by Neil Young
What a fucking bummer. I was there with Rassy and she saw what was happening. We got some food afterward and then I caught up with the tour. That was quite a time, and it was representative of what it was like for the Buffalo Springfield having me in the band for two years, coming and going like the weather.
In a while will the smile on my face turn to plaster?
Stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster
For the race of my head and my face is moving much faster
Is it strange I should change I don’t know
Why don’t you ask her?
—“MR. SOUL”
It had become very hot in the train barn and I got up to stretch, walking around the potbelly. On the opposite side of the stove there was a redwood log about two feet long leaning against the metal and it was on fire, burning away with flames and smoke! I grabbed it by a part that was not burning and shoved it inside the stove, noticing at the same time that smoke had filled the whole barn.
There was smoke everywhere and it was hovering like smog, thick smog. Looking at it hovering over the train layout, I was struck by how realistic it appeared. I wanted to take a picture of it. Then I opened up the doors and windows and turned on the two electric fans I had installed to suck smoke out to ensure Ben’s lungs were protected when we had fake smoke coming out of the Lionel steam engines. About a half an hour later, the train barn was back to normal, although there was still the strong smell of redwood smoke. I kind of liked it, though.
I left that day in the Special Deluxe with my mind reeling over the Buffalo Springfield show list and the memories it evoked in me. The most intense memory was the anxiety I used to feel in crowds or crowded places where there were a lot of choices. Overstimulation is how I think I would describe it, too many decisions to make. Grocery stores and any kind of shopping with a lot of choices were particularly challenging for me during that time. Driving was an escape, but not having a license made me constantly worry about getting stopped by the cops. On the empty country roads, I would smoke weed and drive for miles. The fewer cars I saw, the better; that made it easy for me to imagine I was in another time—the time of the car I was driving. In my body, anxiety and escapism were having the battle of a lifetime, and I was writing songs, lots of songs.
A few weeks after that, I took the Plymouth with me down to Pescadero, an old fishing town near the coast that I used to visit all the time, to see my old friend Paul Williamson. I hadn’t seen Wog in a long time. We had a big blowout in the eighties, somewhere in Canada. It was drug-related and we parted ways. That was all water under the bridge. Time has a way.
Paul was a great conversationalist. Always with a story and an angle, and he had been writing me, telling me he was straight. I was straight, too, so when we got together it was very mellow and we had a lot of fun reliving our glory days as we cruised south in the Special Deluxe on California Highway 1 to visit Mazzeo in Santa Cruz. Neither of us had seen Mazz in way too long, and we decided to get together with him. On a cool afternoon, the three of us met at a restaurant Mazz had recommended.
As usual, the restaurant Mazz took us to was full of beautiful women, which was fun for three old dogs like us. We spent the afternoon talking and then visited Mazz’s sailboat in dry dock before heading north back to Pescadero and the ranch. Paul was very interested in seeing Pearl, the old Caddy limo he used to drive when I was in the Bluenotes, and we promised to get together and give her a look to see what kind of shape she was in in 2012.
1950 DeSoto Suburban “Hernando”
CHAPTER THIRTY
n late 1975, just after my throat surgery, I was spending a lot of time near the ranch with my friends Taylor Phelps and Jim Russell, who had a place nearby called Tunitas Creek Ranch. It was just a few miles from Broken Arrow, as the crow flies, and there were some old ranch roads that connected the two ranches easily, so I was a pretty regular visitor.
Taylor had some chickens, some pot plants, and a lot of little buildings that he was working on. The main house was a white two-story house that had been there a long time. One of the other buildings had an old DeSoto Suburban in it, a 1950 model, kind of a stretch sedan that could be used to carry lots of people somewhere. It was not a common car at any time, yet it was practical.
This DeSoto Suburban was a natural brown color, like it was used to take people to a forest retreat or something, maybe a camp. It had big roof racks for suitcases and luggage. You could envision it with stacks of old leather luggage tied onto the racks, traveling through the forest, full of people going somewhere remote. The interior was very mellow with earth-toned vinyl against cloth, and the car held about nine to twelve people easily.
