by Neil Young
But anyway, back in North Bay, Terry’s father, who was a policeman, had no cash for us. We were offered Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Scotch in the morning, though, followed by a Coke. That was how Terry started his day, with Coca-Cola. His dad was enjoying the Corn Flakes. There was no milk. That was something new to me, Coke in the morning, and I tried it for a while.
Eventually we headed south to Toronto to get some help from my dad. We were treated well, but it was a little stiff and uncomfortable around there and we didn’t stay too long. I felt like we were in the way. My father had remarried, and I met my little sister, Astrid, and her mother (by the same name) there for the first time. Little Astrid was very young then, three or four years old, taking oboe lessons. I started exploring the Yorkville music scene, the Canadian equivalent of New York’s Greenwich Village. I called Ken and Bob, and after some apologizing for blowing off our last gig in Fort William, I convinced them to come out and give Toronto a try.
That was really the end of the Squires, though. Ken, Bob, and I tried to put together something in Toronto, but it was not that easy to get a gig there. We rehearsed in the lobby of an old theater that my dad was able to arrange for us. He was supporting us, and that made me feel like he was behind us. I think when he saw me up close in Toronto he realized how serious I was.
There was not a lot of room for us to break in in Yorkville. It was nothing like Fort William, and times were tough. There were many bands, and the competition for gigs was great. A manager I had met, Marty Onrot, brought people by to listen to us, but no one really bit. We had Jim Ackroyd in the band for a while, and he was really good. He had played with the Galaxies, the number-two group back in Winnipeg, and we filled out a lot with Jim playing guitar. We did a song called “Casting Me Away,” and it sounded great. But no one hired us. There was zero success, and we got no jobs. Bob eventually left the band and went back to Winnipeg. Ken and I tried a few different players, got a new drummer named Geordie McDonald, and did maybe one gig at a ski resort in Vermont. It was an audition gig, and they didn’t take us.
We didn’t succeed in taking Toronto by storm. It was a tough time. We were small fish in a big pond, had no reputation, and really there was nothing special about us in the big city. We were out of our league. We tried, auditioned, practiced, but nothing panned out. Ken and I were living in a rooming house on Huron Street near Yorkville Village, eating macaroni with wieners and beans that we cooked up in the communal kitchen in the house. There were maybe six or seven other rooms with tenants. It was bleak. I met a girl named Sandy Glick, and that was the high point. I had a friend. I skirted around drugs and parties. I escaped.
Perhaps Jack Harper and Ken Koblun are the Squires I remember the most, Jack because he is still in contact with updates on Winnipeg and is still in the Squires in spirit, and Ken because he was so much of a friend and always gave everything he had. Ken was really the heart of the Squires. He lived it with me and went through all the same changes I did.
The breakup with Ken and the Squires was one of the hardest things I can remember. I probably handled it very poorly and that’s why it is hard for me to remember. Ken did well for a while, actually better than I did, playing with the Dirty Shames and a few others in the Toronto area. I tried playing some solo gigs and did one in North Bay and another in the city, and a guest shot at the New Gate of Cleve on Avenue Road when the headliner was sick.
I went down to New York for an audition at Elektra Records that Marty had set up, went to Greenwich Village, and met Richie Furay, who had been in a group with Stephen Stills before the Company and was living for a short time at the address Steve had given me on Thompson Street. Richie said Steve had gone to LA to start a band! I taught Richie “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” and then I did that demo session at Elektra Records that went badly. They had me set up in a tape storage room. I had my electric Gretsch to play and I ended up not using my amp because I had a bad guitar cord. (I had dragged my amp all the way to New York; I still remember lugging it through Port Authority Bus Terminal. I asked someone for a hand with it, and he replied, “You’re in the Big Apple now, kid—carry it yourself!”) Anyway, I ended up doing the demo without it. I sucked. I flunked the audition. They didn’t take me.
