by Neil Young
I drove it everywhere in Florida. Once I took it to West Palm Beach. I was feeling lonely and went lookin’ around, found a little bar, and met a girl there who was playing pool. She had a white dress on. Playing pool with a white dress on blew my mind! She took me to the West Palm Beach Country Club the next day for breakfast, and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I felt like a trophy. The Jensen got me back in a couple of hours of peaceful motoring along A1A, the Florida coast route. It is a beautiful highway along the Atlantic with motels that reminded me of going down there with my parents every winter from Omemee when I was a kid in the fifties. We went down to New Smyrna Beach every year for a few years. Daddy was working on books, and while he would write, Bob and I would go in the ocean. I went to school there for a couple of months for a few years in a row when I was about ten, because that was where my family was. No wonder I like to move. No wonder I love the South, especially Florida.
When I got back to the boat in Fort Lauderdale, I was always happy to see the progress and check in with Roger and the crew. On a Friday, after the traditional payday tequila, we headed out to the bars. Later that night I was driving the Jensen and got pulled over by the police. We were completely shit-faced! The car was full to capacity with drunken shipworkers. I explained that we were all good citizens who had been working hard all week and we were simply going to go and get some coffee. He let us off. Everyone in the car was amazed. So was I.
Later, after the Ragland was launched, Roger shipped the car back to California, and it was damaged along the way. I had to get it fixed. Afterward, they repainted the hood area that had been repaired. It was the European type of hood that lifted completely up, revealing the whole front end, wheels and everything. Now it was suddenly shiny red in the front. I was disappointed and missed the old faded look. We had to repaint the whole thing—John McKeig was great at mixing paint and finishing, and gave the whole car a faded look.
Today, it sits in Feelgood’s in need of a big tune-up (at the very least). The horn/lights controller was broken when I left the car at a dealership to get something done. Some turkey got in the car and broke it with his knee. It has never been quite the same. I want to get it fixed, and that’s what’s happening now. I love that car. So does Pegi, because it’s very sexy. Just seeing it in Feelgood’s fills my heart with all good thoughts of an innocent time with really good friends.
—
A few meditations about success.
Somewhere along the line it always comes up. Are you happy with what you have done? Have you been successful? I know I am thankful for the things I have been able to try. Success is hard to measure. If you have lots of cash, that doesn’t make you successful—it makes you rich. (Even if you’re like me and have lots of stuff and not much cash relatively, that doesn’t make you a success; it only makes you materially rich.)
Success is a tough one for me to define. I have my failings to be sure, and I’m working on them all the time, except for when I forget or am so preoccupied that I’m not aware. These are my personal successes and failures, and they have nothing to do with money or possessions. My children are perhaps my biggest success, and I share that with Pegi, because without her, it would not be like that.
You may have noticed that a lot of my time is spent tying up loose ends, getting closure, and completing things. One early measure of success I set for myself was very material. Remember that red 1959 Cadillac convertible I sat in that was in my twin friends’ garage in the early sixties while I was going to Kelvin High School? The one that was driven back and forth to a TV station in the States by their dad? Remember when I was in the YMCA in Fort William calculating how many months I would have to work at the Flamingo Club to earn enough money to buy that kind of car? Well, as fate turns out, I had it and I lost it and I still have it. The situation wears on me. It’s not a big deal, but it isn’t a success, nor is it a failure. You see, that car is the famous Nanu the Lovesick Moose! But there is much more to it than that.
One day in 1975, I was leaving my ranch. The long road out is very narrow; there is a very steep hill with twists and turns through redwood trees on either side of the road. As I was driving along, climbing slowly up the hill in Nanu, a Volkswagen came flying down the road between the trees and, seeing me, slammed on the brakes and slid directly into Nanu, scraping down the whole side of the car and destroying its side panels and the rare stainless molding that identified this Eldorado as a Biarritz. The driver of the Volkswagen, a teenage girl, was terrified. She was nearly hysterical, crying about the trouble she would be in with her parents for getting in another accident. She had been going way too fast and should not have slammed on her brakes. (That was the worst thing she could have done; she had plenty of room to stop or pass, but she panicked, hitting the brakes and locking them up, and slid downhill straight into poor old Nanu, the Innocent Convertible.)