This particular Suburban was really fun to cruise in, so we would generally fire up a joint or take some blow with us when we took off on a mission exploring local habitats like bars and restaurants, leaving Tunitas Creek Ranch in the late afternoon for points unknown, or at least undecided. It was in this spirit that we took off one sunny afternoon and began an outing. I was not talking because of my surgery, so was using hand signals, whistling a bit—which was probably not a good thing for my throat, either—and writing on a tablet of paper that I had. That is how I partook in the conversations, such as they were. There was a willingness to engage in anything that came along, to meet anyone, and to go anywhere that seemed interesting. Failure was not in my experience. These, then, were the best of times.
Toward the end of one night, we graduated from fine California Tunitas Creek Ranch weed to cocaine and beer. Dinner was over and it had been a good one with beautiful waitresses to look at and many friends to talk with and share stories. We were between bars on Skyline Boulevard, which ran along the very ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains high above Redwood City, when we pulled over at Skeggs Point Scenic Lookout to park and enjoy some cocaine. The fog was rolling across the ridge, blanketing the beautiful view of the flats with its shimmering lights. There was a newspaper in the backseat with me and I picked up a felt-tip marker, one of my favorite writing tools, and scratched out a few words.
Once, I thought I saw you in a crowded hazy bar
Dancing on the light from star to star
Far across the moonbeams, I know that’s who you are
I saw your brown eyes turning once, to stars.
I am just a dreamer but you are just a dream.
You could have been anyone to me,
Before that moment you touched my lips
That perfect feeling when time just slips
Away between us, on our foggy trips.
You are like a hurricane.
There’s calm in your eye
And I’m getting blown away,
To somewhere safer where the feelings stay.
I want to love you but I’m getting blown away.
—“LIKE A HURRICANE”
Later that night when I got back to the ranch, I sat down at the electric organ I had built. It was made by combining an old antique-white painted and art-decorated ornate wooden pump organ I had received from Dean Stockwell in Topanga with a Univox Stringman analog string synthesizer plugged into a Fender Deluxe amplifier from the early fifties.
The unearthly sound resonated in my little cabin for hours and hours while I uncovered the melody and chords that dwelled in those lyrics I had written in Taylor’s DeSoto. Over and over I played the themes and refrains, cascading and blissfully distorted, until I could not stay awake and the sun was rising.
Early ’70s Citroën Maserati
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ome things I have done are outside of whatever shred of reasoning I try to live by and are at best just examples of breaks from the norm. Maybe they are my attempts at change; maybe they represent something I don’t understand. I don’t think it’s worth looking into any further.
So let’s take a look: One prime example of this would be my purc
hase of a mid-seventies-model Citroën Maserati, somewhat of an exotic in its day. This was a very fast and unreliable, generally overengineered and finicky car. I don’t remember where I got it. Driving it was a challenge for me, a pothead. It was way too fast to be safe, and I drove it that way because I think I felt that was what was expected of me. Most of my other cars I used to just cruise around in, laid-back and trippin’ along, as it were. They were big tanks; luxurious pillow rides. Not this thing. It went against the grain. It was everything I wasn’t. It was the contrarian mobile.
One day in 1975, I was on California Highway 33, inland of the central coast, heading toward the San Joaquin Valley on my way to the ranch from Malibu, possibly my first trip in the Contrarian. Traveling along at about ninety miles per hour on this deserted road, smoking a joint, I felt like Steve McQueen on steroids. It was pretty safe out there, no cops; no worries.
Suddenly a Volkswagen appeared right behind me. Then it passed me. I put my foot down, accepting the challenge, feeling confident I could outrun the Bug. At about 105 miles per hour, I hit a dip on the road and the car lurched a bit, almost out of control. The Volkswagen disappeared in front of me. I accepted myself as Neil and slowed back down to about eighty.