I told Richie to say hello to Stephen if he heard from him and headed back to Toronto. Richie then heard from Steve and went to LA to join in a band with him. Back in Toronto, eventually I sold my Gretsch and got an acoustic twelve-string. The Gretsch had a white case that had been signed by everyone I had met to that time, including Stephen, and I am sorry I sold it. I was out of money and I didn’t know what else I could do. I wanted to give the acoustic solo thing a try in the Village (Yorkville). That Gretsch guitar and signed case is probably around somewhere. I sold it at a music store on Yonge Street, and of all the things that are out there of mine, that is the one I wish I still had. That was my first Gretsch, just like Randy Bachman’s, but it was gone and I took my acoustic twelve-string to a few gigs and got some bad reviews. My first review dismissed my songs as full of clichés. They probably were! What’s wrong with clichés? I thought I was pretty good, myself. I had an arrangement of “Oh Lonesome Me” that I really liked, and people laughed at it, thinking it was a parody or something. I used it on After the Gold Rush, and that worked.
Once I went down to Detroit to the Chessmate Club and tried to get a job, but that didn’t happen. I did write a song on a napkin in the White Castle across the street called “The Old Laughing Lady.” I stayed at Joni Mitchell’s house with her and her husband, Chuck, in Detroit while I was there. Eventually they left, and after one night sleeping in some girl’s basement, to the amazement of her parents, I left one morning in a snowstorm and returned to Toronto. It was cold and I didn’t have any warm clothes. That was a long trip.
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It was rough in Toronto, and then I joined the Mynah Birds. I didn’t know it at the time, but Ken actually took off down to LA and played with Stephen and Richie for a week while I was in the Mynah Birds. He didn’t like it and came back to play with the group he was with, 3’s a Crowd. He was doing a lot better than me at that point.
In Toronto I became acquainted with Bruce Palmer, who I think I met with some folkies at David Rea’s flat in the Village. That is where I smoked my first weed. I got high and loved it instantly. The music sounded like God. We were all playing. David was an excellent acoustic guitarist who played with various folk acts like Ian & Sylvia and the Allen-Ward Trio as an accompanist. Bruce was just there hanging, and we became friends quickly.
He asked me to come and check out the Mynah Birds, who had just lost their lead guitarist. I joined the band and played my acoustic twelve-string with a pickup. It was pretty different. I really liked playing rock and roll again, and the Mynah Birds decided I was in. Eventually, the backer of the band, John Craig Eaton, bought more equipment for us, and that included a Rickenbacker electric for me to play. I missed my Gretsch, but we did a lot of gigs. Ricky James Matthews, as he was called then, was our lead singer, and he was known as the Black Mick Jagger. He sang his ass off. Living with Rick in a basement apartment on Isabella, near Yorkville Village, I became introduced to other drugs. I was trying amphetamines and smoking a little hash. Looking back, I could have gone a lot deeper. Luckily I didn’t get too far in the stronger drugs.
The band definitely rocked, and eventually we started doing some tunes Rick and I wrote together like “It’s My Time.” Mostly we did Stones covers in the beginning. I was so jacked on pills that once I jumped off a stage and pulled out my cord! That was a high school gig somewhere in Toronto. But we got good and landed a recording contract with Motown.
It was early 1966, and we headed down to Detroit and stayed in a big hotel, the Pontchartrain. While we were there I saw the Newbeats, the group that had a big hit, “Bread and Butter,” going up the escalator. They all had dyed blond hair and matching powder-blue suits. I was very impressed. A real recording group, right in front of my ey
es! I thought the sessions went great at Motown’s Hitsville U.S.A., 2648 West Grand Boulevard. Smokey Robinson dropped in and was helping us, and some of the Four Tops would come in and back up our vocals, standing behind us as we sang. They made us sound cool. Everything was going great! It was just a big family feeling around Motown.
It was a very cool time and place. We even went to choreography school to learn how to move, and I’m sure we flunked, but they treated us well. They fitted us for clothes. We were on our way to the big time! And then Rick, who was a U.S. citizen, got busted for evading the draft for the Vietnam War. He was gone, just like that. It was over. Zip.
