* Interestingly, Tergesen—who was unaware of the controversies—also insisted it was he who mixed the tapes for the Springfield’s dismal first album, a claim that Greene and Stone refuted.
* Bob Young wrote a letter to a friend in Canada on June 26, 1967, stating that Neil was already out of the band by June 1 and working with Jack Nitzsche. He confirmed the rejection of “Mr. Soul” as one of the reasons Neil left. Writes Bob: “Neil’s music was criticized frequently by Steve Stills … Neil was beginning to lose confidence in his music … the group had also been recording a new LP and Neil at one point told me he’d be lucky to get two songs on it.”
growin’ up, blowin’ up
Jack Nitzsche sits in his home in the Hollywood Hills, looking, as always, a bit awkward. Those harsh features, the long, graying hair and, behind thick glasses, piercing, pained eyes—sometimes Nitzsche, now in his sixties, resembles an agitated Indian shaman; others, a hip Amish farmer. There are nights Jack can look older than a ghost. Demons plague him, and he’s known depths lower than any submarine. Jack’s heart was broken long ago, by a singer/songwriter whose music he never even liked.
Nitzsche’s had a hand in decades of rock and roll: arranging a long string of hits for Phil Spector, playing furious rhythm piano on such Stones tracks as “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby,” composing landmark movie scores for Performance and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, producing everyone from the Neville Brothers to the Germs. And there’s his idiosyncratic solo records, among them St. Giles Cripplegate, a 1972 album of Ives-inspired original orchestral pieces recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, and a wild 1963 big-band version of “Rumble” that actually inspired Link Wray to revamp the arrangement of his trademark song. Nitzsche touches other musicians in a way that’s hard for civilians to understand. “Jack’s one of the modern-day masters,” Neil Young told Gavin Martin. “His creations are on par with Mozart and the composers of the Renaissance.”
On and on it goes, but even on a good day you get the feeling Jack thinks it’s all a load of shit. Everybody warned me about Jack—friends, enemies, even family: Jack’s evil, Jack’s an asshole, Jack’s the devil, Jack will eat you alive ten seconds after meeting you…. Now, Jack can be cruel. I’ve heard tales of Nitzsche telling people things that peeled their skin off. He once reduced Carly Simon to tears merely by commenting on the equestrian nature of her face.
Yet there is something pure about Jack. Take him to a record store and he’ll blow a fortune looking for some new sound to love, whereas everybody else in this fucking story retired from listening to music in 1974. Nitzsche has loved rock and roll ever since the Penguins’ immortal 1955 doo-wop hit. “Once I heard ‘Earth Angel’ it was all over,” he said. “That’s the first one that really, really grabbed me hard and made me cry…. It had death in it. Death is always a part of the music that I make. Death means a lot.”
Nitzsche lives up to his name. He can be devastatingly cynical about the music business, the world and himself. To him, rock and roll, all of it, including whatever he’s created, was stolen from the black man. “Jack’s prejudiced in reverse,” said his son, Jack Jr. “He hates white people.”
Jack has a reputation for being scaldingly candid and has remained on a very short list of people who will tell Neil Young what he thinks without fear of reprisal. Their lives have intertwined both professionally and privately, and Nitzsche never holds back his opinions of what went down—no matter how much of an asshole it makes him seem—and it scares people. “Jack’s brutally honest,” said his old friend Leslie Morris. “He uses it as a weapon.”
In 1955, Jack Nitzsche drove his two-year-old Studebaker across the country to attend music school in Los Angeles, leaving behind a miserable childhood in Michigan. Nineteen years old, he wanted to be a jazz saxophonist but realized he’d never be good enough. Copying lead sheets at Specialty Records for A&R man Sonny Bono led to a partnership with black-music impresario H. B. Barnum and Jack’s first modest hit as a producer/arranger, “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo,” the follow-up to the immortal Preston Epps hit, “Bongo Rock.”
The arrangements for Spector began in 1962 with the Crystals’ immortal “He’s a Rebel,” a number-one smash, and ended with Ike and Tina Turner’s ill-fated “River Deep, Mountain High.” During those years Nitzsche would be omnipresent on the pop charts. His work with Greene and Stone began in 1964 with an all-star session featuring Darlene Love on a droning version of “Yessir, That’s My Baby.” “Jack was the first guy I ever saw with long hair,” said Charlie Greene. “He was a nerd, but a cool nerd.”
