by Neil Young
The 1951 Jeep Overland pickup was a faded blue, with some of the original orange paint showing through where parts of the blue second-generation paint had worn, but the body was in pretty good solid shape. Being a jeep, it wasn’t big, but it had a Chevy 327 engine in it, replacing the original four-cylinder, and was very powerful, but not mellow as when it was first built. That was a surprise, and a bit against my grain, but I bought it anyway and marveled at the radical acceleration it possessed.
The jeep was a fun truck to drive and after test-driving it to La Honda, I took it home and parked it by the house. Now I had my own pickup in the driveway, but after a while the rough ride bothered my back more and more and I drove the truck less and less.
That December, music reentered my life. I did a three-day stand at the Cellar Door in Washington, DC. When I was back home at the ranch for a few days after DC, I got inside the jeep pickup. I turned the key and it fired right up, but when I went to put it in gear and I tried to raise my foot to put it down on the clutch, nothing happened. My leg would not rise and I couldn’t lift my foot up to the pedal.
This had happened one time in Topanga, and I went to a chiropractor Susan referred me to. He was able to fix me up with a couple of adjustments. I had been working with a hoe, cleaning weeds outside the house and preparing for a little garden. Perhaps I had been repeating the same move with the hoe repeatedly. Possibly I was even hoeing obsessively and manically!
Now, thinking back to the day before, I remember that I had strained myself lifting some very large pieces of walnut for the walls in the dining room. I was lifting and reaching to hold the heavy slabs in place. I really didn’t know my own strength or how little strength I actually had, so I would try anything. I was young, not knowing that my body could be broken. I ended up in the hospital and spent a week in traction before I was released in a brace I had to wear until I was healed.
Eventually the 1951 jeep pickup was parked in my old junkyard, where cars were left and almost never used. It’s kind of a sad place, but it’s also a monument. Years passed. I would drive by, seeing it there, parked among other cars past their time of service. Most of the cars and trucks that arrived there never made it out, and that pickup is still there, forty years later.
1955 Chrysler Imperial Sedan “Blue”
CHAPTER TWENTY
ust after moving to the North Country while exploring the area near my new ranch, I found one of the most interesting places: the meeting of Highways 92 and 101. A tall temporary overpass made of wood like an old train trestle was located at the intersection. While crossing it, I could see a junkyard full of old cars. My favorite kind of junkyard. It was called Henry’s Auto Dismantling.
“I’m gonna have to take your wallet, son,” said Henry when I walked up to him and asked if I could look around. Henry needed that for security because he felt there were so many valuable parts in his yard. He needed to know no one was stealing anything.
“Any of these cars work?” I asked.
“Just those ones over there,” he replied, pointing in the direction of a row of fifties classics in pretty rough shape.
There was an old turquoise 1958 Continental convertible, a very intriguing design that caught my eye for a second, very wild looking, but it was pretty beat-up. Next to it was a 1953 or 1954 Nash, not looking too good. Then there was a 1953 Lincoln Capri that looked pretty nice, and a good-looking 1955 Chrysler Imperial sedan. I stopped right there, remembering the same car parked outside a house on the main street of Omemee. It was, of course, brand-new then, when I was nine or ten years old in late 1955.
Although this Imperial wasn’t new anymore, it seemed like it was to me. Strangely, it made me feel younger, remembering my boyhood. The taillights were beautiful, standing on their little posts. What a radical design, I thought to myself. There was a speck of blood on the front seat, but it wasn’t a big one. I wondered what that could have been from. An accident? Something else?
The interior looked pretty good really, aside from that little speck. A little worn here and there but it had a nice color and a shiny thread woven through it. The car was blue, a two-tone with a cream top. When I got behind the wheel, I saw the dashboard was clean. No broken lenses were visible and the paint was good throughout the whole interior. There were no missing parts that I could see. Inside and out, the car was complete.
I asked Henry if I could start it up. He went back into his little office, a small one-room building surrounded by car parts and tires, with bumpers and chrome pieces leaning all over the outside of it. When he came back out he had a set of keys jingling in his hand.
“I think these are the ones,” he said.
I took them and went back to the Imperial, gave it a turn, and it cranked slowly but didn’t start. But it was talking to me. It was ready. I pumped the accelerator and tried it again. The old Imperial came to life. She started up with a wheeze and a cough and then settled into a nice, even purring sound.
The next day, two weeks before my twenty-fifth birthday in 1970, I went back and bought the car for a couple of hundred bucks. Driving it back to the ranch I noticed a few things wrong with it, but it ran nicely and I was feeling good, although on the steep hill entering the ranch I could sense that the brakes were worn out. I got that fixed, changed the oil and other liquids, filled it up with gas at thirty-six cents a gallon, and parked it in the driveway next to my house. The price of gas was cheap in 1970, but for the Imperial, the cost in CO2 to the atmosphere was high at nineteen miles per gallon. Every nineteen miles, the luxurious, top-of-the-line Imperial emitted 19.5 pounds of CO2 for an average of one pound per mile. I loved my new car and drove it everywhere, mostly leaving the Jeepster at the ranch except for back-road trips to the grocery store in Woodside, California.
