Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  When Briggs and I started workin’ together, I was harder than Briggs about certain things. About people hangin’ out in the studio. About rolling from the very beginning, not stopping the tape in between takes. As soon as I started figurin’ out where I was really at and started to grow as a performer in the studio, I said, “Let’s not stop. We just gotta keep on goin’. I don’t wanna wait for anybody—it’s time to go.” So that’s when we started rolling tape all the time, getting sounds. And that’s because I was an animal if we didn’t get it. I don’t know why the fuckin’ machine wasn’t on when we did that great take of “Helpless,” anyway. What’s the use of havin’ a machine, paying thousands of dollars, if you don’t turn the fuckin’ thing on. People who save tape piss me off. Savin’ tape. Fuck. Why do you have to fuckin’ get all into music and then stop and talk about whether you’re recording or not? I always figured, record everything. The only time they should mention it is when it’s not on. But it’s not a perfect world. A lotta people miss the opportunity to record something great waiting for it to start.

  “They have no sense at all of being onstage,” said exotic folk-pop singer Buffy Sainte-Marie to Jack Nitzsche after watching Young and the Horse play the Fillmore East. “That’s Crazy Horse,” said Jack. “Whatever clothes they woke up in, they wear onstage.”

  Compared to the CSNY extravaganza, Crazy Horse was gutter trash—pot, pills and a couple bottles of cheap red wine. Joel Bernstein recalls the vibe: “I’m a white kid from Philadelphia. At the time, the band members seemed kind of quasi-criminal to me.” Whitten gave the teenager a joint, which Bernstein smoked, “and the next thing I knew I was on the floor in a fetal position, stupefied.”

  In February and March 1970, Young would do a tour of small theaters with the Horse, augmenting the band with an explosive new player: Jack Nitzsche. Nitzsche—one of the very, very few “professional” musicians who doesn’t spook the Horse—played electric rhythm piano, and his sparse, soulful notes added just the right color to new songs like “Winter-long” and “It Might Have Been,” an ancient ballad Young had learned at a church dance. Nitzsche wasn’t a Horse fan and quickly grew tired of their limitations. “Billy used to say, ‘Crazy Horse isn’t a band, we’re a basketball team,’” said Jack. “I tend to agree.” But the interplay between Nitzsche and Whitten was electrifying. “Danny was the only black man in the band,” reiterated Jack.

  On March 6 and 7, the band played a quartet of sets at the Fillmore East, two of which were recorded for a projected live album, and these recordings capture the Horse in all their glory, including a torrential version of “Down by the River” that more than matches the original studio take in intensity. Young’s maniacal solos hint at future greatness as Nitzsche supplies a jazzy blues underpinning that’s shockingly complex for the Horse.

  Young sounds happily stoned out of his mind between songs, assigning band members all the wrong hometowns, prefacing “The Loner” by wryly quoting from a review of the single in Cashbox magazine: “This little ditty should send Young rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the Buffalo Springfield.”

  You can actually see it in a photo Bernstein snapped of the band onstage: Head back and eyes closed as he wangs some brain-sick scream out of Old Black, Young looks lost in the stars. Behind the scenes, though, not everything was groovy. “C’mon, baby, let’s go downtown,” Whitten sings on his one contribution to the Fillmore shows, and he was alluding to the new passion in his life: heroin. *

  At some point either a girlfriend or a roadie introduced Whitten to the narcotic and it quickly took over his life. His friend Terry Sachen felt Whitten had gone through such heavy transformations in his experiments with LSD that, when the sixties ended, “Danny could never close up. He predicted he would die before the age of thirty—he said that a few times. Danny was pained by life because people are so shitty. He needed a vacation from the world. It was just too much for Danny.”

  Ralph Molina said that Whitten nursed a persistent unhappiness over his role in the band. “Danny did say that Neil was holdin’ him back. He was in the background and he didn’t dig it. But he wasn’t bad-mouthing anybody—he had more class than that.”

  Whitten’s incredible talent went largely unrecognized, and it had to have stung. “During that period, I liked some of Danny’s songs better than Neil’s,” said David Briggs. “Danny had some great songs—powerful, emotional music. I knew he was a star. I knew that he knew he was a star. Everyone around him knew he was a star, just the people didn’t know he was a star. I remember tellin’ him, ‘Danny, you can’t pick your own time—that’s picked by other people for you—you just gotta keep being yourself.’ Danny was a great guy. He was just a great tortured guy.”