Nitzsche—so enamored of the beatniks that he blackened his entire apartment with Rit die—was similarly entranced by the burgeoning hippie movement “until they put it on TV and it all became a costume.”
It was Brian Stone who first played demos of the Springfield for Nitzsche. “I didn’t think they were so great,” said Nitzsche. “But Neil’s songs stood out. I loved his songs and that squeaky fucking voice. Stills would complain about how squeaky his voice was. I told him, ‘That’s what’s gonna make Neil a star.’”
After spending a night with Young at the Whisky heckling the Nazz—“Neil kept yelling, ‘There’s only one Mick Jagger! You’re not the Rolling Stones!’”—Jack recalls that the musician invited him back to his home to hear a new song. Nitzsche followed Young’s car up Laurel Canyon Boulevard and, drunk on a bottle of Lancer’s, plowed into a head-on collision, smashing the windshield of his Caddy convertible with his cranium. Nitzsche was hauled off to jail, where, much to his mortification and embarrassment, Young harassed the cops who’d detained him by shouting, “Do you know who you arrested tonight? This is a heavyweight ya got here.” Thus began a very unusual friendship.
Nitzsche and sidekick Denny Bruce soon completed the pilgrimage to Utica Drive. Inside the house, beneath a picture of Marianne Faithfull pinned to the wall, Young picked up a twelve-string guitar to play an as yet unrecorded song, “Expecting to Fly.” Halfway through the ballad, Nitzsche exclaimed, “Fuck—what a great song!” That one of the more powerful figures on the music scene had just complimented him was less important than the fact he’d been interrupted, and Young admonished the producer sharply, “Shhhh! Just listen!” “I thought, ‘Fuck, I am listening,’” said Nitzsche, impressed—arrogance was a subject he knew something about.
“Jack Nitzsche was the Yoko Ono of the Buffalo Springfield,” said Denny Bruce. Bruce Palmer recalled that the band members were constantly searching for Neil, and the path inevitably led to the producer’s house. One day Nitzsche came home to find a nervous Young hiding in Jack Jr.’s bedroom—“If Stephen comes looking for me, tell him I’m not here and that your kid’s taking a nap.” Young had fled the group and Stills had stolen his beloved Gretsch White Falcon to lure him back. “Neil was afraid Stephen was gonna hit him over the head with it,” said Nitzsche.
Stills would be rebuffed by Jack when he asked him to produce his opus, “Bluebird.” “I’m too busy with Neil,” said Nitzsche, infuriating Stills, who then snagged Ahmet Ertegun to coproduce.
Using layers of virtuoso acoustic/electric guitar, Stills concocted an unrelenting folk-pop-blues confection: just the sort of meticulously crafted studio creation Young would soon be running from. Live, the song was a showcase for Stills/Young guitar exchanges, and some observers feel that the Springfield’s “Bluebird” excursions were a direct result of exposure to the noodlings of San Francisco groups. An overwrought nine-minute version, complete with Stills’s moaning-groaning bluesman posturings, mercifully went unreleased until 1973, but it hardly constitutes any kind of real jam—Young’s intermittently berserk guitar was overdubbed.
“Neil and Stills had an argument, because it was Stills’s song and it was getting down to ‘Well, it’s your song, you should do it,’” remembers engineer Bruce Botnick. “And Stills was saying, ‘ You’re the lead guitar player.’ He worked Neil up to the point where he had an epileptic seizure right there in the contr
ol room. When he came out of it, he played the solo.”
Nitzsche, present at the session, remembered Ertegun gently admonishing the quarreling musicians by stating a bit of music-biz reality in that low, gravelly voice of his: “You will have to stop this. This is ridiculous. You see, this is Jack Nitzsche over here, and if he picks up that guitar over there and hits me in the head with it, that goes in Cashbox magazine—front page. If you two guys beat each other bloody, no one cares. No Cashbox magazine. Understand?”
Once out of the Springfield, Neil Young found a home with the oddball crew around Nitzsche, which included Jack’s long-suffering wife, Gracia, a member of the backup vocal trio the Blossoms (until they joined the cast of Shindig and the TV people didn’t want a white girl standing between two black ones); his highly amusing teenage sidekick, Denny Bruce; an effete aspiring actor named John Hunter; and Chris Varez, a strapping scar-faced German whom KHJ had fobbed off on the public as a spear-carrying Hawaiian deity known as the Big Kahuna. *
* The Springfield recorded an unusual surf-tinged instrumental for one of KHJ’s radio spots, “Kahuna Sunset.” Cowritten by Stills and Young, it brings to mind the Shadows (and the Squires).