A few months later, when I had returned from a Canadian tour and was taking Carrie to see the ranch, the Imperial and I were descending the long grade for the first time together. I was feeling so good about this place I had found to live. On the way down the grade, Carrie named that 1955 Imperial “Blue.” Blue, a stately and cool lady, took us to a lot of good places, cruising on those redwood roads, maybe smoking a joint and taking it easy in a smooth-riding, big and comfortable luxury car. Blue was transporting us to another time.
Will I see you give more than I can take?
Will I only harvest some?
As the days fly past will we lose our grasp,
Or fuse it in the sun?
—“HARVEST”
Later in life, Blue’s time finally started to run out as she gathered mechanical issues and sat unused. Nothing hurts a car more than being ignored and left behind. They don’t all make it to restoration, and Blue, after an extended stay in the ranch junkyard, was finally recycled.
One fine summer day I went back to Henry’s.
“I’m gonna have to hold on to your wallet, son,” Henry said again.
Inside, Henry’s office was very clean, in marked contrast to the outside of his office. Henry’s shirt was clean and pressed. He had a twinkle in his eye. I decided right then that Henry was a real character. He spoke with a deep voice in an accent I couldn’t quite place. His glasses were sparkling clean. He kind of looked like the filling station attendant in one of those old gasoline commercials I remembered from Hockey Night in Canada, the Esso service attendant giving away place settings with each fill-up, plates or silverware.
Walletless, I walked around behind Henry’s office through an area I had not spent much time in before, to a long lane of cars from the fifties. Seeing an old Nash, I thought about that company, American Motors. It didn’t last too long. American Motors was almost gone by the beginning of the sixties. Their cars just didn’t look as cool as the big three manufacturers, GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Style, power, and appeal were extremely important.
People identified with the image of their cars. GM and Ford remained the strong survivors. Chrysler
was always number three, with advanced styling and new features blazing the way. That history was all on display in Henry’s Auto Dismantling. Lane after lane of designs, reflecting the changing times of America. I was fascinated by it all. It was truly a museum. That’s what I saw: a car gallery. Others saw a pile of junk. I saw memories, history, pieces of people’s lives left behind to gather rust and ruin, plants growing right through them as they waited in line. For what? I asked myself. Mostly, though, I just thought about the personal stories and dreams behind each one of those cars, and I wondered about the people who designed them.
If I was a junk man
Selling you cars,
Washing your windows
And shining your stars,
Thinking your mind was
My own in a dream,
What would you wonder,
And how would it seem?
—“WORDS”
The sun was getting low as I walked back to get my wallet. I stopped by the office and glanced at the line of “running” cars, the ones that might run with just a little bit of attention. There was still an empty space where the Imperial had been. It left a void. Just down the row was a white 1953 Lincoln Capri looking at me. I looked back at it.
It was the second look; that is the one that got me. This was a beautiful car with red and black tuck-and-roll leather seats and one small place where the leather was torn, lots of chrome and stainless trim inside and out, and just a little corrosion. This was a hot-looking car. I checked out all of the trim pieces. They were almost all there. There was a knight’s head with a chevron. It was repeated in several places. I counted three or four. One of them was perfect.
I noticed the fiftieth-anniversary badge in the dashboard, commemorating fifty years of the Ford Motor Company. A lot of pride had gone into this car. The styling was smooth and graceful, understated actually, compared to what was coming in the years ahead. This was a captured moment in time. This 1953 Lincoln Capri had been painted white somewhere along the line, but close inspection revealed a two-tone red and black original finish underneath. I went to see Henry, who told me it wouldn’t start without a new battery but he would put one in the next day if I wanted to come back and hear it run. I was excited and told him I would be back in the morning.
I drove home and thought about it some more. I was starting to accumulate a lot of cars. The driveway was getting full. The cars were all inexpensive and I thought they had more to give, more of life to live. They were not done with their service. The next morning I returned to Henry’s Auto Dismantling and we started up the Lincoln. It ran really well, sounding strong. I paid Henry for it in cash. We did the paperwork. It felt right.
I drove the Capri onto Highway 92 and across the wooden overpass toward home. It had a really throaty-sounding muffler, glasspacks like a hot rod. Cool. Brakes were good, too.
So it went. I had the old yellow and black Jeepster I had driven from LA, the Chrysler Imperial, the Lincoln Capri, and a pickup truck. Those were my cars. They were all old, but if one broke down I still could use another one while I got it fixed. I loved the old ones. They felt right to me. That was the way I looked at it. There was no reason to get a new car, even though I could afford one. I loved driving these old story-ridden cars on the redwood back roads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. They reinforced a feeling of being lost in time, a place I was comfortable. The year of the car.
