by Neil Young
One time, Taylor and Gary had come over to the ranch and visited Shakey Heights so I could play them the title song I had written and recorded for Jonathan Demme’s classic film Philadelphia. When they sat down on the couch, I put it on the stereo, played it through my big old Altec speakers and McIntosh amps, and listened with them. Closing my eyes, I felt the music and the song heavily. When it was over, I looked over at both of them; they were crying together in an embrace. That, and Tom Hanks’s gracious mention of my song as one of the inspirations for his own performance in the film Philadelphia, will be meaningful to me forever, and connected my friend Taylor to the music.
Now I wonder what that hearse is doing sitting quietly there in my warehouse. Should I repair it for another ride so it is ready when it is needed? Does it need attention? Is that why I have it? Of course it is. If there is ever a situation where the hearse is required again, I want it to be ready, yet I am somehow slow in preparing, not wanting to be too ready. There is an old bumper sticker Taylor left on it, where these immortal words are written: SHIT HAPPENS.
1978 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz “Eldora” (The Pony Caddy)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
n 2001, we were living in San Francisco in an apartment we had found on Green Street. It was a beautiful place to live, and our apartment had a great view of the San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz. We could see the big ocean freighters and oil tankers coming and going right from our breakfast table in the kitchen. Every apartment was a full floor. We were on the ninth, and the views were spectacular from every room. The elevator opened into a small vestibule with a door to our apartment. We had a big American flag hanging in this room, which covered the wall.
Amber was a budding artist and was in high school. The apartment’s location made it a lot easier for us to drive her, compared to the ranch, which was very remote. City life was exciting to us because it was so easy to find things to do and places to go and it gave us new variety in our lives. Although I missed the ranch, it was a change I could embrace.
Our apartment had a great front room with a fireplace where I loved to curl up in an overstuffed couch with a book, the fire roaring with wood we brought from the ranch and stored in the basement. A picture of Amber in a top hat was on one of the walls.
Pegi loved the apartment. So did Amber. She had a bedroom filled with her teenage high school things and a metal bedroom set from the thirties that we had found in an antique store. Pegi and I had a lot of fun buying old rugs and furniture, and she really made it feel homey like the ranch. We would visit the ranch on weekends quite often.
I was recording an album with Crazy Horse in an old studio called Toast in the SoMa area (South of Market Street), a pretty arty neighborhood that was being overtaken by lofts and new buildings spawned by the dot-com bubble. There was a lot of new money and things were changing very fast. The studio was for sale when we were there and it looked like it wouldn’t be around for long.
Everything seemed temporary, even Crazy Horse. We were not doing well in the studio. Although we had some great moments and the music was soulful, it wasn’t happy or settled. It was moody and jazzy. This was where Coltrane had cut some of his early classics and we could feel it. A back door made of old metal opened out onto an alley where we used to take smoke breaks. Every night we would go to a restaurant on Market Street and eat dinner together, then go back to the studio and play some more, trying to find the magic that had always been with us.
In the middle of these sessions, we had a gig in South America called Rock in Rio. Before we left, we played a show at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco as a warm-up. It was where the Grateful Dead played a lot back in the day. There were paintings of Jerry Garcia on the side of the building where the stage door was. I felt like I was late or had missed the moment or something, just a little out of place. The history celebrated there was something I had not experienced.
We went down to Brazil’s Rock in Rio and played one show and then moved on to Argentina. The crowds really loved us. Pegi and my sister, Astrid, from my dad’s second marriage, were along singing with us, and we really were sounding good. Astrid had been in LA, making a couple of heavy metal records of her own. It was different to have anyone else singing with us, though, and we were a little unsettled. But overall it was great, and we rocked. When we got back from Rio and were recording at Toast again, we had new energy and recorded a song called “Gateway of Love.” We did some great stuff at Toast, one called “Mr. Disappointment,” and another called “Quit,” but eventually I gave up and abandoned the album. Like my personal life, where I was having some serious problems with my marriage, there was just something missing. I was not happy with it, or maybe I was just generally unhappy. I don’t know. It was a desolate album, very sad and unanswered. I guess you might say that I don’t want to talk about it.
Toast was to be the name of the album. It felt like toast. There is a lot of soul in it. I played my guitar like an old horn, with a big fat sad sound. Ralphie, Billy, and Poncho gave it the old funky feel. It might be a gem. The ghosts of Coltrane and his musicians were everywhere at Toast. It was spiritual. Down and almost out. I missed Briggs, I knew that much, but we had Hanlon, and he was getting a great sound. It was no one’s fault. There is something there and it may be a lot better than what I remember.
It is still unreleased, waiting for its huge and fat surround sound to be unleashed in an art gallery somewhere, full of paintings done by my friends. It will be a huge room with speakers in all four corners and a giant subwoofer under a big table in the very middle of the room where many glass water vessels will vibrate, creating waves moving with the bass. Beautiful women with large hats will smoke cigarettes left over from the forties and talk with angry young men about art and music. I am looking forward to it. My friends will all be there.
