by Neil Young
A Ghost from the Past
Lincvolt is a constantly evolving vehicle. We have just announced our new A123 Battery system, far superior in every respect to the previous battery pack. We have made many more changes in design and we will be announcing them as the weeks unfold. The work will be done in California, home of the greatest hot rods on earth, both in Northern California and Southern California. We will be telling you more about that, too.
Here at Lincvolt.com, you have seen Lincvolt at Brizio Street Rods in South San Francisco for the last couple of weeks. A bare metal body, painstakingly restored at Camilleri’s in Sacramento, is now covered with primer and ready for the rebuild. What you can’t see is that the suspension and parts of the power train have been put in place or prepared for placement under Lincvolt’s massive and beautiful uni-body during the last weeks.
Lincvolt has been redesigned in and out. When all of the new components are installed and tested, as a final stage, an aerodynamic covering will shroud the underbody, reducing drag and allowing Lincvolt to cut through the air more efficiently than ever before at high speeds. We expect the under-shrouding to have more of an effect the faster the car travels. These measurements will allow us to see how much energy is consumed for highway cruising. A typical 400–500 mile day at highway speeds of 70 mph or more on changing terrain is nothing for a Continental, so she has to be ready for that challenge. Many of the changes we are about to announce are designed to make long trips at highway speeds a reality. This is what the Ford Motor Company’s Lincoln Continental was designed for, not just arriving in style like a ’50s dream. That is why Lincvolt is destined to be a Continental Electro Cruiser like the world has never seen, like a ghost from the past, arriving smoothly and silently at every destination.
You can see the love I have for this project, this car. I am so into this that I sometimes wonder where all the energy to keep doing it is coming from. I am not exactly sure, but it feels so good! Basically I just love the car. The idea to do this just sprang to mind one day as I was looking at the car, knowing what a guzzler it was. Since I was a kid I have loved big cars. It’s just in me. I wanted to do something. Try to make a difference somehow. I didn’t care if I failed or not, I just wanted to try. Having no knowledge is sometimes exactly what is needed to find a solution, so I qualified. I have come to think that electric power generated from natural sources like wind and solar is the optimum solution, but we need something created domestically to keep the power flowing, a fuel from the United States that does not require wars.
The movie about Lincvolt’s odyssey is a monster project. After four full years of work, we have time lapse of almost all of the projects in the various shops. There was some pretty flaky stuff happening in the beginning, and I was so enthusiastic about it all that I couldn’t really see what was going on. Using water for fuel was one of those things. We spent a year plus on that. The guys I was working with believed it could happen. Light was finally shed. Then we moved out of Wichita back to California and eventually had our fire accident (or thermal runaway, as it is sometimes called) because one of our team made an error and left an untested system plugged in. It was a human error, not a fault of tested battery technology.
When the car burned to the ground, it gave us a good opportunity to start over with the insurance money. And when everyone saw I was not pausing, that I was continuing with the project and was doubling down to get it right, they all started helping me like never before. I am overwhelmed with the support we are getting from Ford Motors, AVL, A123 Systems, UQM, and Brizio Street Rods!
The movie, though, is a whole other thing.
Shakey Pictures has an epic on its hands! My favorite part by far is that first ride out to Wichita in the original car with Larry Johnson. We had such a great time! I am so glad to have that memory and a recording of it. It is a beautiful thing to have, and it makes me feel so happy! All of the footage surrounding the Wichita build may end up on the cutting-room floor, though. Looking back, it doesn’t make me feel very good, because the task of building the car became so difficult. But I am going to go through it, pull out the gems, and tell the story. Johnathan Goodwin had great energy and enthusiasm for the car. He gave us a good “proof of concept” and proved an electric car with a generator was feasible, but we kept getting derailed by undisciplined process, lack of planning, and not enough attention to detail. He gave it everything he had.
Anyway, I became so emotionally involved, I was talking to the car. It got personal. The movie is going to be nuts. We did a lot of episodes in my junkyard at the ranch, recapping progress. The one we did after Larry passed is going to be hard to watch. There is a scene where Larry’s son, Ben Johnson, and I are driving in the car and talking about how we are going to handle Larry’s passing in the film. Ben is editing this with me and is the cinematographer as well, now that Larry is gone from our lives. Not really gone; just physically not here with us. There is a lot of reality in this project. It is a labor of love. We are in the editing process now, and Ben has made a portable editing room we can take anywhere. Just the sort of thing his father would have done. I am constantly amazed by Ben’s uncanny ability to continue in his dad’s footsteps while completely retaining his individuality. Writing this book and finishing this film with Ben Johnson are my two big goals right now.
Today I have zero interest in touring or playing music, but that is not a threat to me. It has happened before. The muse is out and about and no doubt visiting with someone else, making magic. A little more rest in Hawaii and I will be ready to dive back into the Lincvolt movie with Ben Johnson. What a journey of discovery that will be.