Feeling fairly relaxed, I cruised along for a few miles until I saw the VW pulled over with the driver outside leaning on it, smoking a cigarette. He waved. I slowed down and backed up to where he was parked and got out. “Hi,” he said. “Nice car.” I asked him how he went so fast and he told me he had a Porsche engine and some other things in the VW. Then he told me that he drove at a track every weekend. I thought to myself how lucky I was that I had slowed down and not tried to catch this guy. I offered him some weed and he had a puff. Then I took off down the road, heading north toward the ranch at a reasonable speed, back to being myself again.
On another day up near the ranch, a few months later, the contrarian mobile made a visit to a hippie commune near the ranch called the Land. A girl I knew lived there in a teepee; her name was Starr. I had decided to visit her, to just drop in. I had never been there before and I jumped in the contrarian mobile to go for a spin and see if I could find her. She was a nice and attractive lady and had a little boy. When I got to the Land, I parked and walked down a trail toward the place where I had been directed to go by an Earth Mama, who had been staring at my car with some disdain. I felt some judgment was being made about the car. Maybe it was too expensive and flashy; not in harmony with the Land. I was feeling a bit uncomfortable looking around and never could find the teepee, so I left.
I never did gel with the Maserati and sold it very soon after that, feeling lucky to have escaped unscathed.
1985 Ford Econoline Van “Ironsides”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
en Young was seven years old when we got his first van, around 1985. It took a long time for us to realize he needed a wheelchair. We started out with a custom stroller, but as he got bigger the chair became the obvious solution. He was too big to strap into a large seat insert. We had custom special seating made that supported him in his new chair, which was a lightweight unit that folded down. That’s when we decided we needed a van, because he could stay in his chair and look out the windows as we traveled, sharing the ride with us.
He loved his new van, which had a changing table in the back so we could care for him when we were out and about. It was new for us, the wheelchair, the van, the whole lifestyle, but we adapted to it easily when we saw how much Ben liked it. Traveling in his van was one of Ben Young’s favorite things to do. He would go anywhere in it with a smile on his face.
We had some special art painted on the two small windows in the roof, depicting a couple of locomotives, because Ben was into trains. There was a lift in the back that allowed us to load Ben into the van and he enjoyed that process as well. A few buttons and toggles allowed us to do the whole routine of loading and unloading electromechanically. Simply put, Ben Young loved his van.
After we started using the van and wheelchair, we couldn’t believe that it had taken us so long to get one in the first place. It certainly was a lot easier on Ben and on us. We still have that Ford Econoline van, which we named Ironsides, as backup today, in case of a problem with our newer models.
All of Ben’s new vans carried the same license plate as his original, MOBLBEN. Unlike the first one, the others were all Chrysler minivans. We purchased them because they came equipped with a kneeling feature. Instead of using a lift to get Ben up to a high elevation to get in the vehicle, the vehicle “kneels” down and Ben can just roll in, making it a much easier process. Each time a van was retired from its duty on the mainland, it was shipped to our house in Hawaii for a last tour.
Sometimes, while Ben Young and I were away on the road, Larry used our Sharks season tickets to take Bridge School students to the Tank to see the Sharks play hockey and share in the camaraderie and fun. Those were very special nights for everyone involved. Larry Johnson was a wonderful friend to Ben Young, Pegi, and all of the students of the Bridge School.
Each of Ben’s new vans allowed room for passengers on either side of him in the backseat, making it great for going to hockey games. We put a big shark fin made of foam rubber and gaffer’s tape on the top of Ben’s second van to go to the games. Since Ben was nonverbal, Larry would refer to his conversations with Ben as “brain-to-braining.” Ben loved it. I could tell from the look in his eyes. Sometimes that’s all you need.
