by Neil Young
“Like a Hurricane” is probably the best example of Old Black’s tone, although if you listen too closely, it is all but ruined by all the mistakes and misfires in my playing. That was a memorable recording, though, for the feeling that comes out of our instrumental passages.
I always record every note played, whether it is a run-through or not, and the recording of “Like a Hurricane” is a great illustration of why I do that. When you do that, you catch everything. Most often the first time something is played is the defining moment. That is what I like to capture in my recordings. It is a strict rule that my engineers are there to record everything. The master recording I used for the final version of the track was the run-through when I was showing the Horse how the song went. That is why it just cuts on at the beginning. There was no beginning. There was no end. It is one of those performances you can never repeat; the cherry, the original expression of the song, the essence. We just kept wailing on those changes until we couldn’t move anymore.
One night in late November 1975, I wrote the “Like a Hurricane” lyrics on a piece of newspaper in the back of Taylor Phelps’s 1950 DeSoto Suburban, a huge car that we used to all go to bars in. Taylor was a great friend who lived on the mountain, and everybody loved him. He and Jim Russell were my buds back then. Jim was a cowboy who drove big machinery and was a really nice guy. In the mid-seventies, Jim and I hung out a lot and went to bars looking to get lucky. We had both recently broken up with our kids’ moms, and Zeke and Jenny, our two kids, would be in the truck in the parking lot when we went into the bars for “Daddy’s Boogie.” There was an Alaskan Camper on the back of my new 1975 Dodge Power Wagon, Stretch Armstrong, and Zeke and Jenny used to hang in it while we were doing our thing.
As was our habit between bars, we had stopped at Skeggs Point Scenic Lookout on Skyline Boulevard up on the mountain to do a few lines of coke; I wrote “Hurricane” right there in the back of that giant old car. Then when I got home, I played the chords on this old Univox Stringman mounted in an old ornate pump-organ body set up in the living room. It was painted antique white, and I had gotten it from Dean Stockwell, the great actor and another friend of mine in Topanga. None of the original guts were left inside the thing, but it looked great and sounded like God with this psychedelic Univox Stringman inside it I had hooked up so that it was hammering and overdriving a Fender Deluxe. I played that damn thing through the night. I finished the melody in five minutes, but I was so jacked I couldn’t stop playing.
A few months later at the Village in LA, I put on all the vocals as overdubs. I just had to hear that song finished. Crazy Horse had never sung it or even heard the words. It was just a rundown of the track, and it became the master recording of “Like a Hurricane.”
Taylor didn’t go bar cruising with Jim and me, though. It turned out he was gay. He was such a cool guy. I knew he had something else going on. Later, he started One Pass Video in San Francisco and became very successful. Then, when he suddenly retired and dropped out, I said, “Hey, man, why are you dropping out now? You are going to be a huge fucking success. You are a natural. You could produce movies.”
He just looked at me and said, “I can’t do it anymore. I have more important things to do now.”
About a year or so later, maybe a little more, Taylor died of AIDS. At the time, AIDS was still a relatively new thing with a stigma attached to it. People were just starting to understand what it was. Son of a bitch. That was sad. I really miss him. He was one cool and funny and smart guy. What a drag. He was one in a million. Unique as hell. Taylor had the gift of gab. When CB radios were popular, he talked like he was on a CB all the time. “Breaker breaker, come back?” He outfitted all of his vehicles with them. He was always trying new things. Once he took on the character of a paramedic and drove around the mountain in his Yukon, full of emergency medical stuff, talking on his CB. Then he bought a semitrailer tractor truck and drove that everywhere. He was a very likable and a one-of-a-kind character. Life again.
Chapter Sixteen
As You Can Tell
I am getting aware of the fact that I keep writing and thinking about people who have died. I love living. I do not want to die for a long time because I am not ready. I suppose if I thought I was going to die, I could get ready given a period of time, but I am not sure about that. Some folks think that is not a good thing to think about. I envy the control they must have over their thinking processes.
As you can tell, if you are still with me, I don’t have much control over that. I have only rewritten about one paragraph so far. There is no such thing as spell-check for life, though. There is a big wind blowing today, and I’m part of it. I want to make a difference, and above all, I want to be a good person from here on out. I can’t change the past. Don’t look back. Thanks, Bob. I needed that. “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?”
Buffalo Springfield, Malibu, June 1966. Left to right, Stephen Stills, Richie Furay, Bruce Palmer, Dewey Martin, me.
Chapter Seventeen
How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?”
My first time hearing Bob Dylan was back in Winnipeg around 1963. I was trying to figure out how to get to the USA and had met some friends who had told me about a possible job working on the railroad. Following up on that, I visited one of them. They were all sitting around listening to a record I had never heard. Some guy was singing, playing harmonica and acoustic guitar. We were all listening now. Hanging on to the words he sang. There was something about that, the way it sounded. I thought it was folk music, but not like the folk music of the Kingston Trio. I started to hear more and more of Bob. One day he came over the speakers of my radio singing “How does it feel?” over and over. The lyrics pounded their way into my psyche, this new poetry rolling off his tongue.
