Snooky came up from Texas to try to help. “Rassy cried all the time. I had never seen her cry. It was absolutely awful. Rassy didn’t even hear when I said, ‘Don’t cry. You don’t cry over this. That’s not the thing to do.’ Mother would’ve gotten angry at Rassy for carrying on like that. She would not approve. ’Course, Rassy was crying so hard she didn’t care.”
Snooky said she tried to talk to Scott. “His view of Rassy was a onesentence thing—‘She leaves nothing in the bank.’ Scott wasn’t talking about money, he was talking about relationships—he had to start from square one every day to be accepted as a decent person. I thought it was a dirty remark. I remember the line, because I thought, ‘I wonder if he ever knew Rassy.’”
Divorce just wasn’t the way things were handled in the Ragland family, where Bill and Pearl had stayed together despite what some say was a passionless marriage. “If my father told you something, it was going to be that way, period,” said Snooky. “If it took everything he had in the world, he would deliver on his promise. He raised us the same way—that was pounded into us. We just thought that when we gave our word, that was it. Period. You didn’t turn around and change your mind on something important. I know Rassy felt the same way. She was so stunned by Scott.
“Rassy went through life laughing until then. Everything was funny to her … after that, it wasn’t. She didn’t laugh like she used to, and she drank a lot more. I don’t know how much she drank, but she drank a lot. Anybody that didn’t meet her until after her divorce never really met Rassy. She was never the same. It just broke her heart.”
Within a couple of days of the split, Scott took his two sons out to Ciccione’s, an Italian restaurant in Toronto that remains a favorite family haunt, to deliver the bad news. “I tried to explain to them that I loved them but that I didn’t want to live with their mother anymore,” he writes. “I’m not sure I made much sense … I didn’t want this thing to end with the boys just going off into the blue, but I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
After dinner, Bob and Neil walked Scott back to the offices of the Globe and Mail. Before they parted, Neil reached out to his father and patted him on the arm, “as if to say he was sorry for me, which perhaps he was.” Having been around Neil enough to know he isn’t always the most demonstrative person when it comes to his feelings, I wondered what effect this gesture had on Scott. In reply, he launched into a story.
“If Neil was in the room with somebody who was fat or had some disfigurement—somebody who had undergone some loss—and somebody made a reference that could hurt that person, Neil’s eyes would fill with tears, and this is when he was five or six years old. He was so sensitive to people’s feelings—and I know he’s hurt lots of people’s feelings one way or another—but when he was a little kid, I noticed this. Neil just had a fantastic sensitivity for the hurts that other people carried with them, and that patting me outside the Globe and Mail building? I’ve never forgotten it.”
As the family disintegrated, Neil’s obsession with music intensified. Christmas of 1958 is the first time anyone remembers Neil really playing an instrument: a cheap plastic ukulele. His parents recall getting it for him as a stocking stuffer; Neil said his father had bought it for him a few months earlier in Pickering. Whatever the case, Young started to focus on making music. Scott writes that Neil “would close the door to his room at the top of the stairs and we would hear plunk, pause while he moved his fingers to the next chord, plunk, pause while he moved again, plunk. …”
What were the Raglands’ musical roots? There is the meager evidence of grandmother Pearl’s tormented endeavors on piano and Rassy’s love for it. According to Scott, “The only thing that could move her to tears was music—especially operatic music. The Great Waltz—Rassy saw that five times. She would go anywhere that was showing. Rassy told me one time that the only thing in life that she would really like to do was have a great voice for singing, so there was that in the mix when Neil started to go.”
Scott’s side of the family was full of down-home pickers. “If it was raining on the farm, you’d run like hell for the house and get what instrument you could get,” recalls Scott’s brother, Bob. “Somebody might wind up with a violin, somebody might wind up with a banjo or mandolin or mouth organ. There’s sort of a family pride in musicianship.”
As a teenager, Neil would find out what formidable musicians the Youngs were when he attended a family funeral in Winnipeg. “When Cousin Alice died, a bunch of us got together at one cousin’s house and told Neil to bring his guitar—he was getting to be a hotshot around Winnipeg,” recalls Uncle Bob. “Neil walks into this little house, sees all these farmers sitting around—everything but hay stickin’ out of their ears—and strikes up. Everybody starts playing, and Jesus, he was really trying to keep up. They were all goin’ like hell.”
