Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Geffen was formidable enough to engineer a trade that gave Crosby, Stills and Nash the freedom to record in the first place. He got Nash out of his contract with Epic Records in return for Richie Furay—who was still under the Springfield contract to Atlantic and wanted out to record with his new band, Poco—then engineered a deal for Crosby, Stills and Nash at Atlantic with Ahmet Ertegun. “Ahmet was a fan from the very beginning,” said Nash. “He gave us the feeling he would protect us.” Released in June 1969, Crosby, Stills & Nash was tailor-made for the exploding FM market and immediately shot to the top of the Billboard charts, where it would remain for over two years. Hippiedom had reached critical mass, and CSN, dubbed the “American Beatles” in the press, was its voice. “Crosby, Stills and Nash were it,” said tour manager Leo Makota. “They were treated like royalty wherever they went.”

  Crosby, Stills & Nash was a Stephen Stills tour de force. He was a maniac in the studio—arranging, rearranging, playing every instrument in sight. “It’s getting to the point where I’m no fun anymore,” he wails in the album’s opener, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” an intricate swirl of acoustic guitars and harmony. It was like a folkie version of the Spector wall of sound, and Stills had created it almost single-handedly, aided primarily by Dallas Taylor—a sullen-faced drummer on the rebound from Elektra also-rans Clear Light. Taylor would be one of Stephen’s major sidekicks until drugs knocked him out of commission. “We hold one of the records for being in the studio and staying up the longest,” Taylor said. “Five days without sleep. We didn’t get much work done, but we had fun. A lotta cocaine.”

  The chemistry of the original trio suited Stills’s vision. Although Crosby was a respectable rhythm guitarist, he and Nash were nowhere near as instrumentally proficient as Stills, and they were content to let him run wild and fill up every empty space. While things would change radically when Young entered the picture, CSN’s debut was completed quickly and without controversy. “The first album was a breeze, the music was effortless,” said Taylor. “We’d go in, spend days in the studio doin’ the tracks. Then David and Graham would come in, sing their parts and leave, and we’d continue to fuck with the tracks.”

  Driven by acoustic guitars and three-part harmony, CSN was a novel idea, but not all fans of sixties rock were convinced. “Squeaky mouse music,” said Richard Meltzer. “Dog food. There was nothing Dionysian about them—they were the worst aspects of the Byrds, the Hollies and Buffalo Springfield.”

  Crosby, Stills and Nash’s instant self-importance also left something to be desired. Whereas Buffalo Springfield seemed almost innocent and naïve, CSN were nothing of the sort. They were Superheroes of Rock, Out to Save the World. Ever the comedian, Dylan would have the best line on CSNY in 1997, when a reporter from Der Spiegel commented that the quartet were convinced they had stopped the Vietnam War. “I believe that immediately,” said Dylan. “They were those kinda guys.”

  Crosby, Stills and Nash would also enjoy the dubious distinction of being openly associated with cocaine. Early on, deejay B. Mitchell Reid dubbed the trio the Frozen Noses. “Frozen Noses—I didn’t even know what that meant,” said Joni Mitchell. “I just knew Graham was getting skinnier and skinnier and staying out all night. I thought it had to be another woman. No wonder they call it the Lady.”

  With Joni Mitchell and various members of Crosby, Stills and Nash constantly flitting about, the scene in Laurel Canyon was a rich one. But Neil Young wasn’t really part of the gang. “Neil never dealt with anyone,” said Elliot Roberts. “Neil very rarely called anyone and never socialized—Neil just doesn’t go to parties. He will go a year without talking to you, ’cause he doesn’t initiate phone calls.”

  Roberts would first encounter Young during the tail end of the Springfield. “Even then, you knew he was his own person. Neil didn’t hang with the band, wasn’t friendly with the band, wasn’t nice to the band—’cause they weren’t cooperating with him. They were always afraid of Neil. He had this vibe like Clint Eastwood—he was like death. You saw him ride into town. You didn’t know a thing about him, but you knew not to fuck with this guy. Everyone was petrified of Neil.” *

  But Roberts detected a frailty that others missed. “Instantly—from the first day—I knew that Neil was physically very, very weak. Neil was sickly. He was so vulnerable—you could blow him away with a word, you could hurt his feelings with the drop of a hat. It was so easy to get Neil—so fuckin’ easy—it was really sorta weird.”

