by Neil Young
That was the defining original rock version. Booji Boy added some new lyrics and sang, “It’s better to burn out, ’cause rust never sleeps” or “than it is to rust.” I’m not sure which. One of the Devo members later told me that there was a sign on a shop in Akron, Ohio, where Devo originated, that read RUST NEVER SLEEPS. It was a maintenance and rust-prevention service. As is the case with many of my songs, some of it came from real-life things other people said or did.
Another time that happened was on my bus with Poncho. We were cruising along in the mountains between Spokane and Seattle. Something about the Berlin Wall and the recent unrest was on TV. “Keep on rocking in the free world,” said Poncho. I said, “What?” Then I wrote that whole song and we did it that night. Poncho thought he should have credit for that and told me years later he had always felt that way. Now he gets credited and paid whenever that song is involved.
It’s part of the process. I just do what I do and keep my ears and eyes open. Things are happening all the time. You put it out there and shit happens. Yesterday we were on our way to the movies and I heard some guy pouring his heart out in some song on the radio. I said to Ben Bourdon, Ben Young’s caregiver and friend, “That sounds like Jimmy Fallon doing me. What the heck does that mean?” It was funny. It really did sound like me. We laughed our asses off! Ben Young thought that was really hysterical. Fallon sounded like a twenty-year-old me. Maybe not as good. Maybe better.
How about that Jimmy Fallon? He is a classic. He does me so well, I don’t have to bother anymore. He looks great, and I am an old guy who doesn’t want to be on TV, so Jimmy has done all of my television performances for the last year or so. Thank you, Jimmy!
As an aside to you, the reader: Writing this has been a lot of fun so far, even the tough parts where I have lost some of my best friends. As we make our way through this experience and I grab some thoughts out of the bag while waiting patiently for ideas that come out of the blue, inevitably we are going to get to some of the longest run-on sentences in history, ending in places I may have been avoiding, but not if I can help it! Seriously, though, there are still quite a few boulders to climb out from under.
Formal portrait, sitting in the Big Chair at home in Topanga Canyon, with Danny Whitten behind me, while recording Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969.
Chapter Forty-Nine
In August 1968, Briggs and I began making our first record together, my first solo. This was a big thing to me. I was finally going to create my masterpiece. Buffalo Springfield was fine, but I was creatively frustrated, with a lot more to give. I think Stephen felt the same way about CSN. He had a lot of arranging and production concepts, just like I did, that he wanted to try; Greene and Stone’s production of Buffalo Springfield had made us both interested in doing it ourselves. Just singing on some of the songs was not good enough for me anymore. I was writing every day. I picked up the guitar first thing in the morning and started right in. I was imagining arrangements and couldn’t wait to get started recording. Looking back, I don’t know why we didn’t just do solo records and keep the Springfield together as well. That might have worked. Don’t look back.
Elliot made a solo deal for me with Reprise, and David booked some time at Wally Heider Studios on Selma Avenue in Hollywood. A lot of great records had been made in that place. I really respected the Beach Boys, who had worked there quite a bit, and Wally Heider had an engineer named Frank Dimidio who had built some incredibly good-sounding recording equipment. The place was state-of-the–art, with 8-track tape machines and a Dimidio recording console, known in town as the Dimidio Board. George Grantham and Jim Messina were the rhythm section, and I was recording by overdubbing most of the other instruments. Soon Briggs discovered that I needed to drink some beer to do vocals. In those days I didn’t sing live; I overdubbed. I was very unsure of my singing, especially after my previous experiences in the studio with Greene and Stone producing Buffalo Springfield.
They tried feeding me amphetamines to get me loosened up enough to sing “Burned” with the Springfield, a song I wrote about having a seizure. Now there is a hit song idea! I sang “Burned” for about four hours after it had been recorded, unable to stop. David Briggs suggested an Oly—Olympia Beer was my favorite. It loosened me up quite a bit, and I actually sang a song, “Last Trip to Tulsa,” that was about ten minutes long, without overdubs. Once I got loose and in the groove I was fine, although it still sounded like me. Briggs always said my voice was good. It was unique, and that’s what we needed to make it.