  Whitten began nodding out, even onstage, which led to moments of black humor at the Fillmore. “I looked up from the piano and fuckin’ Danny Whitten had stopped singing,” said Nitzsche. “His eyes were closed and he had a real big smile … Danny was enjoying the show. Finally Neil just yelled at him—‘Danny! SING!’” Backstage, according to Nitzsche, Young reamed out the rest of the band, yelling, “All right—who scored for Danny?” “I wanted to say, ‘Danny did,’” said Jack. ” ‘Do you think anybody else in this band knows how to score smack in the middle of the night in Manhattan?’”

  “I’ve seen the needle and the damage done / A little part of it in everyone,” Young scrawled out on the road somewhere at the time. These days, after ten million performances, it is sometimes hard to appreciate “The Needle and the Damage Done” outside of its Official Cautionary Tale designation, but in the early seventies next to no one (at least in song) was writing about the death-trip flip side of feelin’ groovy; leave it to Young to shine a particularly bare light bulb on the urge for self-destruction. Randy Newman maintains that it’s Young’s greatest song.

  Encouraged, no doubt, by Young’s frequently downbeat demeanor, the public would so fixate on this song that whispers of heroin abuse would follow Neil for years—a ridiculous charge to anyone who knows him. Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, who would eventually replace Whitten in the Horse, recalls copping some heroin while driving around with Young in Europe in the mid-seventies. When he figured out what Poncho was up to, “Neil literally jumped out of the car,” said Sampedro.

  There would be no Horse for a few years, and Young would head off in another direction—much more singer/songwriterly, much less rock and roll. Crazy Horse was at the height of its powers, but Whitten was already slipping away. Once the tour finished, Neil fired the band.

  We had a meeting at the Clear Thoughts building on La Cienega Boulevard to try to bring things into focus. Those kind of things never help. I think it’s been proven now that intervention is not a good idea. You can’t stop someone from doing something by taking things away from them. That only makes them do it more. “Tough love,” as Courtney Love would call it, doesn’t work.

  We knew what we had. We all knew it was really good. Then to see it get fucked up was really depressing. Seeing drugs come in and fuck it up, seeing the whole thing just go downhill. The inexperience of not knowing how to deal with heroin use, not knowing what it was, being too young for certain kinds of decisions. But that was the hand I was dealt at the time. The destruction of Danny’s life …

  —Heroin. What did you notice about that drug?

  I noticed it killed people. I don’t know much about it. It’s the worst kind of drug. Heroin wasn’t for me. I never tried it. I didn’t see any reason to try it. I never shot up anything. It’s not my deal. I never asked for it, it’s never been offered.

  I guess after I wrote a couple songs about it, then people who might’ve offered it … didn’t.

  “Neil was very aloof,” said Dennis Hopper with admiration. “He had a princelike quality about him.”

  In the wake of Easy Rider’s success, Hopper had a deal at Universal “where, if I put up twenty-five thousand dollars, they’d match it.” Dean Stockwell had been in Peru with Hopper making The
Last Movie and took up his invitation to write a script.

  “I was gonna write a movie that was personal, a Jungian self-discovery of the gnosis,” said Stockwell. “It involved the Kabala, it involved a lot of arcane stuff.” Though the After the Gold Rush script is currently missing, Shannon Forbes recalls that it involved a huge tidal wave coming to destroy Topanga. “It was sort of an end-of-the-world movie,” she said. “At the very end, the hero is standing in the Corral parking lot watching this huge wave come in and this house is surfing along, and as the house comes at him, he turns the knob—and that’s the end of the movie.” Russ Tamblyn was to play an over-the-hill rocker living in a castle; others vaguely recall some scene of George Herms carrying a huge “tree of life” through the canyon.

  Young got ahold of the script and told Stockwell he was interested in producing the soundtrack. “Neil told me he had a writer’s-block thing, and Warner Bros. was after him to do something,” said Stockwell. But it all came to naught once the studio executives paid a visit to Topanga. “These suits came out from Universal,” recalls Tamblyn. “Dean was trying to show ’em around—‘This is Janis Joplin, she’s gonna be in the movie.’ And the Universal guys were like ‘Oh, swell—who are these jerks? Neil who?’”

