by Neil Young
So when he died and left that note, it struck a deep chord inside of me. It fucked with me. I wrote some music for that feeling: “Sleeps with Angels.” David was right there with me because he knew. He knew the truth. At the end of that session, David did something highly unusual: He made a sort of declaration about the record and what we were doing. He did it on camera with Larry Johnson, who was there filming the sessions. I went back and revisited all that footage to see what the hell we were doing. I couldn’t find that. I found a lot of other stuff. That is just one more loose end to finish up.
That was David’s last album. He got sick after that. There was more recorded there than what we used. We missed something. I know it. He sleeps with angels.
—
There was a Crazy Horse tour, Ragged Glory, that Briggs and I did, with John Hanlon engineering, around 1990. I wrote a lot of songs in my car barn that were on that album. The car barn was a huge metal building with a gravel floor, and I set up my amps in there with a bunch of old cars. All my best shit. My Fender Deluxe with a Fender Reverb, my whizzer attached to it, my Magnatone feeding from that, and my Baldwin Exterminator feeding off of it, too. The fifties tweed Fender Deluxe I refer to is my original amp purchased from Sol Betnun Music on Larchmont Boulevard in LA in the sixties. That place was always full of old Fenders galore. I think it’s gone now. I had that amp in my little Laurel Canyon cabin when I was in the Springfield. It had a fine sound. It sucked in a really good way when you turned it up to twelve! Yes! It goes to twelve! (Eat shit, Spi¨nal Tap!) At ten it is distorted and chunky but doesn’t suck, at six it is nasty and edgy. At three it is just plain awful in a good way. The whizzer is something we built that turns the knobs manually so the signal doesn’t get compromised. Any volume pot (controller) that’s in the line fucks with the signal. The whizzer doesn’t go in the line. It manually controls by rotating the master volume pot with a motor instead.
My Fender Reverb unit is from the fifties, too, maybe the early sixties. It has tubes and a spring reverb. It’s very analog. If you rattle it, it makes a loud sound all by itself. It is a real effect. Not digital. Digital effects are trying to sound like this stuff. My Magnatone amp has a stereo vibrato. It takes a feed from inside the Deluxe at a point where the signal is least compromised and there is a boost to keep the level up. The Magnatone has a lot more balls than the Deluxe, but they are both run from my pedal board built by Johnny Foster, Tim’s brother, attached with platinum switches built by Sal Trentino, the original tube amp guru. Thanks to Sal, I can bypass all that shit with one button if I don’t want it, because it splits the signal, too. Thanks, Sal—rest in peace, my friend. (Of course, there’s still that one platinum contact that the signal has to go through. If that was too techy for you, then you can just forget I said it, but it’s staying right here in this book where it belongs.)
Anyway, back in 1990, I would go into my car barn with all this stuff and Old Black. I’d just started reviewing my archives, and I had recently heard some of my best shit, so I knew who I was and who I could be. I would come in every morning, smoke some weed, and start playing. Then the songs just came. Ragged Glory. The songs got written. We started recording and playing all the songs in a row two or three times a day for a week or two. No repeating. We’d just do a few sets a day. That was a cool way to make a record. No analyzing. Then at the end, we read our notes and went back and found the masters.
One day we were listening to tracks and we heard “Mansion on the Hill.” It was a funky track, but it had the vibe. I asked David to play it one more time. David said to Hanlon, “All right then, let’s hear it in all its ragged glory.” That became the title. David had a way with words, an amazing vocabulary that he used poetically and to great effect always. So I finished the record, and we went out on tour with Sonic Youth and Social Distortion. Briggs went along, recording in an analog truck. We were a great bill; people got a real show. It rocked. I met Thurston Moore, and he told me about Nirvana, this great band, and how I should be taking them out, too, or at least hear them. Every night I would warm up backstage with Mike, my trainer, when Sonic Youth would come on, and they were fucking great. How original are they? Very. They would echo through the arena and sound like God. First, Social Distortion would come out cold and level the place. Then Sonic Youth! Then Crazy Horse! Because it was the Gulf War, we did an electric version of Bob’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “How many times must the cannonballs fly?” It was just another great tour for the Horse . . .
—
One night in March of 1977, Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson were in Malibu at Linda’s house. I went over to see them and show them some songs I wanted to do with them for a new album. We made a cassette of the songs, and the two of them sang like birds. It was a thrill to be there with them. Everything was so easy. Unlike me, they always sang on pitch. It was like falling off a log for them. Linda has always been friendly to me and has helped me on quite a few records. Harvest was the first one of those. A few years later, I was very lucky to have Linda opening for me on the Time Fades Away tour. That was in 1973. She was dynamite. She got in trouble in Albuquerque for swearing onstage or something. I can’t remember exactly what she did, but she caused an uproar.
I first saw Linda at the Troubadour in the sixties when she was with the Stone Poneys. She was great then, too. So young and beautiful! She blew everyone’s mind with her big voice. Can you imagine sitting in the audience, seeing this girl walk up onstage, looking so amazing in her short shorts, and then hearing that huge voice? It was earth-shattering. She is always at the top of her game, but now Linda has become somewhat reclusive. She just dropped out to raise a family and live a “normal” life in the “real world.” She used “real world” to describe me once. She told Nicolette not to get involved with me because I was “not living in the real world”! It didn’t matter, though, because Nicolette and I did have a close relationship for a while. It didn’t last for us, though. Life is like that.