  Although Joni Mitchell was Elliot Roberts’s “first racehorse,” it was Neil Young who would go the distance. Ironically, Mitchell put the pair together. She was in the studio working on her first album when she discovered her cohort from the Canadian folk scene, still in the Springfield at the time, was recording in the next studio over. Mitchell called Roberts, telling him, “You’ve got to meet Neil Young. He’s the only guy who is funnier than you are.”

  The pair so hit it off that Roberts—still sleeping on B. Mitchell Reid’s floor at this point—got an invitation from Young to stay in his Laurel Canyon guest house. By this time the Springfield were without a manager and floundering. Roberts badly wanted to manage the band and accompany them on a southern California bus tour as sort of a test run. It was just before his first gig with the Springfield that Roberts discovered how difficult a client Young could be.

  “Neil fired me ’cause I took off a half hour to play golf. We went to the hotel and right next to the hotel was a driving range. Everyone goes to their rooms and I go to the golf range. I don’t know it, but Neil’s not feeling well, he’s calling around for me to get him a doctor, and when I get back, Dickie Davis said to me, ‘Well, you can split. Neil fired you. He doesn’t want a manager who’s playin’ golf—he wants a manager who’s lookin’ after the band.’

  “And Neil won’t see me. I’ll tell ya what a lunatic this guy was—Neil won’t see me, but I’m there, I’m on the bus! So I hang out, try and avoid him like the plague. Neil won’t look at me. And that’s how he treats me all night long—like I’m dead. The other guys are talking to me, but to Neil I’m not even in the room. I’m tryin’ to get in his good graces—‘Can I get you somethin’, some aspirin? Do you want some water?’ Neil doesn’t turn around. I don’t exist. When he needed me, I was playing golf.”

  Somehow Roberts slipped back in Young’s good graces, or so he thought, and put together a management contract for the Springfield through Chartoff-Winkler. But when the time came to sign, the deal fell through—because of Young. “Neil refused to sign, even though the band voted four to one,” recalls Roberts, thoroughly confused and hurt by the artist’s behavior. He was still living with Young, who hadn’t offered a word of complaint on the deal. “He drove me to the meeting,” said Roberts.

  Undaunted, a day or two later, Roberts tracked the Springfield down to a rehearsal at the Variety Arts Center in Santa Monica. “I go to the rehearsal and it’s just the band and Dickie. And Neil stops playing and said to me, ‘Get the fuck outta here.’ I walk all the way up to the stage and I go, ‘Neil, please don’t do this’—I’m yelling now, ‘Don’t do this, I know I can make this band happen.’ And Stephen is like ‘Let Elliot talk.’ Neil said, ‘FUCK Elliot! Fuck him!’

  “Now I start to cry. I really loved the Springfield, and I had gotten to really like Neil—and I can’t believe he’s doing this to me. He was so bad to me I was crying in front of the band. I couldn’t believe it, it was so off the wall. Neil’s screaming at me—he said to the band, ‘Either he leaves now or I leave now. You wanna play, or you wanna listen to this fuckin’ shit?’ Now everyone’s stopped, they’re all staring, and Neil’s cursing me and telling me to just get the fuck out. And the band goes, ‘No, we wanna play.’ I’m in tears and I leave.

  “A week later Neil shows up. At one o’clock in the morning, there’s a knock at the door—and it’s Fuckface. I go, ‘What do you want?’ I didn’t know if he wanted to hit me or if he heard I bad-mouthed him—which I had. And he goes, ‘
I wanna talk to you for a few minutes.’ I go, ‘FINE.’ He comes in and goes, ‘I want you to manage me. I left the Springfield. I told them today. I didn’t want you to manage the Springfield because I knew I was leaving and I’d rather you manage me than manage the Springfield.’ I go, ‘This guy’s like Geffen.’”

  First of all, I fired Elliot from Buffalo Springfield because he was out playing golf. I was in a bad mood or somethin’. It was just before the Springfield was gonna break up, so everything pissed me off. So you could even say I was like a spoiled little brat or whatever and it would probably be true. No problem with that. Because I know how long it took me to learn some things—to grow up.

  But still—my feelings were “This guy’s a fucking jerk.”I liked him, but he was a jerk. No way I wanted him to manage Buffalo Springfield. Then later, when I quit the Springfield, I was looking for a manager, and I remembered, “This guy’s pretty good.” But when I said, “I don’t want him to manage the band,” I wasn’t thinking to myself, “I’m gonna get this guy. He’s gonna manage me.”

