by Neil Young
Was the best old hound dog
I ever did know.
—“OLD KING”
In 1973, I had done a tour called Time Fades Away, my first big tour of indoor stadiums and arenas, where I sang really loud (without modern stage monitors) just so I could hear myself onstage. My throat was damaged. I had developed nodes on my vocal cords, making it a bit painful to sing and almost impossible to sing quietly with any degree of control.
Over the following year I had gone through periods of voice rest to try to get the nodes to go away. That had worked for a while, but by 1975, I realized I had to have surgery. It was performed in LA by Dr. Ed Cantor, who had treated many singers and was a world-renowned specialist. I drove Stretch down from the ranch in October, and Dr. Cantor successfully removed the nodes. After the surgery, doctor’s orders were that I had to be silent for two weeks, after which I was not to sing for two more weeks. One month later, Crazy Horse was at the ranch, recording and playing locally in what we called the Northern California Coastal Bar Tour.
This was one of the best times for the Horse, traveling around Northern California in Stretch Armstrong and the Alaskan camper, playing in small bars, writing songs and recording them at the ranch.
Crazy Horse traveled to all the shows in Stretch, driven by Steve Antoine. I used the Alaskan camper to change in, because I was always drenched after we played. Steve was an easygoing, friendly, and soulful guy from Cleveland who we had met while we were playing at a little club called La Cave in the late sixties when Danny Whitten was still in the band. That was before our first Crazy Horse album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, was made. Danny was our original guitarist and singer before he tragically died in 1972 of a drug overdose. So years later, when Poncho joined the band, we had Steve Antoine drive Stretch during the Coastal Bar Tour, and it felt good to have old friends around who understood where we had been and why we were still together. One article was written about a show at the Marshall Tavern, and it showed up in a newspaper in Anchorage, Alaska, so you can see what publicity hounds we were at the time. They got the tour name, Northern California Coastal Bar Tour, wrong. They actually made up their own name, disregarding ours. Any publicity is good publicity:
Taking a cue from Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Crazy Horse have done a dozen or so unannounced shows around Northern California since December. But unlike Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review, Neil has played for free and stuck to obscure clubs like the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati and the Marshall Tavern in seaside Marshall (population 50). One of our correspondents made the 30-mile trip from San Francisco to Marshall. His report: We went over hills, through fog and rain. As we rounded a bend we found ourselves entering and leaving Marshall. We parked in the mud outside of town and walked halfway through town (five houses) to the bar. The doors were open. Nobody was collecting money. It was warm and dry inside and everybody was drinking. The place had a capacity of 100, but it wasn’t full.
Young and Crazy Horse stepped out of their back room and descended the staircase to the stage. Young broke into “Down by the River,” then continued with things from his new album, Zuma. “Don’t Cry No Tears” brought the crowd to an orgasm as the mixer cranked the volume.
Neil came back to play a double encore of “Take Me to the Country” and their anthem, “Southern Man.” His voice was still as strong and clear as ever.
Afterwards, Young hung around the bar and talked easily—although he declined to say where he’d take the Rolling Zuma Review next.
—ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS
During this time, one song we recorded at the ranch was called “Look Out for My Love.” We were having a lot of trouble getting it right and time was dragging on. It was four or five in the morning and we were still going at it. Probably cocaine was keeping us going when we should have given up. It was during the introduction to the song that the door to the studio playing room opened and Ellen Talbot, Johnny’s wife, danced slowly in and pulled down her jeans, showing us all her ass. Well, that was the take! It woke us up and we finally got it.
There’s a lot to learn,
For wasting time.
There’s a heart that burns.
There’s an open mind.
Look out for my love,
It’s in your neighborhood.
I know things are gonna change,
But I can’t say bad or good.
—“LOOK OUT FOR MY LOVE”
One of the best Northern California Coastal Bar Tour shows we did was in a club called the Catalyst located in Santa Cruz. We drove Stretch Armstrong and his Alaskan camper down the Coast Highway to Surf City, as it was called. Santa Cruz then was a hippie haven, full of young people having a good time. Surfers smoked garfong, rode the waves, and cruised their woodies around town. It really was that way back then, and that’s the way I always want to remember it. It’s part of my Canadian dream fulfilled. I always wanted to see Surf City, and that’s what I saw.
Many of our friends from the mountain were part of the Coastal Bar Tour. Taylor Phelps was a co-owner of the Tunitas Creek Ranch with Jim Russell. Taylor was talented and enterprising and above all a real character, loved by all. He was with us a lot, selling T-shirts specially designed by talented mountain artist Becky Holland, whom I loved and who was always a great spirit to be around. Becky’s unique and beautiful paintings depicted the Redwood Mountains, where we all lived. She sold her art all over the world and showed it in the mountain folk art section of the annual art fair at the firehouse. These and many other friends traveled with us on our local adventure.