I let the girl off the hook. I told her right there not to worry, I would take care of it and she should just go home, which she did. There was a place called Coachcraft in Scotts Valley, California, near Highway 17 between Santa Cruz and Walnut Creek. Nanu was taken there to be fixed around the third quarter of 1975. I asked the man in charge to do a perfect restoration of the car. “Make it museum quality,” I said.
He took it down to bare metal in his shop and started to paint the chassis. At some point he decided he would like to work for me and complete the car while he was taking care of my whole collection. I liked John McKeig immediately; we were kindred spirits, so I hired him. He moved to the ranch and began taking care of my cars, maintaining and cleaning the building and the old autos, which had grown in number. He redid the entire building, which took a couple of years and was a beautiful work of art.
John’s standards were very high, but so were his mechanics. (You don’t have to read between the lines here.) Years went by. Anyway, to make a long story short, Nanu sat on the ranch for thirty odd years in the same condition, always next in line to be worked on, until one day John had to retire. It was just not feasible for me to have that many cars anymore, so I started selling them; I even sold the part of the ranch where the beautiful car barn John had built was. That was heartbreaking for John. We then constructed Feelgood’s, where the cream of the crop of my old cars would stay. Today, there is also a warehouse in San Carlos, where Nanu sits in pieces, patiently waiting to be reassembled. I have been told that Nanu is worth a fortune. I have also been told by Brizio Street Rods, the shop building Lincvolt, that to put Nanu back together again would probably cost around as much as she’s worth. So when Lincvolt is finally done, I plan on starting one more job. If there is any money left in the Lincvolt fire insurance fund, I will use that cash to start reassembling Nanu the Lovesick Moose, completing my seventeen-year-old self’s dream in one more giant step toward success.
—
Walking has always been good for me. I love to walk. Long walks on the ranch or over the lava in Hawaii are therapeutic and result in a clear head. Ben Keith and I used to walk the ranch together on a ridge every day for a couple of years. It is usually my preference to walk alone, but with Ben it was fine. One day Ben told me that he got winded starting where I start, so we began starting at the top of the first rise, rather than at the bottom. He was having a problem getting enough air. We adapted, and everything was fine. I miss him now on that walk.
For a year or more, I stopped the walking because my feet were hurting. At a doctor’s advice, I tried wearing special inserts in my shoes, but they threw off my balance. Eventually I learned from various body workers on the Big Island, most notably a Feldenkrais practitioner there, that correct posture is very important and my bad posture was putting a lot of strain on the bottoms of my feet. It’s amazing what you can learn when you step outside the realm of people who are selling you something and into the realm of people who treat the body, not the symptom.
Where the doctor had not helped me and the inserts were not working, the body workers’ advice was the key to
success. I took it to heart and solved the problem by working on my posture, which is a lot better now than it was. I was well on my way to being a stooped-over old guy. That did happen to my dad. That was my problem, and I solved it by changing my posture. After that, things were pretty good.
But I had another thing causing the problem, too. When I find something I like, I stick with it, sometimes for way too long. I had been wearing the same brand of hiking shoes for a long time. At first I loved them, but eventually I found that I had to get new ones more and more often. One day I went to a different store and got some real good leather boots instead of those hiking high-tops I had been getting for years. These new leather boots kick ass. No more problems. Now I have really good boots and can walk a long way again! Fantastic. Maybe I should call this book The Shoe Chronicles.
There is a reason why I am telling you so much about my shoes and my feet. Walking and all kinds of movement from one place to another are very important to me. It has always been my way to think about things while I walk. I am always going over ideas, songs, album running orders, all kinds of creative stuff, while I am walking. I love to walk. It soothes my soul. My mother always told me that my Grandpa Ragland would walk every day and he loved his walks. He lived a long time.
