Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Smith finally got wise. “On the way back, I said, ‘Neil, what the hell’s going on?’” Young avoided the unsavory details, but as the ubiquitous “California Dreamin’” slithered out of the old tube radio in Comrie’s car, he did let on about his plans for the future: “Well, Comrie, I can hear the Mamas and the Papas singing ‘All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray …’ I’m gonna go down to the States and really make it. I’m on my way.” Smith recalls Neil shouting out the window, “Today North Toronto, tomorrow the world!”

  Young next got a new set of wheels for the journey—a ’53 Pontiac hearse he christened Mort Two. Since Comrie had never ridden in the original Mort, Young took him for a spin, revisiting all their old haunts, stopping at the old spot overlooking Yonge where the pair had smoked their pipes and dreamed of being rock stars. Smith didn’t know it, but Young was saying goodbye. Linda Smith, along for the ride, didn’t sense much remorse in Neil’s looking back.

  “Neil was totally confident, very focused. You knew he was gonna make it. I think he had it all planned … he knew what he was doing. I don’t think Neil did anything spontaneously—he appeared to be reckless and spontaneous, but I think he plotted it all out and just kept his mouth shut. I think he’s that way with his whole life.”

  Those people need to take a pill or something. Get a life. Think clearly, heh heh. How far in advance was I plotting? That’s the key question. One step? Two steps? Prebirth? When was the Plot Laid and the Deed Done? Heh heh. That’s what I’d like to know. I’m not talking about Linda—it’s more general than that. You can plot your whole life ahead and have it be spontaneous? Because very rarely did I do anything that I didn’t want to do. I’d come to a point and make a decision—but did I think about the next decision, or the one after that, very often? I guess the longer it went along, the more I’d look down the road to make a move. But did I know I was gonna make a move? No. Not till somethin’ happened. Always somethin’ would happen…. You got a new thing, where ya gonna go? Waddya gonna do? That’s how it happened, that’s how I moved through that whole period—and my whole life.

  They left Toronto from the Cellar. Young’s group now included Bruce Palmer, Tannis Neiman, Janine Hollinghead, a nonmusician named Mike Gallagher who had some funds and a redhead named Judy Mack who apparently also had a few dollars, which cut Beverly Davies and her empty pockets out of the journey. “Beverly is the girl who got left behind,” said Hollinghead. “The six of us left her on the sidewalk.”

  Hollinghead recalls Young not being thrilled to leave town in another funky old hearse, and said that Davies had a lot to do with boosting his confidence. “Beverly practically engineered this trip. She talked Neil into trying it again.” Palmer gave the teary-eyed Beverly his last dollar, then Neil took her sleeping bag with the tepees and Indians on the inside, telling her “when he had the money, he’d send it.”

  One ramshackle hearse packed to the gills with six scraggly kids, a bunch of guitars, amps, an autoharp and, on Palmer, a couple ounces of pot, which, said Hollinghead, “he shared for a while.” According to Hollinghead, they left on March 22, 1966. Young planned on five days to get to Los Angeles. First they went west, curving way up out of the way because Young, paranoid about crossing into Detroit, wanted to cross at Sault Ste. Marie. His hunch paid off; arriving at the border in the wee hours of the night, they encountered some lone geezer in a rocking chair who bought Young’s bullshit story about shortcutting through the States to visit his mom in Winnipeg.

  Once safely across, the group promptly got lost in Hiawatha National Forest, where they spent what sounds like the only peaceful night of the trip. This was not a harmonious bunch. Visions of the original Mort no doubt dancing in his head, Young freaked out whenever anyone other than he drove. “I’d be laying at the back of the hearse trying to sleep, but listening instead obsessively to the transmission,” Young told Nick Kent. More than one person told me that Neiman became furious with Young, accusing him of indulging in Vicky Taylor’s downers to get him through the trip. “Tannis’s mother had killed herself on painkillers,” recalls Beverly Davies, who said Tannis claimed Young “was popping pills all the way down there.”

