Lyrically, “Tell Me Why” illustrates both the virtues and the flaws of Gold Rush. The verses are incredibly evocative and simple, and then you get to that convoluted hippie doublespeak chorus: “Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself? / When you’re old enough to repay and young enough to sell.” “It sounds like gibberish to me,” Young admitted to writer Scott Cohen in 1988. “I stopped singing that song because when I get to that line, I go, ‘What the fuck am I talking about?’You know I don’t edit my songs.”
Young’s most accessible—and most popular—work rarely qualifies as his most interesting. One wonders if a little of CSN’s finger-pointing didn’t rub off on Neil on “Southern Man.” Despite its rocking groove and insect-guitar soloing, this is Young at his least subtle lyrically. ” ‘Southern Man,’ ‘Alabama’ are a little misguided,” said Randy Newman, a long-time admirer of Young’s work. “It’s too easy a target. I don’t think he knows enough about it. Neil’s Big Issue things—‘Ohio,’ or where he’s pissed off about people selling his songs—I don’t like as well. It’s not his best stuff.” The late great Ronnie Van Zant would zing off the best retort to “Southern Man” via a much more powerful song, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1974 hit, “Sweet Home Alabama”: “I hope Neil Young will remember / A southern man don’t need him around, anyhow.” *
Toward the end of the sessions, Jack Nitzsche joined the Horse for the unbelievable “When You Dance I Can Really Love.” Jack’s piano playing on the song is truly nuts—he bashes away at the keys with fevered intensity, adding dark, furious rhythms that give the song a twisted edge. Lofgren remembers Nitzsche as incredibly cranky, “a little looped, and not convinced he should be playing piano on this song. One minute he would be up for it and just love the music, the next it would be ‘I’m not gonna do it.’ Neil had to keep talking him through it.” Equally unforgettable are the song’s lyrics. ” ‘When you dance, I can really love’—I mean, that’s a stupid thing to say to a girl,” said Randy Newman. “It’s really low-end IQ—it isn’t above a hundred—and Neil is not a low-IQ guy. He did it on purpose. That’s funny.”
“When You Dance” is a funky record. Me and Billy and Ralph and Danny and Jack. They were all crazy. Jack plays great—I was pushing him. A lotta leakage, boy. That’s a unique take, ’cause that’s the only take ever done in the studio by the Horse with Jack playing. That group actually didn’t work as well as I would’ve liked. It was nice havin’ Jack with us, but some of the stuff, he was in the way tonally. Crazy Horse was so good with the two guitars, bass and drums it didn’t need anything else.
“When You Dance” is probably the last record with Danny that we played together on. That was done near the end of the sessions. When I did all the other stuff, Danny wasn’t on it—Nils, Ralph and I did the singing. Stills came up and sang, but I didn’t like those vocals, so I redid them all with Danny. Danny kinda got himself together, did the overdubs … He wasn’t lookin’ too good at that point.
—Who inspired all the dancing-women songs?
I don’t know … I remember this one girl, Jean “Monte” Ray—she was the singing partner of Jim, Jim and Jean, a folk duo. Had a record out called “People World,” and she did a lot of dancing with finger cymbals. She was really great. Might’ve been her. Good chance. I kinda had a crush on her for a while. Moved nice. She was real musical, soulful.
—So is she the Cinnamon Girl?
Only part of the song. There’s images in there that have to do with Jean and there’s images that have to do with other people.
—Are you preaching in “Southern Man”?
No. I’m warning. Warning. “Southern Man” was an angry song. I wrote “Southern Man” in my studio in Topanga. Susan was angry at me for some reason, throwing things. They were crashing against the door ’cause I was down there doin’ I don’t know what the fuck. We fought a lot. There’s some reason for it, I’m sure. It was probably my fault … everybody can relate to that.
“Southern Man” was more than the South—I think the civil rights movement was sorta what that was about. The far North and the deep South are not very different. They’re extremes. Look at Robbie Robertson—an Indian from Canada who wrote a lot about the deep South. I’m sure it’s the same kinda thing.
