Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  —Interview with Marci McDonald, 1968

  One night at the Whisky, Barry Friedman and Doors producer Paul Rothchild saw the Springfield perform. “We were sitting there watching the whole thing. I said, ‘How are we gonna know if they’re really it? How can you tell the difference between really it and maybe it—the difference between a hype and success?’ Paul said, ‘Oh, that’s easy—by the quality of the women that surround them.’ The women around the Springfield were very high-quality.”

  Now that he was a pop star, Neil Young was routinely surrounded by willing partners, but how involved he got with any of them remains a mystery. “That’s a tough one,” said producer Jack Nitzsche. “Neil’s relationship with women has always seemed strange.” Writer Eve Babitz felt that Young was a bit sinister and said she was afraid of him. Elliot Roberts stated that Young was “very, very relationship-oriented,” but, recalling seeing Neil with a wellknown groupie, added, “he wasn’t a homebody, either.”

  Others portray him as just the opposite. “Neil worked at being frail,” said Denny Bruce, a pal of Nitzsche’s. “Jack and I would go to the Whisky, because we could usually get laid there. Neil would say, ‘I have to go home and take my medication.’ We were always talking about it—‘Does he do it to make girls like him?’ With Neil, girls would have to come up and fawn over him.”

  It is interesting to study Young’s portrayal of women, because it’s as convoluted as anything else in his world. He sounds desperate to connect in songs like “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong” or the wistful “One More Sign,” an unreleased demo from the Springfield era. Unreleased until 1977, the Springfield’s “Down to the Wire” is an overwrought portrayal of a soul-sucking vampire who is omnipotently seductive. You can find a lot of fear in Young’s songs and, in “Mr. Soul,” a hostility that borders on hatred. A little more complicated than “All You Need Is Love.”

  Some on the L.A. scene felt pushed into all sorts of sexual freedoms they were ill equipped to deal with. “It was almost forced on you,” said Nurit Wilde. “‘You gotta be free—you can’t be afraid—you gotta go with this one or that one.’ There was a lack of freedom in that, I think. I know it was hard on me. People from Toronto were behind schedule.”

  The pressures seemed particularly hard on Young. “Neil was very shy about women—extraordinarily, painfully, tragically shy,” said Donna Port. Vicki and Donna both remember an odd ritual they’d go through with Neil: When he was to meet some female admirer, they’d be instructed to show up exactly forty-five minutes into the date to announce that he was late for wherever they were going. Neil didn’t seem to want anything to happen.

  Port attempted to fix Young up with one of her girlfriends. “She couldn’t figure out what was wrong. They’d spend the night together, but he’d never take his clothes off. She’d come home crying, ‘He doesn’t like me.’ She’d get too close, and Neil would freak out. He was tortured. Here’s this sex idol onstage and … you can imagine the pressure.”

  When Young spent the night on the floor at Commodore Gardens, Port—ever the mother hen—would try to get him up off the floor, out of his clothes and into a warm makeshift bed on the couch. “As soon as I got the belt off, that was the panic zone. It was always ‘No, I’m more comfortable with my clothes on. I don’t mind sleeping with my clothes on.’”

  Port suspected there was more to it than that. Young’s frailty seemed familiar. Noticing how self-conscious he was over his skeletal frame, she began to wonder if he might have had polio. The disease had affected her family when she was a child.

  “His legs were like toothpicks, and one day I just asked him,” said Port. “The look of terror gave me the answer. Then it just flowed out. He was wrapped up in a blanket at the time, crying. It was a huge emotional scar to him. We talked about how cruel kids are when you’re growing up. It explained a lot.

  “This guy had a heavy load, physically and emotionally. Neil didn’t fit. He never felt he fit. He wanted to desperately, but it always eluded him. Neil was always bleeding inside.”

  My point of view was really different. Where I came from—Canada—was just different. I didn’t know how to relate to women that well. I mean, all these girls and everything … I was so innocent sexually. It was just too fast for me. Too much, too soon. I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t ready.

  Everything was so fuckin’ far out down here. Everybody was so far ahead of me socially. I was just goin’, “Wow—this is really fuckin’ somethin’ else. Where’s my guitar?” Took awhile. But like all good Canadians, I eventually caught on.

