“I’m so excited to have that hand control,” Young said. “When we were mixing Weld at Indigo, I was drawing it. This is the first day I’ve had one.” His enthusiasm was contagious. He even had me running the fucking train.
Neil talked about his extended plans for Liontech. Because of him, Lionel’s catalog was now offering the standard disabled-access button that helped Ben run the trains. “It’s not just good for that—it’s good for little babies,” said Young. “Kids that might wanna play with trains, but their hands might be so small. Give ’em the big red button.
“Today Ben had a report. He’s the equipment manager for the team at this regular school. Ben’s the equipment manager!” Young chortled with glee. “It’s part of integrating disabled kids with the regular school. Pretty cool.”
“Ever wanted anything really bad you couldn’t get?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. All kinds of things. It’s not the gettin’ ’em—it’s tryin’ to get ’em that’s so much fun. That’s life.”
Talk turned to two rabid fan organizations, the HyperRust website and the Neil Young Appreciation Society, publishers of the Broken Arrow fanzine. Both venues dissected Young in minute detail, and it ticked him off.
“I don’t have a website,” said Young, annoyed. “I never fuckin’ look at ’em. They can all talk as much as they want, it doesn’t have anything to do with me. * And Broken Arrow? They don’t have any respect for my art. They get way too far into it.
“They think they’re doin’ a great thing. They’re very sincere—that’s their saving grace. But they drive me fuckin’ nuts. They’re reviewing shows I did in 1976! What the fuck?”
Young talked about “Change Your Mind,” the new song he had performed with the MGs on the European tour. “I play it on the road, these fuckin’ people from the NYAS fuckin’ publish the lyrics—and they get ’em wrong.
“I’m tellin’ ya, it’s a destructive thing. It inhibits my creative process to see things written out before I record them and have people passing judgments on songs they weren’t meant to hear. I’m at a point where I don’t wanna play new songs before I put ’em out. They’ve ruined it for me.”
Young maintained that the next time the Horse played, it would be under an assumed name at a tiny, out-of-the-way bar—and the tapers would never know about it. “They’ll never fuckin’ find us,” he insisted. “Route 66. Seligman, Arizona. One night only—the Misfits.”
But in 1996, when Young and the Horse played an extended series of secret gigs at a tiny club not far from his home, tapers captured everything but the first half of the first set—and even that turned up later. Young refused to believe it. It was a different world than he was used to.
“Philadelphia screened in L.A. today,” Young told me a day later. He had contributed a song to the Jonathan Demme AIDS drama, a simple piano ballad that for me had all the vulnerability Harvest Moon lacked. “I spoke to David Geffen this morning. He saw it in New York and said everybody was crying at the end, during the song. It must’ve been quite an emotional release.” Young smiled. “Probably the only thing I coulda done to surpass that is Wayne’s World 2. But I missed my chance.”
I was told Young had put off recording “Philadelphia” a few times. “I knew it wasn’t gonna come easy. To tell ya the truth, the song’s actually quite a bit over my head in terms of playing. It’s a hard song to play, and it’s gotta be played loose. ‘Philadelphia’ seems related to ‘Will to Love.’ Things come and go—they drop in and then they’re gone, like a shadow of a drum, a little inferred cymbal part …” “Philadelphia” pointed to a new direction, one Young would flesh out on Sleeps with Angels.
I had found out Young was planning on donating the proceeds from the “Philadelphia” track to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis center. He acknowledged it was true but didn’t seem anxious to publicize the fact. I got the feeling there were plenty of other charitable acts I didn’t know about. “I’m not trying to score any social points,” he said.
Young was amused by his renewed popularity. “Now I’m at this point where it seems like whatever the fuck I do is cool. It’s so funny the way things go. All of a sudden people want me to do this, want me to do that. I got an offer to go to the hundredth birthday of the Democratic party and play my guitar. This guy who owns Revlon has offered me a hundred thousand dollars just to be there. Just because it’s me. I mean, fuck, I’m Canadian.”
