Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  In one back corner of the room was a cement ramp and alcove overlooking the whole layout. An old-fashioned silver and black wood-burning stove sat between two purple overstuffed chairs. On the white walls hung a set of large, colorful prints by Angela Trotta Thomas, the Norman Rockwell of model-train art. One picture showed a rather apprehensive lad with a locomotive in his hand, looking up at a shopkeeper: “Can you fix it, Mister?” The only acknowledgment of music in the room was an old poster for the Band’s The Last Waltz concert and a Hawkshaw Hawkins boxed set—still unopened—given to Young by Joel Bernstein for his birthday in 1990.

  The more time I spent in the train barn, the more it grew on me. Wood and concrete, piles of trains and train parts everywhere, endless wiring, colored lights and ozone … despite the roaring fires Young built in the wood stove, the room never completely warmed up. It was desolate, kind of spooky, but in an intoxicating way—like a diner-at-three-A.M. Hopper painting.

  Young flicked a few switches and one of the beautiful old-timers clackety-clacked around the layout. The smell of ozone filled the air.

  The train barn was a refuge for Neil: no band members flubbing notes, no producers storming off, no surprises outside of the occasional derailment. Staring at the minute details of the layout, I thought of how one model-train buff had explained the allure: “Model railroading is a series of dioramas connected by track, a mystical world. It lets you be the creator completely. For the guy home from work, model railroading is therapy. He’s got a Godlike position over this little, tiny world that he can control—where the outside world, maybe he doesn’t have as much control over it and can’t make it like he wants.”

  Young’s involvement with model-train technology started sometime back in the seventies. “I was walkin’ down Sunset Boulevard buying Christmas gifts, and I saw a Lionel passenger train and I thought, ‘That’s my Christmas present—from me to me.’ I’ve since got a lot of other trains that look exactly like it—when buying collections, you get multiples of things—and somehow I lost track of which one it is. But it’s in there.” He laughed. “I really paid too much for it.”

  Down in Los Angeles, Young set up a layout for his son Zeke. “He’s sort of the unsung hero,” said Neil. “It was one of our best ways of communicating, playing with trains. I think I was hard on him, because I made him organize things—I was tryin’ to teach him physics and all this stuff.” Young laughed again. “But he learned it. Zeke learned a lot from the trains.”

  Like any of Young’s obsessions, the new hobby quickly mutated into something much larger. After his first setup took over his dining room, he had the train barn built. The wiring system alone was “every bit as massive as a full-blown recording studio,” said engineer Harry Sitam. “Neil’s aptitude for technical things—electrical and electronic—is amazing.”

  Young formed a company, Yardmaster, and engineer Sal Trentino began to investigate new sound systems and different methods of control. “We’d have monthly shows where I’d come to the train barn and show the latest developments,” said Trentino. “He wanted remote-control, robotic trains. I designed a thirty-two-channel system. Each train had forward and reverse and all sorts of sound effects—bells, whistles, horns. Damned if it didn’t sound like a real train.” The 1982 Trans tour and subsequent financial problems put a hold on the Yardmaster project, but Neil continued to tinker, searching for ways to help his son Ben enjoy the hobby. In the nineties, Young got back into model trains full-throttle.

  As I sat in one of the overstuffed chairs, Young ran one of the trains utilizing his new sound system, then one using a system made by the other top-of-the-line-train-effects company, QSI (Quinn-Severson Industries). “Our honorable competitor,” said Young, smiling tightly. They both sounded like real trains to my ears, but Young was only too happy to point out the shortcomings of QSI’s system. “It doesn’t sound like it’s big,” he said, watching the small locomotive chugging down the track. “It sounds like a truck. Power goes up and down too fast … close your eyes and it sounds like a Peterbilt.” Young paused. “It’s got a cool horn,” he allowed.

  Young launched into a story concerning the toy-train business, a small group of competing companies as nefarious and oddball as any in the music scene. “Big business on a small scale,” Young likes to call it, and he went in with a bang.

