by Neil Young
Chad Cromwell is a unique drummer, different from all the rest. He is very strong and steady, the most reliable. You can count on Chad to always be on the money. A band could hang on his groove because it never falters. His playing on Prairie Wind and with the Bluenotes is totally awesome. Equally at home in any genre from country to blues to rock, Chad is a very authoritative, consistent, and powerful drummer who just kicks ass. His drumming on “A Day in the Life” was amazing when I played it with him on my marathon tour with the Electric Band throughout the world in 2007 and 2009. He just rolled with the changes in that song, one of the most difficult and challenging songs for any band, including the Beatles, to play live. When Paul did it with us in Hyde Park at the end of our tour in London, I know he was impressed with how we took that song and delivered it live to the masses.
Chad also played “Words” from the Harvest album with its alternating time signatures on that tour. No one other than Buttrey could even play that song, but Chad took it by the horns and slapped it around. The groove with him and Rick Rosas on bass was so huge that we left the ground every night we played it. Save the original version, “Words” was played the best by Chad and that band. The first time I ever saw Rick and Chad playing was at Farm Aid one year with Joe Walsh. I loved the way they supported Joe. I asked them to play a little with me, and we did Freedom, the Bluenotes’ This Note’s for You; then we did Living with War, and most recently, the Electric Band’s Fork in the Road. These were all wonderful groups, tours, and records. Rick is a pretty quiet guy until he starts telling jokes and getting funny; then he is hilarious. We’ve had some great bus rides. He’s a slinky bass player with a lot of soul. I always enjoy playing with him and Chad, and we have a lot of fun together.
Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield is possibly the fastest and lightest drummer I have ever heard or played with. His kick drum on “For What It’s Worth” is what holds the whole thing together. Drummers are the heartbeat of a song, and it has to be good or you die. So yes, I have been lucky to play with all of these guys.
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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is hallowed ground in my mind. Originally founded by Ahmet Ertegun, Bob Krasnow, Jann Wenner, and Jon Landau, the Hall was a great idea and an amazing place to imagine. Originally, it didn’t really exist as a place, and that was fine. I supposed it was big, kind of like the silver lining around a cloud. Not something you could actually see or touch. It was the honor of a lifetime for me to be inducted. A dream come true.
All or most of my heroes were already in the Hall of Fame when I was inducted: Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry—the pioneers and architects were all there. It is the biggest honor in rock and roll, and rock and roll is what it is.
When people got up to accept their inductions in the first few years, you could feel the energy. It was electric. It was their chance to say what they thought, their moment to be heard and be real. People spoke from the heart and said some outrageous things. You never knew what to expect. A few video cameras captured the moment. People spoke off the top of their heads or from a little sheet of paper. People cried and laughed and settled scores. A lot of them settled scores. There was a lot to say for some of them, and this was their best chance.
Some of these artists had not been active in years or had not had more than a moment in the light and certainly did not make a fortune in the music business. But they all had soul. Some did make a lot of money, of course, but the Hall was about the music, about rock and roll as a way of life. Phil Spector, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and several others have made long speeches that covered things they needed to say and they had every right to say, and they exercised that right. It was amazing to hear their takes on life, how they had been done right or wrong, who they blamed for their problems and thanked for their victories on the road to the Hall. It was an honor to hear them talking to their peers, to the others who aspired to be like them, and to those who they felt had attained even higher ground than they themselves had.
My favorites spoke with no notes. Some cried. Some laughed. Some thanked. Some just lashed out at those who had screwed them out of royalties and security later in life. Rock and roll is no cakewalk. It was and is a shrewd and unforgiving business if you made some bad decisions about your representation when you were young. A lot of bad moves were made, particularly in the early days, as great as they were, and this was a chance to set it straight, and the inductees did, exercising their new power and rights as members of the hallowed Rock Hall.
Then the worst thing happened.
The founders decided to make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony a TV show! VH1! What could be LESS rock and roll than VH1? Now a place that was beyond classification had been relegated to a VH1 show. Gone were the long speeches. Three minutes on TV was the new speech. Good-bye, long rambling diatribes. Teleprompters were now available. I made a lot of obscene comments in my speech and swore a lot about everyone involved, but in the end, I don’t care to mention them here. They may know who they are, and they may not. People make mistakes. They probably don’t know the difference.
It reminded me of the Lifetime Achievement Award the Grammys gave Frank Sinatra in New York one year. A recently successful artist came out and introduced Sinatra in a very long-winded oratory, and then Frank came out. He had just started talking when he was out of time. The band began to play and the introducing artist came back out and walked him off. Sinatra was definitely not finished speaking. I would have loved to hear him, but there was no time left. Frank looked confused and disappointed when he was escorted off. He was just getting started and couldn’t believe he was cut short. That’s TV. A rambling intro that was much longer than Frank’s cut-short speech meant that time was up for one of the greatest legends ever in the history of music. That’s life. It pissed me off. But sometimes it’s better not to blow up at someone. I can save that anger and emotion for my guitar playing. A Crazy Horse tour is just around the corner. I’ll use it for fuel. I don’t want to write some damning thing here about somebody and have to live with that for the rest of time. I don’t think that would be a very good idea.