When we played the original Catalyst, a famous Santa Cruz club, it was in an old building with a high ceiling. That building was later destroyed in the great earthquake of 1982. The night we appeared, it was packed. We took an intermission and Taylor Phelps got up onstage and started selling Becky’s Northern California Coastal Bar Tour T-shirts. The crowd booed him so loudly that we were all killing ourselves laughing. This crowd didn’t want to see anyone selling anything! They came to hear music and hang out. Taylor was a natural salesman and he couldn’t imagine why selling anything could be so negative. He stood his ground for quite a while there onstage with his T-shirts, a box full of them on the floor, until he finally gave up. It was a hilarious moment for all of us who loved Taylor, our own P. T. Barnum.
The true highlight, though, came halfway through our next set as we did “Like a Hurricane.” I remember looking out into the crowd, and it was a dense crowd, with the aroma and fog of weed hanging over it, and all I could see was one girl standing there. She seemed to be floating; her beautiful light blond hair set her apart as she moved to the music in another world from everyone else. She had a light around her, a glowing haziness that set her apart like a queen among peasants, a goddess among mortals. Her clothes were a different color than anything else in the room and she stood out so completely, dancing and floating while not moving at all, a slow-motion masterpiece of a painting.
• • •
AFTER NEW YEAR’S, in early 1976, I drove Stretch Armstrong south to the beach with Zeke, taking him home to his mother, again traveling Interstate 5 through the San Joaquin Valley. Our trip distance was about 380 miles. We got approximately 18 mpg in Stretch. Gasoline was priced at 57 cents per gallon, and during the journey we deposited about 411 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. A little over 97 million passenger cars were on the road in 1976, not counting trucks like ours and other vehicles.
I did a few recordings in LA around that time. One of them was just an overdubbed vocal sketch that I put on a track I had cut at the ranch with the Horse a few months earlier. I was still on voice rest when we cut it, so the song had been recorded without a vocal. The instrumental passages on this recording are some of our best Crazy Horse moments, with Poncho playing a great part on the Stringman keyboard, an amazing analog string synthesizer. It is a very emotional ride. Two months later, I overdubbed all the voca
l parts at a studio called Village Recorders. Ben Keith was there at the board, helping me. I loved that track. I knew I had to finish it. The Horse was cosmic. Those sketches are the vocals we used on the final record of “Like a Hurricane.”
• • •
I WAS IN A HURRY IN 1976, as I had been in the habit of writing several songs a week for months and was backlogged; too much material and not enough time in the studio. I was recording anywhere I could and moving quite fast, finishing my records very quickly. For me, it was not as important to create a technically perfect recording as it was to get the original performances and feelings of new songs on tape. Those performances usually carried the essence of the song. That was my method. Let someone else make the perfect record. I had to take care of my own songs.
Around the beginning of 1976 at Wally Heider Studios in Hollywood, we were trying to record “Powderfinger” with Crazy Horse. It was sounding really good to me and I was way into the song. Then I came completely unglued and yelled at Billy for what seemed like an endless time. We had been right in the middle of a great take and he had missed a bunch of changes. My nerves must have been totaled for some reason. I had to work on my temper with Crazy Horse and Buffalo Springfield, as I was mostly juvenile and had no patience. I’m still not completely past it now, just a little slower to react. When you open up to deliver in the studio, you have no self-control, no defenses, no point of view. That’s the place to be. You’re just a lightbulb with the filament exposed, no outer glass to protect you. The emotional and spiritual music comes along at just about the same time, so if something goes wrong right at that moment there is almost no way to predict what will happen. Usually I would just lose it. Today it is not very different when it happens; we just have recording more down now, and mistakes are easier to fix with technology.
One night, Mr. Briggs and I jumped into Stretch and headed for his favorite place, Indigo Ranch Studios. I spent the night there with David and recorded nine solo acoustic songs, completing a tape I called Hitchhiker. It was a complete piece, although I was pretty stony on it, and you can hear it in my performances. Dean Stockwell, my friend and a great actor who I later worked with on Human Highway as a co-director, was with us that night, sitting in the room with me as I laid down all of the songs in a row, pausing only for weed, beer, or cocaine. Briggs was in the control room, mixing live on his favorite console.
Stretch was the perfect vehicle to reach Indigo Ranch. We created a lot of music there in a very short period of time over that year or so. It was one of Briggs’s and my most creative periods. That studio was way back in the hills above Malibu, past Garth Hudson’s (the magical organist in the Band) house on a dirt road at the end of a canyon. We left some of our soul right there in that building when it burned down to the ground a few years later with all of David’s favorite analog equipment in it. The cause of the fire remains unknown.
1941 Chrysler Highlander Coupe
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
hortly before Christmas in 1975, I was down in Malibu at Automotive Classics, just to see what they had. There were a lot of cars, and many of them had been priced ridiculously high, targeting nouveau riche stars and wealthy sheikhs and others who had money to burn. The cars usually looked good but were not really that together when you looked at them closely. They were often not worth a fraction of the asking price, and the salesmen were really snooty, especially when they realized that they were dealing with an educated customer who knew the real value. This was where I found myself that day, except I had a handicap. There was a car there that I really thought was attractive and I wanted it.
