The music press had a field day, with Geffen their clear villain. For Young, it was the best publicity he’d had in years. “To get sued for being noncommercial after twenty years of making records,” Young would tell Bill Flanagan in 1985, “I thought was better than a Grammy.” But privately, he faced the grim prospect of a future with a record company that refused to back him yet refused to let him go.
“Neil was a pretty down-in-the-dumps puppy dog,” said his friend Roger Katz. “He just felt it all coming down on him, he just felt he had been fucked. The hardest part was making the sacrifices he did for Ben and then having the scene go down with Geffen and having—I don’t want to call it his empire—having that start to disintegrate on him. Neil was under pressure to sell cars, sell trains, sell his bus, sell his boat—to save the ranch. It put tremendous strains on him financially for a while, but I think the long-term impact was more emotional.
“Neil really questioned who he should be and what he should be and where his music was going—did he still have it in him to write good music and perform? Sometimes he’d sit down and actually talk about other things he could do with his life other than being a rock and roll star. That period really made him question himself deeply.”
Predictably, new music would arise from the situation and it was pretty wild stuff. In January, Young recorded two solo songs with the Synclavier: “Hard Luck Stories” and “Razor Love.” They were the warmest of his techno-pop music, particularly the unrelentingly melancholy “Razor Love,” a piece he spent an unusually long time concocting. “Neil was locked away with that Synclavier for weeks and weeks,” said guitar tech Larry Cragg. “He spent days just working on that one drum pattern.”
The obsession paid off. Over mournful, bell-chime keyboard tones, Young sings in a haunted voice of what seems to be a father jettisoning a family. (Was he thinking of his childhood, singing to himself? to Zeke? to someone else? I asked, but he never told me.) Then comes the line that always conjures up a vision of Young alone on his bus, staring out into the blackness of night and seeing only his reflection in the glass: “On the road there’s no place like home / Silhouettes on the window.” Young’s voice cracks on the word “silhouettes” à la “Mellow My Mind.” It was an eerie song, the sort of personalized misery he hadn’t written since Homegrown.
Armed with a batch of new material, Young summoned the Horse to the ranch. Then he made his first mistake: enlisting Elliot Mazer—who had never shown the slightest simpatico with the Horse—to coproduce. Perhaps caving in to the pressure from Geffen to make a “real” record, Young took his frustrations out on the Horse.
“Neil got into the studio trip: Make it fuckin’ commercial,” said Ralph. And unfortunately for Molina, Young focused his attention on the beat. “He was on this trip of gettin’ the drums to sound big,” said Poncho. “Neil was obsessed with not having anybody say we sounded shitty on the bottom—he knew the other bands all sounded modern with fat bottoms, why didn’t we?”
Unbelievably, Young took the Horse’s sloppy, organic funk and dismantled it—literally. “Mazer had us separated,” said Poncho. “We had no visual contact, we were just wearin’ headphones. It just sucked.”
Things deteriorated even further when Young’s guitar and vocal started feeding back and days went by without a solution. “Neil got uptight, he just felt like nothin’ was goin’ right,” said Poncho. “Finally, that last day, man, Neil had that feedback in his head, and he just took his guitar and went bam! and smashed it against the wall. He yelled, ‘This trip’s over! Everybody outta here! Everybody just fuckin’ GO HOME!’”
In the midst of this gigantic bummer, Young and the Horse played four barely announced, five-bucks-a-ticket shows at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California, on February 6 and 7, 1984. The band might’ve been intimidated by Young’s tinkering in the studio, but live, they delivered the goods. This was the wildest, most unhinged music the Horse would make anytime in the eighties. The last show was bootlegged on a two-record set called Catalytic Reaction, and I remember its arrival fondly, because it was easily the best Neil Young record since Rust. I recall tooling around the country deep in the night in the middle of God knows where, just some rental car with a couple of pals and a tape of the bootleg stuck in the deck. It was our fuel and made us drive real fast.
