Shakey Read online

  I’d like to get recordings of the Thorns—and a recording of Two Guys from Boston doin’ “C’mon Betty Home.” I met them at the 4-D in Fort William. They used to be kinda a ragtime duo, wore suits. They were funky. And then their record came in, and I thought it fuckin’ sounded great. We were listening to it for the first time. They were expecting to get some ganja from New York and they were waiting for it—anxiously. I didn’t even know what it was. I said, “What’s a ganja?” They started laughing.

  I learned a lot from all those musicians that came through town. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee—I learned more about playin’ harmonica from Sonny Terry than Jimmy Reed, ’cause I could watch Sonny night after night. I saw them in Fort William, I saw them in Winnipeg and I saw them at New Gate of Cleve in Toronto. I’d go out of my way to see them, anytime … Brownie was the funky one, man.

  Stephen was great. He had a cheap old red Guild guitar and he sang this song, “High-Flyin’ Bird.” I never heard any little white guy sound like a black guy before. That funky southern soul thing. His voice—I loved the way it sounded. I thought he was just a great fuckin’ singer. He also had an ear for harmony. Stephen had been trained by this guy who was the musical director for the Au Go-Go Singers. He was a big influence on Stephen, and Stephen learned a lot from him. Stephen knew a lot about harmony structure. That was valuable information.

  And Stephen was a rocker. Definitely more of a rocker than the rest.

  Big fish in the very small pond of Fort William, Young and his band began to stagnate. Augmenting their pittance from the 4-D was a three-day, $150 gig at the bar in Smitty’s Pancake House, plus the occasional one-night stand. But the band, now living at the local YMCA, was starving. In the wake of Stills, the group tried a new moniker: the High-Flying Birds, after the Billy Wheeler song they’d copped from the southerner. The new name wouldn’t last more than ten minutes, due to a wild turn of events involving a musician named Terry Erikson who sat in with the band on occasion.

  “Neil met this guitar player, Terry Erikson, and was kind of infatuated with him,” said Koblun. “Terry said he had some stocks or bonds he was gonna sell—the plan was he and Neil were gonna go to Liverpool to the Cavern Club. It fell through.” Erikson’s next plan, almost as implausible, didn’t. While sitting around at the Y with Young, Ray Dee and a couple of the Bonnvilles one night in June, Erikson mentioned that he had a gig hundreds of miles away in Sudbury and conned Young into driving his dilapidated hearse on the perilous highway along the edge of Lake Superior.

  “The day Neil left, he was gonna see his dad and put together enough money to go to Los Angeles—but he was coming back,” recalls Dee, who loaned Young $30 to make the trip. “We had a booking that following weekend at the Circle Inn. He came to me and said, ‘Look, I’m headin’ outta town, gonna go see my dad. I need some money, I’ll see ya when I get back.’ I had a funny feeling that that might be the last time I’d see him, and it just about turned out that way.” Perhaps fearing Erikson and Young were shooting for Liverpool, Koblun was equally suspicious and borrowed Young’s guitar as insurance. “I just wanted to make sure Neil was comin’ back,” he said. He wouldn’t be.

  It wasn’t a mission destined for success. Young and Erikson’s fellow travelers were Bob Clark and two members of the Bonnvilles, Tom Horricks and Donny Brown. Five funky musicians, with varying degrees of long hair—one wearing a Nazi helmet, another sporting a cape—and little more than a dime to their names, packed, along with guitars and amps, into a decrepit, seventeen-year-old hearse. The journey would prove to be Mort’s last stand.

  Just outside of Ironbridge, Ontario, the transmission literally fell out of Mort onto the highway. The surreal sight cracked up the intrepid bunch. “I don’t know why, but we were killing ourselves laughing,” Young told John Einarson. “Here was my car, my whole life was in this car, falling apart on the road, and we’re rolling around laughing.” Mort would be towed to Bill’s Garage in Blind River, where, despite repeated attempts at resurrection, it was the end of the line. “Dear Rassy,” Neil would write his mother on a postcard, “please cancel the insurance as Mort is dead.”