It was a 1941 Chrysler Highlander coupe. The price of gas when it was made in 1941 was just nineteen cents a gallon. It was a two-seater businessman’s coupe with a red-plaid interior, a giant trunk, and a cream-plastic deco that carried across the dashboard and glove compartment. The plastic had started to curl, probably because of the California heat and the age of the plastic itself. This was quite a unique car. The salesman said that the car was from Steve McQueen’s collection. Nice, I thought. How can he prove that, which potentially added to the value of the car? I asked myself. But the car was very cool. It was $2,800. Too expensive for what it was, I guessed, and more expensive than most of the cars I had ever bought. I took it for a ride and it rode like a dream.
Sometime later, I got it to the ranch and decided to restore it since it was so famous. I took it to Jon McKeig in Scotts Valley near Santa Cruz. That was a flawed idea. The restoration is still incomplete today. The car is beautifully painted but not assembled. It is complete but missing a replacement for the warped and broken plastic dashboard trim parts, which continued their deterioration to the point where they were unrecognizable.
I now think that the deteriorated plastic dashboard is what stopped Jon from finishing this car. Sometimes he would just get stuck. Jon had repaired the interior upholstery brilliantly but then had stopped just short of reassembling it, perhaps stymied by the missing plastic dash parts. When Jon saw something he couldn’t fix, he couldn’t continue with all the things that he could do. I don’t know why. It’s hard to understand, but somehow I think it has to do with Vietnam.
Perhaps I should have not bought it and just left it alone and maybe someone would have fixed it up. Right now it is a struggle, a story incomplete, an empty feeling. I have to do something about it.
1950 Plymouth Special Deluxe Sedan
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ack in 1974, there was a bar up on Skyline Boulevard, California Highway 35, located on the ridge above the ranch. It was called Alex’s, and Pegi was working there. Alex’s was the place where “I used to order just to watch her walk across the floor.”
She used to work in a diner
Never saw a woman look finer
I used to order just to watch her walk across the floor
She grew up in a small town
Never put her roots down
Daddy always kept movin’ so she did too
Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a Harley-Davidson
Her long blond hair flyin’ in the wind
She’s been runnin’ half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Collidin’ with the very air she breathes
The air she breathes.
—“UNKNOWN LEGEND”
It’s funny to see how a song can start out in fact and go completely to fantasy but then still be there, in the moment. “Unknown Legend,” as sometimes happens, starts out with a factual reference and just goes off into a world that opens up for me once the music starts. This song was a memory that returned to me when I found its lyrics written on an old newspaper fifteen years after I had written it. Soon the melody and chords came rushing back. When I picked up Hank, my old Martin D-28 that once belonged to Hank Williams, the song flowed as if it had always been there. When I finished it and recorded it for Harvest Moon around 1990, Ben Keith’s playing was among the most beautiful I had ever heard.
Anyway, there was a local guy who used to come into Alex’s whose name was Jim Franco. Jim worked as a sanitary engineer down in the flats and got up very early in the morning to collect the garbage in San Mateo. On his route he always found interesting stuff that he sometimes would tell me about at night in the bar over a beer. One night, he was quite excited about a 1950 Plymouth Special Deluxe four-door sedan that he saw in a garage on his route and was now for sale. It had just been sitting there for many years and was in pretty good shape, perfect body with the original interior, a bit frayed. He knew it was my kind of car and he told me about it. I bought it for about eighteen hundred bucks. It was a good runner, three-speed column shift, a little rough getting into first gear just as the clutch was released, but it was really very solid aside from that idiosyncrasy. It was green, all original paint. It always started right up and I used it all the time. I know it was with us at the recording of
American Stars ’n Bars, an album Crazy Horse made at the White House on the ranch, because we have a great old picture of Crazy Horse with the car outside.
In our recording history, especially with Crazy Horse, we used many houses as studios, moving our antique recording equipment into these homes and just playing there. As a group, we disliked the factory feeling of recording studios in Hollywood and did everything we could to make sure our music was isolated from that type of atmosphere. Our music was not a job. It was our way of life. We lived for the music, the girls, the cars, and each other. The songs chronicled our feelings, good and bad. We didn’t give a shit about being perfect. All we ever wanted was the vibe, the magic, what we called the “swim” of our sound enveloping us as we poured our souls into the music. We had just finished recording Zuma at Briggs’s house in Point Dume, down in Malibu, and we still had more to give.
Later that year, my dad came to the ranch to visit, and that time is well chronicled in his own book Neil and Me, a fascinating book to me at this stage of my life, which I love to read because it is like he is still here with me. At the time, I set Daddy up in the Red House up on the hill above the White House, where we had just been recording our LP, American Stars ’n Bars, and gave him the 1950 Plymouth Special Deluxe, and he was very comfortable with it. It was then that I was reminded of his old habit of slamming the doors of cars to make sure they were solidly closed. The Plymouth could handle it.
The White House was always used like a boardinghouse, where Crazy Horse and the crew would stay if we were doing something on or near the ranch, and about this time we were enjoying the Northern California Coastal Bar Tour. One night we had Daddy’s spaghetti, with his own special sauce, which was hot enough to fog up the glasses of those who wore them or create beads of sweat on your forehead. I’ve written about this before but it’s worth mentioning again because I can almost taste it right now. This was dynamite sauce and he cooked it a little differently each time. The spaghetti was a perfect al dente.