Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  It should be noted that Neil wasn’t the only Reagan supporter in rock at the time—Iggy Pop, of all people, enthused about Reagan to Donny Sutherland on Australian TV: “Reagan’s been good for business, any rocker’ll tell ya. Promoters are spending money again.”

  Neil Young’s favorite president remains Lyndon Baines Johnson. “He was real. He was down-home. LBJ wasn’t the most pleasant character that graced the White House—heh heh heh—but he certainly was his own character. What a fuckin’ real American he was.”

  Of course, all this meant that Elliot Roberts had his hands full. Whatever relief Young’s country tours offered his career, they made publicity a nightmare. “I had to keep Neil away from the press. I was telling ’em, ‘Neil doesn’t do interviews, Neil doesn’t do interviews’—he would’ve done them gladly, but he would’ve killed us.

  “He did do one of these Reagan pieces in Europe that everybody picked up on and I spent years correcting—‘Well, no, no, it’s not like Neil’s a rigid Republican, he’s still a leftist rebel-leader king. Neil just likes Ron’s shirt—does that make him a bad guy?’”

  I never seen so many fuckin’ people go berserk. I told Elliot, “Let’s tear the whole fuckin’ thing down, let’s tear it down. A couple of months’ work and it’ll be gone.”

  —Meaning what?

  My career, heh heh. ’Cause Elliot was goin’, “Neil, this Ronald Reagan thing—you gotta stop talkin’ to people.” I said, “Let’s just start over again—level it.” It’s a comforting thought to me. A clean slate.

  —Sometimes in interviews I think you’re fucking with these reporters big-time, just playing another character.

  Well, y’know, my life is a little like that. I believe it so much myself, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Actually, it’s all real.

  Ellen Talbot said to me once, “When you change from one style to another, people don’t know who to believe. They don’t know whether you’re being you or somebody else, and if you do that too much, nobody’ll believe you.” Which I thought was pretty astute. There’s a lotta truth in that.

  Part of me is kinda like an actor—if I don’t have something happening directly about my life, I can take from experiences around me, and then, by way of becoming another person, another persona, I can express a buncha fuckin’ feelings. And that’s what I like to do. So does that mean I’m not being true to myself and that people should not know who to believe?

  The International Harvesters were one funky bunch. Scrawny upstart Anthony Crawford hopped around singing high harmony while playing mandolin, guitar, banjo and fiddle—as a foil for Young, he was like a backwoods Nils Lofgren. Besides the antics of elder statesmen Ben Keith and Tim Drummond, there was Karl Himmel prowling around in his trademark black shorts, threatening everyone with his nunchaku, and Rufus Thibodeaux, who, when not cooking up pungent Cajun delicacies in his hotel room, was figuring out other ways to dine. As Anthony Crawford recalls, “We’d be walkin’ through the hotel, and Rufus’d see room service left outside a room, and he’d go, ‘Swee Pea, pick that roll up—I can’t believe somebody might waste that.’ I picked it up and we ate the damn roll.” Skinny, silent Spooner Oldham had his own peculiarities—according to Crawford, “You open his suitcase, and he’s got two kinds of cigarettes—filtered and filterless, just for the mood he’s in.”

  Musically, the band wasn’t Young’s most adventurous, but he adapted a variety of material for the sets. “Field of Opportunity” suited the approach, as did even “Roll Another Number,” but a countrified “Powderfinger” sounded a little too cleverly arranged and made the listener long for the Horse’s brainless crunch. The Harvesters really began to gel toward the end of the tour—a “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong” from the Universal Amphitheater on October 23, 1984, is exquisite—but as of the end of October, the original Harvesters were no more.

  Drummond felt he might’ve contributed to his own demise early on. “I got on Neil’s case up in Winnipeg. He came into the bar, and he had a headband on. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, he looks just like Willie.’ A few days later he said to me, ‘Could you play some of those two/four bass lines like Bee Spears does in Willie’s band?’ Now, I think Bee Spears is one of the greatest bass players in the world—but I said, ‘Well, yeah, I can, Neil, but that’s the reason I left Nashville. I got tired of playin’ that eat-shit bass—‘boom, boom, eat-shit.’” Drummond felt Young had gotten carried away with his new outlaw pals. “You don’t have to be like Willie and Waylon,” he told Neil. “They wanna be like you—you’re the new outlaw in town.”

