Young would make some of the best music of the mid-seventies period by himself, and he would do it at Indigo Studios. Built near an Indian burial ground in the depths of Malibu Canyon, Indigo has a natural atmosphere antithetical to most studios. “Neil booked the full moon for months and months and months up here, maybe even years,” said engineer Richard Kaplan. Deep in the night Young and Briggs would leave their beach home and head to Indigo, where Young would lay down solo acoustic masters of such songs as “Pocahontas,” “Ride My Llama,” “Campaigner (After the Fall),” “Captain Kennedy” and “Powderfinger.”
Briggs was stunned by the amount of material pouring out of Young during this time. “He’d turn to me and go, ‘Guess I’ll turn on the tap’—and then out came ‘Powderfinger,’ ‘Pocahontas,’ ‘Out of the Blue,’ ‘Ride My Llama.’ Two days, a day. I’m not talkin’ about sittin’ down with a pen and paper, I’m talkin’ about pickin’ up a guitar, sittin’ there and lookin’ me in the face and in twenty minutes—‘Pocahontas.’ No lyric sheet, no pen, no paper, none of that bullshit. Just ‘I picks up the guitar and the demon takes control.’”
The demon certainly took control on August 11, 1976, when Young cut the ultimate acoustic track of the 1975–77 period at Indigo: “Like an Inca (Hitchhiker).”
This autobiography in drugs—bookended by a chilling opening verse about a drifting hitchhiker (the perfect metaphor for changeling Young) and a closing hallucinatory dream of escaping to ancient Peru—is one of Neil’s most abandoned performances. The combination of his unwieldy, wailing vocal and the stark, intensely rhythmic guitar—the picture I always get is a canoe paddling through choppy, dark waters—creates a chaotic vision that sums up the frantic experiences of the previous few years. He sounds ready to implode, and not unhappy about it.
Another tremendous piece of music would be started at Young’s home and finished at Indigo: “Will to Love.” Recording over a Stills/Young cassette on a boom box (Briggs insisted it was his deck, emblazoned with the motto LIFE’S A SHIT SANDWICH—EAT IT OR STARVE; Young disagreed), Young and Briggs brought the crappy-sounding tape (complete with the crackling of Young’s fireplace) to Indigo, where a bleary-eyed Young—looking “run over by a forklift,” according to engineer Richard Kaplan—proceeded to lay down a series of overdubs on his solo acoustic track. Kaplan, who thought the sound quality of the original cassette was beyond hope, could barely keep up with Young as he hopped from vibes to drums to guitar, creating a ghostly band to flesh out his ghostly song. *
The underwater vocals and gauzy production of “Will to Love” took the luminous, captured-moment ambience that began with Homegrown to its most extreme conclusion, and from its strange, impossible opening (and closing) line, the over-seven-minute song remains one of Young’s most otherworldly performances.
Adopting a preposterous persona—a migrating fish—to expound on the complex yearnings of love, Young reveals, amid the bends and twists of the river, some naked truths about his cold wanderlust self. He manages to sound both one with the world and completely, terrifyingly alone, barren yet fulfilled, inviting yet unreachable, reluctant but willing—all facets of the push-and-pull conflict that permeates his work. I’ve listened to the record a thousand times, but I still get a thrill every time I hear Young mutter, “I’m a harpoon dodger / I can’t, won’t be tamed.”
“Will to Love” was written in one night, in one sitting, in front of the fireplace. I was all alone in my house and I was really high on a bunch of things …
I never have sung it except for that one time. That’s what I used for the record. A Sony cassette machine, which I transferred to twenty-four-track and then I played it back through my Magnatone stereo reverb amp. I brought two tracks of the cassette up on a couple of faders with the stereo vibrato in it, then I mixed them in with the original cassette for the sound of the fish. I overdubbed all the instruments and mixed it the same night … it was on a full moon. What a night it was, man, unbelievable. I ordered all the instruments from Studio Instrument Rentals, the drums, the bass, the amps, the vibes, all the percussion stuff. We had them set it up like a live date … then I started overdubbing all the parts! They thought it was going to be a live session! … I just walked from one instrument to another and did them all, mostly in the first take. And then mixed it all at the end of the night … I think it might be one of the best records I’ve ever made.
