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  Young urged me again and again to talk to Ray Dee, which was unusual since he seemed ambivalent about most everybody else. “You’ve got to talk to this guy. He’s the original Briggs,” he said, referring to his longtime producer David Briggs. From Neil there was no higher compliment. Ray Dee’s vibe was a heavy one, and he took no guff. I got the feeling he’d tell Shakey to take the trolley back to Chinatown if he thought the guy was being an asshole.

  “I don’t have a lotta close friends,” Dee told me. “I’m very emotional and sensitive about things. Neil was the same way—he keeps his things inside a little bit. I’m a Taurus—I don’t dick around, and I do not carry anything on a sleeve. I have to let it out.” Dee had the ingredients Young seems to require in people: a certain innocence, a lot of passion, some sort of craziness and a large dose of sadness.

  Ray Dee (aka Ray Delatinsky—“nobody could pronounce Delatinsky on the air”) was a nineteen-year-old Russian-Ukrainian deejay making $185 a month at CJLX when he walked into the Fourth Dimension and first laid eyes on Neil Young and the Squires.

  “There’s a band on the stage, three guys whackin’ away,” recalls Dee. “Neil’s about nine-feet-twelve, all legs and neck, he looks like Ichabod Crane. He did things back then I thought were different—he did not just pick. He beat the guitar up sometimes, that’s the only way I can describe it. He goes at that goddamn thing like ‘You SOB, I’m gonna win, I’m gonna beat you.’ When Neil came out of Winnipeg, he brought something different to Thunder Bay that nobody had ever seen or heard—right away I said, ‘This is interesting.’” The ornery deejay was less impressed with other aspects of the band. “That fucking drummer, he used to piss me off. He was too busy looking at the chicks. So I’m saying to myself, ‘We get rid of the drummer, there might be a band.’

  “Neil was gonna be a success, damn the torpedoes. That was the first thing that attracted me to this guy—the fact that he had a mission.” Ray Dee became the Squires’ big contact in Fort William, producing their next record as well as booking gigs. A hundred and twenty bucks bought you the Squires plus their deejay/manager. “We’d go up to the North Shore and play a school and come out thinkin’ we were the Rolling Stones,” Dee recalls. “I’ll never forget driving two hundred miles to get to a gig in this stupid hearse—laying in the back with a big bass laying down one side, and on the other Ken Koblun laying beside me like a dead man. You couldn’t sit up.”

  As soon as the Squires hit town, they landed a gig, earning $325 for five days at the Flamingo Club. The band was such a hit that they were immediately asked to return by the cigar-chomping, peg-legged Scott Shields, who ran this nightclub fallen on hard times. “What a place!” recalls Edmunsen. “First time we’d ever played in a liquor joint. We were underaged—all these babes start comin’ in, hairdresser babes, a lotta women … I saw an awful lot of female action ’cause it was comin’ and goin’. Neil wasn’t really interested.”

  All Neil was interested in was music, and if the Squires weren’t playing, they were rehearsing in their shabby hotel rooms. Edmunsen said that by this point the band was playing only a little over one-third instrumentals and recalls Neil being particularly obsessed with the vocal harmonies. Both Kenny and Bill sang harmonies into two mikes plugged into a Fender Tremolux amp, and, according to Edmunsen, the vocals were never good enough.

  “Neil’s a tough guy to work for,” he said. “If you made a mistake onstage, he’d give ya a look that would peel paint. He’d hurt your feelings, break your fuckin’ bones, then he’d walk away and say, ‘I’m sorry.’” Young’s drive made an impression. “One of the hardest workers I’ve ever met in my life,” said Edmunsen, shaking his head. “He’s like a tank. You can’t stop him.”

  After a brief return to Winnipeg to score some much needed union cards, the band returned to Fort William for a two-week residency at the Flamingo beginning November 2. Away from home, turning nineteen, holed up in the Victoria Hotel, Young would write “Sugar Mountain,” a lament for innocence lost that would become a staple of his solo acoustic sets. Young and the Squires also began playing afternoon hootenannies in exchange for free food at the local chapter of the Fourth Dimension.