  Young would put together an altered version of the Harvesters in 1985 with a pair of more traditional country players—bass player Joe Allen and pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins, but first he would tour Australia and New Zealand with a strange hybrid only he could concoct. The Crazy Harvesters were basically the Horse plus Ben Keith, Anthony Crawford and Rufus Thibodeaux. (Drummond wasn’t happy to hear about it. “Neil called up and said, ‘Tim, I got some bad news for ya. I’m taking Crazy Horse to Australia.’ I said, ‘You’re right—they are bad news.’”)

  Fans got their money’s worth on the monthlong tour, as these were some of the longest shows Young had ever played. First he’d play a set of the country material, then he’d play solo acoustic, then come back out and blow the roof off with the Horse. Outside of the four sets at the Catalyst, this was his first live rock and roll with the Horse since Rust.

  For many, the electric sets eclipsed the rest of the show. “I remember at the beginning of the tour, the country guys were sittin’ around all chummy with Neil, loved to talk about the show,” said Poncho. “By the end of the tour, no one even noticed ’em, the people were goin’ so nuts.” But Neil Young wasn’t quite done with country music yet, as “Dakota,” a new song featuring the entire Crazy Harvesters band, proved. This portrait of American winners and losers was one of Young’s most evocative songs of the period; it was almost as if he’d peered back on the bent inhabitants of some of Rust Never Sleeps’ more surreal songs and found them all—like himself—faltering but determined to keep going. The main character was “a lone red rider” out on a South Dakota highway: “And though his war was over, he’s fightin’ on anyway / Although he’s seldom sober, from drinkin’ whiskey all day.” There was dignity in moving, even if you no longer knew where you were heading—or if you were going to make it.

  Some of Young’s older songs didn’t fare so well with the Horse. “We had our all-time worst show in Wellington, New Zealand,” said Poncho. “Billy played all the wrong changes two songs in a row—he played ‘Old Man’ during ‘Heart of Gold’ and vice versa. Never landed on the right note, never came close. It was terrible. Neil was yellin’ and screamin’ at him in the dressing room.”

  The squabble with Geffen dragged on. Young refused to budge, telling the label, as he recalled to Tom Hibbert, to “back off or I’m going to play country music forever. And then you won’t be able to sue me anymore because country music will be what I always do so it won’t be ‘uncharacteristic’ anymore, hahaha. So stop telling me what to do or I’ll turn into George Jones.”

  And so a deal was struck: Young would finish a new version of Old Ways and at some point would record a “real” record with a “real” producer. Geffen phoned Young to apologize, and the lawsuits were dropped (ironically, the dismissals were filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on April Fool’s Day, 1985).

  But the interesting detail is what Young offered Geffen Records in exchange. “I went in and I changed Neil’s deal down,” said Roberts, pained at the memory. “It was Neil’s idea. We went from a million dollars to five hundred thousand, because Neil felt that for a million bucks, maybe they’re right—but for five hundred thousand, I should be able to do whatever I want to do.

  “No artist in history has ever gone into a record company and said, ‘I’d like to give you back a half a million an album on three albums left’—that’s a million-five. Like, it was kill
ing me to do this. Killing me, right? Because I thought people would find out and they’d go, ‘Wow, what a great manager—he took a million-dollar deal and made a half-a-million-dollar deal. Guy’s a real scientist.’

  “But Neil was on such a trip about the money—and about the pressure that the money brought him—that he wanted a no-advance, straight-royalty deal. Now I would not make a no-advance deal, because I said, ‘There’s no guarantee that you’ll ever get anything—and you got a family, you got an ex-wife, a kid. I won’t do that, but I’ll cut it in half, if that’ll make you happier.’ Now I’ve solved the problem. It took three minutes. And they’re going, ‘Thank God for Neil, what a class guy—he just came in and gave us a half a million.’”

  —Why did you cut your deal in half?

