by Neil Young
Hello lonely woman,
Are you feeling all right?
Well you look just like heaven
On a clear, clear night.
—“HELLO LONELY WOMAN”
At the CJLX studio with Ray Dee producing, we recorded two songs. Bill played so loud that Ray had to put him in an isolation booth, which was the hallway. I double-tracked my vocals. Working with Ray was really creative. He was hands-on and musical, the best help we had ever had recording in the studio to that date. My voice was never an issue with Ray. He felt that uniqueness was an advantage and a plus. It was great fun, and we were really serious about making a creative, soulful record. It was more than just being in the studio. We were creating.
Oh, I’m so happy I found your love
And I will always thank the stars up above.
I’ll love you forever and idolize
The way you comb your hair
And your laughing eyes.
—“I’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER”
In the end, we recorded and mixed “I’ll Love You Forever” and “I Wonder.” Ray liked our new “I Wonder” a lot better than the one from CKRC. He did not like that earlier track. He had opinions on things and real reasons for them. I had a lot of respect for Ray. We used echo and double-tracking, really having a rewarding time in the studio, but nothing ever came of it. We couldn’t get a contract with a record company. I reasoned that my voice was just not commercial, but Ray thought differently, and we kept on going.
We stuck around town because we had a gig booked, opening for Jay and the Americans at a CJLX show at the Coliseum. It was a huge gig for us. They were big stars. While we waited in Fort William, Del Shannon came and sang somewhere. Ken, Bill, and I stood and watched from the audience, just like we used to watch the Silvertones back in Winnipeg.
Del Shannon, with a mink guitar strap over his shoulder, sang all of his hits: “Hats Off to Larry,” “Runaway,” and “Stranger in Town.” He was really unique and interesting. Unfortunately, years later, Del committed suicide. He seemed smaller than his voice and looked very isolated and alone, but he was an amazing singer and had a very strong vibe. There was something sad about his performance, though. I couldn’t put my finger on it. He seemed bigger than the gig. I sang “Stranger in Town” myself after that because I liked it so much, and we added it to the Squires’ list of songs. Later, I wrote my own song titled “Stranger in Town.” We practiced our new songs and waited to play the big CJLX show. I liked that feeling, being part of that big show. The crowd was huge and excited. However, Bill was really missing Sharon, and that was developing into a problem for us.
At that time, I was starting to think about going to the States. I knew that was where it was at. If we were going to make a dent, why not make it somewhere where it mattered and we would get noticed? Why not Hollywood, where the West Coast Sound was? I had noticed that the farther out of Winnipeg we got, the more excited people were to see us. We were from somewhere else. The mystery surrounding that gave us a little more freedom in our performances somehow, even if we were only fifty miles out of town. After the show at the Coliseum, we threw our stuff into the back of Mort and rolled northwest back to Winnipeg on the Trans-Canada Highway. It felt a little different this time. I kind of felt we were going in the wrong direction.
With Mort, we got around town and stayed busy, flushed with our out-of-town success. Mort was becoming our trademark, our identity as a band. The Squires and the hearse were like one. Everywhere we went we would park right near the door and people would stand outside and look at Mort’s monstrous shape, looming near the entrance to the community club, high school, or church dance where we were performing, announcing our presence. We were on a roll, but another surprise was coming.
As soon as we returned from Fort William, Bill quit the band, saying that he wanted to be with Sharon. Ken and I were alone, all that was left of the Squires, but we were not ready to quit.
The first time we were really successful on a higher level was a hootenanny night at the Fourth Dimension Club out on the edge of town. It was March 7, 1965. That night at the hootenanny, things just went right. We were in the groove with our new drummer, Al Johnson.
We must have sung pretty well, and we jammed on at the end of a few songs. The crowd really went nuts! What a great feeling! To be accepted like that and have people actually clapping and yelling after we played. We were buzzing heavily as we loaded our equipment back into Mort’s cavernous form. That night was a major turning point for us; being accepted and hearing the crowd go crazy was infectious.