  Run by entrepreneur Gordie “Dinty” Crompton, the 4-D was a much hipper joint than the Flamingo. As Ray Dee recalls, it was a “nightclub turned coffeehouse, first and only one Thunder Bay ever had. Crompton bought it for peanuts, took a can of paint and painted the whole thing black—walls, ceiling, everything.” There was a tiny stage and, said Dee, “all these people sittin’ around drinkin’ coffee and smokin’ the latest marijuana that came into Canada.”

  It was at the Fort William 4-D, playing the trash-rock hit “Farmer John,” that Young first got gone on guitar. “Not much of a tune, but we made it happen,” said Edmunsen. “We kept that song goin’ for ten minutes. People just never wanted it to end.” For the first time, Neil fused with his guitar in a way that was transcendental. “We just went nuts, Kenny, Bill and I,” Young told John Einarson. “That’s when I started to realize I had the capacity to lose my mind playing music, not just playing the song and being cool.”

  I think the first real connection with an audience was in Fort William … there were some other times before that where we really got it going, but it started happening more when I left Winnipeg. We really started gettin’ the audiences off. Because being the unknown, being from out of town, makes the mind open wider. People look at you, they have no preconceptions. You have virtually a fuckin’ clean slate to work with, so you can go anywhere. But if they all know who you are when you walk out there, then yer limited by who you are to some extent, because they have preconceptions of what to expect. And they have an opinion.

  —Edmunsen said Fort William was great—“We can drink, we can fuck.”

  Bill was big on the fuck part.

  —Was he different from the rest of the Squires?

  Yeah, oh yeah—’cause he was big into the fuck part. We still hadn’t even picked up on that … that’s when all that started happening. When we left town.

  There were a few bands playin’ Fort William. Donny and the Bonnvilles and they were pretty good. But we were the new kids in town and we were pretty hot. Chick Roberts of the Cryin’ Shames, he told me, “That is one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard.” That was just after I’d written “Sugar Mountain.” It was the first time anybody had ever said anything like that.

  The first time I really got off playin’ a guitar, I just went nuts. We were playing “Farmer John”—something happened. I went completely berserk. I just got lost in it. And then when I came off the stage, people were looking at me different. Heh heh. There was this other guy who could really play great guitar. He was in the Rubber Band, and he was really a good Telecaster player, really a lot better guitar player. He was just lookin’ at me—“I didn’t know you could play like that! Where did that come from? What were you doing?” And I’m goin’, “Well, I really got into it. I dunno.” It made an impression.

  I was probably pretty intense for eighteen, nineteen years old. I was just startin’ to find myself.

  November 23, 1964, at 409 Victoria Avenue. A former movie theater, now the studios of CJLX. Second floor, in the back. Ray Dee was at the helm. The song was called “I’ll Love You Forever,” a ballad Neil would admit was for his old flame in Winnipeg, Pam Smith (Dee would also cut a beautiful version of “I Wonder” complete with slightly countrified touches from Neil’s Gretsch). A tiny studio, with rudimentary equipment—a McCurdy board, two Ampex tape decks, a Bogen amplifier for a mixer and one exceptionally fine Telefunken tube mike. Dee isolated Koblun and his bass in the hallway and stuck Neil and his guitar in another wing. Drummer Edmunsen sat in a news booth.

  Unlike the Squires’ past two recording sessions, the band was recorded playing and singing at the same time. Dee: “What we tried to do was come up with something as close to reality as possible. A live session—mix it and hope for the best.”

  Unfortu
nately, the best wasn’t good enough. Dee felt Young’s vocal needed to be stronger. “If I told him once, I told him a thousand times: Neil couldn’t carry a tune in a handbag. I looked at him and said, ‘Neil, this is coming out flat and sharp and shit. What we have to do here, son, is double-track ya.’ He said, ‘Double-track?’ Neil didn’t wanna sing. He was petrified.” But Dee talked him into overdubbing a second vocal.

  The other concern was a couple of flubbed drumbeats. “Okay, you’ve got a glaring mistake—you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know you had to cover this up somehow,” said Dee, who grabbed a sound-effects record and overdubbed crashing surf and thunder to hide the mistake. “I rode that bloody thunderclap and Neil’s eyes got as big as saucers.” Pingponging between recorders, Dee did the overdubs in a couple of passes, also adding some delicate touches from Neil and his Gretsch.

