Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  The Faustian aspects of show business and the machinations of fame simultaneously repulsed and fascinated Young, but no craziness—not his own nor that of others—would prevent him from forging on. And continuing to mutate.

  Almost thirty years later, Young would open his Unplugged taping with “Mr. Soul.” Trapped in an appropriately garish, hyper-real MTV set, he looked like the weird psychedelic spawn of some itinerant bluesman, his blank face made even more inscrutable by the omnipresent ink-black shades, a grizzled visage that looked older than time. The old man of the mountain had come down to the Colosseum and, staring into the TV eye, waited for the lions to be set loose. His vocal had a walking-dead quality, the guitar a drone. The backup band, there to play along on most of the rest of Young’s ditties, had to sit this number out. This was a solo trip.

  I asked Young about the song many, many times in the course of our interviews. Around in circles we went.

  “Mr. Soul” takes me through all those times—the Springfield era. It really typifies the end without really being near the end or knowing what the end was about. That’s a song that is somehow semiprophetic and semiretro. It seems to make more sense the more I play it. I don’t know where it came from, but it really tells the story of my life at that time, and strangely enough, it still seems to be true.

  I remember bein’ up in the middle of the night writing it—I don’t know why. * I wrote that on the floor in my little cabin. With a felt-tip pen. On the floor on newspapers in the bathroom, smokin’ some bad grass. That’s what I really like, writing on newspapers. It’s so easy and it looks so good. You write in black on top of it, and it’s hidden because of the black-and-white background. The words can’t come out and assert themselves that way. They lay in there, so you’re not intimidated by seein’ them so clearly. Even if you glance at them, they’re not that clear. They’re in there. If you wanna spend time findin’ them, they’ll be there, but you don’t read it instantaneously. They’re, like, a fuzzy thing.

  —Was the Stones riff your idea of a little joke?

  Never even entered my mind, really, that it was that similiar to “Satisfaction”—until it was pointed out to me and I went, “Yeah, it is, you’re right.” But I wasn’t gonna change it because of that. So then I guess I kind of exaggerated it. If it’s there, you gotta go with it.

  —Who’s Mr. Soul?

  Everybody has their own Mr. Soul. So even if I could—which I don’t think I can—point out to you who Mr. Soul is to me, it defeats the purpose.

  —Is there a coldness about “Mr. Soul“?

  I don’t think so.

  —Sometimes I hear a deal with the devil in it.

  Maybe—but I don’t think so. I mean, there’s nothin’ you can say about the song—the song is a combination of the lyrics and the beat and the sound of it when it’s bein’ sung. Breaking it down any more than that takes away from its meaning. It’s basically a guy talkin’ to himself— talking to his conscience.

  —What does the guy singing this song want?

  He wants to be heard.

  —“Out of My Mind,” “Mr. Soul”—they seem like the darker side of the sixties.

  Well, that was sort of like still not feeling I was part of it. Outside looking in. I was groovin’ on it—it wasn’t like I was bummed or anything. It was just a part of growing up, those songs. Growing up in a band that people knew about, playing in front of audiences …

  You take things very heavily when you’re that age. You don’t realize you’re gonna live through it. Of course, sometimes you don’t live through it.

  —“Mr. Soul” sounds like you almost didn’t make it out.

  Yeah … I think sometimes when you have some kind of an experience in your life that makes you feel like you’re lucky to still be alive, that makes you look back into what makes yourself tick.

  —Have you ever been close to death?

  I don’t think so. But I’ve felt the presence of it enough to know … during my seizures that I had around that time, afterwards, when you look at how disorienting things are and the first couple of times it happened, I mighta felt like I was threatened in some way. As far as having a life goes, y’know—as far as living. When you have a seizure, you go off … it kind of feels like you lose yourself for a while. Somehow you’re still there. All these things happen to your body, but you don’t have any recollection of it—and it wasn’t an accident, where somebody hit you. It came from inside.

  —Did you wanna destroy your audience as soon as you got it?