  Somewhere in Ohio, Young short-circuited. “We’d been on the road two and a half days pretty much nonstop,” said Hollinghead. “Eating garbage food, spending more money than we had, not even a third of the way there yet, and Neil just got a little nutsy one morning and pulled off. He just basically said, ‘Out, out, everybody out,’ and he just tore out everything, threw it all out on the ground. He just emptied the hearse. I think at one point Neil was considering leaving us and everything there and driving away. He just stood there with his shirttails hangin’ out, his eyes all bloodshot, lifted his arms to the gods, screamed to the ozone, ‘AAAAGGHHH!’ and got over it. We all got back in and drove away.”

  The girls, they were all fighting and everything, I think it was gettin’ nasty. So I just said, “Fuck all of you if you can’t get along.” I can’t see how I would take a downer and drive. I think the only thing involved in the trip would be weed, but I may have blocked that out of my mind. I wasn’t doin’ speed then. No. Tannis mighta just been shocked at what I was really like. ’Cause I was nervous as hell! I was twitchy. Jumpy …

  That’s why I couldn’t smoke grass in those days … I was still … tuning it up. And I was way outta tune.

  —What fears did you conquer?

  I don’t think I conquered any fears. Maybe I wore down some so that they’re not as real.

  —Such as?

  Driving. Driving up and down hills. That used to bother me. Changing altitudes did something to my head. Made me feel … funny. Disoriented. But I overcame that. I don’t know how. Somehow I struck a deal with this thing, okay? But it’s not conquered—it was bigger than me.

  I was always worried. I was hyper-worrying that the car wouldn’t make it. I think Tannis drove it rough. I could hear it…. I’d already had one go out on me, see, so I was pretty fuckin’ paranoid about this Pontiac. And it was really a similar kind of sound like with the other hearse. I could tell it was gettin’ worse. It was just a U-joint.

  Route 66 was a gas. I just loved traveling. I got hooked on those kind of trips when I was five, six, years old when my dad used to drive us down to Florida. The highway bug. Four-lane highway, long thin lines through the desert, goin’ into these towns, the gambling, all the neon lights. I went, “Wow, this is so wild!” Pretty far-out.

  In Oklahoma the scraggly travelers managed to float a free meal out of a southern couple who saw Neil’s Beatle haircut and Neiman’s long black hair and thought they were Sonny and Cher. In Texas there were some tense moments when the ever fearless Palmer mouthed off to a state trooper. “Bruce used to always carry his pot in his shirt pocket in a bag,” said Hollinghead. “It was flappin’ in the breeze, and this trooper’s standin’ there askin’ these boys for draft cards.” They managed to escape.

  Struggling up an incline east of Albuquerque, the hearse began to falter. Nerves frayed. “Neil started yellin’ at me about second gear, lugging his vehicle,” recalls Hollinghead. “I said, ‘Y’know, Neil, this car’s never been outta second gear, it’s a fuckin’ hearse.’ We were yellin’ and arguin’. Tannis was in one of her huffs and started haulin’ suitcases out.” Along came another unsympathetic state trooper to complicate matters. Everybody wound up back in Albuquerque, stuck in a motel while Mort Two was being fixed. According to Hollinghead, weird tests were going on out in the desert, and looking out of the motel-room window one night, she thought she saw a “friggin’ mushroom cloud.” It was an ominous sign, for Young’s nervous system was experiencing explosions of its own.

  With a sleeping bag pulled over his head, Young holed up in his room, unable to eat. He “basically just turned into a chattering, blooming idiot,” said Hollinghead. Palmer said Young “went into convulsions, for what reasons we didn’t know. For days he was on the floor and I was tending to him.” Despite
what sounds like the first onset of epilepsy, Young was determined to make it to Los Angeles. Soon the hearse was back on the road—minus Janine and Tannis. “They dumped us in Albuquerque,” said Hollinghead.

  We left Tannis and Janine ’cause they were drivin’ us fuckin’ nuts. These chicks were fuckin’ nuts, they had bad vibes. But who knows. My tolerance level wasn’t very high. Ran out of steam in Albuquerque. Had to stop there a couple of days. I was really exhausted.

  We got all the way down to L.A. It was, like, nonstop, smoking weed, driving down the road. Really a trip. Comin’ down the hill from San Bernardino and bein’ scared—I mean, it was so steep, we’re comin’ down in the hearse, it was like “Whoa!” And we were fuckin’ exhausted. We really were burnin’ it. Mort Two got me there. Made it to L.A. Phenomenal.