  Listening to the song today, you can come to only one conclusion: Neil Young had his trip down early. The minimal yet vivid lyrics, the emotion, the ethereal quality of the music—it’s all there on “I’ll Love You Forever” and Ray Dee captured it first. It would be years before Young would capture it again.

  “I’ll Love You Forever”—there was somethin’ about that. That was the first one. That was kinda trippy.

  Ray Dee—a great producer. The records we made, we had fun making. He believed in us. As I remember, he turned down the lights in the studio and did all this shit. It was very creative with Ray—it was a feeling and a mood. He was into that part of it. There was a mood.

  After that, I went to places and we didn’t have the trip. Like the stuff we recorded in the basement in East Kildonan—“(I’m a Man and) I Can’t Cry” and “I Wonder”—they’re not happening like the Ray Dee stuff.

  Billy Edmunsen, he was a great guy. He was my friend in school and he had a lot of soul. Ray hated him—he wasn’t a great drummer, okay? But I liked him—I still like him. He’s soulful. He had a feeling. Even though he lost the beat—he was just beginning, heh heh—he’d get excited and do rolls and shit, radadadada—“What the fuck’s goin’ on?” But he was so into it, it was like “Wow, what great energy—I’ll go with this guy.”

  Edmunsen couldn’t go to Fort William the second time because he had this girlfriend, Sharon, who worked at the radio station, who he met during our recording session. Bill never went anywhere where he didn’t end up with a girlfriend, so he had a good time. It’s funny all the things that happened tryin’ to get these bands together in high school—just when you wanna leave and you finally go, “Now I got the guys—we’re gonna hit the road,” one of ’em goes, “Oh, I can’t go.” They were all great, and they shoulda gone. They shoulda given it a shot. But things happen for a reason.

  Ray Dee sent a tape of the session to Capitol Records in Winnipeg, where it was promptly rejected—although, thanks to Dee, it got some airplay in Fort William, where Edmunsen remembers “I’ll Love You Forever” being played in a phone-in contest called “Voice Your Choice.” “We were beatin’ the competition from the U.S. of A.,” he said proudly.

  Back in Winnipeg that December, Young added Doug Campbell, a hotshot guitarist who had built his own FuzzTone. Campbell was in the Dimensions with ex-Squire Ken Smythe, whom Neil had asked to sit in at a gig for the increasingly unreliable Edmunsen. During intermission, Young let Smythe’s band play a couple of numbers.

  “Next thing I knew, Doug was playing with Neil,” said Smythe. “He stole him from me. It happened very quickly—if Neil didn’t talk to him that night, he was on the phone with him the next day, ’cause that was Neil.” Young then had to fire Edmunsen. “Drummers are all crazy—I came home one day and he was ironing his hair,” maintained Rassy, who admitted, “It was a little awkward, to put it mildly. Edmunsen lived across the street.”

  —How did you handle firing guys?

  Poorly. I didn’t like it. But I did do it. It’s real difficult to tell somebody you’ve been working with that you don’t want to play with them because you think the group will be better without them. Streamlining the group. How do you say it? It’s not easy. You do the best you can. I’ve probably done worst at that of everything.

  —You don’t like confrontation?

  Sometimes I’m really down for confrontation. It’s kind of like a changing thing. I don’t know why.

  Must be something that makes me differentiate between things I want to be straight-ahead about, and things that I don’t want to be straight-ahead about. I think that most people have that mechanism. But some people handle it differently—they just go, “Well, this is something I don’t wanna do that I gotta do.” Some people think, “This is something I don’t wanna do that I’m gonna do—but kinda half-assed.” I think I fall into that category, heh heh heh.

  Quite honestly, I think it’s probably my problem. I carry things around for a long time, just little things….

  A string of drummers would replace Edmunsen, most notably Randy Peterson, who, along with Doug Campbell, would participate in the last known Squires recording session, which produced two cuts, a rocker entitled “(I’m a Man and) I Can’t Cry” and the slickest, most up-tempo version of “I Wonder.” Unfortunately, this lineup crashed quickly, as neither Doug nor Randy were allowed to go out on the road. The Squires reverted to trio status, with a new drummer, Bob Clark.