Chapter Forty-Six
I became very interested in filmmaking around the time I was recording Harvest. I was looking for another outlet, and film had a lot to offer, especially when combined with music. I saw it as a logical extension of my work. My first movie, with Larry Johnson and David Myers, Journey Through the Past, was a wild and crazy experiment that showed no fear. Larry and I, along with David Myers and Frederic Underhill producing, fashioned this documentary/fantasy piece and completed it in 1972. It was a great experience and the birth of Shakey Pictures.
My favorite filmmaker was Jean-Luc Godard. I loved long uninterrupted shots that played out and told a story. I was not a big fan of fast cutting and preferred to not use dissolves. I learned so much from David Myers. He was a gifted cinematographer. I learned how one camera could cover a live event and provide everything the editor needed to cut a sequence, and I learned the virtues of a fixed lens in documentary filming. David’s 5:9 lens is still my favorite tool to create a documentary. I was editing on a KEM Universal table, an electromechanical editing machine that was able to run three reels at the same time, and I was learning as I went along. It was all new and very captivating. It was an incredible experience, an absorbing way to edit film, so creative and empowering to put the pictures and music together and create a whole new experience.
We started editing in my house, and when the ranch studio was finished being built, we moved over there and continued. It is impossible to explain what that movie, Journey Through the Past, is or what it means; you just need to see it to understand. It is not Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind. (The reviewers made that pretty evident.) I am not a mainstream movie guy. But it was a way early music video long form, in some obscure ways. We were proud of it. I wish Larry Johnson was still around so we could continue our life’s work together. I guess that’s why they call it “life’s work.”
We began by going to the South and doing some filming in and around the Carolinas and then Nashville. I had released “Southern Man” and wanted some aerial footage to use with the guitar jamming instrumentals. There was a good CSNY version we had on film that I wanted to embellish. While we were in Nashville, we started traveling around doing documentary shoots. We did one in a junkyard and one at a barge launching. Anything was fair game. We went to a radio station and I did an interview with the DJ, and we shot that.
It is interesting to see that episode today because it shows what radio used to be like when there were still real people involved. I mean when the DJs chose their own content to play as well as the top hits and weren’t following a formula devised by a media marketing company that had been hired by the station. (There was a kid in the reception area, Gil Gilliam, who had a unique look because he had a liver problem and had grown up with it. He was very talented, energetic, and outgoing. I liked him immediately. He had a great look, attitude, and presence. We asked him to continue with us in the film and he did a great job.)
Back in California we shot an old car traveling through redwood country and followed it to an old gas station. We put together a cast of characters inside the station and did a scene there.
Though all of the scenes were interrelated, there was really no thread of continuity that was obvious. I came up with a story about a graduate from school who was dropped off in the desert by some characters: an Italian mafioso, a Catholic cardinal, and an army general. They had dropped off this beat-up and bloodied graduate kid they had in the trunk, still in his cap and gown, out in the desert, and when he got up and started walking, we followed him until he arrived at the Pacific Ocean via Las Vegas and a lot of other places. Gil, the kid we met in the radio station, showed up at the gas station’s restaurant with a card shark and they were sharing a booth. There was also a preacher walking and dancing with a truck. He eventually showed up at the gas station, too. There was a guy walking on the beach with his truck and the truck was talking to him. By the time the graduate got to the beach, he was a junkie. He kept his kit in a Bible he carried around. He broke it out and started to shoot up. A bunch of riders in black robes and hoods came charging down the beach at him on their horses. There was a Bible-thumping revival.
No beginning. No real ending. This was Shakey Pictures in full bloom.
We loved it!
We had the most fun making it and had no fear. We had our first screening at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, California. Shakey Pictures has a very particular fan base. People yelled at me after we first screened it for an audience. A mother who brought her kid to the screening was very offended. I completely forgot about the rating thing; the film wasn’t really appropriate for a small child. It didn’t make the Oscars, either.
It can be safely said that Journey Through the Past was ahead of its time. Of course, I paid for it all myself. There was no one going to take a chance on a hippie with a list of ideas and some friends with cameras, even if they were classics like David Myers and Larry Johnson. It was a very cheap film to make.
Backstage with Larry Johnson (Larry in blackface for a Rust Never Sleeps show) and stage manager and friend Tim Foster, 1978.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Today I got another FedEx package from Gary Burden. Over the years I have received hundreds of these. Today’s is a songbook proof for Rust Never Sleeps. These books just keep coming out. It seems like we have done this one before. This is a new edition with a new publisher, and we are doing it again. Looking through the Pegi Young and Joel Bernstein pictures, I remember how wonderful that 1978 Rust Never Sleeps tour really was!
It all started on the WN Ragland. We were in the Virgin Islands—Pegi, pregnant with Ben, Captain Roger Katz and his girlfriend, Suzanne (Pusette), David Cline and his girlfriend, Leslie Tellier, David Briggs and Connie Moskos, and some crew members, notably Reynoud Bos, our sailing Aussie doctor, and Joe Trailor, a sailor and shipbuilder who was now helping out crewing with us. We were down in the Grenadines, near Grenada, and had gone ashore in Saint George’s to buy supplies. I picked up a school notebook, the kind with lines drawn on the pages. It was rough paper, like we used to have in the Canadian schools when I was a kid. It had a political leader on the cover, a prime minister probably. I suddenly came up with an idea for the next Crazy Horse tour!