My favorite walk is still up on the ridge overlooking the ranch. I walk about a mile and a half to two miles every time I go up there, and always feel better afterward, rain or shine. Nina goes with me now when I go. On the ridge, there is a place I walk to where two eucalyptus trees have grown together. One tree has a branch that reaches over to the other and grows right through its trunk. These two trees are permanently connected. I call them the Trees in Love. I walk to the Trees in Love and back home every time I get a chance.
Now, in Hawaii I like to paddleboard too. It does the same thing for me, I open up and start thinking about all kinds of ideas about music, life, my family, all matters personal. I take all of this to heart in my personal time of reflection.
With David Briggs, backstage at the Roxy nightclub in West Hollywood, 1973.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Once, when Buffalo Springfield did a show in Albuquerque, I went for a ride in a rented car with Bruce Palmer and cruised the back roads around town. There was a road called the Old Indian Trail that ran along the edge of town and had a wonderful view of the mountains and the old Indian country on one side and the city of Albuquerque on the other.
As we were driving along we found an old roadside antique shop and stopped to check it out. Quite a selection of stuff was inside. There were a lot of old glass bottles and some old statues. The place had a vibe I really liked, and I spent a long time just walking around looking. I finally saw something in a corner I wanted: a bow and two arrows. The arrows were handmade, with iron tips that were jagged-edged and very sharp. They looked like hunting arrows. The arrows were long, very straight, and the tips were different on each one. The bow was very plain and I think it was lemonwood. At least that’s what the old man at the shop said.
Anyway, the arrows had real feathers on the ends, tied with twine that was neatly wound around the quills. They looked like authentic Indian arrows to me, although the iron tips were different. Maybe they were obtained from a white man, a trader. So I took them up to the counter and paid for them, along with an old Indian blanket I found, and when I got back to Laurel Canyon and my little cabin there, I stuck the arrows in the wall by throwing them at it and letting them stick.
I always took them with me whenever I moved to a new place, and I would again throw them at the wall and let them stick wherever they were.
They went to Malibu when Stephen found a house on Malibu Road and the Springfield lived there. I had a little separate place below the garage where we put up some paneling and a sliding glass door. It had an ocean view. A decorative llama rug was on my floor. A kerosene lamp was on my Monterey Spanish dresser. The arrows were stuck in the wall. When Bruce was allowed a second chance and returned to the USA with the help of lawyers, he got busted for the last time near that Malibu house, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway on acid without a license. That was really the beginning of the end for the Buffalo.
Later I moved to Topanga and stuck the arrows in the wall there in that house the same way, by throwing them at a wooden wall and letting them stick. Eventually, I packed the bow and arrows away in the back of my ’51 Willys Jeepster and drove north on the 101 to move to my new ranch. When we were done renovating half of the living room, I leaned the bow up in the corner, threw the arrows at the wall, and left them right where they stuck for the first time. Every once in a while now, when Pegi and I move pictures around, we take the arrows down and I throw them at the wall again in a new place. They are still there for us to enjoy after all these years, whenever we return from our travels to our wonderful ranch home.
Of course, our little cabin has grown, and if you listen really closely on a misty morning, you can still hear little Amber’s bare footsteps running gingerly down the long hall to the living room. At night, when a fire is flickering in the lava rock fireplace, you can see those time-aged and untreated redwood planks glowing in the warm reflection—pierced by two arrows from Albuquerque. I like to take a little bit of the past with me when I go to a new place, and those arrows really ground me. It’s odd, but the way Pegi likes those arrows makes me feel like she knows me.
—
David Briggs’s house in Topanga was known as Old Topanga Ranch and was hidden in the trees just off Old Topanga Canyon Road. I would visit David there, and we would listen to records and talk about the songs and records we were working on. There were a lot of good times.