A lot of times things happen and you can’t believe it. You walk around cursing under your breath and it really doesn’t help. Life is too short. Things shake out. They really do. Take the dickhead record executive who came out to hear me once and went back to his Hollywood record company telling them the material wasn’t ready to record. He really pissed me off. Who asked him? I never worked like that before, and I never will in the future. It’s my music. But now I’m letting go of that. I might buy him a beer and tell him to drink it sometime, but that’s about the extent of it now.
I don’t drink anymore myself, I’m moving on. And that’s not to say I won’t drink again. I’m not making any promises, but I don’t think I was a great drinker. Some folks are great drinkers; they drink and tell jokes and laugh their asses off, and they are funny as hell. We buried one of those last week. Life is just a big test, and if you try hard, you fail. If you don’t try too hard and fail a little but have a good time, maybe that is success.
I’ve seen some really happy and content people in this life, and I am not one of them all the time, just some of the time, but I am thankful as hell for them and lonely for the old times and old friends. Not all the time, though. I’m really happy doing what I do, and what I’m doing now is trying like hell to rescue recorded sound so people can feel music again. That makes me happy because it’s real, and if I succeed, I will have helped a lot of artists and music lovers achieve nirvana. Who knows where the feeling of sound went? It went so slowly and gradually that no one noticed but me and a few other narky old buzzards, as my daughter Amber lovingly calls me occasionally. But she was the one who heard Pono in my car after listening to MP3s her whole life and looked at me and asked, “What happened? How did that happen?” She knows why I am doing what I am doing. She is them, all of those young people who haven’t felt the real sound of recorded
music.
I am doing this for them, and me. Let’s not forget me. I want to feel the sounds again like I did in the beginning, or even better now, because technology is supposed to improve life. Of course, you can’t go back, but when I see a young person react to hearing Pono for the first time, well, that is good enough for me. Yes it is.
All I have to do now is navigate the waters of venture capitalism, those treacherous shorelines of commerce, in the HMS Pono, a fine ship of significant age and worthiness, with a crew I barely know, but who seem to be committed to the great cause of delivering the cargo to safe harbor in the Heart of Music. I can’t tell you how scary this is. I have never been here before, on this vessel, in these waters, with the cargo on board. I seek counsel continuously from a wealth of friends who are experienced in carrying the cargo home to port. They have done this before me. But this is my cargo. I chose it myself, and it has gone undelivered for what seems like decades. How often I wake up at midnight full of questions. Am I alive? Yes.
I may have been asleep for forty years. It’s hard to tell. Some people have pointed out to me how great I used to be when I wrote a bunch of songs, but I’m not sure they know what they are speaking about, or the subject, even. Why so pensive about the past? What can it say or do for you now? Nothing much, I fear. I used to wonder if people recognized me, and I was even worried if I thought they did because I didn’t really need to be reminded what I was like or when something happened or if I met you once.
Perhaps I overstated that. Forty years is not an amount of time to ignore, though. I think I will have to use my time wisely and keep my thoughts straight if I am to succeed and deliver the cargo I so carefully have carried thus far to the outer reaches. Not that it’s my only job or task. I have others, too. Sacred things that I need to protect from pain and hardship, like careless remarks on an open mind. I need to guard against that and honor the source of my feelings, not hide them in a blanket of doubt. My songs are hidden now, orphaned from their melodies and structure that once contained them. How am I, some forty years down the road, to deal with that past accomplishment? Cast it off? Relinquish it to the others who value it more? Was it me? Or who am I now that I cannot see or meet myself the way I was? That is not for me to know, because I am busy with new things now and have no time at all. I am very busy with all of this, and every day is shorter and I wake up earlier and go to sleep at a different time than before. I dream all the time at night, not like before, when I induced dreams in the waking hours to snatch them in their innocence and commit them to song and melody and words captured. Not now. It is not now for that. It is far over for that, I think. I am hoping for a revelation of dreams I can remember, but that is never the case with dreams, is it?
So now I am in the song machine gone awry. I wander the halls of straightness, not knowing how to hallucinate. Finally the course is clear and the sound of waves on rocks is fading. The fog is clearing and there is so much sea. An endless chorus of waves, melodies, refrains, and codas, cropping up and fading away, are a reminder of the duty at hand and the wasted moments. It is the time to gather this and make something of it, or it is not that time. There is no clue. Just the clear sound of the waves on the wood as the ship moves dutifully toward delivery of the cargo. I am on the deck now, at the wheel even, the wind in my hair, such as it is. And my hat is gone, blown away by the same wind that powers me on. The Heart of Music to be saved, delivered, moored, and off-loaded. This is my life, my dream, my moment in the wind. Escape me if you will, songs. Let yourselves go now. We approach safe harbor.
Chapter Sixty-Two
It is 9:43 A.M. on the West Coast. I will hit the “Buy it now” button at exactly ten A.M.
