by Neil Young
There are a few of these 45 rpm singles available on eBay every once in a while now. I have one signed by the band that Jack Harper, our original drummer, gave to me. The Squires on that record were Ken Koblun on bass, Ken Smyth on drums, Allan Bates on guitar, and Neil Young on guitar. Unreal! Listening to this today, I can say we were pretty good. We needed better equipment, but we played well and it was a good instrumental. What a rush!
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Although there was never any art for the Squires’ 45, album covers are very important to me. They put a face on the nature of the project. I know albums are viewed as passé by some today, but I am an album artist and I am not ready to give up on my form. I think it has a future and a past. The album cover and liner notes reached out to the music lover, filling them with images and helping to illuminate the story behind the music, the feeling coming from the artist. My first album cover told a lot about me, without words.
I first met Gary Burden while shooting the CSNY cover for Déjà Vu, my initial album with CSN. Gary and I became good friends and we immediately worked together on the album cover for After the Gold Rush. I loved what he did with the photographs. Gary and I have been working together since that time, and I have done the great majority of my album art, my ads, and my songbooks with him. He is one of my closest compadres. Gary and his wife, Jenice, still work with me on every album cover. We are doing our life’s work together.
One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn’t matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us; then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picked up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men’s shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood dumbfounded, watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: SEN. BUCKLEY CALLS FOR NIXON TO RESIGN. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight’s the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica Beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding an airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.
On the Beach LP cover.
Collaborating with Gary has been a joy over the years. We have really maintained a wonderful friendship to this day, no matter where we are on the planet. I hung with him a lot after my breakup with Susan and before I moved north to the ranch. Then I sold my Topanga house to him. A few years ago when Gary married Jenice Heo, an artist he met at Reprise Records, I was his best man.
When CDs came along, it was more of a challenge to present our art. The CD package was about twenty-five percent the size of an album. Everything had to be small. The lyrics were not legible without glasses for anyone over a certain age. So our whole palette was changed by the advent of the CD. Of course, the audio quality also took a dive, with a maximum of fifteen percent of the sound of a master, but if you don’t know how I feel about that by now, you should put this book down. Go directly to your doctor’s office and have your eyes and ears checked.
Now that online music has taken hold with Spotify, Rhapsody, and the other online services, art has become challenged again. Quality has taken another hit, and tactile album art has an unknown future at this point. Things are changing. I have faith that there is a place for tactile art like physical books and album covers and think that we will settle into something new but recognizable. I am not totally sure of this, though. I do think that the future for books is in over-the-top quality printing, paper, photography, and binding. The high price of that quality may enable the survival of the printed and bound hardcover book.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Meditations
I was out by the water looking at the shoreline. The waves came in. They receded. The water lapped on the coral when it rushed in, knocking the pieces of coral all around. The lighter pieces got jostled the most, and the pieces that were wedged into other pieces held on and just moved a little, although they got wet. This pattern continued for hours until the tide went out and the water level became lower, causing the waves to not come in as far and to not touch the little pieces of coral I had been watching. The coral pieces dried out and changed color in the sunlight or reflected a little in the moonlight. They were all there together: big ones, little ones, broken ones, ones that looked like little fish.
When the tide returns, it will be higher or lower than it was the last time it came in, and the little pieces will be jostled again. If the waves are particularly big, the coral pieces might get worn down or be broken into smaller pieces, eventually losing their shape completely. If the tide is gentle and the waves are small, very little will happen except to the smallest pieces of coral. It’s hard to track the progress of every little piece, but it is predictable that they will eventually be worn down and disappear, to be replaced by other pieces.
This is an example of paganism to me, possibly Buddhism, one of the ways I learn to accept change through nature and the way of things. I am not looking for a story to explain this or a legend to believe in or a place to go where I can learn about this. I am already here. The horizon speaks to me in my time of need, sharing the ultimate story of the moment of change. I accept the horizon for what it is. This is my religion.
When I was a little boy in Omemee, my mom and dad took me to Sunday school. I don’t remember much about it, but it didn’t last long. I suspect my mom and dad grew tired of taking me down there to the church. My dad always said, “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen,” before each meal, generally followed by “Neil, get your elbows off the table.” I don’t even know what religious denomination my mom and dad were.
We had spaghetti a lot. It was really good with my dad’s special sauce. Before he poured in the chili peppers, he used to heat it up in a big pot. OMG, it smelled great! Then he would add hamburger meat and let it simmer for hours, covered. Al dente was his preferred way to cook the noodles, and later I got pretty good at that.