  None of this stopped Young—even though there wasn’t a movie, he went ahead with the soundtrack. (Despite what the back cover said, Young, over twenty-five years later, could recall only two of After the Gold Rush’s cuts actually being inspired by the movie: the title cut and “Cripple Creek Ferry.”)

  Gold Rush would be the first album cut outside the confines of a commercial studio and the first featuring live vocals exclusively. The main sessions were recorded in the tiny basement studio of Young’s house on Skyline Trail. Neighbor Louie Kelly and a couple of cronies carried a huge hunk of lead up the steep hill to soundproof the room. “We’re lucky we’re not dead from breathing the fumes,” said Briggs, who would be sent over the edge more than once in fulfilling Young’s whims. For these recordings, Young used players from CSNY and Crazy Horse: Ralph Molina on drums and Greg Reeves on bass (a move that Reeves said infuriated CSN). One new player was added to this nucleus—a diminutive, scrappy East Coast guitarist named Nils Lofgren.

  “I was a young kid, confident and arrogant in a nervous sort of way,” said Lofgren, who at age seventeen snuck backstage at Young’s 1969 Washington, D.C., appearance at the Cellar Door. Lofgren had been taught a few tricks on guitar by his neighbor, blues legend Roy Buchanan, and wanted Young’s advice on how to get his band, Grin, into the record business. “Finally Neil just said, ‘Well, if you think yer so hot, you must have some songs—why don’t you play me some of ’em?’ and handed me his Martin guitar,” recalls Lofgren, who proceeded to perform what would end up being the first Grin album in its entirety.

  Young took the musician under his wing, buying him a hamburger and Coke before the show. Lofgren—who really didn’t know Young’s work outside of Buffalo Springfield—panicked. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s so nice, I hope I like his music.’” Young and the Horse live blew Lofgren away, and a few days later the teenager got a phone call. “My mom hands me the phone and said, ‘It’s some guy named Neil.’ He said, ‘Nils, I’ve just talked to Ahmet, and I think I can get you a record deal at Atlantic.’ I’m like ‘What did I do to deserve this guy?’ It’s been like that ever since.”

  A few weeks later, Lofgren flew to Los Angeles. “Neil never gave me his address—he just said, ‘When you get there, look me up. I live in Topanga Canyon,’” said Lofgren, who, unable to get a lift hitchhiking with his huge suitcase and guitar, proceeded to walk the whole way. Arriving exhausted late that afternoon, he finally got someone to point out Young’s home, then climbed the steep driveway only to find Neil about to get in his car. Young was typically nonchalant. “He said, ‘Oh, Nils—great to see ya. I’m goin’ into town to record. Why don’t you come by tomorrow?’” Too shy to tell Young of his incredible journey, Nils turned around and hitchhiked back to L.A.

  Soon Lofgren was staying in Topanga with David Briggs, who believed in the musician so wholeheartedly he would produce the first Grin sessions on spec without a record deal. Lofgren, who grew up in the suburbs of Maryland, recalls that his first night in Topanga was like something out of the Wild West. “David was in the kitchen with Louie Kelly, Danny Tucker and Billy Gray playing cards. Booze, cigarettes, piles of money. Serious gamblers.”

  Sprawled out on a mattress on the floor of the next room watching this surreal scene as he drifted off to sleep, Lofgren noticed “somethin’ movin’ on the floor, crawlin’ towards me. I realize it’s a scorpion. I freak out, screaming, ‘David, what the fuck is a scorpion doin’ crawlin’ in my face?’ He goes, ‘Aaaah, that’s just a little one,’ and kills it.”

  “It was very strange,” recalls Greg Reeves of the Gold Rush sessions. “It was just me, Ralph and Neil in the cellar of his house with the recording equipment. It was so cluttered and tore up only the three of us could fit in there.” Somehow Lofgren squeezed in to join them, noting Reeves’s eccentricities in the process. “One day Greg shows up and he’s gold. Gold. I was like ‘Hey, Neil, is, uh, Greg gold or somethin’?’ Neil said, ‘Yeah, he’s doin’ his Indian thing.’ I took it in stride.”

