by Neil Young
Buffalo Springfield near my Laurel Canyon cabin, 1967. Left to right, Dewey Martin, me, Richie Furay, Jim Fielder (replacing Bruce Palmer), Stephen Stills.
Chapter Twenty
There was a thing in Hollywood in the sixties called Teen Fair. It took place near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street across from what was then Wallich’s Music City, an amazing store. Let me describe Wallich’s for you: They sold all kinds of music there—45s, LPs, sheet music, books about music—and in a little shop upstairs guitars and other instruments were displayed. There were also listening booths where you could hear singles on headphones and see if you wanted to buy them. I spent a lot of time there. Of course, the place was crawling with flower children and beautiful hippie girls.
Anyway, like I said, upstairs at Wallich’s there was a great guitar department. Martins, Gibsons, all manner of electric and very nice old acoustic guitars were there. This was around the time the Springfield was happening; we were playing at the Whisky a Go Go, about a mile down Sunset toward Beverly Hills. Stills and I went to Wallich’s a lot and tried out Martins together. Stephen was fast becoming an excellent player and had surpassed me in his knowledge of voicings, and he was always playing rhythms naturally that blew my mind.
One day, I was there at Teen Fair with a few friends, looking around, taking in the sights, the sounds, the girls, the crowds, an overwhelming chaos of inputs, when the sky started to spin a little and I felt a bit sick to my stomach. I started to fall. The sky was getting dark and the sounds were all echoing, a hollow reverberation inside my head. Lying on my back on the pavement, I saw the faces looking down on me. It was like I had just been born, and I recognized no one. I didn’t really even know my own name. I was hot and sweating.
“Neil, Neil! Are you okay? Are you all right?”
I didn’t know the answer to that question, but I was becoming aware that my name was Neil and that I was in a crowd of people lying down somewhere. I did feel strangely reborn. On the other hand, I was being helped up and people were all dispersing and walking away. Someone must have taken me home, back to Barry’s, and later I fell asleep, I guess.
From that moment on, for years, I lived in constant fear that it was going to happen again. I could feel it in my stomach, and then I would get really scared and withdrawn until it went away. I felt it onstage, I felt it in crowds, I felt it in grocery stores, this unreasonable anxiety all the time waiting in the wings to come out and envelop me. It had an effect. Eventually I could not even go to the Laurel Canyon Country Store, which was near my place, to buy food. There were too many aisles and too much produce, too many choices for me.
The Canyon Country Store was just two blocks from where I had been living in the hearse less than a year before. I now had a house/cabin at the top of Ridpath Avenue near Utica Drive, way up at the end of the road at the top of Laurel Canyon. It was a crazy place up there, with a main house, a garage, and a little cabin. The shingles were all curved and mystical like a witch’s castle. Wonderful. I was renting a cabin at the top of a flight of stairs, maybe one to two hundred–plus steps. Below it, the garage was down on Utica, and a drummer, John Densmore of the Doors, lived there. The garage was constructed with the same mystical shingle work. An astrologer, Kiyo Hodel, was my landlord. She lived in the main house of the whole compound and was very cosmic. The little cabin was made of knotty pine, very rustic, and I loved it. I had a llama rug on the floor. A lot happened to me up there. I brought a lot of girls up there to my little shack and we had good times, although I was not very confident in myself and probably not an impressive lover to be sure. We could call it performance anxiety.
I was kind of lost in that area and worked on that for a long, long time. Learning how to open up and give myself to another person, learning the depths of intimacy as more than sex. It has become the journey of a lifetime, one of the great revelations. I never did get much advice from my father and growing up missed his presence to quite a degree. I’m uncomfortable talking about that, but I feel a lot better about myself now than I did in my earlier days.
One day Dennis Hopper, who Stephen had met through Peter Fonda, came and took some pictures of the Springfield behind my little cabin. It was very simple, with only two rooms, a bedroom and a bathroom, and a little add-on porch where I kept my fridge. Who knows what I put in that fridge? It was certainly not much. I think I had a hot plate, too. I used it for pork and beans . . . probably.
Once, when I had been on the road for a week or so, I stopped on Sunset at the Whisky before going home to the cabin. I met the daughter of one of the Rat Pack there that night and brought her up to show her my place. She was very nice. We went back to the cabin late that night without me having a chance to get there first. Somehow I had closed my cat in there for a week. The cabin was full of cat shit! Wow! I’ve never seen a girl get out of anyplace faster than she did. I did not make a very good impression on her.
In that little cabin, I wrote “Mr. Soul,” “Expecting to Fly,” “Broken Arrow,” and a few other songs. I would listen to acetates of the mixes with my friends often there, too. (Acetates were records that you could make fast and play only a few times before they wore out and lost their sound. They would make them to take home and listen to right after we cut a song at Gold Star Studios in a little room where a lathe was set up. I still remember that acetate smell. The acetate would go in a little record sleeve and a Gold Star label would be typed up and stuck on it. I heard the first Buffalo Springfield album for the first time on my KLH record player and speakers in that little room.) We would hang and play records for hours, sitting on the llama rug in front of the speakers, listening to tracks like “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles over and over. The sound was so good, you could never get enough of it. I really feel sorry for kids with their MP3s today who can’t hear music the way we did then. What a bummer. I can’t imagine that. It really bothers me.
