by Neil Young
It is just a matter of time.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When Zeke Young was born on September 8, 1972, Carrie and I had been together for about a year and a half. We had been going to Lamaze classes for a few weeks and (mistakenly) felt pretty prepared. Our neighbor Beverly Oaks was going to be the midwife. Our doctor had told us everything was going to be fine, and we were gung-ho to do a natural childbirth.
On the ranch on the morning when Carrie’s water broke, Bev said we should go to the hospital because she thought something was going wrong, or at least differently from what she expected. So we got in a car and headed down to the hospital, forty minutes away.
Zeke was born that day, and we needed forceps to help the delivery, so it was a good thing we followed Bev’s advice. He was a beautiful baby boy, and I was as high as I have ever been in my life! What a feeling! We brought him home and put him in our little bed; then he graduated to a handmade cradle that one of our carpenter friends, Larry Christiani, had made especially for us.
As Zeke grew, we noticed that his right foot seemed extended and he could not straighten out his ankle. His right hand was also held in a different position from his left, and he did not have the same control of it. He was a cool kid, really happy and beautiful, and we were really young and innocent. We talked to doctors and sought advice on what might be happening and what to do. There was some strain developing between Carrie and me as the dream of an idyllic life with few responsibilities came shattering down around us. We knew we had to do something, and felt like we were running out of time, not knowing what was the matter with Zeke, not knowing it was a condition of life, not something that could be cured.
Eventually we got a brace for Zeke, and he started to get picked on by the other kids. This was the beginning of a rough time for him, and he lashed out at other kids and had a lot of anger that he was expressing. At the same time, Carrie and I were not doing well together. We were breaking up, and it was a nightmare. Not fights, but distance. Not screaming, but pain. Everything was coming apart.
Then I got a call from Carrie that Zeke had experienced a grand mal seizure. The doctor thought he might be epileptic or have some other condition. Eventually it was decided that Zeke had cerebral palsy.
Zeke was going from school to school, getting in trouble at all of them. He was living with me in Malibu on weekends, and one day he came home from playing with the other kids and had taken off his brace. His foot was bleeding from direct exposure to the asphalt on the road where they had been playing some game. I remember how I felt the unfairness of it all, that he had to contend with this and the other kids didn’t, but now when I look at him, I admire him for the wonderful man he has grown up to be, handling himself so beautifully, and I feel very proud.
Sometimes he was with me and sometimes with his mom. Mostly he was with his mom. Somewhere along the line she did an interview with People magazine. They went to the house in Hancock Park, a beautiful old residential area, that I had bought for Carrie and Zeke, and took pictures, etc. The magazines love this kind of thing. So a big story came out that was all slanted and crazy, making me look like a villain. I have never talked to that magazine since and don’t plan on it.
Pegi and I were together by then, and Zeke would come to visit us. He had to be a member of the “Clean Plate Club” to leave the table! We had a lot of love and structure in our home, and it was always that way with Pegi. That is the important thing. Zeke loved both Pegi and his mother.
Back and forth and back and forth he went between homes. That was our life until, in a great stroke, Carrie found a school in Idyllwild, California, that was specifically for kids who were having problems adjusting. Carrie and I placed Zeke in that school. Working together, we did something really good. There was a man there who ran the Morning Sky School, and his name was Jack Weaver. I went and met him, and he saw Zeke. I felt really good about what Carrie had found for us. Zeke came out of there a changed young man. They really helped him, and he attributes it all to Jack, who he loved. Jack unfortunately died a few years later of an asthma attack, or I am sure we would still be visiting him today just to keep in touch and tell him how much we loved him for what he did for our family. He was a saint.
Today, Zeke and I are very close.
With Zeke Young in a dinghy off the WN Ragland, 1978.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The surf is coming up. It has been quiet here in Hawaii for about five days, and just a minute ago a wave broke on the seawall and put a slight tremble in the ground. The rhythm of the ocean is such a gift, and this is the perfect place to enjoy it. I don’t expect to have another ocean place as cool and cosmic as this one is in my lifetime, so I am eternally thankful for it now.