It was going to be from the standpoint of a young boy dreaming. All the amps were huge and there was going to be a giant microphone. It was going to be like Tom Thumb in reverse. The roadies were all like Jawas from Star Wars! A cone-headed wizard was the lighting director, and some scientists in lab coats were the sound mixers. It was all like a hospital experiment, with the scientists appearing in lab coats during the performance taking notes on clipboards and the Jawa-cloaked roadies with their illuminated eyes raising and lowering amp cases over the top of the amps from the ceiling by pulling on ropes with pulleys.
A thunderstorm like Woodstock would have a “no rain” chant, and announcements about the bad acid that should not be taken would be played over the PA. The show started with “The Star-Spangled Banner” played by Jimi Hendrix as the roadies (Jawas) raised the big mic into position like the soldiers at Iwo Jima with the flag. It continued with things like that for about a hundred minutes.
I took the little Grenada notebook and drew charts with song titles, effects, action, lighting, sound cues, all in a sort of data-based sequence I had handwritten in this grade school book. When I showed this to Tim Foster, my stage manager, who loved doing things theatrically, he got really into it! He dove right in and explained to the crew that they would all be wearing these outfits and be onstage doing things throughout the show. I was not using actors; I was using my road crew: Larry Johnson as assistant director, his girlfriend, Miss Jeanne Field, as production, Briggs as onstage sound, Stephen Cohen as lighting director, Sal Trentino my amp tech, Joel Bernstein my tuner (and also a great photographer who took all the pictures)—everyone in the whole crew was involved! It was quite a shock when everyone showed up for a rehearsal at the Cow Palace in San Francisco and learned what we were doing and that we only had a couple of days to learn it.
The “roadeyes” (the Rust tour name for roadies) put on their black face and head racks holding the two battery-powered lights placed to shine as eyes under a giant hood. Crazy Horse had the music down and the crew knew the songs and instruments, but that was the easy part. The rest of it put everyone in a state of shock. Our first show was in a few days. We had all the costumes made and the props built. Tim Foster and Larry Johnson did a superb job making this concept happen. It was billed as “Rust Never Sleeps: A Concert Fantasy,” and it was even stranger for the audience because my brand-new album, Comes a Time, had just been released.
Comes a Time had been a completely different type of music recorded in Nashville with a different band! At that time I was in the habit of performing all of my new songs live first, recording them that way, and then taking the audience out of the mixes. Then I released them as studio albums. Crazy Horse was great live, and that was the most fun way to do it.
Of course, that was before the Internet, and it’s not realistic to work that way anymore. Any experiment I try onstage is thrown up on YouTube, where people who think they know what I should be doing start shooting holes in it before it’s even finished. This is the single most daunting challenge the Internet has provided, along with all the good things. The stage used to be my lab, where I could experiment in front of a live audience and see how it reacted and—more important—how I felt while I was doing it. That is how I created and adjusted most of my best plays, tuning them by feel. I try to avoid reading about myself on the Web for that reason.
Now I try to work things out in private while I develop ideas. That way I have a chance to present the first time to a large audience, the way I envision it. Unfortunately that is not as adventuresome for me. The first couple of performances of Rust Never Sleeps were full of disasters, from things not working right to not working at all. If that was today, the rap on the show would have been so bad on the Net that the show would have been killed before it even was fully born. That’s life!
Things change. Rust Never Sleeps was named Album of the Year that year by Rolling Stone. The production of the concert got some awards as well and was seen as bold at the least. That made Briggs and me feel pretty good. The movie we made of the concert is one of my favorites.
Original performance notes and cues for the Rus
t Never Sleeps tour, 1978.
Chapter Forty-Eight
It’s better to burn out than to fade away.
John Lennon disagreed with that.
Kurt Cobain quoted it in his last letter.
People have asked me about that line since I first sang it in 1978. I wrote it referring to the rock and roll star, meaning that if you go while you are burning hottest, then that is how you are remembered, at the peak of your powers forever. That is rock and roll.
At sixty-five, it seems that I may not be at the peak of my rock and roll powers. But that is not for sure. The idea that I should have died earlier is not the point. There really is more to life than its charged peak, because other things continue to grow and develop long afterward, enriching and growing the spirit and soul.
I wrote that song right after the death of Elvis Presley, one of my childhood heroes, and sang it first for Bruce “BJ” (Baby John) Hines, part of the original Crazy Horse family. He was visiting the ranch for some reason, and I had just finished the song. It was written as an acoustic song. Rather reflective.
During the filming of Human Highway when I played it with Devo, Booji Boy sang it in his crib, pounding on a synthesizer. I played it on Old Black. I remember seeing the video of that, and the peace signs and doves on Old Black’s strap played against the visual of Booji Boy, and the image created a feeling I can’t describe. It was the feeling of the hippie generation and the new punk generation juxtaposed. Devo’s influence and where they came from is something that I have never seen adequately described. They were true originals. It was just one of those moments.