Anyway, when I was getting to know Nicolette, she was at the ranch with Linda recording the songs I had shown the two of them in Malibu. (By the way, Linda was addicted to peanut butter at the time! Isn’t that exactly the kind of interesting information you expect from a book like this?) That album, American Stars ’n Bars, we recorded in the White House with the Green Board, exactly like I want to do with Crazy Horse now. After we made that album, Nicolette came to Nashville and sang with me on the Comes a Time album. That is one of my best albums ever.
With Linda Ronstadt riding at the Broken Arrow Ranch, 1977.
The tapes from Comes a Time were damaged en route to the mastering in New York, and I ended up purchasing all of the records that were pressed from those tapes, a couple hundred thousand of them, and remastered from a safety tape copy. All of the high frequency was missing from my master! I couldn’t believe it when I got those dull test pressings and checked the master tape. It was severely damaged somehow. I don’t know what happened to it. That was the last time I ever shipped a master anywhere. Now my guys hand carry.
The song “Comes a Time” is one of my all-time favorite recordings because it just has a great feeling. The song and the performance are a total mesh. Nicolette’s singing is beautiful. I can see all the pictures. That is as close to a perfect recording as I ever have gotten. Karl Himmel laid down a unique groove on drums, and the band was locked in. Karl has the ability to play two grooves at once, which I have never heard anyone else do as well as he does. He is a completely unique musician. Chuck Cochran did the string arrangement. Rufus Thibodeaux played fiddle. JJ Cale played a guitar on it. Ben Keith played steel. Spooner Oldham played piano. There was a rhythm guitar section with six great guitarists all playing rhythm on old Martin acoustics. Everyone played and it was the country wall of sound, the Gone With the Wind Orchestra. What a sound!
With Nicolette Larson, Linda Ronstadt, and Crazy Horse, during sessions for the American Stars ’n Bars album at the Broken Arrow Ranch studio, 1977.
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br /> Soon after I was so high on that orchestra that I did a free concert in Miami and took the whole group down there and played. But we didn’t record it—I can’t believe it. It must be the only thing I’ve ever done that I didn’t record. I did “Sweet Home Alabama” at that show, and the folks loved it. (My own song “Alabama” richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it today. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue.) We did record a rehearsal at the Musicians Union Hall in Nashville, and I have a tape of that from a room microphone for the archives. It was a golden moment.
In 1992, Linda’s singing on the Harvest Moon album was beautiful, particularly on the title song. She really made that record what it is. She is a master. “Hangin’ on a Limb” on the Freedom album is beautiful because Linda played such a part in it. She played such a part on all of those songs, and “Unknown Legend” was taken to new heights by her gifted arrangement and singing. When she came to Broken Arrow and sang on my records, she elevated everything she touched. I could never thank her enough. She never asks for anything, so I can’t do any return favors for her. I am ready to anytime, though. She is like a sister to me, and I love her like that. So giving and selfless, just loving the music.
(Incidentally, I was playing really quiet on the Harvest Moon album because my ears were blown out from the Weld mixing. We mixed Weld twice because Billy Talbot and I were not happy with Briggs’s mixes. We were wrong, and it was a waste of time. We should have used Briggs’s work. Loud music hurt for a year after that. I still have and always will have tinnitus, ringing in the ears, from mixing too loud with low-quality digital sound. The resolution on those machines was nowhere near what we have available today. Tinnitus never goes away, but the pain does.)
Linda is now outside the pop music world, doing her thing. I don’t know if there will ever be another singer who impacts me like she does. She is truly at the top of the class, along with Emmylou Harris and Nicolette. Some artists just have it. Like a painter who is great, you can’t say why. I have been so fortunate to have these friends.
I find it unbelievable that Linda Ronstadt is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There is something wrong with that. She should have been inducted a long time ago. I would be honored to induct her. Linda, Emmylou, Nicolette—these were beautiful ladies who gave to the music so selflessly. I have been truly blessed to make music with them all. The background chants by Linda and Nicolette on “Bite the Bullet” from American Stars ’n Bars will never fade from my mind. “Hold Back the Tears”—so rockin’! Linda has so much to give. In “Star of Bethlehem,” the harmony of Emmylou and Ben Keith is so beautiful. So I have been lucky and life has gifted me. I know who I am and what I’ve been part of, but the music speaks when words can’t. I will never forget those times.
These days, Pegi is singing her heart out about things that really matter to her, just like she dreamed of doing when she was so young. She is opening up her voice and her soul on her third recording, Bracing for Impact. It is really a true record; her songwriting is so focused and real. Her singing, so honest. More power to you, baby! I know we will have a lot more to look forward to!