I started introducing more of my original tunes and singing them every night we played, along with a lot of other songs that were made popular at the time by the English groups. “I Wonder” was one of the first original songs we performed. Then there were more. A lot more.
Things were moving very fast and the band members changed like musical chairs until we settled on a trio with Bob Clark on drums and Ken Koblun, who was still with me, on bass. Bob sang and we were doing three-part harmonies. When we went back to Fort William, we were able to make a living for a while. We met Steve Stills, who was traveling through playing the Fourth Dimension there. We had peaked and gone as far as we could go.
So I traveled on, toward Toronto, with some guys I had met, but Mort didn’t make it. We broke down in a little town called Blind River. After a few months, Mort was fixed, and I picked up Mort, ready to drive into Toronto and have another shot at having a band.
After about an hour driving east, with some really ugly mechanical sounds emanating from underneath, Mort sadly limped to the side of the road near an old decrepit roadside hotel. I had to leave Mort there in the parking lot of that hotel out on the Trans-Canada Highway. I had only made it about fifty miles past Blind River. I remember hitchhiking away from there, getting a ride toward Toronto and looking back one last time at the beautiful Mortimer Hearseburg, parked forever in my mind in that hotel parking lot. The old hotel was actually just a two-story wooden house, with a makeshift addition, not as grand as you might imagine. There were some other unfortunate cars parked haphazardly around it, too. No doubt they were victims of a similar fate.
For a while I made up this whole story about how I pushed Mort over a cliff. I actually believed it myself, but it was all fantasy. What really happened was even worse. Abandonment. Dreams die hard. That old funeral coach/rock and roll delivery truck full of memories took a lot of me with it. It was so great, and it has never faded from my mind. I think I’ll take that one with me.
We’ve been through some things together
With trunks of memories still to come
We found things to do in stormy weather
Long may you run.
Long may you run. Long may you run.
Although these changes have come
With your chrome heart shinin’ in the sun
Long may you run.
—“LONG MAY YOU RUN”
Daddy, seeing me through new eyes when I arrived in Toronto, had learned firsthand how dedicated I was to being a musician. Helping us, he found a place to rehearse in the lobby of the Poor Alex Theatre just off Bloor Street, near Yorkville Village. Kenny and I began practicing there with a guy named Geordie McDonald on drums. We had connected with Jim Ackroyd from the Galaxies back in Winnipeg, who had also come to Toronto to seek his musical fortune, and he was singing with us for a while, and playing guitar. We were starting to sound pretty good. We did a new song of mine called “Casting Me Away from You” and were thinking of calling ourselves the Castaways. We practiced every day for hours and hours. We got good and just needed an audience.
We used to laugh and play
Games together.
We found things to do
In stormy weather.
But now I find
You’re leaving me behind.
Casting me away from you.
&nb
sp; —“CASTING ME AWAY FROM YOU”
I was trying to get something going for us with a manager, Marty Onrot. He had some ideas for us and wanted to call us Four to Go. I didn’t like that name at all. Marty brought in a couple of club owners who we played for in the Poor Alex lobby, but no one would hire us. Those solitary auditions were not like playing in front of people. With no energy from the crowd to feed off of, it was sterile and uncomfortable, not musical. It was not like the Squires, who had played at a hootenanny. That is what we should have done. Nothing happened. Shortly after that, Marty told me I should give up the band and just write songs that other people could sing. I hated that idea and did not take his advice.
There was a street near Yorkville Village in Toronto that I used to walk on a lot. On that street was an old garage repair shop and in front of the building I noticed a 1947 Buick Roadmaster convertible. It was black with a white top and red leather interior. Overall, it was pretty worn-out, but you could still see the beauty of the lines. I looked at it every time I walked by because it had all the same features as Mort, except of course Mort was taller and longer and was a hearse. That old Buick Roadmaster convertible cost me seventy-five dollars and I don’t know if I ever completely paid for it. Buying it was kind of a dreamer’s move on my part, but if I could find another one today in nice original shape, I would probably still get it. That’s how addicted I am to 1947 and 1948 Buicks. I have a soft spot in my heart. I remember driving it down Yorkville one night, feeling pretty cool. It was a beautiful old convertible. It smoked a lot, and a few days later it stopped running. I abandoned it on a street off of Yorkville and don’t know what happened to it after that. Sad things I tend to forget.