Neil himself doesn’t remember this tale, and because his contact with this side of the family was limited, he would retain little awareness of this tradition—although two figures in the family made a big impression: Uncle Bob and Grandma Jean.
Although Bob Young spent most of his life working as a public relations man, his first love was music. “My dad could play any stringed instrument that was put in front of him,” said daughter Marny Smith, who, along with her sisters, Stephanie and Penny, performed in a traveling singing group put together by their father. “I remember Neil watching my father wherever we went,” she said.
It has been assumed that Scott Young, who knew a few rudimentary chords on the ukulele, was Neil’s teacher on the instrument. This claim is hotly contested by Scott’s brother, Bob, who, when I first met him, despite being in his eighties and in ill health, whipped out his own Arthur Godfrey uke and tore into “How in the heck can I wash my neck if it ain’t gonna rain no more?” Bob is adamant that he gave Neil lessons, although he puts the location at Omemee, which is before Neil had his own instrument. Neil also credits Grandma Jean, matriarch of the Young clan.
Jean was great, just a free-spirited musician. She’s got to be the root. It’s just … the way she was. Everybody liked her. She was outgoing—but there was always something about her that you didn’t quite have a grip on. She sang like a bird and played piano. She would gather people around, sing at the drop of a hat, always putting on shows for the miners and stuff. She was a working musician. I saw her and heard her play the piano, and she was great. I wish I’d known her better, because I really think she was somethin’ special.
My uncle Bob, too. He was great. He had his girls—my three cousins. He had ’em trained. I mean, they were like BOOM—“Dah daah dah daaaa!” Three-part harmony, everything perfect, y’know, snappin’ along, just groovin’ like hell, my uncle playin’ ukulele, whatever it was, a big smile on his face and the girls all boogyin’. Then he’d stop. “Well, girls—waddya wanna sing now?” Oh God, they were great.
I started concentrating on the ukulele on Brock Road. Then I picked up on it more when we got to Old Orchard in Toronto. I think the first things were “Billy Boy” and “Rachel and Rachel” and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” My dad can play, but he doesn’t play nearly as well as his brother. We went down and got the ukulele, my dad got me started. And then my uncle came along and showed me. He’d be all over the fuckin’ thing—“Uncle Bob, what the hell are you doin’?” Rooop a dooop dooop …
I went from a ukulele to a better ukulele to a banjo ukulele to a baritone ukulele—everything but a guitar. I was getting into music.
“When I was in school, I always used to change all of a sudden,” Young told Dave Zimmer in 1988. “This is when I was just in junior high school, and I’d wear the same kind of clothes and everything for a year and a half. Then one day I’d be wearing all different clothes and I’d never wear those other clothes again. I’d do a whole different thing … there’s something I didn’t like about obviously being who I am. For some reason, I don’t feel safe like that.”
Neil Young had white bucks on his feet t
he first time he encountered Comrie Smith, who would be one of the bright points of life on Old Orchard: Neil’s first boyhood musical pal. Having met in ninth-grade math at John Wanless High School, they became fast friends over their mutual love for rock and roll. Upon entering high school in the fall of 1959, they’d meet daily in front of the A&P at the corner of Yonge and St. Germain to head off together for Lawrence Park Collegiate.
An adolescent hipster with hair piled high in an attempt at an Elvis pomp, Smith was knocked out by Young’s style. “Neil bopped down Yonge Street. Very thin, very tall, with a greased-back D.A. on the sides but a crew cut on top. He had a transistor radio, white bucks, a nice sweater, black pants. Very slick-lookin’ guy.”
Despite her limited funds as a single parent, Rassy splurged on Neil’s wardrobe, buying him sporty sweaters and snazzy corduroy jackets at an upscale shop called Halpern’s. Comrie remembers Rassy more as Neil’s buddy than his mother. “She was really nice and open with us. She had a kidlike feel to her. I thought it would be so nice to have a mom like Rassy—‘Go ahead, do it.’ The freedom Neil had was quite admired.”
Comrie found a stigma involved in befriending a boy from a broken home. “My parents couldn’t really accept Neil, always feeling that it would be better for me to hang out with more balanced people.”