—Interview with Bill Flanagan, 1985 *
In April 1977 came more sessions with the Horse. Outside of “Bite the Bullet,” a torrid, blatantly suggestive rocker, the material was countrified and easygoing, the first solid block of lighter material in five years. Very informally recorded at the white house on Young’s ranch, the tracks were augmented by Ben Keith on steel, Carole Mayedo on fiddle and a couple of fabulous dames on backup vocals whom Young dubbed “The Saddlebags”: Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson.
Larson, born July 17, 1952, was a longhaired beauty from Kansas City whose powerful pipes had graced sessions for Emmylou Harris and country rocker Gary Stewart. “Nicolette and I were thick as thieves, good pals,” said Ronstadt. “Nicki is one of those people who’s born to bake a pie and raise children. I admire that about her—she’s very middle America, very Midwest, came right out of Kansas. She’s kind of plucky and not very sophisticated—she reminded me of little Dorothy. She’s got great little rhythm instincts and a wonderful smoky voice that is very good for harmonizing. The kinda voice that activates other voices—sort of like you throw a dot of orange into something every once in a while and it’ll perk up the blues. I thought she sounded great with Neil—something about the way their vibratos would bend together.”
Young ran into Larson one rainy night at Ronstadt’s beach house. “He said, ‘I guess I’m supposed to meet you, ’cause I called three people lookin’ for a singer and everyone told me your name.’ Neil’s kinda cosmic about things like that.” Young and his Saddlebags sat in front of a roaring fire and ran through a bunch of numbers that night, and Larson and Ronstadt quickly found themselves at the ranch, recording songs they barely knew. Larson would be an integral part of the next Young project, and the pair would be lovers for a brief period.
It was somewhere around then that Young, accompanied by Ronstadt and Larson, bumped into one of his heroes: Roy Orbison. * Ronstadt had just cut “Blue Bayou” when Orbison attended a party at the home of Emmylou Harris. “We were all so in awe,” said Ronstadt. “I tried to peek behind the glasses—it was kinda like looking at Darth Vader, except that Roy was so nice.”
At the party Orbison found himself accosted by a scraggly longhair who started ranting about how Orbison had changed his life back in Canada. “Then this guy starts asking requests for these really obscure Orbison songs and Roy was saying, ‘I hardly remember them,’” Roy’s wife, Barbara, told Pete Doggett. “So the guy would start them off for Roy.” Not until after the party was over would Roy Orbison realize that his overzealous fan was Neil Young.
Orbison, Harris, Ronstadt and Larson joined in on a surreal sing-along, and Ronstadt felt there was more than a little similarity in the voices of two of pop music’s loneliest figures. “Neil’s a thrilling tenor and Orbison’s a tenor who’s almost a countertenor—the combination vibrato with Emmy’s voice … uh! It was just beautiful.”
Released in May 1977, American Stars ’n Bars was a side of the country material from April, plus an assortment from sessions of the last three years. The highlight was the knockout punch at the head of side two: “Star of Bethlehem,” “Will to Love” and “Like a Hurricane.” The album cover, a Dean Stockwell creation, was one of Shakey’s funniest: a shitfaced Young, face to the floorboards, next to a spittoon, and a passed-out, whiskeywielding floozy played by Briggs’s paramour Connie Moskos. “They put me in some horrible dance-hall outfit. I called my mom. She said, ‘Just tell me one thing—you have panties on.’”
Amazingly, Young had another almost completely different album ready to go around the same
time. Bootlegged from a stray acetate under the title Chrome Dreams, * this collection combines a few cuts from Stars ’n Bars with a raft of unreleased recordings. There were a number of stark solo performances from Indigo, among them the original demo of “Powderfinger;” “Stringman,” a plaintive ballad from the 1976 Europe tour (“Written for Jack [Nitzsche] and me,” says Young); the tremendous “Too Far Gone,” with Poncho Sampedro on a 1917 mandolin he could barely play; and an exquisite “Hold Back the Tears” reminiscent of the Homegrown sessions that is much more eccentric than its country incarnation on Stars ’n Bars.
In many ways, Chrome Dreams is a more powerful collection than the haphazard snapshot of Stars ’n Bars. Some of the material would mutate into Rust Never Sleeps a year later, but in the meantime Young would play with another band, the Ducks, and make another record, Comes a Time. He was moving at breakneck speed. “No one ever mentioned we were doin’ an album ever,” said Poncho. “We just played and recorded. Every once in a while Neil would say—and I remember it shocking us—‘Hey man, I sent in a record.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah? What was on it?’”