  Got tired of having to live up to it. They wanted me to do all this shit and I didn’t wanna do it. I said, “Pay me less money, let me do what I wanna do.” I didn’t want all that money.

  —Did it have an effect? Nope.

  —What’s it like making music when a record company doesn’t believe in you?

  It’s not fun. You always have a chip on your shoulder. That’s why I want a record company that believes in me. That’s what I like about Warner Bros. Everywhere I go in the world, they’re there. Big bear. Big company. They can withstand the fact that they pay me millions of dollars and the records only sell, like, a hundred thousand—if that’s what happens, big deal. Go to a smaller company, do that, it breaks them. You feel the responsibility. I don’t want that.

  —Did Geffen Records know who they signed?

  No. But you gotta be fair to David Geffen.

  —Why?

  Because David Geffen has continuously said that that was the biggest mistake he ever made and he would never do it again and that was the one thing he regretted—suing me. That he should’ve done it a different way. He thought I was losing track, he was trying to bring me back to track or whatever. He did it the wrong way. He didn’t come up and sit down and talk to me about all the reasons why he felt the way he did—which he should’ve, because we’re friends and he could’ve.

  Instead of that, he took it personally—that I was making these weird records just to make him look like an idiot. He thought when people didn’t make big hits, they were doing it to piss him off. That they were actually doing it to David. But David had a little learning to do there—he had to like himself a little better than to think people were trying to hurt him all the time.

  The fact that he’s just a multi-fuckin’-billionaire, it means very little. He’s just another fuckin’ guy to me. And he’s a big man for saying that he was so fuckin’wrong. All I can do is praise him. He’s still my friend—he may help me out of the worst jam I ever get into, ’cause he has the power to do it.

  But more than that, he’s just an old friend, and old friends have bad times and good times. My times with Geffen are no worse than my worst times with Briggs. They really aren’t. And Geffen’s judgments of me are no worse than David’s, either, y’know what I mean? It’s an innaresting pair of Davids.

  “My good music comes from my heart and my mediocre from my mind,” Young would tell an Entertainment Tonight reporter visiting the Nashville recording sessions for the new Old Ways album. He had cut the first version in January 1983, and here it was April 1985. The finished product would leave the strong impression that Young had had a little too much time to think.

  Elliot Mazer was no longer aboard. Young had continued to record while he was on the road with the Harvesters, and Mazer once again thought Young was going for style over content. “I said two things to Neil: a) he wasn’t playing guitar. He was playin’ like Waylon—his guitar was hangin’ by his side. And b) his songwriting. All these lame songs we were trying to record—‘Are You Ready for the Country, Part Eight.’”

  The result was Mazer was out and David Briggs was back in. Mazer wasn’t surprised. “Neil kept saying during that period that he’d love for me and Briggs to work together. I think what he’d like to see is Briggs and I fighting—he likes people being crazy. It’s some sort of entertainment for him, and for someone who’s not mean-spirited, it’s a pretty mean thing to wanna promote. I think it’s a form of voyeurism.”

  Compared to the original sessions, this Old Ways was an extravaganza. There were “thirty-five thousand, four hundred people on it,” said engineer Gene Eichelberger. The studio was jam-packed with the cream of Nashville’s session players. As Drummond put it, Neil finally got his eat-shit bass.

  Anthony Crawford, one of the holdovers from the first session, was amazed at the excess. “I asked, ‘Well, what do you want me to bring?’ Neil said, ‘Well, bring everything ya got. Bring it all.’ So I loaded up my damn truck with amps, all kinds of shit. I stayed out there a week, I didn’t play one lick. He had a roomful of people sittin’ there just waitin’ on his ass—people like Waylon. To me, Waylon is the Neil Young of country music, and Neil kept him waitin’. I hated it.”

  The record was cut live with minimal overdubs, but a country record was one job Briggs perhaps might not have been the man for. Crawford recalls the producer would “make me sing this incredibly hard part over and over, and finally I thought, ‘Screw it.’ It went against everything I thought Neil was about, which was first take, feel, vibe, intensity. I don’t have anything positive to say about those sessions. A lot of good people got caught up in a bad thing.”