Then, two days later, Morley Shelman, who was our manager, OD’d on some heroin he had bought with our advance money. The cash was all gone, and so was our manager. We went back to Toronto and the band broke up. It was time to make a big move. That night I met with Bruce Palmer at a seedy little club on Avenue Road called the Cellar.
Driving Pocahontas, 1978.
Chapter Nine
Playing with Fire
I made a film once, Human Highway, in which I burned four wooden Indians in a bonfire. It was a great scene in the movie, and it had a lasting effect on my life. One of the wooden Indians, the chief, had lived for a long time in the trees outside my beach house in Malibu, where Pegi and I were married in 1978. Sometime after the filming of that part of Human Highway, I went on the road in my bus and toured America. It was a 1973 Eagle bus we had fitted with wooden wings on the side and car tops, a Studebaker and a Hudson, on the top. The interior was all custom woodwork. It was a wild machine used prominently in the movie. I called her Pocahontas. Whenever I was asked about the bus, I would say, “Give a hippie too much money and anything can happen.”
Now I’m going to relate to you three stories; I think you’ll notice a pattern . . .
First story: In 1974, CSNY did a tour of North America and actually made it to England to finish up at Wembley Stadium for a final show with Joni Mitchell, The Band, and Jesse Colin Young. Most of these big stadium shows were just no good. The technology was not there for the sound. It was all about the egos of everyone. The group was more into showboating than the music. It was a huge disappointment. Listening back to the tapes of Wembley, it is pretty obvious that we were either too high or just no good. I am saying too high. I know we were really good when we were at our best. I heard it and I felt it, but not on that tape.
When the big CSNY tour started in the United States, I leased a brand-new GMC mobile home and took it on the road. David Cline (aka Ranger Dave), Jim Mazzeo (aka Sandy Castle), and I were on board, along with my older son, Zeke Young. It was a journey to remember. The GMC was a poorly designed unit with double back wheels and front wheel drive, and every thousand miles or so the front tires would need to be replaced. We did not have that unit for very long. We ended up abandoning it and flying to somewhere near Cleveland, where we purchased a 1954 Cadillac limo for a few hundred bucks and tried to make that work. It did work well for a while, until it had problems, too. We had it fixed, and then Taylor Phelps came out to drive it home to California, where I had it restored.
Eventually we purchased a 1960s Flxible bus that worked pretty nicely for the rest of the tour. We named it Sam. At the same time, we purchased a 1973 Eagle bus that I saw on the road and planned on converting to a motor home. Mazzeo, an artist I knew, and I had been talking about ideas for that bus for months. When the project finally got under way, Mazzeo introduced me to a master woodworker/artist/designer, Roger Somers, who took on the job in Sausalito, right on the San Francisco Bay. Roger was the sort of character only Mazzeo could have found. He built, with the help of a mechanic named Bart Ehman, a motor home that was completely over-the-top. Work was done over the period of a year and a half in a boatyard.
No one who saw it in real life would ever forget it. This was simply the most outrageous bus in history. So over-the-top in every way that it should have ended up in the Smithsonian as a testimony to what might have happened if Ken Kesey was a millionaire and a sex addict.
Roger Somers named the bus Emily Flowers. Its interior features were all slanted toward being phallic or sexual in some way or other. All of the details reflected a highly tuned awareness of sexual pleasures in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I was not aware of this aspect of what he was doing. It never occurred to me that the bus was being made for someone other than myself! Considering how shy I was sexually, I was very uncomfortable in the bus until I started to change a lot of these details and mellow it out. It took years to get it to that point. It was a lesson of sorts.
I liked the exterior of the bus, except for one decorative part that sort of resembled Medusa of Greek mythology to me. You may remember her as the woman with snakes for hair. I changed that design several times until it finally became a cow skull on a redwood bark background. Eventually, after years of refinement and simplification, the bus became a very comfortable place for me to be (although it was still outrageous, like a giant woodie with its wooden wings and car tops on top). We renamed it Pocahontas and toured around the country for years and years in it.