My dad’s spaghetti sauce recipe is framed and hanging in our kitchen today, back at the ranch. It is so faded that I can barely read it anymore, but it does have his original handwriting. Pegi has made it a few times, and it’s great when she does. At least someone is making it, and that feels good to me. I would like to taste that again. Once, when Crazy Horse was doing what we called the Northern California Coastal Bar Tour in 1975, my daddy was living on the ranch in the little red house and driving my 1950 Plymouth. He came down to the White House and cooked spaghetti for us all one night. His glasses were fogging up while he ate it! It was amazingly great, that meal. A real good memory!
My father Scott Young’s spaghetti recipe.
Old memories are wonderful things and should be held on to as long as possible, shared with others, and embellished if need be. Whenever I go back to Canada, my heart is flooded with them—memories, that is. I look forward to seeing my brother, Bob, and Dave Toms up there in Peterborough when I go back for the premiere of Jonathan Demme’s new documentary. It will be a great time. (Canadians say great a lot, in case you haven’t noticed. I know. I have looked up many other words I could have used in the thesaurus, but that is not my style. I prefer to be boring and use the same words over and over, because that is more true to who I really am. That may not work for you if you pride yourself on your great vocabulary.)
Visiting my mom, Rassy Young, in Winnipeg, June 1968.
With my dad at the Riverboat club in Toronto, February 1969.
Chapter Forty
When I arrived back in Toronto from Blind River in the mid-sixties, I visited my dad. I had not seen him much in the few years since our family split up and I moved to Winnipeg with my mother at age twelve or so. He had never shown much interest in my music or supporting it, and he had constantly urged me to improve my grades at school before he would help me with my music in any way. So I was not surprised when he thought I should get a job to support myself while I was looking around for gigs in Yorkville Village, the place where artists and musicians and former beatniks hung out and did their thing.
I got a job at Coles Bookstore on Yonge Street and took a flat nearby at 88 Isabella Street so I could walk to work. I had a hot plate to cook on there. Beans mostly. My job at Coles was described as stock boy. I was the person putting price tags on all the books. I only lasted two weeks. I had no discipline and could not put anything ahead of my music. I spent the days wandering around the Village, trying to meet other musicians and seeing if I could get a gig or a band going.
Number 88 Isabella Street was filthy, because I never cleaned anything. I was a little pig. But I did write a song called “The Ballad of Peggy Grover” up there. It was pretty good, but not too good. “Peggy Grover” was a play on words for Grover pegs, which were the best tuning pegs you could buy for a guitar.
The way the story goes,
she just ran out of clothes.
This world just wore the peg down.
Then I wrote a song called “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing.” That song had a little more depth and was more a stream of consciousness about how it felt to be in my body at the time.
Hey who’s that stompin’ all over my face?
I was beginning to feel like songwriting was what I was about more than anything else. I wrote a few more songs there and started playing them for people in the Village. Some people said they liked what I was doing.
Then one day I bailed on the flat without paying because I had no money for the rent. I went and slept on the floor at Vicky Taylor’s flat above the Night Owl, a club on Avenue Road, just north of the Village. Vicky was a folksinger struggling in the Village, and her parents were paying for the apartment. She was an important part of the scene there with musicians and hippies. She was a magnet. Everybody knew her. She had long, straight, jet-black hair. We were all trying to make it somehow in the music scene. One of the LP records we listened to with Vicky, and I in particular loved, was by Bert Jansch. His singing and guitar playing were masterful. I never forgot that. I learned a lot from him. Vicky was a big fan of Bert, as well.
John Kay, who would later sing “Born to Be Wild” in Steppenwolf, also slept there on the floor in front of the fireplace. We burned anthracite in the fireplace, white coal. We both would be sleeping there, listening to records and crashing. He showed me some cool guitar stuff that helped me to define the way I played. He had been in the Sparrow, a local band that did well. They were really great and had a slippery lead guitar player, Dennis Edmonton. They were the Toronto sound, along with the Hawks, who later became The Band. The Toronto sound featured R&B-based rock, with a Roy Buchanan–influenced Fender Telecaster guitar playing style that Robbie Robertson and Dennis Edmonton, along with Domenic Troiano, were all great at.
One night after hearing me at a hootenanny, Chick Roberts of the Dirty Shames told me he really liked my song “Sugar Mountain”—that made me feel like I was somebody.
—
Folk clubs and the folk life were burning their way into my psyche. Back in the beginning in Winnipeg, I played with the Squires at a club called the Fourth Dimension. That was one of my first gigs. I was green as could be and played the Hootenanny every weekend, and I would watch the headliners: the Thorns, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the Dirty Shames, the Allen-Ward Trio, Chuck and Joni Mitchell (who I first met there), Don McLean, Danny Cox, Lisa Kindred, the list goes on and on . . . They came through regularly, a new act every week or couple of weeks.