“Rock Forever” was a ridiculous song, a brainless ode to big rigs rolling down the highway that featured an equally brainless chorus: “Rock! Rock! Rock!” Great stuff. Young’s unbearably loud guitar spews fat riffs that could’ve stopped a Mack truck; the only addition to the Horse is Ben Keith farting along on a (thankfully) barely audible sax. Young played six new songs, and outside of one trashy love song, “Your Love Is Good to Me,” and a retread of “Hurricane” called “Touch the Night,” all were angry, demented rockers.
No characters to hide behind here, just ninety-mile-an-hour train wrecks with lyrics so simple and dumb they verged on Zenlike beauty. “So tired / Of talkin’ to strangers,” Young screams out during the desperate, alienated “So Tired.” All scraping, choppy riffs, ugly music that could have followed the Ramones or Howlin’ Wolf. “I Got a Problem,” with its straight-out-of-a-strip-bar sampled drum break, was sublime: “Me and my shadow are so in despair / ’Cause we keep hurtin’ someone who cares.”
Young soon headed back into the studio. Briggs returned as producer, and he and Young decided to take the band to New York City’s Power Station. It was the first time Crazy Horse had ever been in a studio outside of California, and Briggs was stoked by the idea of getting Young and his band off the ranch and into a new environment. “It could’ve been great,” he said.
But inside the Power Station, the vibe crumbled. Young went right back to his mania over the drums and separating the band. During one song, Ralph recalls Young “just stopped and said, ‘I told you not to play the fuckin’ hi-hat! Ever since that time it was ‘Oh God, I can’t do this fill here.’ I remember about eight people tuning snare drums in the hall.”
“Maybe I’m to blame for it all,” said Briggs. “I’m a very strong personality when I make records—I don’t let the inmates be in charge of the asylum. During that period, the inmates were in charge.” The band returned to California empty-handed. “It was a bad trip on the ride home from that session,” said Poncho. “We hadn’t accomplished anything.”
I’d listen to the radio and hear this big drum sound, and I’d say, “That’s pretty cool. I wanna get that. But I don’t wanna do what they’re doing. I don’t wanna sound like those records—but I want that drum sound.” It turned out it was a very difficult thing to do.
And y’know, with Crazy Horse it’s such a special thing, because none of us can really play. We know we aren’t any good. Fuck, we’d get it in the first take every time, and it was never right—but we could never do it better.
So what happens is when a real musician enters that, it fucks it all up. They were great “feel” guys, both of ’em, but it made everybody conscious of how they were really dumb players. Oh, the sessions sucked. We were all inhibited by each other—and we were all sick, fuckin’ Legionnaires’ disease or something. I don’t know why we went to New York. We took the Horse way out of its environment. The Power Station—too many hit records had been made there.
It ended up a big fuckin’ bum-out. Everybody was bummed, and we didn’t do anything for a long time. Because we never failed completely to fuckin’ get anything. It was a rough time. I had a lot of animosity from my own team during those years—I mean, Briggs was pissed at me. Crazy Horse had a big chip on their shoulder. They were pissed because I recorded with other people. Everybody was pissed at me, y’know.
—The Catalyst performances were angry.
Oh, yeah. “Violent Side”—I wish that song done that way was out there—and I guess it is. It’s out on bootleg. People who really wanna hear it can hear it.
—How do you feel about all this live shit floating around?
Y’mean all this bootleg
stuff? It doesn’t bother me. More power to them—they can sell ’em in the parking lot, I don’t give a shit. I have nothing against bootlegs—I think that for an artist like me, they’re essential. There’s just no way that the record company’s gonna accept as many records as I would like to give them.
After all the recent failures, this must have been the lowest blow—united with his greatest band and producer, Young had bombed completely. Where would he go now? He went back to the music Geffen had rejected in the first place: country. And he did it with a vengeance. “The more they tried to stop me, the more I did it,” Young told Rolling Stone. “Just to let them know that no one’s gonna tell me what to do.”