Briggs and I always had a good groove working together. For another recording session at Sunwest Recording Studios on Sunset Boulevard, Jack Nitzsche came in and did “The Old Laughing Lady” and “I’ve Loved Her So Long” from my first solo album with me. Later on, Briggs and I did some work there with Crazy Horse. Pat Boone owned Sunwest. I bought some monitors from the studio that I still have today in my living room. They are totally antiques now.
There’s a quote from Briggs that I want to share, which comes from an interview (that I asked him to do) with Jimmy McDonough for his book Shakey. Here it is:
I can teach you everything I know in an hour. Everything. That’s how simple it is to make records. Nowadays, buddy, the technician is in control of the medium. They try to make out like it’s black magic, or flyin’ a spaceship. I can teach anybody on this planet how to fly the spaceship. If you look at the modern console, there’ll be thirty knobs—high frequency, low frequency, midfrequency, all notched in little tiny, tiny, teeny tiny degrees—and it’s all bullshit. All this stuff doesn’t matter, and you can’t be intimidated. You just ignore it—all of it.
I walk into studios with the biggest console known to mankind, and I ask for the schematic and say, “Can you patch from here to here and eliminate the ENTIRE board?” I just run it right into the tape machines. All the modern consoles, they’re all made by hacks, they’re not worth a shit, they sound terrible. None of it touches the old tube stuff—like the green board from Heider’s. It has two tone controls—high end, low end and a pan knob—and that’s it. I had great good fortune when I was a kid and started makin’ records. I made ’em at Wally Heider’s, Gold Star, so all the people that taught me were Frank Dimidio, Dave Gold, Stan Ross, Dean Jensen—these guys were the geniuses of the music business, still are.
They taught me more about sound and how sound is made and the principles of doing it, and it’s unshakably correct what they said to me: You get a great sound at the source. Put the correct mike in front of the source, get it to the tape the shortest possible route—that’s how you get a great sound. That’s how you do it. All other ways are work. The biggest moment of my life—the one I haven’t been able to get past ever, really—is 1961, when I first got to LA. I got invited to Radio Recorders to see Ray Charles, and I walk into the studio, and Ray’s playin’ all the piano parts with his left hand, reading a braille score with his right hand, singing the vocal live while a full orchestra played behind him. So I sat there and I watched. And I went, “This is how records are made. Put everybody in the fuckin’ room and off we go.” In those days everybody knew they had to go in, get their dick hard at the same time and deliver. And three hours later they walked out the fuckin’ door with a record in their pocket, man.
Of course, in those days they didn’t have eight-, sixteen-, twenty-four-, forty-eight-, sixty-four-track recording, ad nauseam, to fuck people up, and that is what fucked up the recording business and the musicians of today, by the way—fucked ’em all up to where they’ll never be the same, in my opinion. People realized they could do their part . . . later. Play their part and fix it later. And with rock and roll, the more you think, the more you stink.
It’s very easy for people to forget what rock and roll really is. Look man, I’m forty-seven years old, and I grew up in Wyoming, and I stole cars and drove five hundred miles to watch Little Richard, and I wanna tell you somethin’—when I saw this nigger come out in a gold suit, fuckin’ hair flyin’,
and leap up onstage and come down on his piano bangin’ and goin’ fuckin’ nuts in Salt Lake City, I went, “Hey man, I wanna be like him. This is what I want.” Even today he’s a scary dude. He’s the real thing. Rock and roll is not sedate, not safe, has truly nothin’ to do with money or anything. It’s like wind, rain, fire—it’s elemental. Fourteen-year-old kids, they don’t think, they feel. Rock and roll is fire, man, FIRE. It’s the attitude. It’s thumbing your nose at the world.