  Back in the fall of 1990, Young entered into a partnership with QSI, a Hillsboro, Oregon, outfit run by a pair of eccentrics, Pat Quinn and Fred Severson. QSI was investigating all sorts of technological advancements, and Young, who particularly liked Severson—a train brain who kept his Christmas-tree layout year-round—became a one-third partner in the outfit. The trio began developing a new sound system for model trains.

  Severson and Quinn introduced Young to all the major players, most important Lionel owner Richard P. Kughn, but the deal with QSI fell through. Young felt the company had unreasonable expectations. “Their whole view of how to move into the train business was based on paranoia, people taking their stuff, not having competition … their dream was to take over everything, have their equipment in all trains, be like Dolby. I knew that Lionel would never do that. I realized, ‘Hey, why put a bunch of money into these guys who aren’t even interested in bein’ with the only company that’s gonna give us a return?’”

  The final straw came, Young said, during contract negotiations between QSI and Lionel. “One of the things I had in the contract was that Lionel and QSI would work together to make toy trains accessible to the disabled.” Young said that he got the contract back from QSI with that clause crossed out. “From that moment on I lost my heart for them. And I said, ‘Listen, you guys—all your ideas, I’ve thought of. It’s just the way you did it I didn’t know. And I’m not using the way you did it. It was fascinating to me—that’s why I asked so many questions—and I learned how you did it. But I’m not using it, and I won’t tell anybody. I’m gonna do it the way I was gonna do it before I met you.’”

  Severson and Quinn—who maintain that Young left without an explanation—were stunned by his sudden departure. “Neil was very impatient, didn’t understand technology moves very slowly,” said Severson. “We were already needing money, because we were ramping up to meet Neil’s demands. He continually assured us we would be paid. And then Neil abruptly pulled out.” Severson said Young’s handlers descended on the company, demanding not just the return of his money, but all their research as well.

  Meanwhile, Young went into business with Lionel himself, joining forces with Kughn to form Liontech. He also began supplying the company with “E” units, a part previously provided by QSI. “Neil not only tried to get our technology, he also took our best customer, all in one fell swoop,” said Severson, who wondered if Young hadn’t planned it from the beginning. “What he did to our company, it was like hittin’ the side of your TV with a sledgehammer—flickering lights, tubes gone, nothing.”

  “When I started dealing with Lionel, QSI threatened to sue me because they claimed everything I was doing I learned from them,” said Young. “They didn’t know I’d spent a hundred thousand dollars on this project in 1979, ’80, ’81. Even though I told them, they didn’t believe me. They thought that I’d learned everything I knew from them. That I planned the whole thing ahead of time—to get info and to go to Lionel myself.

  “They started makin’ noises as to how they would protect their patents. They sent threatening letters to Lionel and basically interfered with my business. Threats. And I said to myself, ‘Well, fuck these guys—they’re gonna screw up my deal. What I’ll do is sue them.’ Sue them for declamatory judgment, no money—that’s the court saying, ‘Do I have the right to do business or not?’ Let the lawyers decide. They came back and sued me for twenty-two million in damages.”

  When the case got into depositions, Young surprised his counsel by asking if he could attend. “I said, ‘I can go to these, right?’ They said, ‘Yeah. You wanna go?’ I said, ‘I know what questions to ask.’ All
this documentation of what we were doing in 1980 is what saved me in my lawsuit with QSI. I had it nailed. So I sat there beside my attorney and took Fred Severson’s deposition. They thought it was gonna take an afternoon. We deposed him for five days.”

  The suit was settled: Young was free to continue with Lionel; QSI kept their research and Young’s investment, and took the sound system Young had helped pay for to Lionel’s main competitor, Mike’s Train House. The combination of MTH and QSI would make for tough competition. Young remained determined to keep the majority of Lionel’s manufacturing in the U.S., while MTH relied on cheap overseas labor, undercutting Lionel’s prices significantly. *

  Young and I talked about the QSI matter many times, and despite their falling-out, he was complimentary to both Severson and Quinn. “They’re good guys, but they’re so paranoid. They never fuckin’ trusted me. Even though I was giving them money, they didn’t trust me. I think that’s good to know—that someone can feel that way about me.”