  Turnover. Like in clubs where they turn over the audience? Did you ever notice that if the same audience stays, the second set usually isn’t as good as the first set? But if they turn the audience over, the second set could be better than the first set? Because with me that’s the way it is.

  In July 1966, Vicki Cavaleri and Donna Port abruptly left Los Angeles for San Francisco. A wellknown gnome like pop star, angry that Port had spurned his advances one night at the Whisky, had threatened to have her “taken care of.” Given money by one of the star’s handlers and advised to leave town until things cooled down, Port scooped up Vicki and headed north. The pair wound up in an old Victorian mansion in Haight Ashbury with members of the newly formed Jefferson Airplane. It was there in late October that Vicki and Donna received an unexpected guest.

  “We hear this little knock on the door and it’s Neil with his two kittens,” remembers Port. “I don’t know how he got there or how he found us. He said, ‘I’ve got two weeks off and I had to get away from the guys. I’ve had it. I don’t care if I ever see those guys again.’”

  Six hours later there was another knock at the door: Stephen Stills. Within a few days, the entire band—along with Greene and Stone, complete with limo—had shown up. “There was no furniture in the place,” recalls Stone. “Everybody was completely stoned, lying on the floor.”

  Although the Airplane’s Marty Balin persuaded concert promoter Bill Graham to give the Springfield a shot at the Fillmore that November 11 through 13, their stay in San Francisco was a dismal one. They were so broke Richard Davis had his parents wire $500 so the band could eat. Tensions were at an all-time high. “Stephen and Neil were not getting along,” said Port. “There was no flow in that band whatsoever.”

  In addition, Young was very self-conscious about his Los Angeles address. “There was this big thing about San Francisco being San Francisco and L.A. being L.A…. and if you’re from L.A. you’re phony and if you’re from San Francisco you’re real, y’know,” Young told Tony Pig in 1969. “And here we were—the other groups happening from L.A., from our town, were the Association, the Monkees…. I was very aware of the difference between the two cities and how one was real or trying to be real and the other one was in its own reality—not real at all.”

  There was one San Francisco band with whom the Springfield would form a brief but significant bond: Moby Grape. Led by Alexander “Skip” Spence, a maniacal Canadian who had been the original drummer for the Airplane, the Grape had just gotten together and were playing a Sausalito dive called the Ark.

  Moby Grape shared the Springfield’s unique structure: three singer/ songwriters, three electric guitars. “It was a real stunner, because instrumentally it was a mirror of the Buffalo,” said Richard Davis. For the few weeks they were in San Francisco, the Springfield alternated sets with the Grape at the Ark. “Richie used to sing, man, and when he’d get to those high parts, his neck would bulge out like a stomped-on toad frog,” said Grape guitarist Jerry Miller.

  Even in terms of personalities, the Grape and the Springfield had their parallels, with blond redneck blues singer Bob Mosley offsetting the dark and mysterious Peter Lewis. Offstage they hung out with their doppelgängers—Mosley with Stills and Lewis with Young. Son of actress Loretta Young, Lewis found the distance between Neil Young and his bandmates reminiscent of his own situation.

  “I came from a completely different background from the other guys in the Grape. I was in t
he band, but I didn’t feel as in the band as they were, and in that respect I identified with Neil a lot. Because I think that the Buffalo Springfield did that to him, too. They would all get much more loaded than he did, so there was this thing about him bein’ sorta on the outs. I didn’t really see Neil as bein’ on the inside in that band.” For a brief moment, Lewis said, a trade was pondered: Lewis into the Springfield for Young joining the Grape.

  Moby Grape would quickly self-destruct in a morass of management and personal problems even worse than the Springfield’s. They were “too aligned with the whole sixties trip,” as Ken Viola put it. But they would leave behind something that had completely eluded the Springfield: a perfect debut album, Moby Grape.

  There are those who were present at the Ark that claim the Grape’s tough sound had a big impact on the Springfield. Lewis said that the Grape “used guitars much more aggressively.” The records the Springfield made after their San Francisco trip belie a possible influence, but one has to keep in mind the Springfield’s insistence that their live sound had always been much heavier than their debut would indicate. * Whatever the case, the Springfield would return to Los Angeles and, on December 5, 1966, record a song some feel was directly inspired by their time with the Grape, “For What It’s Worth.”

