of our gasoline-free trip across America to Washington got off to a late start and was uneventful. After staying overnight in Sacramento, about ninety miles from the ranch, we started up the long grade over the Sierras. I noticed that the battery-power level was falling as we climbed the Donner Pass into Truckee. Checking the generator, I saw that it was running, but when I looked to see how much power it was making, I saw zero. Miss Pegi was slowly running out of her precious reserve power.

  I decided to conserve energy and travel slower on the shoulder until we reached the next exit. Less speed equals less energy used over the same distance. At that point, the California Highway Patrol began to assist, traveling behind us with their blinkers on. A few miles later at the next exit, we pulled off and stopped. Someone recognized me. A small crowd gathered and soon cameras were out and everyone was taking pictures of Miss Pegi, the highway patrolman, and the rocker.