  —Did you have an idea of California in your head?

  Not really. 77 Sunset Strip, Route 66 and Dragnet. TV shows.

  When I went, I didn’t have any intention of anything. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doin’. We were just going—like lemmings. I knew what I wanted and I knew that’s where I had to go to get it, but what was I gonna do after that? Would I stick around to enjoy it? I didn’t have the foggiest notion.

  Foggy … everything was foggy. It was a foggy day in L.A. when we got there. April Fool’s Day. We were punchy from the trip. I think Bruce and I drove straight from Albuquerque to Los Angeles. I remember drivin’ by Juanita Street. Bruce and I were pretty giddy by then. We must’ve said “JUAN-EEE-TA STREET” two hundred times, laughing our asses off because we were so tired and giddy.

  We stayed on this street parallel to Laurel Canyon, I think it’s called Holly Street. We parked the hearse there and slept in it a couple of nights. Then we found this old friend, Danny Cox—a black folksinger, a really cool guy I met in Winnipeg at the 4-D who went to breakfast once with Koblun and I and told us about Hollywood and California. He put us up for a night or two.

  We made enough money to live on by selling rides in the hearse. There were two restaurants that were happening, one was called Huff’s, the other was Canter’s. We would hang out at one and charge people a buck to go to the other. We’d load up, go back. That’s how we made our money, Bruce and I.

  L.A. was just real big. Bruce and I were walkin’ down Sunset, we found a roach on the sidewalk and we smoked it. And that stuff got us so wasted … I don’t know what it was.

  * Young has a penchant for pop songs sporting idiosyncratic femme vocals. During our interviews he would praise Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes,” Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” and also the vocals of Victoria Williams and No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani. He was less than crazy about Liz Phair and Melissa Etheridge.

  * When I repeated Koblun’s description to Young of his being unable to stop playing guitar after everyone else had stopped, he quipped, “I learned how to use that later on.”

  * The most powerful version of “Clancy” I have heard is a November 10, 1968, solo acoustic performance from the Canterbury House unearthed by Joel Bernstein for Young’s Archives project. Ever the perverse one, Neil told me he doesn’t want to use the take because it’s too good. “I was too on it,” he said.

  * “Melodically speaking, Phil Ochs was a big influence on me,” Young told deejay Tony Pig in 1969. “I really think Phil Ochs is a genius…. He’s written fantastic, incredible songs—he’s on the same level as Dylan in my eyes.”

  * Both Joel Bernstein and I think the song Young is referring to is “Lover in the Mirror,” an unrecorded work that a manuscript exists for, dating from September 1966: “You look an awful lot older than you did before the dawn/Is it your eyes are getting colder or your makeup has broken up wrong?”

  mind over matter

  “For a time we were all free in the sixties,” said Ken Viola. “For a time. I don’t think our parents were ever free … ya know?”

  I talked to many fans while writing this book. I interviewed most all of the people in Young’s inner circle. At times I even consulted that most loathsome bottom-feeder, the rock critic. And nobody understood Neil Young’s art like Ken Viola.

  Ken Viola lives in a nice house in the New Jersey suburbs with his wife and two kids. He wears his salt-and-pepper hair and mustache short. Ken’s a big guy, and with his imposing frame and machine-gun raps, for a minute you think you’re talking to a teamster. A pretty decent disguise. Because once his vibe hits full force, you realize you’re dealing with a poet, a psychedelic poet. If you come through a round with Viola without a question raised—or your consciousness altered—you’d better have your karma inspected back at the factory, pal.

  Take that dough set aside for a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and blow it on a bus ride to Ken’s instead. Hopefully he’ll let you in, because there’s nothing you really need to see in Cleveland—it’s all in Ken Viola’s attic. Records and tapes are everywhere, huge posters of Neil Young cover the ceiling, file cabinets bulge with thirty years of clippings. Viola possesses one of the world’s great collections of pop-culture ephemera, but this is no anal-retentive keep-it-in-the-plastic-bag-and-don’t-touch collector’s nightmare. Viola uses this stuff—to live. To teach. And to search for an alternative to the way things sometimes are.