  With Vicki and Donna, it was just a really good friendship that was happening at a magical time in our lives. We were all living this thing together. I was able to relate to those girls—they were really cool. So hangin’ out together was fun—they were more like my friends. Donna’s a great lady. I should see her. I keep missing all the chances….

  I was just so into what I was doin’, I wasn’t really focusing on women that much. I wasn’t worried about it—I just wasn’t into it. There were other things on my mind.

  —So much went wrong for you during the Springfield. Did you ever feel rejected?

  AHAHAHAHAHAHA—I gotta get a drink. Whew. Oh man. Have I ever felt rejected? I don’t think it’s ever been a major thing, know what I mean? Or maybe it has—and it’s so obvious I can’t even see it. I think everybody’s felt rejected … but I don’t think I’ve ever been bothered by feeling rejected.

  Behind on his rent at Commodore Gardens, Young needed a new place to escape to, and Donna Port helped him find one: 8451 Utica Drive. It looked like something out of a fairy tale: an old, rough-shingled house with a wrought-iron gate, tucked away in the hills of Laurel Canyon. The one-room knotty-pine guest house Young lived in was perched behind the house at the end of a long trail of steps, nestled in the treetops and overlooking the canyon. It’s still an eerie place today—you expect an elf to pop out from behind the trees and whisper a dirty limerick. “It’s outta the way,” drawled Young laconically. “You had to go through something to get there. You had to wanna go there.”

  Overseeing the property was the late Kiyo Hodell, an exotic, raven-haired half-Asian astrologist who mistrusted musicians and refused to rent to Young until she did his chart. “This woman had some kind of power goin’ for her,” said Linda Stevens, a friend of Young’s. “Gorgeous long hair piled on top of her head, always very intense. She was a Leo, and Scorpio was her opposite, so she thought Neil was wonderful.”

  “Kiyo was a good witch,” said musician Jim Messina. “She invited me to her house for tea, and I remember this mass of bees rolling out of her fireplace. It was like somebody spilled honey. She lived that way.” Considerably older than Young, Hodell became a buffer between him and the rest of the world. “She was a tremendous protector of Neil,” said Donna Port.

  Visitors to Utica Drive remember it as a difficult time. “Neil was very intense to be around,” said musician Robin Lane, who lived with Young for a few weeks. “He had a purpose. Neil didn’t talk much about himself or what he was feeling. He was removed and in his own world. He was strange, mysterious—he sort of floated above the earth, but at the same time had his feet planted on the ground.”

  “We hated each other a lotta the time” is how Young would describe the relationships in the Springfield to Tony Pig, and the friction wasn’t just between Stills and Young. Dewey Martin provided his own unique frustrations. “There were times when everybody wanted to replace him,” said Richard Davis, who remembers a secret audition at the Whisky with the drummer from the Grass Roots. “We all felt very sheepish about it. Nobody knew how to do it.”

  “Dewey would always say the wrong thing at the wrong time,” said roadie Chris Sarns. “Right about the time Stephen and Neil were calming down, he’d say something to fire ’em both up again.” Martin didn’t deny his own obnoxiousness, blaming the copious amounts of amphetamine he was ingesting. “I know I got on a lotta people’s nerves, ’caus
e I like to rap, rap, rap. Here’s a guy who’s already hyper, takin’ uppers.”

  But with Martin it wasn’t the chemicals that people remember most, it was the alcohol—a very unhip substance to abuse in the sixties. Charlie Greene’s wife, Marcy, remembered telling the drummer just that one afternoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I said, ‘Dewey, if you ever get busted, they’re gonna find a bottle of Scotch in your drum kit. You’re an embarrassment to the music industry.’”

  Then there was Bruce Palmer. Once he hit Los Angeles, he was lost to another dimension. “Bruce became psychedelicized overnight,” said Donna Port. “Bruce could not say no. He opened Pandora’s box. We had to have people literally follow Bruce in cars to make sure he wasn’t arrested or killed in an accident, because he was driving under the influence of God knows what. I can’t tell you how many rented cars that guy wrecked. Bruce wrecked everything he touched.”