  After parting with QSI, Young continued developing his own remote control/sound system (concerning the dough Neil has dropped on model-train pursuits, Elliot Roberts said, “I can’t even put it on tape, frankly. Let’s just say you can get a first-round draft pick in any sport for half the money”) and in early 1992 presented it at Lionel headquarters in Michigan. “I was so nervous I screwed up the demonstration completely. The worst stage fright you could ever imagine. I knew I fucked up. It was still a success.”

  The crusty ex-cop and the longhaired rocker, Richard Kughn and Neil Young were an unlikely pair, but the two saw eye to eye on Lionel’s future—although Young startled Kughn with his money-is-no-object attirude: “I told him time and time again I really didn’t care how much it cost.” Kughn cautioned that they couldn’t just go on an endless paper chase. “I said, ‘That’ll never happen. It’s gonna work.’ At that point I didn’t even know how we were gonna do it. But you gotta believe.’”

  The train whirred, whistled and chugged along as Young ran it back and forth around the track. Even I was starting to hear the advantages of his system—the effects were less one-dimensional, more synchronized with the action of the train. Young had gone out and recorded the actual engine the replica was based on, then had his engineers reconstitute the sound on a computerized chip that played back through a tiny speaker within the cab. He explained the problem at hand, his eyes never leaving the train.

  “It’s supposed to rev up like that and then stick,” said Young, frowning as he listened. “I wanna see if it’s gonna do it after you leave it off for a while. Electronics are funny.”

  A little while later he tried again. “Now that time—after being off—it worked right, see?” He scrawled some notes on the blackboard, outlining the problems one by one. Joe Thibodeaux, Young’s software engineer, was having trouble duplicating the problems and this point-by-point would enable him to isolate the difficulties.

  Young’s intensity was palpable. Just about everybody who knew him wondered if he ever relaxed. “Is it easy for you to have fun?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s easy for me to have fun doin’ this. Fun for me is makin’ things—havin’ a goal, an idea.

  “Lionel is like an American institution. This is like GM, RCA, General Electric, Ford, Revell … those classic names. It’s gotta be cared for like a piece of fuckin’ history. It’s tradition. And I have the technology to make these trains compete today. I’m on this.”

  I found the whole story incredible. “Where did you get your business sense?” I asked.

  “I’ve been a notoriously bad businessman … I’ll do anything to get what I want. Pay way too much, that’s how I do it, usually. Y’know, I don’t care. If I want something—I don’t wanna hurt somebody or cheat, I don’t like to do that and I don’t do that—but if it can be gotten financially and I want it, I’m tenacious. I’ll just keep going for it until I get what I want.”

  “What do your advisers think of this attitude?”

  “Oh, you think they liked it when I was spending a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars on spec for a control system for Lionel? It’s like ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ They’re just scratchin’ their heads, makin’ fun of me and shit. But here I am … and it’s happening.”

  We were back in the Plymouth. “I love the winter when it’s like this,” he said. “Hardly anybody comes to visit ya.”

  “Ever feel too isolated up here?”

  “No,” he said, gripping the wheel. “Definitely not. Like sometimes Ralph and Billy say I got a little bit of bark on me. I must be doin’ really great to be doin’ as great as I am under these dire circumstances.”

  I related some of the “Stay on Neil’s ranch long enough, you’ll grow moss” quips I’d heard. Young was not amused, and I’d regret repeating them, because he would soon invent a new torture for the Horse. A random advertisement that happened to contain the slogan BECAUSE THE HORSE had caught his eye, and that was it: the recording plans with Booker T. and the MGs would quickly evaporate. Why? Because the Horse.

  “This time I’d like to start recording and just not stop. Just record for thirty hours and see what that sounds like. Never leave the studio for a week. Sleep in it. The whole thing—coffee, breakfast, just be there. See what that works like. That’s the opposite of what grown-ups would do. The Horse is gonna be beggin’ me to record at the ranch by the time I’m through with ’em.