Not long after the Power Station fiasco, Young headed for Perdenales, Texas, to help out on a Bobby Charles date. The April 15 session was being cut at Willie Nelson’s home studio, and it was there, Charles said, that he introduced Young to Nelson, surely the most psychedelic figure in country music. The writer of such standards as “Crazy” and “Night Life,” Nelson has also palled around with the likes of Leon Russell. “In my book, he’s pretty up there at the top,” Dylan said in 1993. “Whatever he’s singin’ he makes his.”
Young was enraptured. “I remember the first time he came back from Willie’s,” said Joel Bernstein. “He literally looked like Charlton Heston had come down from the mountain. It was like ‘Neil, what’s come over you?’ Neil saw the light.” Young grew a beard and started wearing a headband, prompting some of his crew members to refer to him privately as “Willie Neil.”
Young went so far as to tell Bernstein he was through with rock and roll. It was full of backstabbers, all about payola. No more. It would be country music from now on. Country audiences, Young told reporter Jim Sullivan, “get off more on hearing fiddle than they do on hearing a rowdy rock and roll solo…. How many guitar solos can you play? … I’ve had it. I think I’m going to be making country records for as long as I can see into the future…. I really believe in country music, and I believe in the country music community.”
Once Young had committed himself, he went whole-hog. The International Harvesters hit the road, playing outdoor arenas and state fairs, booking his gigs through Buddy Lee Attractions in Nashville (“Neil had me find out who was the best guy in Nashville,” said Roberts, “and that caused me big huge problems—I had to fuck ICM and go, ‘Yeah, we are doing a big tour this year, but I’m afraid you’re not involved.’”). The supporting acts were equally authentic: Johnny Paycheck, David Allan Coe and Waylon Jennings, who had already scored a country hit with a cover of Young’s “Are You Ready for the Country?”
At times the down-home venues “were so tacky that your expectations were very low,” said Roberts. “You really went from hall to hall, thinking, ‘Well, if the dust doesn’t blow in our faces, we’ll be ahead of the game.’” At one gig the Harvesters played for 5,500 people; just a few miles away, Bruce Springsteen was playing to ten times that number.
Joel Bernstein recalls with disgust setting up for a show at Gilley’s Rodeo Arena in Pasadena, Texas. The tiny stage—usually occupied by the rodeo announcer—was thirty feet in the air. Equipment had to be hoisted up by rope, and since the stage was above the horse stalls, mud and cowshit were everywhere. Young wandered in and perused a giant American flag on the wall. “I asked Neil, ‘So—is this the cowboy way? He said, ‘Sure beats playin’ for a buncha fuckin’ hippies at the Fillmore!’”
Young’s chameleonlike genre changes had worn thin on audiences and bookers alike. “There was a new Neil every year,” said Roberts. “And we had been canceling tours left and right in this down period, which was another thing that was working against us. Not only did you not know which Neil you were gonna get, you didn’t even know if you were gonna get Neil.”
Playing state fairs, said Roberts, was a godsend. “I could take Neil out of the marketplace, because the good thing about fairs is that no one knows you’re playing them—and we had big-money dates. This country-fair success was very good for Neil. The audience really respected him. So it was ‘Fuck, we won’t make Geffen records—we’ll do fairs.’”
In pursuit of the country audience, Young even ventured back into that dreaded medium, television, appearing on both Austin City Limits and Nashville Now. Dressed in his road garb of black shirt, fringed leather vest and black Harley Davidson hat, Young yukked it up on the couch between fellow guests Faron Young and Little Jimmy Dickens as a local politician bequeathed him the key to the city jail.
The host of the show, Nashville fixture Ralph Emery, asked Young if he was gonna get back with those boys Crosby, Stills and—who is it? Nash? “No, not anymore,” replied Young, the familiar Cheshire-cat grin crossing his face. “[Our] lifestyles are a little different now …” Thinking this hippie feller had cleaned up his act, the audience cheered, unaware that Young’s country set also included “Roll Another Number.” Young then hopped up to the microphone for a tribute to his new four-month-old daughter, Amber Jean. No one can accuse Neil Young of holding back in his country phase.