My latest love affair is a 1961 Lincoln Continental with about fifty thousand miles on it. Very nice original condition with a few hot rod appointments, and not what I usually go for, but this car really caught my eye. I was looking for a Ford product to replace the Eldorado in the video series. One reason for this is the damage I did to the Eldorado that day on I-5 with little Nina.
The other reason is the real reason: For the same amount of money it would take to rebuild the engine in the Eldorado, I can purchase another Ford product. (Of course, I will rebuild the Eldorado anyway, so the money is not really a valid reason.) “Why is that so important?” you might ask. It is important to me because I will be taking Bill Ford, executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, for a ride and letting him feel Pono. I really like Bill because he is a futurist, and not many people would actually believe how much of a visionary he is, since he is at the head of one of the oldest car-manufacturing companies in the world. He is taking a hard look at the future while he is here on earth. He is trying to understand where traffic will be in twenty years, what cars will be like, what people will need for transportation. He and Jim Farley, head of global marketing for Ford, have changed a lot of things.
Today’s Ford cars are very different from yesterday’s. They have evolved the interior and its features into many levels while using the same exterior with few changes from the top of the line to the entry level. That is really revolutionary. The quality is added inside. It’s in the user experience inside the car. That is where the big difference is now. This enables a lot of money to be saved and put into the inside of the cars, where people are. So I want him to hear Pono in one of Ford’s own cars. No car in the world has ever sounded that good, and I think he will hear that. Being me, I have chosen a 1961 Continental over a new Ford Focus, but I want to take the prototype system out of the Continental and put it in the Focus to show how easy that is as part of the demo I plan for Mr. Ford.
So I located this Continental and plan on buying it at ten A.M. PST, when the owner will put it up on eBay for a prearranged price, which is actually still a little too high. I go by feelings, and my feeling is that this is the right car, even though it is not standard stock, because it has nineteen-inch wheels and a new exhaust system resonating the original 430-cubic-inch V8, and I am paying for extras I don’t really want. That said, it is rock and roll and worthy of the Pono feature. It is quite possibly the Hot Rod Lincoln you have heard so much about! The rest of the car is a really nice, near cherry original, beautiful in every respect, a true work of automotive history. I have looked at this car for almost two weeks in pictures, checking out each one and reading the description over and over. I trust the seller.
The car is in Canada, and I may go up there and get it next week and drive it home, stopping in Seattle on the way back to celebrate Pearl Jam’s twentieth anniversary with them. Sounds like fun. 9:59 A.M.! Gotta go!
Chapter Sixty-Three
In Kansas City for Farm Aid 26, I found myself strangely lightened, with all of the harsh business negotiations I am so unfamiliar with over for the moment and gone from my thoughts. I thought of myself as a breeze blowing through Kansas, not worried, not pensive at all. I saw my old friends in the Farm Aid family: Willie, John, Dave, Carolyn, Glenda, Corky, David, and a couple of new friends, Willie’s talented son Lukas Nelson, and Jamey Johnson, a great singer/songwriter from Alabama who has landed in Nashville, I imagine temporarily. Jamey and Lukas are the new guard. Real country. Real good. No bullshit. They are not the only ones, but if they were, they could handle it.
Musicians like to check the stage and make sure everything is working before a show. Some groups let their crews do it. Some don’t. If a band is running late, then the crew has to do it. If you sing, it’s good to know that the monitor speakers onstage are right for your ears. Some singers today use in-ear monitors and listen to their voices pretty loud directly in their ears. I don’t do this. I love to hear the sound of the hall, the echo off the walls, and the sound of the instruments onstage blending together. That is key for me if I’m going to improvise or get lost in the sound. I want to walk around the stage with my guitar, finding the sweet spot where I can hear everything in balance. That is key for me playing extended jams. In-ear phones are way too sterile and clinical for me. I have
to hear the speakers and the amps and the hall sound.
The night before the Farm Aid show, I had a sound check and it was different. I sang the set I was planning on doing in the empty soccer stadium. I started with “Comes a Time.” There was so much echo that I really couldn’t hear too well, and the monitors sounded really harsh to my ears. I sang “Powderfinger,” and it was too high for me to reach the notes that night. I hadn’t really warmed up and it was hard to sing those high notes. I tried a few things and nothing really sounded too good, so I asked Mark Humphreys to just turn off the monitors completely, which not many musicians feel comfortable doing. All I could hear was echo now, just the sound of the stadium. I sang “Sugar Mountain.” Actually it sounded good to my ears; notes just lasted forever. Nothing was abrasive. I tried my harmonica. It was like floating on air. The echo was amazing. I did “Peaceful Valley Boulevard” and then “Love and War.” I tried out the harp in “Love and War.” It worked, and the sound just floated out into the Missouri night.
So the next day at the show, when I was watching everyone play, adjusting their monitors all the time, trying to find a good sound and struggling, I used no monitors at all. I just didn’t bother using any. I knew it was going to be cool. Just like a breeze blowing through Kansas. Everything sounded beautiful. I did an acoustic set and really enjoyed it. One guitar, one harmonica, and six songs were all I needed.