Back when I was living in Coconut Grove in Florida in the mid-seventies, there was a houseboat that I slept in that was owned by a lady named Heather. We were recording the Stills-Young Band’s Long May You Run at Criteria Recording Studios, and it was quite a trip from the studio in Fort Lauderdale back to the Grove every night—and I was usually pretty high on the way home. I had a ’57 Jensen 541 that I drove regularly to and from the studio.
Heather’s houseboat was way out on the end of the docks. Every night after the studio, I would end up in the houseboat and Heather would be there, welcoming me back. She was really kind to me, and I always was happy to get back there. We had a good relationship. The water was right there, and it was soothing to rock in the boat as dawn came up on the bay.
The Grove was intoxicating, and I stayed there on and off for years. I had a suite in a local hotel called the Rangoon. There were a lot of high rollers in and out of the hotel all the time. Fred Neil, the great folksinger/songwriter who wrote “Everybody’s Talkin’,” which was eventually used in the movie Midnight Cowboy, was there hanging out at the dock a lot with some of his friends. (It is ironic to me that someone as seminal and influential as Freddy Neil would become more known for a movie song than the influence he had on a generation of musicians, including Stephen Stills, but that’s the way it goes.)
The high rollers always seemed entertained by my comings and goings, like I was just some inexperienced kid. I did not feel that inexperienced. Eventually I bought my own boat in Fort Lauderdale and brought it back to the Grove. It was an old Trumpy yacht that I called The Evening Coconut. I was in the habit of taking it out for cruises, and I was known for sometimes crashing it into the dock. The engine kept failing on my approach. I had a lot of fun times on the Coconut and met a guy there in the Grove named Andre Prest.
He was charged with finding me a sailboat that I could buy and sail around the world. It seemed like a simple enough task, and soon we found the boat. It was in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, on an island called Bequia. We went way down there and saw the boat. It was a huge Baltic Trader, and it needed some work on the deck. When I first saw the boat it was in a bay, looking like a dream. We needed to take a skiff out to it. Cruising out to get on board, we saw a lot of sharks in the water. I was very happy to get off the small boat and onto Lilli, as she was called then.
After the purchase, we sailed to Grenada and had some deck work done, Captain Andre Prest in command. The good captain had hired a first mate named Roger Katz. It turned out that Andre knew nothing about being captain of a boat or sailing, so quite soon it became obvious that Roger Katz was the de facto captain. We got the boat to Saint Thomas somehow, even though we were seasick. We sat at the dock with the generator running and choked out half of the marina.
I flew back from there to my ranch to do some recording, and they managed to get the Lilli back to Fort Lauderdale, where Captain Katz took over officially and took charge of the rebuild. We renamed her WN Ragland in honor of my grandfather, Bill Ragland, a southerner who came north to Winnipeg from South Carolina and started his family there, giving birth to my mother, Rassy, and her sisters, Snooky and Toots. Naming my boat after him felt good. We took her to Rogers Marina in Fort Lauderdale, and many dollars were pu
t into rebuilding the boat over a year or so.
Zeke came out and visited us there at Rogers Marina while we were working on the boat. Ellen Talbot, a friend of Carrie’s and the wife of Johnny Talbot, who was my roadie with Crazy Horse at the time, brought him to Fort Lauderdale from his mother’s house. He was a child with two homes: my house wherever I was, and his mother’s house wherever it was. He was about five years old and as cute as could be. He went to a Montessori-type school while he was there, which he got kicked out of for being too rowdy. He had his brace on and was pretty angry with the other kids. He was a real handful.
But when we were together he was just a happy, sweet little guy who I loved and who loved me. We used to go for rides in our yellow rubber dinghy that he loved tremendously. It had a Mercury outboard and really went fast. It had a steering wheel, and he loved that, too. We really had a great time together and both remember those times very fondly, racing up and down the New River in Fort Lauderdale. Those boat rides are some of our happiest early memories.