He spoke for a lot of us without knowing it. I felt connected to him in a moment. That was in Toronto, ’64 or ’65. Bob left his mark. I had to avoid listening to him for a long time in the late sixties and early seventies because I thought I would assimilate so much that I would suddenly be copying him. It was a conscious thing to avoid being too influenced. I am like a sponge in that when I like something, I become so influenced by it that I almost start to be it.
Eventually I was able to pick up the harmonica without thinking I was copying Bob, just influenced by him. Dylan’s words are part of the landscape, like country names on a map. I have heard people try to sound like him, and it turns me off. People have tried to sound like me to the point that my dad thought “A Horse with No Name” was mine! (Hey, wait a minute! Was that me? Okay. Fine. I am back now. That was close!)
I am currently tired of my musical self. I have reached a point where I have OD’d. When this happens, it is temporary, but my capacity to enjoy music disappears totally. Everything I think of musically is a joke and I reject it completely. That is part of the process. It has happened a few times before. The last time was near the end of 2009; I finished that tour and had to stop. Too much of a good thing. Even other people’s music turns me off when I am like this. It all sounds the same.
I did, however, hear a group called Givers on TV a few nights back, and they blew my mind. It was completely original! WOW! It sounded like they were in a complete other zone from the rest of music. “Land of a Thousand Dances” did the same thing to me when I heard Danny and the Memories do their version on YouTube. So I am not dead. Just sleeping. Hibernating, like music lovers who can’t feel what they used to when they heard music because of the low sound quality. They are hibernating bears. They will come out of their caves only when the sound of music shines like the sun again.
Anyway, when I first heard Bob, back in ’63, I was just getting used to being independent, looking for a reason to stay in Winnipeg and finding a reason to leave. It was very hard to get out of there. I went down to the railroad station and could not get a job. I thought workin’ on the railroad would be a good way to get out of town and go to the USA.
Then I found out I needed a work visa. I didn’t think I could get a visa, because I didn’t know what I was going down to the USA to do. What was I going to say, “I’m going to write songs and play my guitar”? No. There was an American who could already do that job; we were just talking about him. You have to be unique to get a visa. Do something no one else can do. I was stumped.
So I made up my mind that someday I was going to sneak in. It took a long time for that to happen. A few year later, in 1966, I was in Toronto, in the middle of the night, sitting in a funky after-hours dive called the Cellar. I was with Bruce Palmer, bass player for the group I was in at the time, called the Mynah Birds. The group had just broken up. Bruce and I were just sitting there, probably pretty stoned, and I asked Bruce if he wanted to go down to LA. I targeted LA because that was where all the music was happening. Bruce and I knew that. He said yes, so we sold all the band’s equipment (even though it had been purchased for the Mynah Birds by the group’s backer, John Craig Eaton) to buy a ’53 Pontiac hearse. We loaded it up with three girls and another guy, all from Yorkville Village in Toronto. We immediately headed for Sault Ste. Marie, the most nondescript border crossing we could find.
With six lids of grass and a few musical instruments, we crossed the border. As we headed into the States, we were laughing our way into the promised land. The U.S. immigration guard asked us where we were going. We said, “Vancouver, but the roads are so much better down here, we are dipping south to use them.” With a compliment like that, six wide-eyed kids made it through!
We headed straight south. The roads were better. We were surprised at how good they were. They were made of gray concrete with yellow lines down the middle, and made a slight ba-bump sound as we rolled along. These roads all were smooth and looked brand-new. Most of the highways in Canada were black asphalt with white lines, and they had bumps and places where they had been repaired. It was a very different sensation, riding on these roads.
Having heard about Route 66, we headed for it south of Chicago. We broke out a lid, rolled a couple of joints, and smoked them. Then we just drove. Next thing I knew we were down in Texas and got pulled over by a state trooper. Oh shit. He asked us for our draft cards. We told him we did not have draft cards because we were Canadian and we were just on our way to Vancouver but the roads were so good, etc. He took down our Ontario plate number, went back to his trooper patrol car, and we sat and waited. Miraculously, he told us to keep going and obey the signs. We were off on our way again.
The girls were driving me nuts. It’s hard to say why. I don’t remember. I was just very stressed. One of them drove occasionally, and I didn’t like the way she treated the car. I thought for sure it would break down because of how she drove. We had to start putting oil in it. We knew only a little about caring for a car. I was exhausted from driving, not eating much, and really not feeling well. We got to Albuquerque and stopped there, took up residence at a crash pad some hippies we met turned us on to, and hung out and rested for a few days.
Looking back, maybe I had my first epileptic seizure there. I know we went to a hospital emergency room, but I don’t recall much about what happened to me there. Afterward, I slept on a mattress on the floor of the house for a really long time, probably a couple of days. When I started coming around, Bruce and I decided two of the girls were stressing us out too much. Things were not harmonic. So we hatched a plan. Bruce and I, along with the one of the three girls we liked who was really nice and kind of lost, would get into the hearse in the middle of the night and leave the others at a folk club in town where they had been hanging out. We felt a lot better after we left them behind.