Smith remembers Young as very high-strung and deeply affected by his parents’ split. “Neil was very twitchy about the breakup. He talked about it a lot. His face would usually be bright red by the time he finished.” Accompanying the flushed complexion was a habit Young had “of flicking his fingers forward at such velocity as to cause a loud snapping of the fingernails.” Neil somehow managed to turn his nervous tics into classroom shtick. “It was well used,” said Smith. “All he’d have to do is walk in, make his face, do a flick and the whole class would break up.”
Neil’s antics, whether willful or chemical, made him popular with girls. “They all liked him because he was so funny,” said Smith, vividly remembering Young bouncing a rubber band off the chest of one female to prove she wore falsies. “See that, Comrie—bounced right off,” exclaimed Neil, who, to Smith’s amazement, even managed to get his victim laughing. “If I’d done that, pow!”
Such behavior earned Neil a fairly permanent seat outside the vice principal’s office, although even from there he managed a stunt or two. “I remember the odd firecracker soaring past the classroom window, hurried footsteps, Neil rushing back past the room to his desk in the hall, Miss Smith rocketing out the door to apprehend him en route and the class breaking up.”
Then there was an army cadet inspection one very hot day in May. Comrie recalls chewing on a rubber band to keep from passing out in his uniform and black dress oxfords. Young sauntered into line wearing his beloved white bucks. Thrown out of the ceremony, Young was “laughing the whole way,” said Smith. “We had to stand there for an hour.”
Young felt an empathy for the more misanthropic members of his peer group. No doubt he recognized a little of himself in such misfits. Gary Renzetti was “a streetwise kid with no brains and no money,” said Smith. “He looked like he’d been through everybody’s garbage cans the night before.” One day, Neil decided to help Renzetti through another day of harassment by clobbering one of his tormentors with a math book to the head. The next time a bully started giving Renzetti grief, Neil asked the teacher for a dictionary, and WHAM! Legend has it he knocked the hooligan out cold. “I got expelled for a day and a half, but I let those people know where I was at,” Young would tell Cameron Crowe many years later. “That’s the way I fight. If you’re going to fight, you may as well wipe who or whatever it is out. Or don’t fight at all.”
It wasn’t like literally “KILL!” But I did hit this person over the head with the dictionary as hard as I could, and it felt great. I don’t advise it, but it sure opens ya up. I could feel good about myself. John Wanless? You had to go at the right time. If I got there a little early, I could get the shit beaten out of me, so I made sure I arrived right on time. And when you got outta that school, you got fuckin’ out. Got away. People used to be assholes. You know how they pick on you in school.
There’s one guy in every class that nobody fuckin’ likes, that is a total weirdo. I just have to have some conversations with this person, y’know? Gary Renzetti. I hardly knew him, except that he was from another fuckin’ world, this guy. Everybody picked on him. I don’t know—maybe he couldn’t speak English very well, that might’ve been it. He was very big. And the clothes he wore were like from the forties—everything was like, used. I never really got to know him very well, but I liked him. I said, “Renzetti—now this fuckin’ guy has got a row to hoe—let’s watch and see how he does.” It was innaresting.
—Some people have said to me, “Look at Neil’s childhood—it’s a classic case of Revenge of the Nerd.”
Revenge of the Nerd? Great.
—Why is that good?
Because to achieve nerd status with only homegrown knowledge of nerddom is a fuckin’ great accomplishment—and I’m proud.
I had to wear these fuckin’ white bucks. I liked the fact your feet were light and you could move around. I had this Sani-White stuff I used to clean ’em—this white stuff in a bottle with this sponge thing on the end—you paint them. It’s like whitewashing your feet.
I was always about two or three years behind everybody. There was nothin’ new about white bucks by the time I started wearin’ white bucks. They were like, out. No one was wearing them. That’s when I got mine. They were enough of a statement to piss people off. They set me apart.
After school, Comrie and Neil would head for Comrie’s house at 46 Golfdale and a new Philips hi-fi belonging to his dad. Smith had it all: Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis 45s and EPs, a 78 of Little Richard screaming “She’s Got It,” Roy Orbison. Instrumentals by Link Wray and Nashville pianist Floyd Cramer. Hell, Comrie even had a couple of albums: Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ The Chirping Crickets and Go Bo Diddley.