One of the scariest was when he fell in the river getting on The Evening Coconut. It was tied at a dock and was out of the water for hull repairs. Zeke was fearless, and one day he just tried to get on board from the dock himself, even though we were always around to guide him and told him to always be with someone. While I was at the work site, Zeke, with his heavy brace on, fell into the water. Dennis Buford, one of the shipwrights working on the boat, rescued Zeke! Thank you, Dennis! You probably saved my son’s life!
—
A great tradition was payday. Every Friday we got together for some Jose Cuervo on The Evening Coconut, where Roger would hand out the checks to the shipbuilders, who were a motley crew just like us, and then we would go out partying. We eventually moved the Ragland to another place on the New River to get her finished and rigged with sails. So there she was in Fort Lauderdale on the New River, tied alongside an empty lot where the workers parked their cars and eventually I brought Pocahontas, my bus, to live in. I parked the bus right alongside the boat. At first, I slept on the boat in the construction zone of my cabin on my cot with sawdust everywhere, and then I moved to Pocahontas. It was fun.
On Valentine’s Day I asked Pegi, who I was just beginning to hang out with, to come out and see my new boat. That was our first big outing, the first time we traveled together as a couple. We flew out to Fort Lauderdale together and stayed for a while. She was game, but obviously the place was not ready for us yet, with carpenters crawling all over the boat at seven A.M. This was a remarkably good time, full of memories of Pegi and me together, rebuilding this beautiful old boat and getting ready for the first sail. We had a crew of about thirty people working on the project, and as I’ve said, I always love that kind of thing, building things.
We went into Miami, Roger, Pegi, and I, to see a place called Stoneage Antiques. Stoneage was owned and run by Milton Stone, a great and unforgettable character, and it housed a rich collection of marine antiques and a host of other things, among them a beautiful classic nineteenth-century nine-foot Steinway grand piano I bought and shipped to the ranch. It was restored, and I still enjoy it today. I love things with memories attached. It’s nice to think that it was one of the first times Pegi and I were together when I found that old piano, which is now restored and in our hallway. We also purchased a collection of wood from the dance floor of the Essex House hotel in New York City to use as bulkhead finish on the interior of the WN Ragland.
—
There is another part of the boat story. It is the hurt part, the emotional-impact part.
Sometime in 1973 before I bought the Ragland, the touring and constant womanizing finally caught up with me. I was growing further and further from Carrie. During the recording of On the Beach I did a song called “Motion Pictures.” I did the recording with Ben Keith and Rusty Kershaw and we were all high on “honey slides,” a little concoction that Rusty’s wife, Julie, cooked up. Honey slides were made with grass and honey cooked together and stirred in a frying pan until a black gooey substance was left in the pan. A couple of spoonfuls of that and you would be laid-back into the middle of next week. The record was slow and dreamy, kind of underwater without bubbles.
Motion pictures on my TV screen,
A home away from home, and I’m livin’ in between
But I hear some people have got their dream.
I’ve got mine.
I hear the mountains are doin’ fine,
Mornin’ glory is on the vine,
And the dew is fallin’, the ducks are callin’.
Yes, I’ve got mine.
Well, all those people, they think they got it made
But I wouldn’t buy, sell, borrow or trade
Anything I have to be like one of them.
I’d rather start all over again.
Well, all those headlines, they just bore me now
I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow,
And I’ll stand before you, and I’ll bring a smile to your eyes.
Motion pictures, motion pictures.
I asked Larry Johnson what he thought of it. He told me, “It scares me.” Carrie was in Hawaii with Zeke at the time, and I was in the studio. When the recording was over, I drove Hank to the ranch and jumped on a plane to Maui. I was too late for one thing and just in time for another. When I got there, I went looking for Carrie at the Pioneer Hotel, where she was staying. I found out she was out on a sailboat with Zeke and a guy I had heard of, a friend of Crosby’s, and she’d been gone for a number of days.