  At his best, Palmer was an otherworldly creature. Charlie Greene remembers how they’d stick a mike over him as he lay on the floor, oblivious. “If you said, ‘Excuse me, Bruce,’ he couldn’t give you the time of day—but the minute the music started he’d play perfectly.”

  “Bruce was very aloof and off on his own trip,” said Dewey Martin. “Dropping acid and playing sitar for twelve hours at a time.” Withdrawing more and more into his studies of Eastern music, religion and karate, Palmer began to blow off sessions, showing up late or not at all. “We were always waiting for Bruce, it seems,” said Martin. Palmer, the driving musical force of the band, was slipping away. “As Bruce became more and more difficult, Neil felt more and more protective,” said Richard Davis. “He took care of Bruce.”

  Getting high was a prerequisite in the Los Angeles rock scene, but drugs were something Young had grown extremely cautious about. Robin Lane recalled Neil bawling her out for smoking a joint in his car. Linda McCartney—then Linda Eastman, a photographer on the scene—remembered being in a car with Neil, some of the Jefferson Airplane and LSD guru Owsley Stanley. A joint was passed, and Young frantically rolled down the window to get away from the smoke. “Before he was the king of dope, Neil was scared to death of marijuana,” said Jack Nitzsche. “Just to be around the smell of it.”

  I was crazy anyway. It didn’t matter if I did the drugs or not.

  Crosby said somethin’ to me once, ’cause he knew I couldn’t smoke as much weed as other people that he knew—I had the seizures and whatever—he just said, “Your chemistry is just different—you’re different. You can’t do this. Be careful.”

  —R. Crumb said taking LSD profoundly altered his work. Did any drugs do that for you?

  I don’t think so. Debatable, though. Y’know, I really find the one thing that always works if you’ve really gotta do something is to be straight.

  But like anything else, that’ll change. I’ll take it right to a point, and then one day I just won’t do it anymore. That’s the way I am.

  Live one way, live another way. Change modes. See things a different way.

  In the summer of 1966, Young’s nervous system short-circuited. “Neil was real sick,” recalls June Nelson. “He’d have these shaking fits. He called me in the middle of the night and said, ‘June! You have to come over—I’m gonna die!’” Nelson packed him into her car and took him to UCLA Medical Center.

  Young was in the hospital for ten days, during which a battery of tests was run, including, according to Charlie Greene, one procedure where they opened his skull. “I’ll never forget it. They drilled a fucking hole in his head to release pressure.”

  Then came the pneumoencephalogram, a torturous procedure designed to check abnormalities in the brain. When it was over, the doctor asked him if he’d ever taken LSD. Young said no. According to Neil, the doctor replied, “‘Well, don’t ever take it—you’ll never come back.’ That’s what they came up with.” Young was put on Dilantin and Valium to minimize the chance of seizures, then sent home. Charlie Greene felt that the turmoil of the previous few months, culminating in his surreal hospital stay, left Young shell-shocked and depressed.

  “You could see the fear in his heart about this success being thrust on him with fuckin’ limousines and shit. He was in a quandary. He didn’t understand what was goin’ on.”

  The pneumoencephalogram was like God’s answer to the Spanish Inquisition. Y’know, “What can we do to fuckin’ really make somebody go nuts—break ’em down to primal scream, let’s do that.”

  You’re completely strapped into this thing, leather all around you, then they put a needle in your back, give you a shot and start feeding in this radioactive dye—and it hurts. You can’t be sedated for this, you have to be totally awake. That was pure fuckin’ hell. The worst. Strap you in, do all this shit, shoot all this radioactive dye up and down your fuckin’ back, into your brain. Track it. With all these little instruments, satellite receivers and stuff going around in the room. It was killing me. Very painful. Very, very painful.

  And then you have a headache for a couple weeks after that while the air bubbles dissipate into your brain from the intrusion of this foreign substance into your body, and that air rises, tryin’ to get out, seeking the highest level, like a bubble would in water—and gets caught in the top of your brain—until the air actually dissolves and goes away. Had a headache for a week, bubbles of air in my head. Fuck. And every time you move your head, it kills you. But that’s nothing compared to the pain of having the procedure done. It reduces you to a complete fuckin’ animal.