At the end of a week of exhaustive interviews, I was hanging out with Young in the second-floor office of his car barn. Down below us was a special airtight chamber with a rotating lift Young called “the operating room.” “The painter stands in one spot, the car moves so that the paint is an even stroke,” said Young. Auto restorer Jon McKeig was inside the chamber, outfitted in some outlandish protective suit, aiming the high-pressure sprayer. It was straight out of a fifties science fiction film.
The car barn was a magnificent place, a cathedral of heavy iron. The very first Buick Skylark ever made. Hernando, the Desoto Suburban that Young wrote “Hurricane” in. Pearl, the $400 Caddy from the ’74 CSNY tour. Pieces of the old jalopy Young had driven from Chicago to Nashville to start Homegrown. Young waxed poetic on a factory paint job. “That’s an original 1958 Lincoln, never been touched. I don’t know if you can tell the difference, but there’s a reality to the color that goes with your memory of the time.” Every car had a story, a life.
As I studied the collection, Young studied me, then muttered, as if to himself, “All that’s missin’ is a little sled stickin’ out down there sayin’ ‘Rosebud.’”
“I don’t think that would bother you one bit.”
“Yeah, it would be fine with me,” he said, smiling crookedly.
The November 23 presentation at Lionel was a great success outside some minor technical glitches. With that out of the way, he concentrated on the Horse, and on December 6, 1993, he and the band entered a Santa Monica studio Briggs had found called the Complex. It was the first time in seven years that the Horse had been in a recording studio off the ranch, and to avoid any distraction, Young rented the entire building to the tune of $110,000 a week.
As on Ragged Glory, Briggs took the band in a day before Young arrived to run through chord changes—enough information to play the song, but not enough to come up with any extra stuff. This would enable Young—who hadn’t played some of the new songs himself—to capture the performance as soon as it happened, an ethos he would take to ridiculous extremes on Sleeps with Angels.
Over the next ten days, Young and the band would record and mix seven songs, among them an epic fifteen-minute version of “Change Your Mind.” The band was ready. Billy and Ralph had been actively playing outside of Crazy Horse. Young would say again and again that his time with Donald “Duck” Dunn had given Billy a big kick in the ass—“He knew what I’d heard.” And Poncho, in the midst of a painful divorce, was really ready to give. Briggs would bestow upon him the compliment of a lifetime when the album was finished, telling him he’d given Young the best guitar accompaniment since Danny Whitten.
“I keep hearing simplicity. Bare-bones simplicity,” Young later told me. “I don’t want any more ‘two guitars, bass and drums’ for a while … Crazy Horse doesn’t necessarily have to come out and hit you over the head with a club. Where I wanna go is sounds I’ve never done before.” Bass marimbas, flutes, vibes, synthesizers—even a fucking tack piano—would all be utilized on Sleeps with Angels: touches of color reminiscent of After the Gold Rush.
“I want there to be rough edges on everything. On Freedom and Ragged Glory, I took some time cleaning up. I don’t see a reason to do that this time. I want it to be obvious that that’s not what’s happening.”
Briggs booked another two weeks in the studio for February 1994. This would give Young a month and a half to come up with more songs. “Neil called me a day before going back in and said, ‘Well, I don’t have any songs,’” said Briggs. “I said, ‘Fuck, let’s just go in anyway and see what ha
ppens.’ Me and my big mouth.”
What happened is that Young went in and wrote songs. He had written in the studio before—Tonight’s the Night being a prime example—but this time he was going in completely empty-handed, and over the next few months, the entire record would be finished this way.
Not everybody was thrilled with this routine; instead of getting seven songs in two weeks, now it was one song a week. Then Young began tinkering. The process was endless and emotionally draining, according to Briggs, who declared Young “the worst finisher in rock and roll.
“In my opinion, some of the best things on this record were written on the fucking spot, under the gun, with the clock ticking at a hundred and ten grand a week. Neil rose to the occasion, it’s just not a way that I would personally prefer to make records. One guy doin’ all the work and fifteen other people—the band, the producer, the engineer, the crew—all sittin’ around, waitin’ on Neil to do what he’s supposed to have done on his own: write the songs. Everyone just sits there, day after fuckin’ day, doin’ nothing. It makes them lethargic. It’s a bad way to work. It’s not creative and not good.”