  Now, to tell ya the truth, I don’t exactly remember every detail about this. It’s twenty-six years ago—what the fuck do you want?

  How did I know Elliot was the one? It was obvious. He was a lotta fun. Just like that.

  As long as I give Elliot good direction, he does what he has to do to protect me. Elliot, he’s a character, boy. Hard to find. One in a million. He’s a soulful guy. That’s all. Elliot’s got soul.

  The night Young came knocking on the door, “he ended up staying, just smoking pot and talking about his hopes and his fears, what he really wanted to do,” said Roberts, who described the Young of those days as a primitive, instinctual artist without the savvy of a Joni Mitchell. “Joni really had a much clearer vision. Neil was into his thing and thought that being too much into the business end of it perverted you. He only knew that he had more to give than he was able to give.”

  Folksinger Dave Van Ronk—playing a gig at the Ice House in nearby Pasadena—was staying at Roberts’s house, and the next night Elliot convinced Young to open for him. “Neil was scared to death—he wanted to do it, but he didn’t have the balls to do it,” said Roberts, who maintains that this impromptu gig was a turning point.

  Young “played all these new songs and kicked ass. Everyone loved him. Had they booed him, life would’ve been a hundred percent different. It was after that night that Neil’s vision became clearer, because he was resolved that he could do his own material better than anyone else—and that there was an audience for it.”

  Roberts took Young to Reprise (Jack Nitzsche also deserves credit, having talked up Young to label head Mo Ostin every chance he got). Under the guidance of Ostin and Lenny Waronker, Warner/Reprise was thriving on the singer/songwriter boom of the early seventies. “You could be sort of ugly and not have a traditional voice and it was okay,” said Reprise veteran Randy Newman. With its counterculture advertising and hip roster, Reprise was the record company of the era. “Of course, Reprise was never as different as it purported to be—they always cared about sellin’ records—but they left us alone,” said Newman. “Lenny was passionate about music.”

  Roberts would make an unusual deal for Young at Reprise. “We took very little money, and I took a lot of points. Everyone else was front-loading their deals, taking short points and taking the bread up front. I really thought Neil was gonna sell big records. I believed in Neil.”

  Young’s first record would flop, but within a year he would link up with Crosby, Stills and Nash and, with Elliot Roberts’s careful orchestration, emerge a superstar. In the meantime, Neil Young would meet his greatest producer, David Briggs, and his greatest rock and roll band, Crazy Horse.

  Santa Cruz, a day or two past the full moon. I call on David Briggs. We head to the Sea Cloud, a hangout off the Santa Cruz Pier. Accompanying David, as always, is his wife, Bettina, a blond German sprite whom Briggs met on the 1986 Crazy Horse European tour. Once nicknamed Little Mike—after Tyson—for her feisty demeanor during dice games, Bettina is a lively match for David and the only woman he would ever marry.

  Also along for the ride is Briggs’s foreign houseguest; let’s call him the Fanzine Editor. The Fanzine Editor is pals with Crazy Horse bass player Billy Talbot, has cut a few demo tracks with him and has the audacity to play Briggs these wayward warblings and make him guess who it is. David, who has been producing Billy Talbot for the last twenty-five years, doesn’t wanna play “Name That Tune” and in fact gets it in less than two notes. He’s been letting it fester for the last couple of days, and now a constant supply of Mexican coffees enables Briggs to get a little more intimate and relaxed with his houseguest.

  “Billy Talbot can LICK MY ASSHOLE, you FUCKING IDIOT,” he screams. “Playing me fucking BILLY TALBOT music in my own home … I SHOULD KILL YOU RIGHT here and now, you WORTHLESS, NO-GOOD FOREIGN MOTHERFUCKER.”

  After deconstructing the guy verbally, Briggs slinks off to the bar, where, as usual, he pays the tab for all of us. Back at David’s bungalow, the fury continues. Briggs proceeds to eject the Fanzine Editor—and the man’s wife—out of his home and into the street.

  The little guests scuttle about, snatching up their things as their host rants and raves. In the middle of it all, David pauses for a moment, looks at me and says with a smile, “How’m I doin’?” Taking my gales of laughter as approval, he starts right back in on the hapless pair until they run into the night, Briggs slamming the door behind them.