I realized right there that it was probably over, and went off the deep end, drinking a lot of tequila and drowning myself in sorrow. Of course, I was as guilty as hell myself, but that did not take away the pain. The thought that my family was irreparably harmed was inescapable. There were too many disconnects between Carrie and me, aside from the infidelities. I was so drunk that I went to the Chart House and played a solo set in front of a few tourists. Who knows? I was really getting the meaning of “What goes around, comes around.”
In this frame of mind, I wrote about twenty songs I recorded in one form or another. Tapes of this are in a shambles, still being sorted out and readied for The Archives Volume 2. There was a lot of traveling around, soul-searching, and the like, crossing over to Europe and Canada and Hawaii, just moving for the sake of moving. That is when I started looking for a boat, my own boat. In some sort of balancing act inside my own head and heart, I decided to buy a boat and sail around the world, which never happened in the end. I did not sail around the world.
It was also around that time I first saw Pegi Morton. She was the hostess at Alex’s, a bar/restaurant up on the mountain above the ranch. I first met Pegi in 1974. I loved her instantly, but was very nervous about repeating my past and not being able to hold the relationship together. I remember thinking Pegi would always be a beautiful girl, even when she was a hundred years old. Time passed. It was a different kind of love, infatuating like Carrie, but I felt this much deeper. Pegi’s blue eyes are like crystals. They are so deep and true. Too good for me? In those eyes I saw myself and a life I hoped I would be able to hold together.
Time passed, and Pegi and I visited the boat a few times and made a few trips. On one of the early ones, Pegi was pregnant with Ben Young. We both got so seasick. We returned to California and the ranch. Then Ben Young was born on November 28, 1978, at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto. He was premature, and we had to keep him in the hospital for a while. Pegi remembers the day after we got little Ben home—we took him on a blue-jeep ride in the pasture near our house. She had him all bundled up like the wonderful mother she is, and was so protective. We sat there in the sun for a while and took it all in.
Things had moved pretty fast with us, and we were reeling a little. We were deeply in love. Our family was starting. We kept on moving with our young lives shortly afterward and took Ben Young with us everywhere. But pretty soon Pegi started noticing that Ben was not doing the things some other
babies were doing. Pegi was wondering if something was wrong. She was young, and nothing had ever gone wrong in her life. People told us kids grow at different rates and do things at different times.
But as Ben reached six months old, we found ourselves sitting in a doctor’s office. He glanced at us and offhandedly said, “Of course Ben has cerebral palsy.”
I was in shock. I walked around in a fog for weeks. I couldn’t fathom how I had fathered two children with a rare condition that was not supposed to be hereditary, with two different mothers. I was so angry and confused inside, projecting scenarios in my mind where people said something bad about Ben or Zeke and I would just attack them, going wild. Luckily that never did happen, but there was a root of instability inside me for a while. Although it mellowed with time, I carried that feeling around for years.
Eventually Pegi and I, wanting to have another child after Ben, went to see an expert on the subject. That was Pegi’s idea. Always organized and methodical in her approach to problems, Pegi planned an approach to our dilemma with her very high intelligence. We both loved children but were a little gun-shy about having another, to say the least. After evaluating our situation and our children, the doctor told us that probably Zeke did not actually have CP—he likely had suffered a stroke in utero. The symptoms are very similar. Pegi and I weighed this information. To know someone like her and to make a decision about a subject as important as this with her was a gift beyond anything I have ever experienced. It was her idea, and she had guided us to this point. We made a decision together to go forward and have another child.
—
We tried being on the boat with Ben, but it was not in the cards. Ben was a handful, and neither Pegi nor I was truly a sailor. The boat went around the world more or less, but we didn’t. That dream didn’t come true. There was something more important to me than that: my family. My Pegi and Ben.