The sessions crept on until Briggs was ready to throttle Young. “I can see it now: ‘Producer kills artist.’ Make a helluva ending for your book, Jimmy.”
“I’m not Grammy material,” Young said in a 1987 Domino interview. “I hate that shit. It has nothing to do with rock and roll. It only has to do with Hollywood, and it’s jive—a buncha people handin’ each other awards and talkin’ about how they made the best record and the best this and the best that. There is no best in music.”
Despite these words, on March 1, 1994, Young attended the Grammies like any other dutiful rocker. He’d received four nominations for Harvest Moon, plus one for his contribution to the Dylan tribute concert. A few days later he was in San Francisco, jamming with pop-metal goon Sammy Hagar on “Down by the River” at the Bammy awards. On March 21, Young appeared on the Oscars, performing a tentative version of “Philadelphia.” This was his seventh television appearance in a year and a half, more TV than he’d done in his entire career. He’d even done The Tonight Show—the program he refused to perform on while in Buffalo Springfield. And outside of the Dylan tribute, none of it was essential.
Perhaps the nadir was Young’s appearance with Pearl Jam on the MTV Video Awards to play “Rockin’ in the Free World.” The MTV postmortem featured such luminaries as Lenny Kravitz, Michael Stipe and k. d. lang rhapsodizing on about the performance. Undoubtedly, Young came across as more alive than the rest of that evening’s wallpaper, but I thought the hoopla was unjustified.
Young seemed to be everywhere, giving interviews to every magazine. Shakeymania was out of control. It reminded me of something Stephen Calt had written concerning the artistically less-than-triumphant return of acoustic bluesman Skip James: “One of the reasons James’s playing eroded was because the fawning attitudes of white blues fans made it unnecessary for him to put any real care or effort into his musicianship. He could readily count on receiving the same plaudits whether he played capably or atrociously, performed in earnest or merely went through the motions.”
I thought Young’s newfound adulation was having a similar effect. Neil’s music depends on emotional reality, and he was putting himself in some very unreal places. The results were uninspired. Little things like this seemed indicative of a decline in quality control, like Korean parts on a Lionel train.
“Be great or be gone” was the motto in Shakey’s camp. Was Young giving in, getting old? Losing his instincts? The next time I saw him I was going to try and find out.
* As of 2000, Lionel is moving more and more of its manufacturing overseas.
* As of 2000, www.neilyoung.com now exists.
drain you
Riding in a long black limousine, rocketing toward York, Pennsylvania, on my way to meet Shakey. Kurt Cobain was dead, and it broke my fucking heart. I wasn’t alone.
Nirvana were one of the few reminders left of anything real about rock music: passion, abandon and, as Briggs would say, thumbing your nose; a real band, a sacred combination of grace and white noise. Of all the denizens of the grunge scene, Cobain was the one, and in some ways he was not unlike Neil Young—a funny, big-hearted misanthrope with a lethal attitude somewhere beyond pessimism, capable of amorphous lyrics that millions connected with on a multitude of levels, his music containing the same sense of dread that permeated Neil’s best work. Plus, as J. J. Cale put it, “The kid could play guitar.” Nirvana deepened the mystery. They were the end of rock and roll—until the next end comes along.
Young and Cobain nearly crossed paths a few times. Briggs had been under consideration to produce Nevermind; Sonic Youth had tried to get Nirvana on the Ragged Glory tour as an opening act; and I’d seen Cobain and wife, Courtney Love, hovering around backstage at Young’s Harvest Moon solo acoustic show at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Back in November, I’d seen a copy of In Utero that Young’s trainer had given him lying on the front seat of his Plymouth. Mr. I-Don’t-Listen-to-Music had listened to the entire album.