With Mort and the Squires before moving from Winnipeg to Fort William, 1965. Left to right: Ken Koblun, me, and Bob Clark.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The Squires were ready to move. From August 8 through 14, 1965, we had a gig up in Churchill, Manitoba, on Hudson Bay. That was very far north, and it was a day-and-a-half-long train ride through Indian Territory. It was the farthest we had ever gone from Winnipeg, and we were excited. As the train rolled north, I remember seeing Indian villages by the tracks, teepees and little wooden and tin shacks side by side. The First Nation’s people were in disarray, very poor, and their lives were brutal. Seeing and feeling that through the coach window was an experience I will never forget.
As the miles rolled by, characters of all kinds traveled on that train with us. When we finally got to Churchill, we found it a pretty desolate place, with a lot of trailers and some white buildings made of wood and concrete. They all looked the same to me. There were no trees there at all. The tallest bushes were so windblown that the branches all extended in only one direction, so the plants always looked like the wind was howling, even if it wasn’t. And the people looked that way, too.
We stayed outside the hotel in one of the buildings during the day and ate at the hotel. There was a restaurant/supper club there, and we set up our gear. The crowd was pretty subdued until the weekend, and that was when people got rowdy. Nothing happened to us, but we could tell that it could have. We were too young to be playing in there, but they didn’t know that.
One night the place was very rowdy, and suddenly the floor started moving! A polar bear was under the hotel! Some guys went out and shooed it away. Some shots were fired, and everything returned to normal. Another night during the week, an Indian guy was drunk and had left to walk home. He stopped and leaned on a telephone pole to rest, fell asleep, and died right there. Frozen to death. They found him in the morning, leaning on the pole, frozen solid. That place was not on the Squires’ list of places to return to.
After the long trip back to Winnipeg, we got into Mort the hearse and took off to Fort William. I had written a few songs about Churchill on the train ride and updated the song “The Birds and the Bees” with lyrics about Churchill. It was a funny song. One of the updated lyrics was “A penguin I know, and a thing called snow.” I don’t remember the rest.
Whenever we went to a new place, I always thought that since we were from out of town, we would have a mystique about us and be more interesting than the other bands. That turned out to be true, and the Fort William days, when we were on the road, were among the best in the history of the Squires. We were headed for the big time at last.
The sky was the limit.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Life in LA
There was an apartment building called the Commodore Gardens on Orchid Avenue in Hollywood. It was there that I got my very first place to live in LA. The Springfield was playing the Whisky a Go Go, and I had some cash. Some girls who were real good friends of mine from the Whisky were living there. Their names were Donna Port and Vicki Cavaleri. I enjoyed their company. They had a girlfriend who was really nice who they were always trying to get me together with, but I wasn’t ready for her at the time. We really hung out a lot.
They introduced me to the Commodore Gardens landlord, and I got my own apartment there. In an attempt to make it my own, I immediately broke all the rules and tacked up some matting on the walls that I had bought at Pier 1 Imports. I put a blue lightbulb in the fridge. It was an old fridge. I don’t know what I ever put in it. Must have been Cokes and Twinkies. I wasn’t into health food yet, that’s for sure.
I wrote a lot of songs there for the Springfield, and it was an exciting time for me. “Flying on the Ground,” “Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It,” and “Burned” were among the songs I wrote there. I was also dealing with my newly discovered seizure disorder, and come to think of it, I’m sure the food I was eating was not helping! We would come home from the International House of Pancakes on Sunset at about three A.M. after eating a bunch of German pancakes with sugar and lemon all over them. Those things were great because they reminded me of the pancakes I used to have back home in Canada, “rollers,” we called them. Butter, sugar, and lemon juice, all rolled up and eaten like a hot dog. I did that almost every night after the Whisky, and we played that place for a long time and returned and did it over again night after night. We were the opening act for lots of stars.
We had lots of girls and lots of fun. I got a few sexually transmitted diseases and started to become aware that there was a responsibility connected to the decisions I was making. Breaking new ground, you might say. I visited the Hollywood Free Clinic a few times. That was a place by La Brea that had been set up that helped all t
he transient kids on Sunset to stay more or less clean and healthy. Those were simple days. Some of the support systems set up by the government actually worked for the people.
It was after that period at the Commodore Gardens that I got my next place up in Laurel Canyon. We were getting more successful. I had my own car, but no license because I was still an illegal alien and had no Social Security card. Driving my car was nerve-racking for that reason. I was always worried about getting stopped by the cops. The first car I got was a ’54 Packard ambulance. The next one was a ’57 Corvette that I got with my share of the advance money from Atlantic Records, approximately twenty grand for the whole band, split many ways, when we signed with Ahmet Ertegun. Charlie Greene and Brian Stone retained most of that themselves.
Once during the height of tensions on Sunset, just before Stephen wrote his classic “For What It’s Worth,” I got stopped and put in jail for not having a license. My friend Freddy Brechtel, a singer without a band, was with me, and he took the car back to my place. I went to jail at the Hollywood substation, just down the hill from the Whisky. While I was in the cell, one of the officers called me a stinking hippie. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses. Shooting back, I told him he looked like a grasshopper. He came in the cell and beat the shit out of me. Slamming my face and kicking me around on the floor. That was traumatizing.