  Then he starts in on me. I once made the mistake of describing David as looking like a cross between Peter O’ Toole and a beaten dog in a worthless article for Spin magazine, so he now does ten minutes on what a shitty piece of writing the story was (correct), and how I’m lucky he doesn’t kill me at that precise moment. He then begins pawing my girlfriend, cooing about some nearby hot tub. Amid the abuse, he slinks off to the bathroom to chip away at the requisite eight-ball of cocaine. Booze and coke. It fueled Briggs for decades.

  Pit stop completed, David grabs the phone, ringing up Young archivist Joel Bernstein to give him a full report on this evening’s merriment. Then, standing in his boxer shorts, teeth chattering, eyes rolling back in his skull, he threatens to kill me, my girlfriend AND ALL THE BABIES in the town where I live if I write a SINGLE FUCKING WORD in my FUCKING BOOK he doesn’t like. In many ways, David was my biggest ally. He’s gotten me into places I shouldn’t have been, given me information I shouldn’t have had. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t an asshole just like the rest of them.

  Briggs suddenly demands to see a Little Richard boxed set I have just bought. Visions of shattering vinyl filling my head, I am reluctant to hand it over to this stoned maniac, but David gingerly cradles it as if it contains nitroglycerine. Gazing at the manic visage of Little Richard, he begins to weep, then wanders out of the room. I follow. There, alone in the kitchen, a crumpled and deflated Briggs is sobbing. For a moment it is hard to reconcile the wounded individual before me with the raging lunatic in the other room.

  “I was just a boy … just a child,” he moans. “Little Richard was my God, he was my fucking God. Don’t you see?” As he looks up at me, I notice David has the saddest eyes of any man I’ve ever met. Bogart eyes, lonesome beyond words. I don’t know what it was Briggs saw, but I was glad I hadn’t.

  NILS LOFGREN: David was not only a producer—he was an audience, a cheerleader, engineer and brother all in one. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would be there with ya for twenty minutes and go make phone calls and do another deal—I mean, he was down in the trenches with ya the whole time.

  David is a real gentle soul, but he had a real tough life. He was never able to be a kid.

  LINCOLN BRIGGS, son: He’s a spiritual atheist, a scientific realist. He doesn’t believe in an afterlife. It’s like, “This is it. This is my chance and I’m gonna go for it. I’ve got no time to waste, and nobody’s gonna tell me what to do.” That’s a real powerful stance to be approaching life with.<
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  JOHN HANLON, engineer: David doesn’t give a shit about money. He’s had it, he’s lost it … he doesn’t seem to be motivated by it at all. He wants to make art—group art.

  JOHN LOCKE, keyboard player for Spirit: If anybody is rock and roll, it’s David Briggs. As a producer, as a lifestyle … If we’d stayed with Briggs, Spirit would’ve been huge … but he ran off with our guitar player’s old lady.

  FRANK “PONCHO” SAMPEDRO, Crazy Horse guitarist: David was the master of committing women to slavery by putting them in left field … a true master of administering pure pain and gaining true love, HAHAHAHA. David fuckin’ had the women on their hands and knees. He cleaned up the fuckin’ floor and then washed the walls with them, twisted ’em up like a pretzel and filled their head full of fog and haze. And I think he said “I love you” now and then … just to make it real.

  LESLIE MORRIS, Geffen-Roberts employee: An asshole, an arrogant asshole … Briggs came off as such an asshole.

  DAVID BLUMBERG, arranger: David chased Manson off the grounds of his Topanga house. Manson wanted his truck. David told him he’d shoot him if he didn’t get lost. Manson was scared of Briggs.

  BOBBY MORRIS, cohort: Get on his wrong side, forget it—he’d probably kill you before he’d fight you. Just shoot you dead.

  KIRBY COHEE, childhood friend: You put a hand right in front of David’s face, you’ll get a lot of respect out of him immediately. His mouth has written a lot of checks his ass couldn’t cash. David, despite his persona, is a very frail man.

  SHANNON FORBES: David doesn’t like families … I think the minute I became a mother, it went to pieces, ’cause he doesn’t like mothers—starting with his own. He didn’t even go see her when she was dyin’. She’d send letters, he wouldn’t write back. David has a hard time being happy. He’s not used to it.