I started collecting a lot of parts for the Capri, mostly trim parts that were missing or broken, like plastic knight’s heads with chevrons and some stainless trim. After visiting a few junkyards, I had collected a complete set and had it all laid out on towels on a workbench in an old barn. I felt very good about this collection of perfect trim and was planning on painting the Capri its original colors and using the parts to make it perfect. After that, all that would be left to do was fix a little leatherwork on the driver’s-side front seat. It was tuck and roll so it would be easy to replace only the worn parts with new leather, but I kept on driving it as it was.
Soon I discovered the real reason that the Capri had found its way to Henry’s Auto Dismantling. The car had an electrical problem that was very evasive. Everything would suddenly just shut down. I would be driving along and the car would die and coast to the side of the road. Dead. The engine would not turn over. The lights wouldn’t work. Everything electric was nonfunctional. After a while, it would start to work again and everything would be fine. The problem was hard to find because there was nothing wrong most of the time. I tried to get it fixed, had many parts replaced, but the problem stayed. Several times the car went to the shop for repairs. An electrical specialty shop worked on it and was unable to find the problem. It was very frustrating because the car was great when it ran.
1953 Lincoln Capri
Finally the problem was solved even though no one knew exactly what it was. A lot of things had been done at once, so we didn’t know what fixed it. It cost me a lot more to fix that problem than what I had given Henry for the car.
On September 8, 1972, after we had been living together for almost a year, Carrie and I had a child, Zeke Young. He was a beautiful baby boy. We brought Zeke home from the hospital in the Capri. After a few days he started sleeping in a handmade crib that one of our local carpenter friends, Larry Christiani, had built for us as a gift out of eucalyptus. It was an intricate crib that hung from leather straps and springs on the frame, which allowed us to rock it gently. During his first year, little Zeke grew quickly and was a happy boy, with a beautiful smile and blond hair. He was beginning to explore and soon was walking.
The fragility of our short courtship and our young child soon started to reveal that Carrie and I didn’t know each other very well and had not anticipated what it would be like to actually share a home. We started getting along poorly and eventually we had a bad breakup, rooted in my continuing dedication to music, my time away from home, our infidelities, and our inexperience raising a child. The love had been intense but it was not strong enough to survive. We separated in early 1974. I remember thinking to myself that I would never do that again, and that if I did remarry, it would be for a long time and the kids would stay with their parents, come hell or high water.
At the time, CSNY was considering recording again, and the band was just beginning, feeling it out. Crosby had a song called “Homeward Through the Haze.” It was very dark. I did not realize then that David was freebasing cocaine. We were trying to get something going, but the magic wasn’t coming to us the way it used to, although it was still there like a fog out on the ocean that didn’t come in to the land. Graham was doing everything he could to make it happen. I admired his strength and conviction for the band.
I was driving the Capri every day from the ranch to Sausalito, where the Record Plant Studio was, enjoying the ride, but the sessions were not going well. One day, about halfway to Sausalito, I just turned the Capri around and went home to the ranch. I called the guys.
“Let’s try again later,” I think was my basic message.
I know this was probably not the right thing to do, but I thought it was right for the music. It is not easy making these moves, but they have to be made when the music is at stake. That’s how I felt.
Another flower child goes to seed
In an ether-filled room of meat hooks.
It’s so ugly.
—“HIPPIE DREAM”
One day, a while later, I was driving through the redwoods and the Capri’s engine made a strange sound and stopped. It would not start. I parked it by the side of the road and one of my friends, Jimmy Delucca, who drove one of CSNY’s road trucks, volunteered to tow it back to the ranch. I gave him directions. On the way there, he got a little lost and took a different route that involved a steep hill. He lost control of the car while towing it down that grade and it rolled off the road into a tree and suffered a lot of damage.
Things went downhill from t
here. I was able to find another front end, but it wasn’t exactly the same; it was from 1954, not ’53, and the chrome design and bumpers were different. I thought I wouldn’t be happy ’til I got the original 1953 fiftieth-anniversary parts and made it right. It never happened. A dream unfulfilled. The 1953 Lincoln Capri missed its moment. Time was flying and so was I.
Eventually I had the engine rebuilt, solving the original problems. Louis and Clara left the ranch after a while and went to live in Modesto, where they had old friends, and Louis passed away a few years later. Clara lived a long life and came back to visit the ranch one or two more times over the next ten years or so, just to see the place where she used to live with Louis. We spent some good time with her when she visited Broken Arrow. Louis and Clara always called the ranch “God’s Country.” Even though she is gone now, too, and another generation has passed, I can still see her walking by the lake and up the roads in the mist of morning, getting her exercise.
Why are you growin’ up so fast
My boy?
Oh, you’d better take your time.
Why are you growin’ up so fast
My son?
Almost time to live your dream
My boy.
Oh, you’d better take your time.
Almost time to make some plans
My son.
Vacation gone, school is out,
Summer ends year in year out.
Oh, you’d better take your time
My boy.
I thought we had just begun.
Why are you growin’ up so fast
My son?
Vacation gone, school is out,