It’s a load. It’s such a load that it burns people out after a few years. Even the best of ’em burn out. People get old—they forget what it’s like to be a kid, they’re responsible, they’re this and they’re that. . . . You can’t have it both ways. You’re a rock and roller. Or you’re not.
I wanna tell you somethin’: Neil’s never been insecure about anything in his fuckin’ life. First among equals is Neil Young, and it’s always been that way. When Neil’s got his ax in hand, it’s like the Hulk. His aura becomes solid—he becomes eight feet tall, six feet wide. The only guy other than John Lennon who can actually go from folk to country to full orchestra. The only guy. I think when it’s all written down, he will unquestionably stand in the top five that ever made rock and roll.
During these recording sessions at Sunwest, my love affair with cars continued. I bought a 1934 Bentley close-coupled Mulliner Coupe that Briggs and I cruised in between the Hollywood studios and Topanga Canyon while we were recording. It had a lever on the floor that bypassed the muffler for high-speed efficiency that was really a cool feature for saving fuel. It was loud as hell. Briggs and I cruised home in that car every night after the sessions, grooving on the cutout muffler bypass and the hairy sound it made as we flew along the interstate and into Topanga Canyon’s backroads.
When we finished our first record, Reprise had some new technology they wanted to try with us. It was called the Haeco-CSG system, a new way to produce albums. According to the good folks at Wikipedia:
The Haeco-CSG or Holzer Audio Engineering–Compatible Stereo Generator system is an analog electronic device and method developed by Howard Holzer, Chief Engineer at A&M Records in Hollywood, California. His company, Holzer Audio Engineering, developed the system in the 1960s during the years of transition from monaural to stereophonic popular music recording . . . The idea behind Haeco-CSG was to create stereophonic vinyl LP records that when played on monaural equipment would allow the two-channel stereo mix to automatically “fold-down” properly to a single monaural channel . . . Generally speaking, Haeco-CSG has a degrading effect on the performance of both stereo and mono sounds processed through the system. The effect can vary substantially from one recording to another depending on the characteristics of the original unprocessed sound. The system “blurs” the focus of lead vocals and other sounds mixed to the center of a stereo recording. As bass frequencies are centered on most recordings, it also causes a partial loss of low frequency information, making the resulting sound somewhat “tinny.”
Holy shit!
This completely fucked up my first solo record, Neil Young, so that it didn’t sound anything like the mixes! What a beginning! My first solo record release! My masterpiece! I was totally blown out, being a technical freak of sorts even at that age. We went back in the studio and, of course, overreacting, remixed a few tracks and took the process off the other tracks. We should not have done any more remixing.
Then the next version of the record (which was also called Neil Young) was released with the changes. Unlike the first edition, it had my name across the top of the album cover in big letters so you could know it was a different edition. Some copies of the original made it into the marketplace, and they are collector’s pieces today.
Ultimately, the record was disappointing to myself and to my fans. All the people who were really waiting for it went out and got the bad version. That was a big learning experience.
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I started thinking about how much fun it was to play with a band, not be in a band, but play with a band, where I could direct the music and interact with other musicians. I was tired of overdubbing. It’s a lonely job. Since that first album, with few exceptions, I have only done minor overdubs for color on some tracks, mostly just a chord here or there; the rest has been playing live with other musicians in the same room at the same time.
Singing live in the studio was the next big hurdle for me to overcome. I could visualize myself singing live in the studio like musicians used to do for the old records, where there was a real performance, not some contrived built-up creation, but a real piece of music. I began building confidence in my ability to sing and play with a band at the same time while recording. I was doing that live onstage, so I figured it shouldn’t take too much to do it in the more analytical environment of the recording studio.
Soon after that first record, Neil Young, came out, I remember meeting Billy Talbot and Danny Whitten from the Rockets at the Topanga Center. As I have said before, I met the Rockets first in Hollywood at the Whisky and visited them a few times in their house on Laurel Canyon Boulevard while I was still in the Springfield. We visited with a friend of Billy’s at a Topanga house. It was way across the canyon from mine, and it was visible from near my place. I always wondered what it was like inside because it was an incredible house on a beautiful piece of land, set aside from any other houses. It was pale yellow in color and was quite striking to me.