In the credits for Young’s self-titled debut it says, “A John Hunter contract.” Hunter filled out the contract forms for the sessions. Young—always one to enjoy spreading a little mystery—told Jack, “We’ll put it on the record—nobody will know what the fuck it means.” Varez supplied grass that was “beyond anything we’d ever experienced,” said Nitzsche. “It was like acid.”
Nitzsche and Denny Bruce sometimes snickered over the idiosyncrasies of their odd new friend. No matter what restaurant they went into, Neil would insist on ordering the same thing—a hamburger. At home, all he cooked was french fries, cutting the potatoes into big hunks “so he wouldn’t have to peel ’em,” said Bruce, adding that physically, Young was “never healthy at all. His gums were always bleeding, and the jar of big yellow pills for his seizures was never far from reach.” Social activities invariably seemed awkward for Young. He went along on Hollywood Boulevard excursions for miniature golf or Ping-Pong, but “he had no athletic ability whatsoever. You could see he kind of hated it if we were having fun.”
One night in 1967, Denny Bruce went with Neil to see Don’t Look Back, the acidic D. A. Pennebaker documentary on Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. “It blew Neil out of the water so much he said, ‘Denny—can we stay to see it a second time?’” Nitzsche recalls that Young was obsessed with the Rolling Stones and constantly quizzed the producer about them. “Neil later told me in these words: ‘I knew what I wanted and I knew how to get it’—cross Bob Dylan with the Rolling Stones. He tried to become a meld of the two.”
Nitzsche began taking Young to sessions, cutting covers of his songs with other artists and even writing songs with him. He tried to get his own label off the ground with Young as its premier artist. Engineer Bruce Botnick remembers Nitzsche’s excitement: “Jack kept saying, ‘Wait till you meet this guy.’ Neil came in looking like an eagle—he had this leather jacket that was a little bit large on him. When he’d hold his arms out, the fringe went almost down to the floor.”
However fast Nitzsche got Young into the studio, it wasn’t fast enough. “Whenever Neil wanted something, he wanted it now,” said Nitzsche. “Who did he think was gonna pay for the sessions now that he was solo? He never once gave consideration to that. He just said, ‘Book the studio, book the musicians.’” Denny Bruce remembers picking up the phone at Nitzsche’s when Young called, demanding to know when his studio time with Jack had been scheduled. Nitzsche had an appointment book filled with his session dates and Bruce said he’d check it. Young became impatient. “I’m not just some name in a book! I’m NEIL YOUNG!”
Nitzsche had happened into Young’s life at a crucial moment. Although the Springfield had continued working in the studio since the release of their debut album, by the summer of 1967 the sessions were becoming less of a group thing, and not just because of their squabbles.
Released in the U.S. on June 2, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band altered the way rock bands went about getting their ideas onto tape, as well as the ideas themselves. Four or five guys standing there cranking it out was suddenly “old-fashioned.” There was a whole universe of juicy sounds out there, and to make an album without strings, sitars, segues, sound effects and spoken-word sections became almost unthinkable.
By Christmas of that year, stores would be full of overblown concept-album “masterpieces” impossible to duplicate for a live audience. Leonard Bernstein spent an hour of prime time extolling the virtues of the Left Banke’s “Pretty Ballerina” while Brian Wilson previewed “Surf’s Up” on a grand piano. Record companies, sensing that highbrow credibility could open up vast markets beyond pimple-faced teens, threw unlimited funds at neophyte bands and let them run wild. Seemingly revolutionary at the time, much of this Pepper-inspired stuff was pretentious kitsch with a shelf life of thirty days or less. For each album like Love’s Forever Changes, there was a truckload of hogwash like the Electric Prunes’ Mass in F Minor and Sonny Bono’s Inner Views. Predictably, the only one who didn’t lose his head was Dylan, who retreated to Woodstock with the Band to record the most unproduced, spontaneous and truly psychedelic music of his life: The Basement Tapes. “I didn’t know how to record the way other people were recording and didn’t want to,” said Dylan to Matt Damsker in 1978. “The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper, which I didn’t like at all. I thought that was a very indulgent album…. I didn’t think all that production was necessary.”