Now, I didn’t get this cabin until the Springfield was happening, months after my first episode at Teen Fair, but somehow we got around to the subject, so here we are. The Canyon Country Store was where I bought food. Not that I bought much food. I would go down there and stand in the parking lot, working up the nerve to go in, hoping I would not get anxious and paranoid and freak out, leaving whatever I had chosen to buy inside and bolting for the door. This anxious feeling was similar to a seizure feeling in my stomach, and I couldn’t tell the difference, so I just panicked.
Somewhere along the line, our managers, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, who we hired in 1966, set up an appointment for me with a doctor at UCLA Medical Center to do some tests. April Full, Greene and Stone’s secretary, took me down there. First they stuck a bunch of things on my head and gave me a little liquid in a cup and told me to go in this dark room and lie down. Then they wired all the things up, and while I was lying there I could feel these little flashes. I still feel those today, kind of like little rushes of something, gusts of cosmic wind in my head. My hearing changes for an instant, and it’s hard to describe. Anyway. I live with that, and it’s nothing. But it is somehow related to the feeling I used to get going up and down steep hills in my car. After that test, which revealed nothing to my knowledge, I went back to April’s house. April chose that moment to explain to me what turned a woman on, demonstrating what would be physically stimulating for me to do as an education for me to apply later in life, say five or ten minutes later at the most.
It was not long afterward that suddenly I realized I had the clap. There were a lot of hippie girls, and we saw them at the Whisky all the time. After the show it was time to go to the International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard. I remember those German pancakes. They were delicious. How much sugar can one person eat? After that we paired off and went back to our shacks for some fun. Anyway, I had the clap and I had to go to the clinic. The doctor said he wanted to draw some blood. I said okay. I was on a metal table. He drew my blood. I crashed and had another full-on seizure on the spot. The same
feeling. The room spinning slowly, the echoes, the darkness creeping in, and finally the doctor and nurses trying to get me back on the table, shoving a piece of wood in my mouth so I wouldn’t bite off my own tongue. Then remembering my name, starting over. Getting a grip on my identity, where I lived, etc. It would all come back in a semi-orderly fashion, like a reboot. Eventually, I had to take another test with Dr. Morton K. Rubenstein. I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS TEST. It is barbaric. It was called a pneumoencephalogram.
Pneumoencephalography (sometimes abbreviated PEG) is a medical procedure in which most of the cerebrospinal fluid is drained from around the brain and replaced with air, oxygen, or helium to allow the structure of the brain to show up more clearly on an X-ray image. It is derived from ventriculography, an earlier and more primitive method where the air is injected through holes drilled in the skull.
The procedure was introduced in 1919 by the American neurosurgeon Walter Dandy.
Pneumoencephalography was performed extensively throughout the early twentieth century, but it was extremely painful. The test was generally not well tolerated by patients. Headaches and severe vomiting were common side effects. Replacement of the drained spinal fluid is by slow natural production, and therefore required recovery for as long as two to three months before normal fluid volumes were restored . . . Modern imaging techniques such as MRI and computed tomography have rendered pneumoencephalography obsolete. Today, pneumoencephalography is limited to the research field and is used under rare circumstances.
Thanks, Wiki.
It is the most painful thing I have ever been through. Pure torture, where they tie you into a big device, stick a needle in you, and inject radioactive dye into your spinal column. Then they track its progress through your brain. Of course, being man-made, it is flawed, and bubbles sometimes get in there with the radioactive dye. These fucking bubbles are the worst pain ever in the universe. I took a long time to recover from that shit, and they learned nothing. I am still pissed about that. Of course, medical professionals don’t do that test anymore. It’s too barbaric. I am even more pissed now to realize that they knew they were injecting gas into my brain, then they had the nerve to tell me some bubbles might have gotten in there with the dye. I am pissed. I am over it. None of these tests revealed any new information about my condition. There was no conclusion. The doctor’s recommendations were that I not take any LSD. Prior to that I had never had a doctor recommend that I take LSD. I had never taken acid. I never wanted to, anyway. I hallucinate enough on my own and can’t control that.
In my life I have had various health threats: polio, seizures, a brain aneurysm. None of these things has really changed me much, although it is hard to say for sure. These are events that are part of my life. They make me who I am. I am thankful for them. They are scary.
With Joni Mitchell, doing her song “Raised on Robbery” at Studio Instrument Rentals in Los Angeles, where the album Tonight’s the Night was recorded in 1973.
Chapter Twenty-One
Have you ever wondered what goes into writing a song? I wish I could tell you the exact ingredients, but there is nothing specific that comes to mind. It seems to me that songs are a product of experience and a cosmic alignment of circumstance. That is, who you are and how you feel at a certain time.