  Within this minimalist context Reeves truly shone, playing amazingly weird, soulful bass parts on songs like “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” “Greg Reeves was kinda like James Jamerson gone mad,” said Lofgren, referring to Reeves’s Motown mentor. “Greg had this ability to play way too many notes, the kind of thing where you’d bet anybody—especially Neil—would say, ‘That’s too much, you’re overplaying.’ And just before you were about to say, ‘Stop bein’ so busy,’ not only does he start playin’ the simplest, funkiest rhythmic thing, you realize what you just heard was beautiful. It was like ‘How did he do that?’ To this day, no one knows.”

  Young would subject Lofgren to a special trial by requesting that the guitarist play an instrument he didn’t know at all: piano. “I was taken aback,” said Lofgren. “Let me play guitar, Neil—I can’t play piano,” he told Young. “Yeah, I know—but I want you to play piano on this record,” Neil replied.

  Terrified, Lofgren spent day and night practicing at Spirit keyboardist John Locke’s house. Even on a session lunch break, Lofgren kept working on “Southern Man.” “I used to be an accordion player, and accordion’s all ‘oompah, oompah,’ so I started doin’ the accordion thing on piano. Ralphie came in and starts double-timin’ it and we get into this great jam. I said, ‘Neil, check this out.’ I banged into this solo, minus his guitar. He said, ‘That’s the solo.’ I said, ‘Really?’”

  “I can’t play piano”? Perfect. That’s the sound I was looking for. I didn’t want to hear a bunch of fuckin’ licks. I don’t like musicians playing licks. The only guy who could play licks on that record was Greg Reeves. He could play whatever the fuck he wanted to, and you couldn’t hear it anyway—it was just like this big rumble down there. Greg Reeves is the only bass player where it didn’t bother Ralph not to be playin’ with Billy. He just moved right along. Greg’s a great bass player—had his own style and there was a lotta room. There was a shitload of room on those records, because there wasn’t anything else goin’ on—rhythm guitar, rhythm piano, bass and drums—that’s all there was. It was a good concept I had on that one. The song was it. The song spoke, everything else was supporting it.

  That was a real small studio. Had a very funky little sound goin’ on. After the Gold Rush is the only thing we ever did there.

  Nils is fantastic—if all it required was energy, Nils would be number one. And he keeps growing. Some of that stuff he played with me on different records is really fantastic, especially his keyboard stuff. Nils is the fuckin’ classic barrel-roll piano player—put a cigar in his mouth and a white hat on his head and let that boy go. He’ll fuckin’ be gone all over those eighty-eights.

  —What was it about recording studios that y
ou had to get away from?

  Factories. I didn’t like seeing other musicians in the hallways. I didn’t like hearing other music. I didn’t feel like “I’m workin’ on my record, they’re workin’ on their record.” Fuck that. I want to be by myself. I don’t want to be affected by social bullshit. Don’t want to have anything to do with it. We’re not part of that, heh heh.

  Cinema verité? I got into audio verité. The concept of capturing the moment on the camera? I just translated that right into the recording studio. And when I started doin’ it, I found all these other reasons why I was doin’ the right thing. But the original thought was audio verité. Why not make records like that? Capture the moment.

  More than a few people told me that Young was unsure of the direction he was heading on Gold Rush. There are apocryphal tales of Neil playing the album in its entirety live on piano and guitar for visitors. Out on the porch of his house between takes, Young expressed his doubts to Nils Lofgren. “We were about halfway through Gold Rush and Neil was like ‘God, it really sounds good to me, but it’s been so easy to do. I wonder if people are gonna get it.’”

  A patchwork of songs quilted together from different sessions, After the Gold Rush was primarily the mellower side of Young, consisting of eight songs from Topanga, two songs from the August 1969 Sunset Sound sessions—“I Believe in You” and “Oh Lonesome Me”—and an overly polished solo rendition of “Birds.” There were funky touches everywhere: You can hear the band talking during the solo on “When You Dance I Can Really Love,” and two of the songs feature French horn. The dry-as-a-bone flatness of the cramped Topanga studio created a sound like no other record on the radio. There’s no echo on those songs, as Briggs noted, “because we didn’t have any.”

  “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” is a doomy work with a mood that recurs throughout Young’s music: hope in the face of total despair, which somehow doesn’t sound like hope at all. “Tell Me Why” showcased Young’s spartan but unerring rhythm on acoustic guitar. As Ken Viola stated, “Neil has a unique way of playing acoustic which is solely his. It’s a perfect combination of melody and rhythm. It’s not just chording—the melodies are married to the words in a strum relationship that’s not just simply played—it’s very calculated, designed.”