  “My heart is telling me to play with Crazy Horse,” Young said. “It’s speaking loudly. I have to know for sure … I don’t wanna start something in motion that’s not gonna go right away. I just gotta make sure everything’s in place. Y’know, like Briggs doesn’t want me to record with Crazy Horse, so …”

  I thought there were some things Young should know if he wanted to record again with the Horse. As I related the disappointments over Weld, the conversation grew so intense and combative that, had there been an eject button in the car, I would’ve pressed it myself. But Young took it all in. That’s the amazing thing. Even if he did have a bunch of nuts on his back, namely Briggs, Elliot, the Horse and presently his biographer—all of whom thought they knew what was right for the guy—give Young the right information and he acts. He called Briggs and made it official: Round up the Horse, we’re making an album in Los Angeles.

  The next day at the train barn, there were a couple of big amp cases on the floor, and John Nowland was using white spray paint to stencil in a name. Only this time it didn’t read NEIL YOUNG, as it would for any tour; Nowland was painting the LIONTECH logo all over them. Young watched and smiled. “You open it up and it’s all these trains in foam. Two huge boxes full of Lionel trains outfitted with my technology—and the competitor’s trains and their technology. ‘This is what they’re doing, this is what we’re doing.’ We’re gonna eat ’em alive.”

  Young paced around the room, a favorite pastime. “I always get really nervous before I take all this stuff to Lionel. I’m trying so many new things all at once, I don’t want to be overshadowed by some malfunction. I don’t wanna be surprised. It’s like a concert, y’know. I like to know if the band knows the songs.”

  In the suburbs of Menlo Park, we visited Real Design Labs, one of Young’s research-and-development units. Inside was a large, harshly lit room full of long tables with studious men poking at trains and hunched over computers. “People working, problems being solved, money changing hands,” Young whispered, entranced by the buzz of activity. “I really get off on this.”

  The sight of one RDL denizen made Young’s face brighten. “Hi, Dennis!” Young exclaimed. This was Dennis Fowler, a guy I had already heard a lot about from Neil. He had developed Liontech’s “E” unit and was one of Young’s favorite characters at the moment.

  Pale, with a graying mustache and beard, Fowler and his worn jeans, worse sneakers and beat-up Ford Galaxie made him something of an outcast at RDL, which endeared him all the more to Young.

  “Somebody ran into Dennis’s Galaxie. He to
ok it to the body shop, got an old fender the same color as his. The insurance company couldn’t believe it. Dennis likes it rusty the way it is,” Young whispered in approval. “He’s watching it change.” Whenever we visited RDL, Fowler would get the first hello and the last goodbye. As I watched him quietly discuss with Neil some arcane aspect of the locomotive he was grasping tightly in his hand, I immediately saw why. He had that particular intensity Young craves in people. I saw it in Ralphie when he hung his head down and bashed away, lost in the beat, or in David Briggs when he was hammering out a mix.

  Fowler was showing Young a new innovation: double chuffs. We watched as the train went around the track, a smoke unit inside emitting pairs of white puffs in sync with the sound effects. Young was thrilled.

  “Dennis has got a vibe, hasn’t he? Dennis is my main man. Completely focused on the stuff—to the point where he can hem and haw on some little detail for like days, nights, weeks … he’s so into it.” Neil Young, Dennis Fowler’s number-one fan. I wondered if Fowler had any idea.

  Back at the train barn, Young was happy as a clam. In his hand was CAB-1, the first fully functioning remote-control unit. A small, sleek black box with an antenna and a bunch of buttons—most prominently a big speed-control button with the red-and-white Lionel “L”—the design was a combination of ideas from him, Lionel and Applied Design Labs’ Ron Milner. Young’s first design, done with Rick Davis—an awesome unit that incorporated the bullet shape of the old Bakelite ZW transformers—was rejected as too retro. “You gotta know when to let things go,” said Young, who spent $10,000 building the prototype.