On the weekends or at least on sunny days, we would all be outside around a fire pit or pitching horseshoes. Kirby, David’s old friend from Wyoming, was there with us a lot, as was Shannon, David’s wife and the mother of Lincoln Wyatt Briggs, David’s son. LW, as he was called, was a great kid. Hannibal and Attila were David’s two dogs, brown shorthaired hounds, who were always around in the living room somewhere. David produced a few records during this time with Spirit, Nils Lofgren, and Murray Roman, among others. Briggs is known to have driven several bands crazy with his temper and his rants about the inadequacies of certain musicians and bands. Subtlety was never David’s thing, although he did work his magic in some pretty curious ways. His reputation grew and became legendary, and some musicians were actually scared of David.
David once said, “If you want to fight someone big, hit them first and run like hell!” He was fearless. But of all the records I made with David, what I most remember is his dedication to getting a great performance on tape at any cost. “Be great or be gone.”
One time we traveled across the country from Key West to San Francisco together in Pocahontas. I was driving and David was navigating. When we got to the Rocky Mountains, we decided to give Independence Pass in Colorado a shot. It was about twelve thousand feet or so at the summit, and then it landed in Aspen on the other side. We were imagining all the starlets we would meet there, so we tried to take that two-lane road over the Rockies in a forty-foot-long bus. It was the wildest ride I have ever been on. When we got to the peak, there was a curve on the side of the mountain with a sheer drop down several thousand feet on the left side and a rock wall straight up on the right. The road was about fifteen feet wide at that point, less than two lanes, and slightly narrower than on a straightaway. I couldn’t see around the curve because the rock wall was cutting down my angle. I swung the front end out over the line a bit to make it around the curve, when suddenly a car appeared coming the other way!
Quickly I turned away from it and simultaneously heard a sickening scraping sound on the right-hand side of the bus where it had kissed the mountainside. We couldn’t stop up there or anywhere, so we just kept going around the curve and down that road. We had peaked the summit and were on our way down into Aspen, and after about twenty minutes of driving we got to a place where we could pull the bus over and take a look. H
oly shit! There was a gaping slash in the bus. The generator and the air-conditioning unit were both heavily damaged. We continued into Aspen and went for a series of beers. David was drinking Mexican coffees, a favorite of his, made of coffee and tequila.
When we exited the bar, we checked into a hotel to regroup. The next day we continued on toward California with no generator and no air-conditioning. A couple of days later we finally arrived at Alex’s Bar on the mountain on Skyline Boulevard above the ranch, one of our old haunts. We went in, had dinner and a lot of alcohol. That was a trip to remember, but it was only one of the many experiences I shared with my good friend Mr. Briggs. I think I have time to tell you a few more, although I could never tell you all of them.
About twenty years later, in the mid-nineties, Briggs and I were making an album. I still call it an album because that is what I make. I don’t make CDs or iTunes tracks. I make albums. That is just what I do. Call it what you like. I remember how I hated the shuffle feature on iTunes because it fucked up the running order I spent hours laboring over. Having tracks available independently and having the shuffle feature available sucks as far as I am concerned. Call me old-fashioned. I make albums and I want the songs to go together to create a feeling. I do those things on purpose. I don’t want people cherry-picking the albums. I like to choose the singles. After all, it’s my shit.
We were making an album at the Complex in LA that Briggs was producing with John Hanlon engineering. It was Crazy Horse, and it was cool. We were right into it. Briggs said at one point that this record was going to be Crazy Horse’s Grammy. He was really into it then, and that surprised me. He never gave a shit about that in the past. Kurt Cobain had just committed suicide and left a note with my song quoted in it. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” He had been taking a lot of heat for canceling some shows. I, coincidentally, had been trying to reach him through our offices to tell him that I thought he was great and he should do exactly what he thought he should do and fuck everybody else. He was not just an entertainer; he was an artist and songwriter. There is a big difference. I knew him and recognized him for who he was. I wanted to talk to him. Tell him only to play when he felt like it. And that would be good enough. Be true.