Sadly, Ben Young was with Larry the night that he died on one of those regular trips to the hockey game. Larry was taking Ben to see the San Jose Sharks play the Anaheim Ducks. That night, Ben’s caregiver, Tony Rivera, had driven Ben in his van down to the harbor where Larry’s boat was. Larry had been feeling tired a lot in the past few days, even going back to his boat for a rest in the afternoon once, but as always, Larry was ready to take Ben to the game. Larry came out and said “Hi” to Ben, sat down in the driver’s seat to drive him to the game, and then just sighed one last breath and passed on into the next world. That was the end of an era on January 21, 2010. What a wonderful person Larry Johnson was. So giving. My friend for life.
Larry and I worked together over the years, starting with our first movie in 1972, Journey Through the Past. We founded Shakey Pictures that same year. Larry was my partner in crime and creativity. He was a friend who always gave me his opinion and collaborated with me on any idea, no matter how zany or wacky it was, and I did the same for him. When he died, we were working on a picture in which we interviewed terminal cancer victims during their end-times. It was heavy, and it was Larry’s idea, unfinished.
Larry and I had also done CSNY’s Déjà Vu, a documentary about Living with War that focused on the Iraq War and the soldiers and their families. This project was near and dear to Larry’s heart, coming from a military family himself. He considered himself an army brat, having grown up on bases around the country. He was very concerned that we get it right and be respectful, while voicing our concerns about the wars through the music and picture. It was a great work, another one of Larry’s big contributions.
All of my musical movies involved Larry in a primary way, even the ones I did with Jonathan Demme. Rust Never Sleeps, Journey Through the Past, Human Highway, Greendale, and all the other productions I worked on were collaborations with him, and he supervised all of the production efforts. That is just part of who Larry was.
Larry can be seen as my brother, as my friend, certainly one of the best friends in my life. His relationships with the Bridge School students were genuine and heartwarming. He served on our board of directors and helped in any way he could.
1953 Buick Skylark
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ne day in the very early nineties, Jon McKeig told me he had made a miraculous discovery. Jon was really excited. He had gone out to a body shop in Pleasanton and in the shop, disassembled to pieces, was a total basket case. It was in restoration and had been a
bandoned by the Blackhawk Collection in Danville, California, one of the finest and most famous auto collections I had ever heard of. They had hundreds of cars. For some reason, this one sat in pieces, neglected for years, painted but never rubbed out, never finished, never reassembled, abandoned and forgotten. It was an original 1953 Buick Skylark. But that was not all. Under the hood on the firewall was the nameplate with the serial number on it, G1. This was the first Buick Skylark ever built!
As I have said, Jon McKeig’s methods of restoration are legendary for the pace they move at and the quality we strove for. We tried to make the cars like new, yet still show their age through faded colors and slightly tarnished chrome. To those immersed in the car world, these special cars are called “survivors.”
Eventually I moved the Skylark #1 to Roy Brizio’s shop for restoration. Jon McKeig had a big hand in the finish and the car still had his mark, especially on the interior, although some of the mechanical parts showed the differences in approaches between Brizio and McKeig. With this survivor, I got the best of both worlds. It now stands completely finished on its spoked wheels, a rolling piece of American automotive history and the pride of General Motors, residing in Feelgood’s, and ready to roll at the turn of a key.
Riding home from a practice with Crazy Horse at Shoreline Amphitheatre, preparing for a world tour in 2012, the Skylark rode like a dream. I cruised along 280 to the mountain turnoff at about seventy, as I adjusted the loose mirror with the miles flowing by. What should we open with? I asked myself. We needed an easy one first. One that is organized, that everyone knows. One that says “Here we are,” and I mean we. On the mountain road, I had the brights on when I hit a curve. Another car was coming toward me. Trying to dim my lights quickly and forgetting that the big steering wheel needs to turn more to make a curve, I was suddenly blinded by the headlights of the oncoming car. I nearly crossed the yellow line. That scared the hell out of me. It struck me that someday I might not be so lucky if I did not become more careful. I was tired.