Young didn’t hold back in his interviews, either—he played the role of redneck to the hilt. “I feel very strongly that we should be proud of ourselves as a country,” he told Holly Gleason. “I’m tired of people constantly harping about everything, feeling sorry and apologizing for being Americans.” To Melody Maker’s Adam Sweeting, Young bashed Jimmy Carter as a wimp, championed Ronald Reagan’s arms policies, then expounded on AIDS: “You go to a supermarket and you see a faggot behind the fuckin’ cash register, you don’t want him to handle your potatoes.”
It was Young’s support of Reagan that gave many critics and supporters the biggest heebie-jeebies. It started at a Harvesters gig at the New Orleans World’s Fair in Shreveport, Louisiana, on September 27. “Young looked like the rock star he is,” wrote Jason DeParle. “But in conversation over a long-neck Budweiser, he sounded more like a warm-up speaker at the Republican National Convention.”
Young would later say he was in a foul mood that day, and that the reporter particularly annoyed him. Whatever the case, Young was in the mood for a rant. “This is not the age of idealism,” he said. “I’m very pro-American … very patriotic. I’m tired of feeling like America has to be sorry for the things that it’s done.”
Young bashed the welfare system, saying people needed to “stop being supported by the government and get out and work. You can’t always support the weak. You have to make the weak stand up on one leg, or half a leg, whatever they’ve got.”
It was all vintage Young, but one quote in particular really got everybody going: “Reagan, so what if he’s a trigger-happy cowboy? He hasn’t pulled the trigger. Don’t you think it’s better that Russia and these other countries think that he’s a trigger-happy cowboy than think it’s Jimmy Carter, who wants to give back the Panama Canal?” As usual, Young had shot from the hip and spoken his mind freely about how he felt at that moment. It would result in his having to defend his opinions in interviews for years to come.
Was it from the heart or a put-on? “Some of Neil’s incursions into politics have been, I think, more designed to shock than any real deep feeling he has himself,” said a somewhat amused Scott Young. “And, of course, this has rebounded on him a few times.”
Elliot Roberts said Young’s politics are as changeable as the wind, like everything else about him. “Neil’s a that-day guy. If he sees something in the morning on the news, he’ll talk about it that day—but a week later it’s gone. Neil doesn’t read newspapers, he doesn’t really read Time or Newsweek very much. It’s gotta be somethin’ he sees—if he watches TV on the road and there’s a CNN special on Bosnia, Neil wants to do a record and a benefit within two days. Or he can ignore it forever if he doesn’t see it.”
But Roberts was more than aware of the hawk side of Young’s makeup. “Neil is more American than anyone, even though he’s Canadian. The man is a foreigner. He thinks Reagan is too loose, okay? Japan and France and England—he thin
ks they’re all enemies and we should nuke everybody. Neil’s an isolationist. I mean, if it were up to him, we’d have no foreign aid, we’d talk to no one, we’d really deal with no one else—‘If they can’t cut it, fuck ’em.’ Neil is extreme. I don’t know where it comes from. One minute he’s a leftist Democrat, and the next minute he’s a conservative. You never know which Neil you’re dealing with.”
However offensive Young’s opinions might’ve seemed to some, the real issue was that he didn’t conform to some clichéd notion of a sixties rock artist. As always, Young was only too happy to frustrate expectations, which pushed buttons in the press like mad. People pointed at Young’s past as if it demanded some sort of continuity. “It was so outrageous for Neil Young who wrote ‘Ohio,’ to be supporting Reagan—or worse, Nixon,” Roberts sputtered. “But that’s how Neil felt.”
Critic Dave Marsh voiced a particularly personal reaction: “I hate Neil Young’s guts,” he told writer Justin Mitchell. “Because he killed my father … by supporting Ronald Reagan, he killed my father … Neil Young said, and stuck to it, that Ronald Reagan’s policies have been great for America. My father died because he could not get a disability pension. It’s literally true he had to continue working in a way that killed him at fifty-seven years old. And I hold Neil Young personally responsible.” *
* When Marsh finally interviewed Neil in 1995, one might have expected fireworks—the critic had made a point of attacking Young for years. But somehow the subject of murder was never raised. The liveliest moment was when Young corrected Marsh for misquoting a lyric.
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