After we visited that cool house in Topanga, I asked if they would like to play with me and try some stuff out. I just wanted Danny, Billy, and Ralphie from the Rockets, though, because I was looking for a simple band sound. I invited them up to my house in Topanga, and we got together in the living room. We hit it off instantly, jamming just like we had many times in the Laurel Canyon late-night pot fests they had at their house.
That was all before music became a business, an industry, a commodity, or an asset for any of us. Music was more important than “making it.” It seemed to be more down-to-earth to me, and I think that is why I was more relaxed hanging there with the Rockets at the Laurel Canyon house. It was so cool, with everyone sitting in a big circle talking and sharing songs together or playing solo. Music was our language. We passed the guitar like Native Americans passed the pipe. It really was our language of love, our shared interest, our common bond, our own. That is the feeling we shared with our audiences back then, too. We had a bond.
The Rockets had a lot of friends back then, including Robin Lane, a musician singer/songwriter. She was Danny’s girlfriend, I remember. I was unaware of her history with Danny and the Memories, but I could tell this group of people had been friends for a good long time. I always felt so comfortable jamming over there with Danny, Billy, Ralphie, Robin, and their friends. There was a lot less pressure there than there was around the Buffalo Springfield scene. There were no big expectations. Just dreams.
A few weeks before the people who would found Crazy Horse (as yet unnamed), Danny, Billy, Ralphie, and me, got together in my Topanga living room, I had been sick with the flu, holed up in bed in the house. Susan was bringing me soup and good stuff, but I still felt like shit. I was delirious half the time and had an odd metallic taste in my mouth. It was peculiar. At the height of this sickness, I felt pretty high in a strange way.
I had a guitar in a case near the bed—probably too near the bed in the opinion of most of the women I had relationships with. I took it out and started playing; I had left it in a tuning I was fond of, D modal, with the E strings both tuned down to D. It provided a drone sound, sort of like a sitar, but not really. I played for a while and wrote “Cinnamon Girl.” The lyrics were different from how the song eventually ended up, but all those changes happened right there, immediately, until the song was complete.
The original “Cinnamon Girl” lyrics, 1969.
Then I took the guitar out of D modal and kept playing. At the time, there was a song in E minor on the radio that I liked, “Sunny” or something like that. I remembered hearing it in the drugsto
re at Fairfax and Sunset while I was shopping for something to ease the flu. The song kept looping in my head, endlessly, like some things do when I’m sick and maybe a little delirious. So I started playing it on the guitar, and then I changed the chords a bit—and it turned into “Down by the River.” I was still feeling sick, but happy and high. It was a unique feeling. I had two brand-new songs! Totally different from the last album!
Then I started playing in A minor, one of my favorite keys. I had nothing to lose. I was on a roll. The music just flowed naturally that afternoon, and soon I had written “Cowgirl in the Sand.” This was pretty unique, to write three songs in one sitting, and I am pretty sure that my semi-delirious state had a lot to do with that.
So there Billy, Ralphie, Danny, and I were in the Topanga house living room. It was all so easy, just like falling off a log. We played so well together. Simple, down-to-earth rock and roll. There is a cool picture of us all in that living room, grouped around a big chair Briggs and I had found at an antique shop in Echo Park and brought back to Topanga. The only thing wrong with that picture is the suit I had decided to wear. It was the suit I married Susan in. Should have left that one on the rack.
Anyway, I remember saying to the guys when we were playing “Cinnamon Girl,” describing the modal instrumental theme that introduces the song, “It’s like the Egyptians rolling giant stones up to a pyramid on logs. It’s huge and it’s moving. Unstoppable. Think Egyptians!” Soon we were in the studio recording those songs with Briggs at Heider’s. It was massive. I was so freed by this music. I was happy as hell.