Now Cobain had blown his brains out. He’d entered the vortex of fame and come out a corpse. Say what you will about the tortured mess of Cobain’s life, but Nirvana’s meteoric implosion also suggested that it might be next to impossible to stay real in the high-stakes, big-money VH1 world rock and roll had become. That morning of April 8, 1994, when a workman found Cobain’s body, alongside it was a scribbled note: “The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it. I don’t have the passion any more, and so remember, it’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
Out of the blue, Young called me a few days later, telling me how he’d awakened in the middle of the night a week or so before with Cobain on his mind. He’d even asked Elliot to find a way to get in touch with him. “I started really thinking about him a lot the last four days of his life—some cool way I could talk to him that wouldn’t seem like some old fart wanting to give advice.”
With this turn of events, Young was anxious to get Briggs and the Horse back in the studio. “Fate’s a funny thing,” he said.
I began ranting like an idiot. “So does this make you think about all the phony dumb shit you’ve been doing, like being on TV a million fucking times?” The phone went dead. That’s it, I thought. I finally pushed it over the end.
Ten minutes later his management office rang back. Neil was attending a Train Collectors’ Association convention in York, Pennsylvania, for the unveiling of Lionel’s new Liontech offerings. He wanted me out on the next flight.
The limo pulled into the York Holiday Inn. A traveling fair was set up in the parking lot; amusement rides blaring in the night. Just another surreal setting to meet Shakey. Well-kept older homes, tree-lined streets, picket fences and home-cooked meals: York was middle America. Neil’s kind of place.
Lionel’s demonstration tent was packed. The buzz concerning the new technology had spread quickly, and train buffs were squeezed in around the table, craning to hear an explanation of the system from Young himself. I thought of the rock fans who would sell their soul to get this close. But most of these folks didn’t seem to have a clue who Young was other than some longhaired guy with a really cool remote unit in his hand, and that suited him just fine.
One old codger—at least eighty, wearing a wooden tie with a steam engine painted on it—stood at the edge of the layout, his eyes wide as saucers as he listened to the unit with Liontech’s new sound system chugging around the track. “It sounds so real!” he gasped.
As Young stood there giving his spiel, I thought of something Larry Johnson had said to me not long before: “Here’s this guy they say is a graduate of the University of Mars—and Neil really is eccentric. He’s outthere. But he tries his best to be normal. That’s what I love about him. The pain is still etched in his face—but he’s succeeded. He’s succeeded at being a regular guy.”
Sunday morning I tagged along as Young
made the rounds of the dealers, seeking items for his own collection. He moved fast, scanning quickly. One dealer congratulated him on his recent Oscar nomination; this didn’t stop Neil from bargaining the guy down a few hundred for a train he coveted.
Young was in an ecstatic mood. Everyone was talking about the system, even his former cohorts from QSI. Fred Severson had bounded right over the first day of the show with his good wishes. But what Young really got a kick out of was the reaction from his partner, Richard Kughn. As a last-minute touch, Young had stuck Kughn’s initials on one of the prototypes.
“It looked real funky, but it’s all he could talk about,” said Young, smiling. “‘Neil, about the prototypes—they really should be in the Lionel Museum.’” Young grinned. “They weren’t nearly as valuable until I put the lettering on them. Kughn wants those prototypes so bad he can taste it.”
The night before, Elliot said The New York Times, Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Times had been calling, desperate for a sound bite from Young regarding Cobain’s suicide note. Roberts didn’t return the calls, feeling it was a no-win situation. What could Neil say? I agreed, not mentioning that it was the very thing I wanted to ask him myself.
I felt like a schmuck—the day of one of Neil’s triumphs, and I gotta bring up the dead guy. But the subject was already on his mind. After the show ended, we climbed aboard Pocahontas, Joe McKenna fired up the engine and we were on the road.
“I wasn’t even aware of Nirvana till recently,” Young said. “It was the only tape I sat and listened to in recent memory … It’s like the ocean, waves keep comin’ in, water’s comin’ up on the beach, water’s goin’ out … but every once in a while a wave comes that’s fuckin’ unbelievable and everybody goes, ‘Did you feel that?’”
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