  Ken Viola still believes in the power of rock and roll. And the rock and roll he believes in more than just about anything else is that of Neil Young. Viola has listened very closely to Neil Young for over thirty years, buying every record, digesting every song, relishing every phase with the fevered enthusiasm of a kid who’s just bought his first 45—all the while retaining a critical overview that borders on mystical. It is in this ability that he stands alone.

  Lemme tell you something about Neil Young fans—the real fans: They’re all a bunch of fuckin’ maniacs. You have the ones that prefer the mellow acoustic side, like Scott Oxman, a proud Christian who heads the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young archives out of his well-appointed Los Angeles condo and organizes yearly get-togethers with like-minded fans for sing-alongs of “Helpless” and “Teach Your Children.” He’s disdainful of the freakier side of Young’s work, the complete opposite of Crazy Horse fanatic Dave McFarlin, a blue-collar kid who discovered Young in the mid-eighties. McFarlin thinks anything Shakey does without the Horse is lame, no-edge bullshit—Neil Young Lite. Then there’s Jef Michael Pielher, who specializes in arcane discographical inquiries. He gingerly studies the label of a single with the cold eye of a lab technician analyzing a bacterial smear under a microscope. He can rave over the “obvious” superiority of an alternate version of “Like an Inca” that Young dropped from Trans and has written detailed-to-the-verge-of-the-subatomic articles on variations in pressings and album versions for Broken Arrow, a quarterly fanzine put out by a European-based organization called the Neil Young Appreciation Society.

  Broken Arrow publishes the mind-numbing ramblings of fans, plus whatever arcane details of Young’s life they can ferret out, like their indepth article—complete with footnotes—on the 1952 Canadian polio outbreak that struck Young as a child. Once, the publication was endearingly crude, a few mimeographed sheets stapled together. Now it’s a real magazine with computer graphics and full-color cover, a little too slick and worldly—but maybe that just reflects something of its subject. The NYAS seems benign compared to the Rusties, a group of self-appointed experts spawned by the Internet.

  None of these divergent strains seem to agree on anything—they all think they have the one correct answer. Just like me. I’m sure it would fill Young with glee—if he bothered to pay the slightest attention.

  Ken Viola is an exception. He’s been able to sidestep the pitfalls of being a fan, avoiding becoming obsessed in an unhealthy way, and although at odd and sometimes amusing junctures in his life he has bumped into his hero, Viola takes it in stride. He doesn’t expect anything from Neil Young. The way he sees it, Young has already given him enough. Each new album, says Ken, is “like a letter from a friend I don
’t have to write back to.”

  Somehow Ken managed to become a fully functional adult without throwing his records away, and without becoming a square. For a while Viola tried being a musician himself, even gaining Young’s permission to cut one of the master’s unreleased songs. Then for many years Ken made his living overseeing security for the Grateful Dead, watching the culture he loved become big business, seeing many of the musicians who so inspired him act in a less than flattering manner or, worse, completely self-destruct. But Ken has remained uncynical about it all. In what has to be the ultimate tribute, he named his two sons Dylan and Neil. Coming from anybody else, that alone could make me throw up, but with Ken, it’s just more proof of how serious the guy is.

  Rock and roll changed Ken Viola’s life, and it all began with Neil Young and Buffalo Springfield.

  The year 1966 remains sacred for many who went through it at an impressionable age. As culture hound Charlie Beesley put it, “There you are, heading out after school in the family Buick, scanning the AM dial, when the Yardbirds’ ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’ hits you square in the face and lifts you into the squall of a whole new universe being born. All the way to Burger World.”

  “You had this, in a way, totally disposable thing—you had trash, in a sense,” said writer Richard Meltzer, then a twenty-one-year-old Yale grad student immersed in the music and writing about it like no one else. “Something where, yes, it had its emotional urgency and all that, but basically it was disposable—something that could be blown away in the night merging with the eternal, infinite … universe-manifesting disposable shit.

  “I was taking courses in philosophy and religion, and it seemed to me it was a greater example than Jesus Christ for something of the moment equaling the forever. Before producers came up with the formula sound, it was really about hearing that tentative attempt to come up with new sound—to come up with something. Sound for sound’s sake.