  In the middle of April 1965, Neil Young and the Squires packed up Mort and moved to Fort William. Fourth Dimension owner Crompton was now splitting the meager take from the gigs with the band, and for the next couple of months they scraped by. The music Young and the Squires were experimenting with at the 4-D was by all accounts truly weird. Young was taking familiar old folk tunes like “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” and giving them rock and roll arrangements. David Rea, a formidable acoustic guitarist then working with the Allen Ward Trio, heard Young for the first time as he threw himself into a particularly doom-laden version of “Tom Dooley.”

  “I remember it just like it was yesterday,” said Rea. “I walked into the 4-D and Neil was doing this incredibly outré version of ‘Tom Dooley’—he was working with his guitar and voice in what I recall were parallel thirds, fifths and seconds. Really wild stuff, very heavy sound, very heavy plangent, plunging chords, like a dirge—imagine being in this little cinderblock club in the Lakehead, teenage customers sitting around … it was really somethin’ else.” At that time Rea was a bit of a folk purist, yet the electricity Young added seemed perfect for the ancient murder ballad.

  The strange sounds Young was laying down in Fort William caught the ear of another visiting musician that April. Born in Dallas, Texas, on January 3, 1945, Stephen Stills was a brash southern boy. Mother Talitha was an omnipotent force not unlike Rassy; father William worked in construction, lumber, molasses and real estate. According to Crosby, Stills and Nash biographer Dave Zimmer, he “would shift from job to job, making a fortune, losing it, then making it all back again.”

  Stephen grew up mostly in Florida and Latin America, attending military school and listening to the blues, Latin rhythms and early rock and roll, although he felt Elvis lost it after “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “because he was always being told what to do.” One thing is certain: No one has ever been able to tell Stephen Stills what to do.

  Learning drums, guitar and piano, Stills played frat rock in Florida bands like the Radars and the Continentals, then folk as part of a duo in New Orleans before landing in the midst of New York’s Greenwich Village folk scene in 1964. There he became a member of a New Christy Minstrels-style nine-member vocal group called the Au Go-Go Singers, cutting a bland record for Roulette. A mutated version of the group, the Company, somehow wound up playing Fort William.

  “They were more folk-rock; we were more rock-folk,” said Koblun. Stills and Young hit it off; each had something the other lacked. Stills had an accessibly “great” voice, Young was already writing his own material. Among the things they shared were complicated relationships with absent fathers, overbeari
ng, impossible-to-please mothers and a drive to get somewhere that bordered on demonic. But there would be one important difference between them: Young excelled at self-preservation, Stills at self-sabotage, and while Neil would periodically recharge his batteries by escaping into nonmusical avenues (perhaps at times to the point of distraction), a guitar rarely left Stephen’s hands.

  That was all a lot further down the road. Right now they were just a couple of hungry kids tooling around in Mort, drinking beer and sharing dreams. Koblun felt that seeing Stills had a marked effect on the Squires. “We heard Stephen singing ‘Oh Susannah’ with a new arrangement. It sort of influenced Neil to arrange other songs like ‘Clementine.’”

  No. False. Stephen and the Company did “High-Flyin’ Bird.” “Clementine” was influenced by seein’ the Thorns—they did “Oh Susannah.” The Thorns came through playin’ in nightclubs that we were playing in afternoons. They were the original folk-rock band, okay? Tim Rose and two other guys—no drums, but they had bass, two guitars, I think it was. They did some really nice stuff and sang really well. One of my favorites was “Oh Susannah”—they did this arrangement that was bizarre. It was in a minor key, which completely changed everything—and it was rock and roll. So that idea spawned arrangements of all these other songs for me. I did minor versions of them all. We got into it. That was a certain Squires stage that never got recorded. Wish there were tapes of those shows. We used to do all this stuff, a whole kinda music—folk-rock. We took famous old folk songs like “Clementine,” “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain,” “Tom Dooley,” and we did them all in minor keys based on the Tim Rose arrangement of “Oh Susannah.”