Southerners, northerners, they’re extremists. I mean, look at the people who live up in Canada. And look at the people who live in the deep South. They’re out there. I love Canada, with the hockey games and the fuckin’ spirit—everybody gets so fuckin’ into it. It’s so real. And there’s that real family thing about the South—everybody gets together and has barbecues, ya know what I mean?
“Southern Man” is a strange song. I don’t sing it anymore. I don’t feel like it’s particularly relevant. It’s not “Southern Man”—it’s “White Man.” Heh heh. It’s much bigger than “Southern Man.”
—People recall you were very unsure of your direction with After the Gold Rush.
I always feel unsure about stuff that I like. But I knew that I liked it, I could hear it—I could stand outside, listen, and it made me feel good. I want the music to feel like I’m immersed in it. You know it’s right, you know you got the take of the song. That’s what I’m looking for.
Released in August 1970, After the Gold Rush was “the spirit of Topanga Canyon,” Young would tell Cameron Crowe. “It seemed like I’d realized I’d gotten somewhere.”
Young’s album packaging was becoming more personal: Gold Rush included a foldout insert of handwritten lyrics, plus—just to make everybody wonder—a list of the songs that didn’t make the cut. There was even a credit for Susan Young’s patches, featured in the back-cover close-up of Neil’s ass. Joel Bernstein took the pictures and was shocked by Young’s choice for the front cover: an odd, accidental shot of the musician walking through Greenwich Village passing an old woman. Joel considered the shot scrap-heap material—he had even solarized the print in order to hide its soft focus. Young glanced at it and immediately announced, “That’s my album cover.” The eighteen-year-old thought it was a joke until he walked into a record store and there it was on display.
Coming after Neil Young, Everybody Knows and the work with CSN, Gold Rush was another completely different piece of the puzzle and a smash success. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” an infectious ballad said to be inspired by Nash’s split with Joni Mitchell, provided Young with his first top-forty hit. “Gold Rush really did make the turn for us,” said Elliot Roberts. “It was a soft record and much more writerly. It propelled Neil into that writer class with Leonard Cohen, James Taylor and Joni.”
But Neil Young was a whole lot odder than his peers, as evidenced by the album cut that resonated most deeply for many, “After the Gold Rush.” Accompanied by a mournful French horn, Young tickles the ivories and sings a tale of time travel that culminates in an exodus to another planet. Spaceships, archers, Mother Nature’s silver seed … it’s the sort of cornball shit Dylan wouldn’t be caught dead with, but it was completely original and, for better or worse, completely Neil. In 1992, Young would describe the song as being “about three times in history: There’s a Robin Hood scene, there’s a fire scene in the present and there’s the future … the air is yellow and red, ships are leaving, certain people can go and certain people can’t … I think it’s going to happen.”
The inherent mystery of the song appealed to Dean Stockwell, who was flattered that Young gave eternal life to his abandoned project. “Sit down and listen to the lyrics of that tune itself—tell me what it means. I mean, you can’t do it. And no one could tell what that screenplay meant either. But Neil got it.”
The song has been a staple of Young’s solo sets over the years as well as one of his most covered. * “I would listen to Neil singing that all the time when we were on the road,” said Linda Ronstadt. “I would think, ‘This is the future. Neil’s seeing humans leave the planet and go off to start a new space colony.’ I’ve always felt that Neil had a great deal of really uncanny prescience i
n his writing.”
What appealed most to Ronstadt was Young’s imagery. “With a record you don’t try to make music, you try to make your story clear. As strange and surreal as a lot of Neil’s lyrics are, they’re very clear—‘The archer split the tree.’ His images are much more precise than Bob Dylan’s. There’s a clarity that grabs you by the collarbones and just shakes you. ‘After the Gold Rush’ is evocative, like the I Ching is evocative, or a powerful mandala. It evokes a feeling in you.”
Randy Newman found the song’s charms more inexplicable. “I can’t believe I liked ‘After the Gold Rush,’ because it doesn’t hold up to analysis. I can’t stand that sort of ‘meadow rock’ thing—Neil’s doing it, and writing about a big issue in a simplistic way, but I still like it. I love it. It just sounds good. There’s some kind of alchemy going on. It’s an artless type of thing—not to imply that Neil’s some kind of idiot savant, he’s certainly shrewder than that—but you have to listen to the records to realize how really great he is.