  They never really figured out what was wrong, either. Kind of a medical limbo dance. They don’t do it anymore—they decided it was inhumane. I got in just under the line, I guess.

  Definitely that whole trip was major. I’m sure that had a big effect. A seminal happening in my life—big-time pain.

  —Were you curious about LSD?

  No, I never took LSD. Nobody ever gave me any. I never wanted any.

  —Why not?

  Doctor told me not to take any. That was the message: “Don’t take LSD.” He inferred that I was a little bit too far out there to take LSD and that I might not make it back. Even if I smoked some grass, I was liable to get too high, so I wasn’t ready to go off the deep end on some psychedelic drug. Everything seemed to be psychedelic already. When people talked about things bein’ psychedelic, it didn’t seem that I was missing that. Y’know, I could relate. So I was thinkin’, “Well, y’know, maybe this is a bonus. I get this for nothing—without taking the drug.”—Is your music psychedelic?

  Some of it. Depends. What’s psychedelic to you might not be psychedelic to me. It’s transcendental, trandscending the moment. What’s psychedelic about my music is the fact that when the music is really happening, we’re all just tuned in to some force that’s fuckin’ driving us and we’re all going together—that’s psychedelic. Even last night when our performance was as mediocre as it was, it still had a semblance of that. We got hung up. Getting hung up is part of psychedelia. Things repeat. The same thing happens over and over again.

  I do that in my thought processes. Sometimes I do it in my music. When I do it in my music, I love it, when I do it in my thought processes, it drives me fuckin’ crazy. In music I can control it, but outside of music, when you start thinkin’ about the same thing over and over again and you can’t get it out of your head, that turns into a negative. In music it’s a positive. You don’t try to control it and you have total control over it—it’s like … psychedelic.

  Free from the hospital, Young must’ve felt despair. He’d come to L.A. to make music, be a rock star, and had slammed into a wall. * He was fighting his managers, his band and now his brain. Young took this tangle of feelings and set it to music. It came out in one shot, unedited, and it was called “Mr. Soul.” The song was a turning point. Written on a twelve-string acoustic, the original version of “Mr. Soul” circa fall 1966 was, according to those who heard it, a slow, moody folk number with a dark edge intensified by Young’s D-modal tuning.


  Both Peter Lewis of Moby Grape and critic Paul Williams told me they were more impressed with the original arrangement of “Mr. Soul” than the released version. “It was a completely different thing,” said Lewis. “That one was really mysterious.” The unrecorded “Mr. Soul” was the first Neil Young song known to utilize D-modal tuning, also heard in “Ohio,” “When You Dance,” “Cinnamon Girl” and “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” Young said he liked “the way it just sustained. I liked the drone.”

  The recorded version of “Mr. Soul” is propelled by a riff Young nicked from the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—an appropriate touch for a song rife with sexual tension and “respectfully dedicated to the ladies of the Whisky A Go-Go and the women of Hollywood.” But the rock version of “Mr. Soul” with the Springfield was months away. Things would have to get a little more insane before the band could record it.

  Open to a thousand interpretations, shot full of mystery and dread, “Mr. Soul” is the first glimpse into the darker side of Neil Young’s psyche. Whatever it was that had descended on him, the feeling in “Mr. Soul” is that he’s just made it out from underneath. There’s an ironic distance new to Young’s lyrics, and a creepy black humor. “Stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster”—perhaps a reference to epileptic attacks and hospital stays, but like much of what Young writes, subject to endless debate.

  Young reflects on the relationship between his audience and himself, his observations reaching a climax in the last verse. “Hearin’ that tune at the time was so heavy,” said Ken Viola. “There was a lot of talk at the time about the soul, the inside of a person. To me, the whole point of the song is: What’s externally on the face of a person—how does that juxtapose with what’s in their soul? And that last line—‘Is it strange I should change / I don’t know why don’t you ask her?’—I remember at the time thinkin’ how nasty that was.”