Traveling through some tremendously hot and dry country, the next thing I remember is coming down a really steep hill near San Bernardino. And then we got to LA. It was April 1, 1966.
There was a freeway exit called Juanita Street, and Bruce and I, thinking that was particularly funny, were saying “Juanita” with big Mexican accents over and over and laughing our asses off. “Juaneeeeeta, Juaneeeeta!” We were really giddy with happiness at having finally made it to LA. Then, of course, we had to find Hollywood and 77 Sunset Strip! I had a picture in my mind of the TV show where Kookie used to park the cars. I was looking for that building. We drove through Hollywood looking, but the numbers were way too high. So we turned around and headed west on Sunset toward 77. Finally we got to the ocean—but no 77!
There we were at the Pacific Ocean! A trio of Canadian kids in an old hearse with Ontario plates, in a parking lot off the Pacific Coast Highway, looking at the sea. It was a little cold and foggy, but finally we were there. The sandy beach was right between where we were parked and the waves. We got out and walked across the sand to the shore, full of wonder. And I mean FULL of wonder! We forgot all about 77 Sunset Strip! Eventually we headed back up to Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard, reversing our tracks. When we got to Hollywood again, I saw the building! I saw 77 Sunset Strip, just like the TV show. But it was not really 77. It was some other number. That was one of my first lessons about Hollywood. The numbers are not always what you think they are.
—
A long time before, back in Winnipeg at the Fourth Dimension Club, I had met a singer named Danny Cox. He gave me his phone number to call him should we ever make it to LA. I called him. He was there. We went to his house off of Laurel Canyon and visited. We couldn’t crash there. It was just a small place in the hills, but he fed us and let us take showers, and that felt real good. (Thanks, Danny.) So we slept in the hearse on a side street parallel to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I remember that every time I pass by, and I have passed by a lot in the last forty-five years or so. We lived there for almost a week. We used the bathrooms at gas stations and restaurants. It was cool. We weren’t scared. We were fascinated by the whole scene in Hollywood.
We spent our days looking for Steve Stills, who I knew was down there. Richie told me that Stephen was down in LA trying to put together a band. That was all I needed to know. I remembered Stephen from Fort William, four hundred miles southeast of Winnipeg, at the Fourth Dimension Club, where I had first heard him play in a band called the Company. We had talked about playing more together then.
Bruce and I went to the Trip, a cool club on the Sunset Strip where the Byrds played. We asked around. No one knew Stills. We visited a place called Huff’s on Sunset. It was a hippie hangout. I had never seen so many hippies in my life! Where did they get all those cool clothes? Where did all these girls come from? They looked so cool and unreachable. They had tie-dyed dresses and T-shirts, so colorful and beautiful. It made me feel like I was from another planet, but I loved it. We made a living that week by giving hippies a ride between Huff’s and Canter’s, another cool hangout that was down on Fairfax. We charged about fifty cents a ride. (These hippies mostly were rich.) The girls were really something; I had never seen anything like it. I was completely in awe!
One day, Bruce and I were walking down Sunset toward a hotel, the Colonial West, we visited regularly that we gave people rides to and from, and we found a joint on the sidewalk. Of course, we smoked it right away and got so high, we were completely flying. What the hell kind of pot was that? It smelled really pungent. So we walked along toward this hotel. Some places you can just feel are havens for drug users, heavy drug users. These places have a feeling to them. I sensed the dark seed (which is a phrase I’ve stolen from Stephen and Kristin Stills’s twelve-year-old son, Henry, who used it to describe a Disney movie). There was an opening on the strip that led to a parking lot that was surrounded by about three stories of rooms, so the place was kind of separated from everything else, like a fort. Musicians lived there along with drug dealers, actors, and rich hippies I suppose. It was a scene, and you could feel it instantly. Bruce and I had never experienced anything like this. It was all new to us.
We couldn’t find Stills anywhere. Eventually we gave up on LA and decided to head north to San Francisco, where Flower Power was in full bloom, with Jefferson Airplane a
nd Big Brother and the Holding Company. Human Be-Ins were happening in Golden Gate Park. Hippies were everywhere. We were on our way to Mecca! The Great Pilgrimage was about to begin!
We made our way along Sunset and got caught in a traffic jam. It had dawned on us that we may not have enough gas money to get to San Francisco, but we were working on a solution when we heard a voice shout, “Hey, Neil!!! Is that you?”
I looked around out the driver’s window of the hearse. It was Stills! We got out and hugged right there on Sunset Boulevard in the middle of traffic. Horns were honking! To us it seemed like everybody was celebrating! Something was happening, but we didn’t know what it was. It was fucking Buffalo Springfield, that’s what it was.
—
Stills and Richie Furay were living at Barry Friedman’s house on Fountain Avenue. Barry had a background in the circus and the entertainment business. He was a smart guy with a great musical sense. He was managing Stills and Furay, which is how I met him. Stills had convinced Richie to come to LA from New York because he had a group going. When Richie arrived, Stephen explained that the group was now Stephen and Richie!