  —Did going to San Francisco have any effect on you musically?

  I don’t think there’s anything that didn’t have an effect on me. That was just a different situation up there … the band playin’ in a communal kind of club. I wasn’t really part of it. We were on the outside. It was open and great if you were from San Francisco, but for those of us less fortunate, from Los Angeles, it wasn’t quite the same.

  —You have that way of categorizing music—‘This is the Beatles, this is the Stones.’ Where did psychedelic music fit in?

  Closer to the Beatles, but in between—because there was a lot more improvising in that psychedelic music than there was in the Beatles’ music.

  —Did you like it?

  I didn’t mind it. Didn’t really get to me. Because the songs didn’t get to me. I’m a song kinda guy, so I do love Jefferson Airplane. “Today” by Marty Balin is a great record, and I think Surrealistic Pillow is real good. It had a vibe. That’s the one that does it for me.

  —Did the Grateful Dead make an impression?

  Not a musical impression that much—their thing was real subtle. It took years to grow on me, even just to realize what it was. They just played and jammed, and they weren’t great. They were just so real—as musicians, they grew into greatness.

  —Tell me about recording “For What It’s Worth.”

  Two of our engineers did that record. Stan Ross, a really well-respected Hollywood engineer, and Tom May, an engineer at Columbia. Old-timers. Tom May was doin’ the session. Bruce played on it. Really cool song. Stan came in and said, “You gotta do this one thing to the drum, the snare.” Took a broom, a guitar pick and mixed that in so it’s got that sound—of a guitar pick goin’ through a broom, on the straw. That was it.

  Again, that was done without Charlie and Brian. They don’t remember that, though—I guarantee ya.

  —So what effect did Moby Grape have on Buffalo Springfield?

  The same effect Buffalo Springfield had on Moby Grape.

  “While we were gone, the shit hit the fan on Sunset Boulevard,” said Richard Davis. “A bunch of teenagers had flipped out over being rounded up at ten o’clock every night. They’d run down the street burning cars, smashing windows, screaming and yelling, protesting their own mistreatment.”

  In an attempt to control the long hair and drugs overrunning Sunset Strip, local authorities had instituted a ten P.M. curfew for those under eighteen. The neon-purple Pandora’s Box, a dive bar not far from the Whisky, was ordered to close down, which resulted in mass demonstrations and three hundred arrests. By the time the Springfield got back to town in November, rioting had turned violent and protesters had banded together to form CAFF: Community Action for Facts and Freedom. Two of the members were Greene and Stone, still burning over their jailhouse debacle with Neil.

  Out in Topanga Canyon, Stephen Stills wrote a song about it. According to Richard Davis, he’d been messing around with a jam based on two Grape songs: a 4/4 blues called “Murder in My Heart for the Judge” and a never released Peter Lewis song called “On the Other Side” that featured an unusual stop-time chorus (“Stop! Can’t you hear the music ringin’ in your ear”).

  Musing on the Sunset Strip situation—after, Dewey Martin noted, ingesting hallucinogens—Stills wrote a new song based on the jam “but done up in a more folky, gentle manner,” said Davis. Charlie Greene remembers Stills in the back of his limo, picking up an acoustic guitar and saying, “Let me play you a song, for what it’s worth.” Time was booked immediately in Columbia’s studio B and, Dewey Martin claimed, “an acetate was being played on KHJ within four days.” *

  It was a landmark session for the group, their first time recording as a real band. Young contributed his own bit of genius on guitar—spare, belllike harmonics that took the edge off the “heavy” lyrics and added so much to the record’s ominous, day-of-reckoning feel—but the moment belonged to Stills. He captured the paranoia in the air, circa early 1967. Dennis Hopper would proclaim to me that “‘For What It’s Worth’ and ‘Dancin’ in the Streets’ by Martha and the Vandellas were the two most revolutionary songs of the time.”