“You can’t put those lyrics down on the page and say, ‘Look! This guy’s great!’ They lay there like a turd … if you look at it close, his songwriting seems so artless. It’s very simple—‘bad’ rhymes with ‘sad,’ ‘mad’ and ‘glad,’ and he’ll do it again in the third verse—it’s like a child grabbin’ around and pickin’ the first thing he finds. But between those grabs there’s a high IQ at work, making it all turn out.
“‘After the Gold Rush’ is very evocative—‘thinking about what a friend had said, I was hoping it was a lie.’ That’s great—Neil doesn’t tell you what the friend said, you don’t know what it is, you never know what it is—it has nothing to do with anything, but I like it. ‘After the Gold Rush’ is sort of a primal urge for a simpler, better time—which may never have existed, but Neil thinks it does. ‘Sugar Mountain,’ same thing: same kind of nostalgia for childhood, spaceships, knights. For something else.”
I love nature. To me, nature is a church.
—Are all living things sacred?
Everything. Every living thing. Smallest to the largest. The cancer cells, the spirogyras … It’s all there for a reason, possibly because if it wasn’t there, something worse would happen.
What if they found out that cancer could be cured—but that if you got this other thing, that not only was it not curable, but it was contagious. Okay—that’s what cancer did in the balance of nature. Now, doesn’t that fit in with a lot of the things that nature does? Protecting itself? So if you get back far enough and look at any part of nature, there’s a reason for it. So living within the balance of nature—like eating organic foods and doing all the right things—you’ve got more of a chance of actually making it.
—Does it make you angry the way man has polluted this planet?
What makes me angry is people planning to do things that will pollute the planet. That makes me angry. What has already gone down is a product of many things we have no control of…. I look at the planet and all you see is proof that we need to change.
—I get the feeling you see space travel as organic.
I think so, yeah. I don’t know how we’re gonna do it, but we’re gonna be able to travel all over the fuckin’ universe. Without using fuel. Perpetual motion. Get in a vehicle and just go to another planet.
—The “silver seed” in “After the Gold Rush,” it’s like farming—
Civilizations. Dropping seeds. Races. Blending. Species getting stronger. Like plants do. I see it all as the same thing. Who knows how big the fuckin’ universe is? How can there be an inside or an outside or a boundary to this? I mean, this whole planet could be a fuckin’ seed.
—Would you like to go into outer space?
If I knew I was goin’ all the way. I’m not just goin’ to the fuckin’ moon. I’d like to take my family…. I think I could talk them into it. And y’know—we might not come back. It might be nice out there. In twenty years, rock and roll might be the biggest fuckin’ communication medium in the universe. Who knows? Invaded by people from another fuckin’ planet—and all they want is the musicians.
I’d go up on my bus. I’d be playing with the All-Insect Orchestra by then. I’ll just go in my bus, open up one of the doors. We could make a very grand entrance, like the King of Egypt—the thing comes down, a little fanfare, my son Ben rolls out, says a few words on his communication device, then back on the bus, heh heh.
—When did you become interested in the environment?
“After the Gold Rush” is an environmental song…. I recognize in it now this thread that goes through a lotta my songs that’s this time-travel thing. And the reason I recognize it now is that I heard it in someone else’s song and I said, “Wow, that was trippy, that kinda sounded like somethin’ I did.” Then I realized that I did that.
—Do you have a feeling you were here in a previous life?
I don’t think that I need to be here in a previous life…. Suppose there’s just many dimensions to the same life—things are just going on all at once, everywhere, all at the same time. All different times, all different places, everything’s happening at once instead of having time go by. Only the people are moving, time is standing still. What I see when I look out the window, the first thing that comes to my mind is the way this place looked a hundred years ago. Then I see the city. I can look out there and I know that there’s an airport, but I always, in the back of my mind, see what it looked like before. I try to figure out what was here before all this. I don’t know why. It’s just the way I am.