• • •
ALSO WITH US on Green Street was Carl, a cross of a golden retriever and a standard poodle, sometimes called a Goldendoodle. When we first got Carl in 1996 from a friend of Amber’s, he was about four months old. We were living on the ranch at the time, and when we played with him on the lawn, he was always full of pep and so big! Carl could run sideways, which he would demonstrate for us every time he ran at full speed and turned to fetch something we threw. As he turned, he kept running at full speed, resulting in his astounding sideways run. That move goes down as one of the greatest in doggie history. Lovingly dubbed “Carl the Affection Hound” by Pegi, who adored him, Carl was a stunningly great-looking animal and drew praise from everyone who saw him. This was a very special dog with so much love and adventure in his eyes. We were lucky he traveled the world with us.
At the apartment on Green Street, sometimes when I took a walk on the “Poop Loop” with Carl, Amber went along with us. It was really cool taking these little walks with Amber. They were one of those beautiful low-key times we got to talk. Once, we were walking along, chatting and laughing about something, when a fabulous sight appeared right before our eyes: a giant, pale yellow Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz was parked right on the street with a FOR SALE $2,500 sign on it! Taking a moment to admire the plush white leather interior and vinyl top, I could see that this Eldorado was in fine shape with only a little rust showing. It was a 1978 model with front-wheel drive and a giant V8.
A proud Cadillac ornament adorned the huge expanse of hood. Everything about it was deluxe. I immediately loved it. Amber loved it, too. It was an exciting and cool car. These big cars were all way out of style because of the price of gas, $1.83 per gallon, and the smog from their exhaust, but that didn’t bother me one bit. Neither did the 1.6 pounds of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere every mile traveled. This was a piece of art. We took down the phone number on the sign in the windshield and continued our walk with Carl. I called the number and made a reservation to meet the owner and check out the car.
Later, Amber and I took off to a Safeway parking lot in the middle of town, where we met
the Cadillac’s owner. At first, I thought it was strange we weren’t going to the owner’s house, but then it dawned on me that we could not have gone to the owner’s house because that would not be safe for anybody. Nobody ever gave away a real home address to a complete stranger. The world certainly was different from when I was growing up in Canada.
So there we were in the Safeway parking lot. The owner was standing by the car when I walked up and said hello. He said the car ran well but didn’t have the power it was supposed to have and strained on the hills, but it was reliable. I gave him the cash after driving it around the block. It felt fine to me, and I drove it back to the apartment. That Cadillac was the last gas-guzzler I bought. Amber was thrilled that I got it, and we immediately went for a ride. The next morning I drove her to school in it. It was our car. We found it together. I still take the Eldorado whenever I think I will be going somewhere with Amber: to a movie, art show, anything. I like that memory of finding it together on our walk with Carl.
Soon afterward I took it to the session at Toast and showed it to the guys. I had told them all about the yellow Caddy I had found with Amber. “It’s not yellow, it’s white!” said Billy. Of course, he was right. I guess my color blindness and the sunset colors made it look pale yellow to me, and it still does, kind of ivory white.
I abandoned the Toast project because it wore me out. Music can be that way. Toast may be great music. If it is, then it will stand the test of time. I went on to record some of those songs with Booker T. and Duck Dunn of Booker T. and the MG’s, at a studio in Marin County called the Site. I drove the Eldorado up there every day and parked in the lot, probably getting about twelve miles to the gallon, passing George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch on the way. It was a cool session, playing with Booker, Duck Dunn, and Steve Potts. I could smell the fumes from the engine. It was starting to bother me that I was polluting, but I loved the car.
When Amber was about seventeen or eighteen, it was time for her to get a driver’s license. We had not rushed it. She was taking her time. She felt she was not ready before then. I started giving her little driving lessons on the ranch, and of course she drove the Eldorado. Our roads are very narrow, with some steep cliffside drop-offs, and you have to really watch what you are doing. I reasoned that she would be confident in driving anything if she could drive the Caddy. Away we went, to the barn and back, practicing turning around and backing up, and eventually she drove all the way across the ranch. Over the period of a couple of weeks, she got really good. She would move the seat up and sit up really straight behind the wheel so she could see over the hood.
She did notice that because of the size of the hood, she could sometimes not see the road. This often happened when she crested a hill. I told her to look at the side of the road out the side window and to stay close to the edge, thereby always making sure she was on the pavement. It took a little doing, but that was really a cool bonding between us. I loved every moment of it. Now she has a Prius, and I don’t think she wants to drive the Caddy, but I will have to find that out. Amber is a cautious driver, very responsible.
In 2003, when I made Shakey Pictures’ Greendale with the Upstream Multimedia crew, the 1978 Eldorado, dubbed Eldora by Jon McKeig, played a big part as Grandpa Green’s car. Every morning at the ranch, I would get up before the sun and grab some coffee. Then I would jump in Eldora and drive to the coast town of Half Moon Bay, where most of the filming was done. Grandpa Green was one of the main characters, portrayed by Ben Keith, and Grandpa’s car was that Eldorado Biarritz. We got some great shots of Eldora being driven by Grandpa and Grandma through Greendale and the surrounding areas. What a wonderful time of life that was, all my friends working together on something new. Sarah White was a schoolmate of Amber’s and we had discovered her talent when she acted in one of the school plays. She played Sun Green, the heroine of Greendale, a young girl coming of age and finding her voice as an activist, protesting against the oil companies and a villainous anti-environment pollution-spreading corporation, POWERCO.