A couple of months after the release of Stars ’n Bars, Young abruptly changed direction again. He surfaced in Santa Cruz, a friendly but somewhat seedy hippie college town not far from his ranch, playing guitar in a local outfit that included Moby Grape’s bass player, Bob Mosley, and Jeff Blackburn, whom Young had encountered during the Springfield days.
Sandy Mazzeo, who would function very nominally as the band’s manager, recalls how their moniker came to be. “We were driving around town for days, throwing out names like ‘Thunderhead.’ We drove by the lagoon, and there were a lotta ducks crossing the street, and somebody yelled out, ‘The ducks.’ Neil really liked that one—‘Yeah, the Ducks.’ We vowed to never play outside the city limits of Santa Cruz.” Young moved into town. “We got houses on a cliff over Castle Beach,” said Mazzeo. “We bought bicycles—Neil bicycled across Santa Cruz daily.”
The Ducks were another hit-and-run job along the lines of the Crazy Horse bar tour: shithole clubs, zero publicity and more new songs, although for the most part Young was happy being a sideman. “I just play my part,” Young told reporter Dan Coyro. “This band isn’t just me and some other guys who back me up … it kind of reminds me of the time I was in the Buffalo Springfield.” Young would perform a few originals with the band, among them a wild instrumental called “Windward Passage,” besides contributing berserk guitar on Ducks songs like “Two Wings.” Nearly all the gigs were recorded and there was talk of an album, but Young disappeared again.
“It got to be the end of summer,” said Mazzeo. “We got ripped off—a couple of motorcycle punks broke into our houses and stole our luggage, TVs, sleeping bags, so that kinda bummed Neil out.”
In October 1977, Young’s much delayed career anthology Decade was released. It would influence countless boxed sets to come. The packaging was great—wry notes on each song handwritten by Young himself, and a cover photo obscure even by Young’s standards—the girlfriend of art director Tom Wilkes standing out in the desert, balancing a well-traveled guitar case on her back. Decade was mostly a greatest-hits package with a few haphazardly chosen outtakes thrown in. The three-record set was critically acclaimed and went gold in 1979, platinum in 1986. “It served to establish his credentials as the most important rock singer-songwriter after Mr. Dylan,” wrote John Rockwell in The New York Times. But longtime fans aware of the mountain of outtakes Young was sitting on were underwhelmed. “I was really disappointed with Decade, “said Ken Viola. “I just don’t think it was the best stuff.”
At some point Young returned to Florida, where he rented an apartment with his boatmate, Roger Katz. The bachelor life gave Katz further insight into Young. “Neil’s real funny about women. He really likes the earth mama, the motorcycle mama. That’s his type. Bar-hall queens, just like in his songs—‘Motorcycle mama won’t you lay your big spike down,’ ‘Welfare mothers make better lovers.’ Neil’s a real rootsy, earthy, ‘get down, get dirty’ kinda guy. He wouldn’t go for the flashy women, he’d go for the bar waitress.”
Rassy, living not far away in New Smyrna Beach, was an occasional visitor. “Neil was real attentive to her—it was kinda neat to watch,” said Katz, who, one drunken evening, lifted a rather official-looking plaque off a boat belonging to some pretentious blowhard. “Neil took it and gave it to Rassy. She proudly displayed it in her living room.”
Carrie Snodgress also paid a visit to Young in Florida, and Katz found her presence unnerving. “It was terrible, awful—the kind of situation you’d walk in and you wouldn’t wanna be around it. It was the first time I’d ever seen Neil like that. He was moody, withdrawn, difficult to reach. He didn’t want any part of her. She just left. He was very relieved. It was an enigma to me—I knew she was the mother of his child, but I just couldn’t see them together.”
While in Florida, Young started recording what would be his most commercially accessible project since Harvest: Comes a Time.
I made most of Comes a Time in Florida by myself, with these kids that were startin’ a recording studio—Triad. It was great. Used to come in in the afternoon and work three, four hours, go home. Did it all during the day. Acoustic guitars. Come in, lay down a basic, then I overdubbed—all me. Do overdubs on it with my acoustics, try a whole bunch of stuff. I did all kinds of things there—“Lost in Space” “Pocahontas” “Human Highway” “Goin’ Back.”