Around that time, I was feeling lost and bent out of shape. I had no place to go and wasn’t eating very well. Everything was changing and seemed to be careening out of my control, when I was rescued by an old friend, Bunny Stuart. I stayed at his house with him and his dad and mom, near Old Orchard Grove, where I used to live. With little money to my name, I found care and support there at Bunny’s home.
1953 Pontiac Hearse
CHAPTER TEN
he part of my life spent with Mort was gone and the Squires were over. I had to do something. I had met a bass player named Bruce Palmer, a thin guy I met in Yorkville Village, the hip part of Toronto, where the music scene was flourishing. Bruce got me in his band, the Mynah Birds with a guy named Ricky James Matthews. We were great but we didn’t last long. After getting a big break and going down to Motown in Detroit to record, things fell apart and our record never materialized, but our next move was big and life changing.
When we returned to Toronto late one night, Bruce and I met in a little club called the Cellar, on Avenue Road near Yorkville, to plan what we would do next. We decided together to go to LA and follow our dreams. To get there, we would sell the group’s equipment and buy a 1953 Pontiac hearse I had found in the paper. It was just outside of Toronto, and when we went out there to see it, we bought it right away and drove it home. This hearse was not quite as big and deluxe as Mort, which was a top-of-the-line model. It had less trim and extra chrome and was just not as magnificent without all the cool velvet inside, but it still suited our needs and drove really well. I still had my Manitoba driver’s license and we gathered a few friends to take the trip with us; a folk singer named Tannis Neiman and her friend Janine, plus one other girl who wanted to go, and a guy named Mike. The girls had some weed and a little money. We left the next day, never considering how John Craig Eaton, the Mynah Birds’ financial backer, would feel about us selling all of the equipment he had purchased for us.
We were just an old funeral coach full of stoned hippies heading southwest to Hollywood, California, where the music scene was vibrant and the West Coast Sound was on fire. The trip was exhausting. We traveled Route 66 day and night. I don’t remember much about where we stopped or where we slept, although we stayed a few days in Albuquerque and left three people there: Janine, Tannis, and Mike.
That trip, making about 10 mpg in the hearse, added about 4,900 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere, but I didn’t have a care in the world. Finally, we arrived in Hollywood on April 1, 1966, exiting on Sunset Boulevard, and immediately started trying to find 77 Sunset Strip. Of course, there is no such address. It was just a TV show. We ended up at the end of Sunset and the Pacific Coast Highway, where we parked by the beach and walked barefoot out onto the sand and put our feet in the Pacific Ocean. As we looked back through the foggy mist to the evening traffic on Highway 1, I felt strongly in my heart that we had really accomplished something. We had made it to the Pacific Ocean and California, home of the West Coast Sound. This is where the Beach Boys had come from, the Byrds, the Mamas & the Papas, and so many others. We had made it.
The hearse was still running well and feeling great. There was a certain leather smell that I liked and the dashboard had beautiful chrome parts on it. All in all, it was a wonderful vehicle and had served us well.
We found my old friend from Fort William, Steve Stills, in Hollywood just as we were leaving to go to San Francisco, so we stayed in LA and started again right where we left off. We had always wanted to play together. Bruce and I joined Steve and his friend Richie Furay. We added a Canadian drummer, Dewey Martin, and formed Buffalo Springfield. Needing a manager, we drove the Pontiac hearse down Sunset and met with some business guys. Things seemed to go fine; of course, I had no way of knowing what they were really thinking, but it felt good.