I have written a lot of songs. Some of them suck. Some of them are brilliant, and some are just okay. Those are all other people’s opinions. To me, they are like children. They are born and raised and sent out into the world to fend for themselves. It’s not an easy place to be, the world, for a song. You might find yourself on a tape in the garbage, or on a CD someone threw out, or you may even be in the bargain bin. You may be a forgotten song languishing on a vinyl record in the dump or, more hopefully, in an independent record store rack. In one of the worst cases, you may be relegated to being nothing more than another MP3 file with less than five percent of your original sound. However, someone had to create you, and that is our subject for now.
I have not written one song since I stopped smoking weed in January 2011, so we are currently in the midst of a great chemical experiment.
When I write a song, it starts with a feeling. I can hear something in my head or feel it in my heart. It may be that I just picked up the guitar and mindlessly started playing. That’s the way a lot of songs begin. When you do that, you are not thinking. Thinking is the worst thing for writing a song. So you just start playing and something new comes out. Where does it come from? Who cares? Just keep it and go with it. That’s what I do. I never judge it. I believe it. It came as a gift when I picked up my musical instrument and it came through me playing with the instrument. The chords and melody just appeared. Now is not the time for interrogation or analysis. Now is the time to get to know the song, not change it before you even know it. It is like a wild animal, a living thing. Be careful not to scare it away. That’s my method, or one of my methods, at least.
I was just thinking that I am putting a lot of pressure on myself to write a song. That never works. Songs are like rabbits and they like to come out of their holes when you’re not looking, so if you stand there waiting they will just burrow down and come out somewhere far away, a new place where you can’t see them. So I feel like I am standing over a song hole. That will never result in success. The more we talk about this, the worse it will get. So that is why we are changing the subject.
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The Black Queen is a 1947 Buick Roadmaster sedanette fastback. Originally the Black Queen was found in Idaho in a church parking lot by a friend of mine who purchased it for $650. That was a great deal. I used this car exclusively during the recording of Tonight’s the Night. This is a beautiful car that is out of Feelgood’s right now, getting some work done on the transmission. Tonight’s the Night is an LP that centers in on the lives and deaths of Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten. Both tragic deaths were drug-related. There was an epidemic of these events going on in the early seventies, and I was not interested in referring to it directly. I did not want to be specific. These were just my friends. Actually, Tonight’s the Night centers in on the aftermath of those deaths. It is a wake of sorts.
Anyway, the Tonight’s the Night sessions, recorded on the Green Board by David Briggs, were done at SIR, Studio Instrument Rentals. Jan Berry of Jan & Dean, the surf legends, was an owner of SIR and the older brother of Bruce, one of CSNY’s roadies. So memorializing Bruce Berry, the little brother of Jan, at those sessions was particularly close to home. Danny Whitten, the original Crazy Horse guitarist and singer, was the spirit of the album, as was Bruce. The songs were all pretty down. Both Bruce and Danny had OD’d on heroin.
It was an LP recorded in audio vérité, if you will, while completely intoxicated on Jose Cuervo tequila. We would not start recording until midnight, when we were so fucked up we could hardly walk. One night Joni Mitchell came in and did “Raised on Robbery” in the most sexy and revealing version that song ever had. She still refuses to let me release it. I don’t know what the hell she was thinking when she joined us and sang the song. It kicks ass. What the fuck was that about? It was funkier than anything she has ever cut. A total gem!
I drove to SIR and home from SIR in the Black Queen nightly. The album was risky and real. It was a real mess of a recording, with no respect given to technical issues, although it sounds like God when played loud, under the able production of David Briggs. The original roughs were never remixed to our satisfaction, and the album was held up for more than a year, and released after one or two other albums were already done. Zeke Young used to use the rough masters on his toy tape recorder, practicing threading, winding, and rewinding the tapes for when he would grow up and be a big-time recording engineer.
This album survived a memorable production cycle unparalleled in my history, from the great David Briggs to my three-year-old son Zeke, all having their way with those rough master tapes. Those original roughs were used in the final release.
Homegrown had been recorded and On the Beach
had already been released when Ben Keith and I played the tapes one midnight in what is now known as the Belushi bungalow of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont Hotel for Rick Danko of The Band and some other musicians. Rick said after hearing Homegrown and then Tonight’s the Night, “You ought to put THAT out! What the hell is THAT?” So we did. It was Rick Danko who brought it back. Homegrown, which I think is a great album, is still unreleased to this day. (It will come out, though, and we are preparing it now.)
When I played Tonight’s the Night for Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker at Reprise, as was always my habit to do when I handed a record in, Mo asked, “Neil, are you sure you want to put THAT out? It is really rough, and it may not be received well.” I said yes. He understood why, which makes him one of the greatest record men of all time, along with Ahmet Ertegun and Clive Davis. Then we got in the Black Queen and rode home to the ranch, at least a full year after Tonight’s the Night had been originally recorded. The car was there for every event tied to that record. Every night after those sessions, we rode the Black Queen home to the Sunset Marquis on Alta Loma in Hollywood, weaving down Santa Monica Boulevard at three or four in the morning, completely wrecked on tequila, and we made it, so there is a God.
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When I first went to Topanga, I still didn’t have a California driver’s license, because I was in the country illegally. I had no Social Security number. I had recently gone to Santa Ana and purchased the 1951 Willys Jeepster that I have told you about already.