One day after the movie was made, we were on the road touring the Greendale stage, when Sarah took me aside. With all of the intensity of youth unbridled, she told me I was hypocritical for doing that film and having all the big trucks and buses, as well as the airplanes we used. That stuck with me. She was absolutely right. Imagine a character in my own story telling me that I was hypocritical for not practicing what I was preaching. That was a seminal moment. That young lady made a lot of sense. Very soon after, I seriously started focusing on energy solutions and using biofuels for my tours. That was eleven years ago. Sun Green had her first convert.
My thinking about the environment and the damage being done to it had mostly come from examples of big corporations raping the land and destroying natural things in the endless quest for oil and energy. The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with alternative energy. Climate change was a big idea and I began wrapping my head around it, trying to get an understanding of options for alternative energy. The more I looked, the more I learned what an immense challenge the world was facing. That’s when I began dedicating myself more to the task of raising awareness, which is pretty much the only thing a celebrity can do. But I was fascinated with the technology side, too: What were the solutions? What had been tried? Why did some projects fail? And the marketing side: Why did people not get it? Why did they not understand the world’s situation? Why did the media, especially TV networks, downplay and ignore the obvious so consistently, making it virtually impossible for the masses to grasp reality as far as the importance of climate change was concerned?
These were important questions. I searched every place I could find for a solution to the problem of polluting automobiles. I researched a man named Stanley Meyer who had fueled a car with water. I spent a year focused on him, trying to figure out whether that was a hoax or an amazing discovery. I visited a company named Realm Industries in California where a young man gave us a convincing demonstration and presentation about water gas. A year later, that young man was killed in an accident at Realm Industries when water gas exploded. The power contained in it was awesome, but the amount of energy that was needed to unleash it was too much. We couldn’t figure it out. Realm said that they had, but they would not let anyone know because they feared the technology would fall into the wrong hands. Realm wanted to only do good with their discovery. We never could make an arrangement with them that allowed us to demonstrate their technology in a car, although they showed us a Land Rover whose engine was idling on water gas.
A man in Canada had some promising power-generating technology, but he wouldn’t let us use it in an application meant for transportation. Everyone had a reason for not sharing. It was very frustrating and left us wondering whether any of these people, or others like them, actually had a solution.
I went to Australia, chasing a fuel-vaporizing concept, and got ripped off by a doctor for thousands of dollars. He told me I could use the technology and make a film about the development of it for an amount of money. I filmed for several months, and when he was done, he took my money and said the technology was his alone, that I had only paid for the right to film. There were more rip-offs and hoaxes than you could ever imagine, and I only found a few of them. I still believe that there is something undiscovered out there, and I am not the only one who feels that way. I just didn’t have the endless resources to deal with these people and their eccentricities. It wore me out. I gave up on all of that pie-in-the-sky stuff after about a year and a half and started trying to focus on other methods, more accepted and demonstrable technologies that were firmly within the possibility of physics.
Then I came to know more about carbon and was blown away by the facts. I spent hours and hours reading papers on the Internet and reviewing speeches given at world conferences on biofuels. I was fascinated to learn how much I had missed, how much I had no idea about, how many people were trying to solve this riddle. I developed an
insatiable curiosity about fuels and efficiency, electricity, and power storage. I said somewhere that battery technology development is my Super Bowl. That’s the game I watch: the development of better batteries. I know that is the key to solar energy powering civilization. I refuse to close the door on anything forever, including nuclear power. I have faith in technology and I believe we can find solutions if we put the financial resources available behind development of secure power. A slow death through climate change is just as scary to me as a fast death. I don’t want either one. We have a challenge.
So my ideas and concepts about my favorite subject, transportation, and what is both desirable and required, changed very radically in a short period of time. I came to believe that, to make a fast change, you must give people what they want and make it clean. Giving people what they don’t want and making that cleaner is not enough. Many people will just ignore it. You can’t force people to like something they don’t want. People need to have what they are accustomed to having. Science and technology need to provide it in a clean way. Go with the flow. That was my thinking.
In 2011, we started a company called Pono, to rescue the art of recorded music by bringing a quality listening alternative to the marketplace. I had a Pono sound system installed in Eldora with a sub-bass woofer in the trunk, new speakers and amplifiers throughout, and a demo development version of Pono. The idea was to take the car to places where my artist friends were playing their music and expose them to the Pono sound by taking them for little rides in the Caddy and giving them demonstrations.
The 1978 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz became the Pono messenger. Sitting on those plush leather seats, listening to great music and full high-resolution twenty-first-century digital sound was a wonderful experience. I began to listen to all of my new records in Eldora before I signed off on them for release.