  Young went so far into a straight Nashville sound that he got steel-great Ralph Mooney to play on most of the sessions instead of Ben Keith. Neil Young country without Ben’s steel is like Crazy Horse without the mistakes: in other words, too good. The music could’ve used some of Keith’s woozy heart, because the sound was not country, as Tim Drummond pointed out, but “countrypolitan.”

  I always found it curious that Young failed to emulate such country confessional crooners as George Jones, Lefty Frizzell or even his Canadian brother, Hank Snow. Their brand of heartbreak is much closer to Young’s soul than any of the so-called outlaw music. He comes close on “Once an Angel,” a touching tribute to Pegi, but this direction was never really fleshed out. The kind of music represented on Old Ways had been done better by others.

  None of the studio versions were improvements on the live performances Young had already done with the original band—a fact proven by the inclusion of “California Sunset” from the Austin City Limits taping—better than the 1983 studio recording and possessing more life than anything else on Old Ways. “Dakota”—reportedly renamed “Misfits” by Waylon Jennings during the sessions—received a bombastic production that was undeniably ambitious, but Young slowed the tempo down to molasses, turning the song into a wake and losing the boozy, exuberant but melancholy tone the Crazy Harvesters brought to it live.

  Only two cuts survived from the original sessions, and one of them—“Are There Any More Real Cowboys?”—Young fucked with beyond belief, turning it into an overdubbed duet with Wille Nelson. Elliot Mazer—the coproducer of the original track—was dumbfounded when he heard it, thinking it was a mistake. “I called Neil and said, ‘Listen, I got this test pressing of the single—there’s an out-of-tune piano, the bass sounds weird, the mix is dreadful.’” Mazer laughed bitterly, recalling Young’s response. “It turns out that was the desired effect.”

  One has to admire Young’s nerve, though, opening the record with perhaps his schlockiest piece of music ever—a cover of his childhood favorite, “The Wayward Wind,” complete with autoharp and string section. And he sang the shit out of it. Once again, you couldn’t accuse Young of going halfway. He went straight over a cliff on this one. *

  * One of the more interesting songs left off of Old Ways was “Time Off for Good Behavior,” whose lyrics dealt with his brother’s arrest and subsequent prison term for selling pot.

  The lyrics express Young feeling “guilty as hell” over telling his brother to turn himself in to Canadian authorities: “He got seven years for what I’ve been smokin’ al
l my life.” Young appeared as a character witness for Bob in a Toronto court on May 31, 1985. According to Bob, this was against the advice of his handlers, and Young’s appearance resulted in such headlines as The Toronto Star’s NEIL YOUNG SAID HE’S USED ILLEGAL DRUGS FOR TWENTY YEARS.

  “The only thing wrong with cannabis is that the government doesn’t make any money from it like it does alcohol—that’s my educated opinion after twenty years,” Young told the court. “It’s a shame so much money had to be wasted on this case when so many other crimes of real danger are being committed in the street.”

  “Neil went and made an absurdly country record,” said Anthony Crawford. “That record sucked compared to what it was—it sickened me. On the first Old Ways, you got a bunch of personality. You take the other one, and you just got a bunch of people makin’ a helluva good paycheck.”

  Those excommunicated from the second Old Ways were livid when they heard the finished product. “Neil took Spooner and I off ‘Real Cowboys,’” said Tim Drummond. “I took the needle off. That’s as far as I got.” The bass player sat down and dashed off an angry letter, telling Young that he’d lost the soul of his music. Elliot Mazer was equally upset. “I was pissed off. They fuckin’ ruined a bunch of really good recordings. I listened to it once and threw it away. I think Neil was deliberately trying to give Geffen a piece of junk.”

  Apparently Geffen thought so, too. According to Young, they pressed only eighty thousand copies of the album when they released it in August 1985. Old Ways was another flop, and as a commercial recording artist, Young was fading away. The cover said it all—Young, with an old felt hat belonging to his bus driver’s father perched on his head, walking away down a road at the ranch, his back to the camera—and to the world. It was starting to feel like Neil Young was on a kamikaze mission.