Joni Mitchell also really loved my song “Sugar Mountain.” Later, she wrote “The Circle Game” about “Sugar Mountain.” It was a real feeling of recognition that Joni wrote her song to answer mine; I didn’t even hear it until she had already been singing it for a year.
Meeting all of these people had an effect on me. I saw myself as a part of it all, the music scene, the writers and performers. I wanted to do just what they did, too—get in a truck after they finished their set and leave.
Eventually that is exactly what I did, taking the Squires to the Flamingo Club in Fort William, Ontario, where to my surprise I discovered another Fourth Dimension Club! We played there, too. There was a guy there who played a Fender Telecaster, and he played the shit out of it. He was better than most of the players I had ever heard. He had the Toronto sound, that string-bending Telecaster technique. I don’t remember his name or much else about him. He was pretty straight-looking, with really short hair, kind of like a Kingston Trio look. He was there watching the Squires one night when we played “Farmer John.” When the instrumental break came along in the song, I just went crazy on the guitar solo. I had just started to do that. One night it just happened, and now I was doing it all the time.
When the set was over, he came up to me.
“What the fuck was that?!” He exclaimed. “What the hell were you doing? I have never heard anything like that in my life! It was fucking great, man! Shit!”
I knew that while I was playing like that I was out of my mind. It felt right, but I don’t know what it was. Every note was out of the blue! I went places I had never gone before with no fear. It made an impression on him, and me too. That was the beginning of something. I knew I was doing something that had just come out of me, not something I learned, but something that was me.
With David Geffen (left) and Elliot Roberts, at Lookout Management offices in West Hollywood, 1971.
Chapter Forty-One
Friends for Life
My manager, Elliot Roberts, plays such a large part in everything I am doing that it makes more sense to say what we are doing! I speak with Elliot five times a day at least. Everything we do, we talk about. He advises me on every move I make. I am involved in a lot of things and I am capable of screwing every one of them up without even trying. That is why I consult with my Wise Counselor on every little thing.
We fight. We argue. We laugh. We cry.
There is something to long-term relationships and loyalty that you learn over time. There are pitfalls to avoid, grooves that become ruts that you need to climb out of, and relationships that sour for one reason or another that still have to be managed gracefully. Because I tend to avoid the confrontations and delivering bad news, I am not good at doing any of that. Elliot is. He knows how to communicate where I don’t. That is why I am where I am now.
He has a cell phone as his instrument. He is tech savvy, but he is a people person, believing in face-to-face relationships and speaking relationships being at the core of any e-mail. He hardly ever writes an e-mail. He has to talk directly to people. Just as I wake up every day with a new idea, he wakes up every day with a new approach to solving the problems that arise with the projects I am already immersed in. There are a lot of them. This is our pattern.
As I’ve said, he is also one of the funniest people I have ever met. He is full of one-liners, and I love to hear him talk when he is on a roll. Oh my God, he blows people’s minds with some of his insights and humorous comments. If there is a heavy meeting, he is the icebreaker. Let me tell you a typical Elliot story: We were having a meeting in an office in San Francisco. Our agents were there and we were talking about the future of our music system project, negotiating some fine points having to do with a lot of money and my control of the business. It was a little tense in the room. The negotiations continued. Elliot made some strong statements, and the other people there did, too. It was not an easy situation, but we all had a common goal. E
lliot reminded everyone of that. Eventually we got what we needed. The room was still tense. Elliot looked his adversary squarely in the eye and said, “I just want you to know, we have no issues at all with your partner’s drinking problem. It’s really not a problem to us.” There was a pause. Everyone started laughing uproariously! Elliot had brought the house down. His ability to move seamlessly from one mode to another is unbelievable.
Elliot navigates the rocky shoals of Respect. He is not perfect, and neither am I. If we shipwreck, we jump in the same lifeboat and row like hell. Thank you, Elliot.
Elliot and I have a long history with David Geffen. David started in the mailroom at William Morris, as did Elliot. David was a master of the deal, as was Elliot. David shaped a lot of things and was an artist himself. He played a deal like it was a Stradivarius. He was always on the phone in his office when we all started out together. He and Elliot were Geffen-Roberts, our managers. A superstar in his field, David was used to winning and expected to be successful at everything he did, and he was successful at almost everything he tried to do. His first foray into film was not a success, and I can’t even remember what it was. That was a rarity, in that he did not succeed. Geffen Records was not the success I think he expected it to be. He had a lot of great artists on board and wanted to re-create Asylum Records, which was a total success, giving artists freedom. It was the ultimate label. The Eagles were one of the first acts. David’s taste was great, having started with Laura Nyro, who we all loved as a great artist and unique presence, but Geffen Records never quite achieved the success he’d hoped to reach.