When Neil Young returned to CSNY for the Déjà Vu May through July 1970 mega-tour, things were wackier than ever. First, Greg Reeves, who’d been recording solo material with Young and Briggs, wanted to do a song with CSNY he had written called “Stop.” Stills and Young were for it, Nash and Crosby said no. “It was a big confrontation,” said Crosby, who fired Reeves. “I said, ‘Hey, kid—it ain’t good enough. It has to be great. You’re a good fuckin’ bass player, you’re not great. Kiss your ass goodbye.’” *
*During the argument with Crosby, Reeves remembers, “Neil turned right around to me in the middle of all this heat and told me, ‘Regardless of this thing, I still want you to play with me. You and me still got somethin’ goin’.’ I want it to be known that whenever Greg Reeves wanted Neil Young to come and record, he would always come. He was super to me, man. Success brings out the prick in everyone, but Neil’s very good at keeping a hold on that. He’s a very good motherfucker. Solid as a rock.”
Later, Young sent Reeves $10,000 to get him out of a bad situation in Mexico. Both Reeves and Dallas Taylor have taken CSNY to court over their one royalty point apiece on Déjà Vu.
Reeves was replaced by Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuels, a bowler-hatted Jamaican who was homeless and sleeping with his bass on the couch at Island Studios in England when Stills hired him for his first solo album. On May 12, 1970, CSNY played their first tour date in Denver with Fuzzy, and it was a very surreal show.
Samuels—who would later claim to have spent the entire tour on acid—fumbled songs left and right, and the electric set was nearly all Stills songs, since he maintained that there wasn’t enough time to teach Samuels anything else. On top of this, Stills spent the entire show hobbling around on crutches due to a ski injury, which, Nash said, “we all knew was bullshit, because we were in the dressing room and Stephen was walking around.”
The group was reportedly awful and Young stormed off the stage mid-show. Backstage, Dallas Taylor—who had sunk into a major heroin habit hanging out with Stills in Europe—overheard a heated group discussion during which Young delivered an ultimatum: “Either Dallas goes or I go.” Tempers remained so hot that, after arriving the next day for a date in Chicago, Crosby, Nash and Young all fled the tour for Los Angeles. “Stills went to the sound check and he’s standing onstage, plunking away, ready to go,” said Nash. “He goes, ‘Where are the other assholes?’ Our road manager, Leo Makota, said, ‘They’re in Los Angeles.’ Stephen goes,
‘Fuck you! I saw ’em this morning.’ Leo goes, ‘Stephen, they’re gone. They ain’t in Chicago.’ I don’t think Stephen’s ever forgiven us—to this day.”
I don’t know what the hell was goin’ on. See, that’d be it—we’d have a tour to do and Stephen would show up completely zoned. I realize now that maybe he’d been up for a couple of days and was just completely out the window. He’d get so wound up about goin’ on the road, nervous about goin’ out with these guys. He’s a real sensitive guy—sensitive. He had to get himself together, and how he gets himself together is he tries to take over the world.
But I’ll tell ya, he was just nervous. I could see that. You take away all the insecurity and all the things that have made Stephen do some of the stuff that he’s done over the years—and there’s a wonderful human being who’s right there. Just one thing gets in the way of it—or did in the past.
But I always see the real Stephen in there, and he’s a really great guy. A wonderful guitar player, great singer and really a good friend. I love Stephen. In his heart, he’s a really loving guy, an individual, a really good parent. A good family guy.
Stephen just has personal torments and demons that are constantly on him, and a lotta the things he’s done in his life are a result of that conflict he has with himself. He has, in his own way, been his own worst enemy. Without Stephen to get in his way, he would be great. We would still be making records today.
Back in Los Angeles, Dallas Taylor was fired. Taking his place on drums was Johnny Barbata, formerly with the Turtles. Rehearsals with the new rhythm section began immediately on the Warner Bros. soundstage where the dance-marathon drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? had just been filmed. On the wall facing the band was a leftover prop, a huge banner that read ominously, HOW LONG WILL THEY LAST?
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