But Young and Nitzsche brought a little genuine art to the party with the stunning “Expecting to Fly.” Completed for the most part before Pepper hit the street, “Expecting to Fly” leans more toward Brian Wilson and his Pet Sounds in its hallucinatory lushness, where everything seems to be taking place underwater. Strings are the first thing you hear, but on a long, slow fade-in that wobbles and veers sharp just as a solo violin opens up out of it like a time-lapse rose blooming: “There you stood on the edge of your feather, expecting to fly / Well, I laughed, I wondered whether I could wave goodbye,” sliding into a woozy 3/4 time signature on “goodbye.” On a snare hit, the stereo pans from one side to another, and the song ends with what Nitzsche dubbed “the pancake,” an eerie in-unison shimmer of female voices that leaves you hanging in the Twilight Zone. Longing, but not getting. Young’s fragile voice supplies a very different perspective on the Summer of Love from Grace Slick yowling “Don’t you want somebody to love?” *
Nothing like other Springfield records—or any other record, for that matter—Nitzsche created the perfect introduction for Young the solo artist. When I asked Jack what he thought the secret of the record was, he said one word only: “Epilepsy.” I don’t think Nitzsche’s being a smart aleck—the out-of-kilter sense of time in the arrangement captured the je ne sais quoi of Young’s electrical system.
Nitzsche built the track while Young was still touring with the Springfield, employing session players Don Randi, Carole Kaye, Jim Gordon, Russ Titleman and the Johnny Vidor string section. (“They were the hip string section in town,” said Jack. “Johnny wore a lot of felt hats.”) Then Young came in to overdub his guitar. But when faced with doing his vocal, suddenly his “I’m-not-a-name-in-a-book” bravado evaporated.
“When it came time to sing, Neil was scared to death of the microphone,” said Nitzsche. “To the point of saying, ‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.’ He didn’t have much confidence in his voice. I tried to encourage him any way I could. That strange thing in his voice—all that quivering and shaking, like you think the guy might have a nervous breakdown in front of your eyes? I told him that was appealing. I said, ‘You sound different—it isn’t a matter of can you sing like Stephen Stills—you’re a nonsinger. Look at Bob Dylan.’”
The record took weeks to create, giving Jack and Neil a reputation for obsessive tinkering in the process
. Bruce Botnick remembers “a lot of trying to make guitars sound like they were on clouds.” Many attempts were made at an ending before coming up with the pancake—overdubbed and slowed down—sung by Gloria Jones, Merry Clayton, Gracia Nitzsche, Brenda and Patrice Holloway. The pair mixed and remixed the record. As Jack said, “Those were the good old days. We kept going back until that mix was fucking perfect.”
As evidence of the all-pervasive influence of Sgt. Pepper, Young changed his own record after hearing it. “I’ll tell ya where the beginning of ‘Expecting to Fly’ came from,” Young told deejay Tony Pig. “It was supposed to be the end … that whole fade-in and that low rumble, we did that before ‘A Day in the Life’—and that was the last note…. You can hear a splice in the end just before those chicks’ voices come in doing that big ‘Oooh’ note…. The first note of the song played backwards is the last note … and it lasted like about half a minute on the record and we had it all ready to go and the Beatles came out with ‘A Day in the Life,’ so we just went back into the studio and changed it around, started it off with it, faded it in.”
Later, when Young returned to the Springfield, he brought “Expecting to Fly” with him, and while the record failed as a single—Atlantic put out a pointless truncated version—it had a tremendous effect on Young’s peers. Graham Nash, then of the Hollies, called Nitzsche from England to sing its praises and when the producer played the record for Keith Richards and then girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg—fresh from a trip to Disneyland and high on a fat Kahuna joint—they were rendered speechless. “‘Expecting to Fly’ was a great record for smoking pot,” said Nitzsche. “Each time you listened to it, you could discover something new.”
—“Expecting to Fly”—overdubbed, but good?
That’s JACK. His dedication to feelings—getting the feelings on tape. It was a collaboration. Jack and I were working away peacefully with no distractions. “Expecting to Fly” has a sound. It’s overdubbed and yet nothing’s missing. It’s possible to overdub. But the longer you overdub, the harder it is to do.
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