After that meeting, on the way back up Sunset, there was a huge crash under the hearse. The driveshaft had fallen out and was dragging on the road. Pushing the old hearse slowly over to the side, we parked it. Somehow we got it towed to a garage near Highland Avenue, but I had no money to get it fixed. That was the last time I ever saw it. Somewhere in the cosmos there is a 1953 Pontiac hearse with Ontario plates and no driveshaft. Some bolts probably fell out of the universal joint and it could have been fixed easily, but I didn’t know anything then. It was gone. Out of reach for a broke hippie.
1954 Packard Ambulance-Hearse
• • •
WE EVENTUALLY SIGNED with Greene and Stone, two guys from New York who had something to do with Sonny & Cher. They became our managers. There was a chap named Chesley Millikin from Australia who we met through one of Greene and Stone’s secretaries, Joy, a pretty, black-haired girl who kept her distance from us, to keep her job. The most interesting thing I recall about Chesley, along with his accent, was his mode of transportation. He owned a 1954 Packard ambulance-hearse combination, a rare bird if ever there was one. To me, it was the logical successor to Mort and the Pontiac, continuing in the great tradition that began in the Squires. It was silver in color, kind of metallic, with a siren built into the roof above the windshield, but the siren did not work.
I decided I had to have that vehicle. With what little cash I had collected from the first Springfield gigs we got at the Whisky a Go Go, I purchased that Packard from Chesley as a reward for the success I was having and I started driving it around Hollywood. Of course, since I had no papers and no legal right to be in the USA, I had no driver’s license. That made me very nervous every time I drove the Packard, but I hoped that I would eventually get my papers because Greene and Stone had already told me they had a lawyer with connections.
We continued playing the Whisky a Go Go, opening for a lot of bands, including the Gentrys and the Grass Roots. Eventually, toward the end of our six-week run, we got billing on the marquee outside, and this was a major event for us. Greene and Stone had signed us to Atlantic Records, under the ATCO label, and we were beginning to get a following at the Whisky. We even had our own groupies. Two friendly Italians who ran the Whisky—Elmer Valentine, the manager, and Mario, the doorman—took us under their wing and watched out for us, steering us away from trouble now and then. Trouble was everywhere in the form of drug dealers, bad actors of all kinds, and opportunists, and we were
as green as you could be. This was a remarkable time of growth, recording in the studio during the day, making our first Buffalo Springfield LP, and playing the Whisky at night.
Do I have to come right out and say it?
Tell you that you look so fine?
Do I have to come right out and ask you
To be mine?
If it was a game I could play it,
Trying to make it, but I’m losing time.
I got to bring you in,
You’re overworking my mind.
Indecision is crowding me;
I have no room to spare,
And I can’t believe she’d care.
Like a dream, she has taken me,
And now I don’t know where
And a part of me is scared,
The part of me I shared
Once before.
—“DO I HAVE TO COME RIGHT OUT AND SAY IT”
Every night after the shows at the Whisky we would go to Ben Frank’s, a nearby diner on Sunset that had a big night scene, and get a bite to eat. Groupies would follow us there and we were easily available. We were young and foolish, not knowing what we were getting into. It was like a feeding frenzy. I had never seen so many girls. It was mind-blowing. We all were learning a lot of new things and getting a few new diseases along the way. What an education for a naive Canadian boy.
One night, we were at Ben Frank’s and this cute girl with way too much perfume and makeup came up to our booth and asked if she could sit with us. I said sure, and she slipped in the booth beside me, placing her hand between my legs. What a sensation. I had never had anything like that happen before. Of course, I immediately took her to the parking lot to show her the back of my silver Packard ambulance-hearse combo.
I didn’t have that fantastic Packard ambulance-hearse for very long and I don’t remember what happened to it. It probably developed a problem that I could not afford to repair. I imagine I left it parked somewhere. There was never a registration, insurance, or anything legal like that to deal with. It was cool to drive and have wheels again, but it was a relatively short-lived experience, sort of like the 1947 Buick Roadmaster convertible I had in Canada and left on a side street when it developed problems that I could not afford to have fixed.