Being true record hounds, Neil and Comrie had very specific tastes. “It was weird sounds we liked,” said Smith. “Unusual sounds that hadn’t been heard before.” Comrie recalls Young going gaga over particular records, usually guitar-based, like the Fendermen’s demented bashing of “Muleskinner Blues” or “I Sure Do Love You Baby,” a Gene Vincent B-side with a torrid solo that utilized volume control instead of distortion. But it was the attitude of Richie Valens’s cover of “Framed” that got to Young: pure J.D. hep talk featuring the immortal couplet “I was walkin’ down the street, mindin’ my own affair / When along came a cop, grabbed me by my underwear.”
“Neil thought that was fabulous,” recalls Smith. So fabulous that when the homework assignment in Miss Pat Smith’s English class called for copying a poem from memory, Young scrawled down the lyrics to “Framed” and turned them in.
When not obsessing over records, Neil and Comrie attended weekend dances at Saint Leonard’s or Saint Timothy’s to check out the local groups. “Neil and I would stand by the stage drooling,” said Smith, who still recalls the Saturday afternoon they were invited over to an older kid’s house to watch the Sultans rehearse.
Inevitably all this led to talk of forming a group, and Smith remembers Neil mulling over the possibilities: Are we gonna play music with lyrics that mean something? Top-forty hits? Instrumentals? Folk music? Rassy’s input was considered heavily. “She really wanted him to do more of a lyrical thing like the Kingston Trio,” said Smith. “Neil said, ‘Well, if we put a group together, think bongos, Comrie, think bongos.’”
At Young’s urging, Smith ran out and got a set for twelve bucks. He remembers sitting on the edge of a bed, trying them out while Neil plunked away at his uke, both of them playing along with a 45 of Preston Epps doing “Bongo Rock.” “We finally figured out we should have more people in the group.”
One Sunday evening when Comrie’s parents were away at church, the pair took it to the next level: a quartet. Neil on uke, Com
rie on bongos, school chums Bob McConnell and Harold Greer on guitar and bass. “Let’s go to the hop, oh baby, let’s go to the hop,” chirped Danny and the Juniors over and over from the Philips as the group fumbled the chords, eventually braving a run-through on their own. Said Comrie, “Within an hour, we said, ‘Wow—we’re gonna have to learn more songs!’”
Now they were a band, even though nobody can recall the name of the outfit if indeed it had one. But they did have outfits—gold boat-neck half-sleeve T-shirts with black crisscrosses that Neil had picked out at Halpern’s. Young and Smith boldly wore the getups to school, thinking they were two cool cats—until some wisenheimer shouted, “Look! The Bobbsey Twins!” “Talk about a put-down,” muttered Smith some thirty-five years later.
We were pretending we had a band. None of us could play. Without the record going there was nothing happening.
I do remember hearing a lot of Kingston Trio at home. I remember Rassy used to play Lena Horne records, Glenn Miller, those big-band kinda things—she played those quite a bit during that period on Old Orchard Grove.
Comrie really is a cool guy. Still makin’ music, has a little band. Sent me a tape—haven’t listened to it. I’m so terrible. I never listen to anybody’s tape.
People don’t realize how little I listen to anything. Anything. I’m untouched. I really am—compared to the input most people have, their knowledge of music and what’s happening … I always felt that the less I knew, the better off I was.
But I did have my own records. I remember bein’ fascinated by the fact that the Everly Brothers had done “Lucille.” Even though it was the Everly Brothers, I felt there was something missing—it was great, but it’s not what the original was. The original—and the copy.
I started buyin’ 78s. Larry Williams, “Bony Moronie.” Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. “Rawhide” by Link Wray—that’s the one that goes, “Dahdahdah dah dardar“? That was his follow-up to “Rumble.” Those were both great. Phil Phillips, “Sea of Love.” Jack Scott. I liked Sam Cooke, but not quite enough to buy the record. I did like Buddy Holly—but I didn’t like that quite enough to buy the record until I bought the album that had all the songs on it. I didn’t buy the singles. But with Larry Williams and some of those old records, I bought the 78s as soon as I could. Robinson’s was like an appliance store, and there was this nice lady that we used to talk to all the time. I think Comrie and I went in there a lot together. It was just around the corner from his house. You’d go in, it’d be the Hit Parade. You’d see it all: “Wow, you can buy that song?” Take these big things, discs, hide ’em under your arm. “I got a record here. You people have got shit!”
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