Started out as a solo acoustic record, and then I went in to Warner Brothers and played it for Lenny and Mo. Mo said, “We like it, but if you’re not in a hurry, why don’t you take it and see if you can put rhythm tracks on what you have? We just wanna hear you play with a band, too. If you don’t like it, fine. Give it a shot.” Mo never makes suggestions, and he made that one. So it gave me something to do. * I decided, “Hey, that sounds like fun. I’ll try that—go to Nashville, have ’em all play on it at once.” So I got all these people out there to play along with these existing tracks of me. Bobby Charles was like our guru when we were doin’ Comes a Time. Bobby was at all the sessions. †
That was one point where I think overdubbing worked, especially on that one song, “Goin’ Back.” “Goin’ Back” was originally done in Triad. I did all the guitars by myself and went to Nashville and put the other stuff on there—put Nicolette on there. That’s one of my favorite records. It’s funky. Not that it’s technically great, that’s for sure. The sounds are a little muddled. It’s got a great amount of feeling. It had a lot of feeling in its straight acoustic versions, too. There’s something there that’s me, that record. It tells a story—“Goin’ Back” is sorta like the debris of the sixties. There’s nowhere to stay, nowhere to go and nothin’ to do. You could go anywhere …
The Nashville Comes a Time sessions in late fall 1977 were notable for a number of reasons. In addition to old stalwarts Tim Drummond and Ben Keith came a number of new musicians, among them a trio steeped in roots music who would work off and on with Young throughout the years to come: Karl “Junkyard” Himmel, a New Orleans drummer that had played for J. J. Cale and Leon Russell; Dewey Lyndon “Spooner” Oldham, the Alabama-born soul songwriter extraordinaire whose sparse keyboards had graced sessions for Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan; and Rufus Thibodeaux, an earthy, built-like-a-block-of-ice Cajun who’d fiddled for the likes of George Jones and Bob Wills (as well as played bass on fifties Excello Records R ’n’ B hits). *
The recording style was unique—an artist who hated overdubbing was now overdubbing a giant band to his own solo demos. “That was funny,” said Himmel. “Ben had hired some rhythm-guitar players, and I had told some rhythm-guitar players … next thing you know, we had eight rhythm-guitar players ’cause no one had talked to each other! Neil said, ‘Well, let’s just use ’em all.’”
Coproducer Ben Keith recalls cutting “Goin’ Back”: “It was a great session. Everything was live. There was, like, thirty-five people in the studio
—percussionists, kettledrums, strings, the whole thing. It was like Sinatra cuttin’.” A large part of the electricity generated was vocal: the combination of Young with Nicolette Larson. “She just tracked him perfect,” said Keith. “She’s the best harmony singer I ever heard.”
“We sang on the same mike,” said Larson. “I could look in his eyes and keep up with him, and that’s as much rehearsal as he wants. Neil really wants you to read his mind and get the part. My entrance on ‘Four Strong Winds’ is all over the map—Neil wouldn’t let you try it twice.” Engineer Denny Purcell remembers Larson’s frustration over Young’s approach. “Neil’s got three faders of her. And he said, ‘Now, Nicolette, this is the best vocal you did’—pushes the fader up—‘and now here’s the next best one’—pushes that fader up—‘but here’s the one we’re gonna use, ’cause we like the feel.’” The most exuberant recording of Young and Larson remains unreleased: a tribute to Annie Oakley entitled “Lady Wingshot” whose arrangement is reminiscent of Phil Spector bombast.
Outside of the caterwauling, unbearably funky “Motorcycle Mama,” the songs were mellow affairs generally less quirky (and perhaps more mature in attitude) than Harvest. “Peace of Mind” was a plaintive ballad suggesting that Young had come to terms with the demons of his past relationships (although typically he cut the most naked verse of the song); “Already One” was a touching tribute to son Zeke; and Young also covered the Ian Tyson song that had moved him so much in his youth: “Four Strong Winds.”
To complete Comes a Time, Young added two Crazy Horse tracks to the Florida/Nashville material: “Look Out for My Love” and the radiofriendly “Lotta Love,” featuring coproducer and engineer Tim Mulligan on sax. “We hadn’t seen Neil in a long time,” said Poncho, who played piano on the cut. “He called us into Wally Heider’s—I was so high on smack I didn’t even know if I could make it through the recording. I just faked it.”
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