  When the session was over, maintained Charlie Greene, Stills complained he didn’t have a title. “Yes you do,” said the manager. “You said, ‘Let me play you this song for what it’s worth.’ For once Stephen agreed with me.” Ahmet Ertegun didn’t, hence the convoluted original title: “(Stop, Hey What’s That Sound) For What It’s Worth.” According to Greene, Ertegun also requested that Stills change the line about the “man with a gun over there,” but he refused.

  No one in the band thought the song would be a hit, least of all Stills, who worried that the Springfield would be pegged as a protest group. Some claim he didn’t seem to think much of the song at all. Peter Lewis remembered seeing him in San Francisco shortly after the session. Stills said sheepishly, “Man, we just recorded this song—and when we were done we realized it was a compilation of two of your songs.”

  Atlantic Records felt strongly enough about “For What It’s Worth” to pull the Springfield’s debut album out of the stores and add the song to a new pressing.

  In December and early January 1967, the band went to New York City to play Ondine’s, a small showcase club on the Upper West Side. During their engagement, “For What It’s Worth” started to climb the charts, and it looked like the band was headed for success after all. Ertegun recalled the gigs with excitement. “When they performed there, man, there was no band I ever heard that had the electricity of that group. That was the most exciting group I’ve ever seen, bar none. It was just mind-boggling.” Otis Redding, Mitch Ryder and Odetta all showed up to jam.

  But the Springfield would crash hard in New York. While Greene and Stone stayed at the Plaza Hotel, the musicians were crammed like sardines into a two-room suite at the Wellington. Tempers flared. At one of the Ondine’s shows, Stills and Palmer got into a fight over the volume of the bass, and Palmer, as Stills would later recall to writer Allen McDougall, “slapped me across the face. So I went completely purple with rage and put him through the drums … everyone was very shocked…. We all just flipped right out, man. Neil, Bruce, me, the lot of us.”

  At this point Stills and Young were like “chalk and cheese,” as Linda McCartney put it. “It would really make me angry, because Stephen pushed Neil back constantly. Neil was painfully shy. I thought, ‘Well, he just doesn’t stick up for himself.’”

  Young was having his own problems. After one show he experienced a severe seizure. “I could see Neil holding on for dear life,” said Nurit Wilde. “Near the end of their last song, I could see Neil was gonna have an episode. He was struggling so hard against it. As soon as th
e band finished the song, the audience started to applaud, and Neil ran right off. I ran after him.”

  Ondine’s had no dressing rooms, so Young made it to an empty hallway and collapsed to the floor in the throes of a grand mal seizure. Wilde stuck a pencil in his mouth so he wouldn’t swallow his tongue, and gradually Young came to.

  “He was kind of dazed, like ‘What am I doing here?’” she said. “I’ll never forget how he ran for that hallway to get away from everybody and collapse. Anybody else would’ve just fallen down and had a seizure.”

  To top it all off, Bruce Palmer got busted for pot at the Wellington. While the rest of the band returned to Los Angeles, Palmer was sent to jail and then back to Canada. His repeated legal problems would wreak havoc with the Springfield.

  “Bruce was always getting thrown out and we were always getting him back in,” said Charlie Greene. “Bruce had the longest hair of anybody, so we snuck him in as a woman once. He looked like an ugly Veronica Lake. Then we cut his hair, gave him a briefcase and pince-nez glasses and got him in as a businessman.”

  As the Springfield struggled to replace him, the momentum of the hit single was lost. Despite a host of substitutes—Jim Fielder, Ken Koblun, Bobby West, Ken Forssi and Jim Messina—the band would never recover from the loss of Palmer. “Bruce,” as June Nelson put it, was “the glue that kept the Springfield together.”

  Buffalo Springfield started out to be what it was with all of us—as far as I was concerned, when we changed the people, it was somethin’ else.

  Bruce was beyond. He was the soul of the whole thing. He wasn’t inhibited by anybody, and he knew he was probably better than any of these guys—because he was. It was Bruce that made it so great, because his bass playing was like nothing I’d ever heard before. It was just in another world.