First Zeke Young, then Ben Young, took the position of shotgun and grooved away the miles with me, both of those boys having the time of their lives! I loved traveling on that bus with my boys, and they loved being on the road with me. Drivers came and went. David Cline, Jim Russell, Paul Williamson, Dave McCleod, and finally Joe McKenna, who was with us the longest time of all. Bigger motors, better brakes, new air conditioners, better generators; we kept upgrading, tour after tour, show after show. Just the memories of life on that bus could make a whole book. It had a shower where you could climb out the top through a skylight hatch and dry off on the roof or just hang out in the sun on a beautiful teak deck. Its kitchen was fully equipped so we could cook whatever we needed on the go. The beds were super comfortable, with one of them below the floor in a luggage bay. You entered that one through a hatch in the floor. Zeke loved sleeping there and looking out the round portholes that were on either end. The big bus was insulated with lead and was so quiet it was eerie. Pocahontas was so heavy she was nicknamed the “lead sled.”
One day I was at the train barn and the phone rang. It was Joe McKenna. He was crying. “Oh God, Neil! I lost the bus. It burned to the ground. I just couldn’t put it out. I’m so sorry, man! It’s gone.” He was on his way to the Pittsburgh area to have the bus worked on as part of its regular maintenance. He was calling from the side of the road on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where that great bus met its demise. I would probably still be riding in it today had that not happened. The 12-volt system had caught on fire somehow, and it was unstoppable. I consoled Joe. “Don’t worry, man. It’s only a thing.” It had been a good run. There was nothing more you could say, unless I write another book just about that bus.
We brought Pocahontas’s remains back to the ranch and buried her in a eucalyptus grove, up on a ridge. We began building another bus right away and were able to use some of the interior pieces from Pocahontas that we salvaged. The whimsical wooden wings were gone, though. Two Buick Fastback car tops from 1947 replaced the original Studebaker and Hudson in topping off the new bus, a 1993 Eagle, which is bigger and has a lot of aluminum siding. While it doesn’t run as smoothly as Pocahontas, it is equipped with a special lift and bedroom for Ben Young, our spiritual guide. There is a slight vibration in it that I always attribute to something I can’t explain. It’s not a good vibration, but it’s not a particularly bad one, either.
Second story: At the end of our 1978 tour, when we returned in Pocahontas to Los Angeles to play the Forum, we noticed a lot of smoke in the sky. You could see it for miles. Wildfires were burning, and the fires were traveling fast. It was on TV. I made it to the Forum and performed my show with Crazy Horse. Afterward, the mood was upbeat until we got backstage. Something was off. It turns out our Malibu house burned to the ground during that performance. Nothing was left but the fireplace and a plaster mask of my face some gi
rl had done after a wild night of partying at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Malibu.
And a third story: One weekend not long ago, Pegi and I were on our own little retreat in Desert Hot Springs, visiting one of our favorite places, Two Bunch Palms. It is a spa with a great hot springs that really is relaxing. We always try to stay in the Al Capone Suite. That is where the notorious gangster stayed when he was there a long time ago with one of his starlet sweethearts. Pictures of her are all around the place. There is a cracked mirror in the room with what appears to be a gunshot in it. The place has great vibes. Anyway, we were at the spa and this was one of the times we were unable to book the Capone Suite. Early in the morning, the phone rang. I picked it up. Ben Johnson, Larry’s son, was on the other end of the line. “Oh my God! It’s gone, Neil! The car has burnt to the ground. It’s gone! Lincvolt is gone!”
We got on the Internet and watched it burning on the morning news. They didn’t mention the car specifically, but I could see the taillights reflecting through the fire. They just reported that a warehouse in Belmont full of things owned by rock star Neil Young was burning and there were a lot of tapes and archival materials in the fire. We jumped on a plane and headed home to view the site firsthand.