  Unable to locate a new tranny for the hearse, the five were forced to depart. The two members of the Bonnvilles and High-Flying Bird Bob Clark barely managed to get back home, hitchhiking part of the way; Neil and Terry Erikson, on a Honda motorbike Erikson had stuffed into the back of the hearse, headed for Toronto.

  Koblun, stranded in Fort William, was forced to live off of an advance check for the Smitty’s gig the band would never play. “Scott had to pay ’em back,” said Koblun. “He was pissed.” Young would soon send for Koblun and Clark, but the Fort William days were over. Outside of Smitty’s Pancake House, the marquee read THE BIRDS HAVE FLOWN.

  “That’s the way I was brought up—to keep changing,” Young told Johnny Walker in 1992. “I went to twelve different schools before I finished grade eleven or whenever I dropped out, and my family moved around a lot. All the time, there was always different things happening. So in my life, I can roll with that.” Others often got rolled over in the process.

  For Ray Dee, the man who first captured Young’s sound on tape, there would be no phone calls, no letters, no explanation. Unfortunately for those who loved Young, this would be typical of the way he handled certain situations deemed too intense or complicated to face. “He never came back,” said Dee. “I was really hurt by that. I tried everything I could do to make this guy a success back in those days. The guy was a friend—that meant more to me than anything, I suppose. I always wondered what the hell had gone wrong. That’s what you’re left with—you’re wondering whether you screwed up. What did you do wrong … what did I say? Christ, I gave the guy thirty bucks.”

  What happened is I just went on to Toronto instead of going back to Fort William. It completely screwed everything up. I dealt with it by going on instead of going back. That’s what kind of person I was at that point. I wasn’t really that worried about anybody else. I didn’t really consider Ray Dee, and I didn’t consider the other guys in the band. But I thought I was coming back, okay?

  Of all the people that I left behind on my journey, Ray Dee got screwed more than anybody. I don’t know why, ’cause he was great. But I think I was just so irresponsible that I didn’t realize what I was doing.

  —Ray was really hurt.

  Oh … And I’m really sorry. I had no idea what I was doing—or the effect I was having—or how much other people really cared about what was happening. I’d never seen anybody really care before, so I didn’t really pick up on it, y’know? But Ray did. Ray was there for me at the beginning. He really cared about it, and he could’ve ridden the whole thing all the way. I couldn’t go back to Fort William. I had to keep on goin’. I felt without the car to get around in …

  Mort was real important. My first car. It was part of my identity. It was like this weird thing—The Band and The Car. I remember getting the hearse. A hundred and fifty bucks. Kinda gave the group something that made them different.

  It’s like a cowboy and his horse, know what I mean? That’s your horse. Remember Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers and the horse? If the guy lost his fuckin’ horse, it would be like “Wow, what a fuckin’ bummer. What are we gonna do with Roy now? He doesn’t have a horse!” The idea of getting another horse never crossed anybody’s mind.

  * A seminal figure of fifties R&B, Jimmy Reed was born on September 6, 1925, in Mississippi. According to his wife, Mary Lee “Mama” Reed, he shot down a chance to record with Chess Records by insisting on playing both guitar and harmonica instead of sharing duties with the far more proficient house band. In 1953, beginning with the atmospheric, melancholy “High and Lonesome,” he began a long association with Vee-Jay Records that resulted in eighteen hits on the R&B charts. The second guitar that Young refers to was frequently played by childhood pal Eddie Taylor. Epileptic, alcoholic, Reed was a tragic figure. Mama Reed sometimes had to whisper lyrics in his ear durin
g recording sessions when he was too inebriated to remember them. Jimmy Reed died August 29, 1976, some say of a heart attack; others maintain it was a fatal epileptic fit.

  * Said Astrid Jr. of Astrid Sr. and Rassy: “They both drank a lot, and they both had the same drink—rye whiskey and water. Neil and I used to laugh—‘What does our father do to these women?’” Fourteen years later this marriage would also come to a dramatic end. “One morning Dad left the house,” said Astrid Jr. “I think he went across the street to get a newspaper, still in his bathrobe—and he decided not to come back.”

  * When Young returned to Winnipeg in June 1987 for Shakin’ All Over, a reunion concert of Winnipeg rockers, Bill Edmunsen was nowhere to be found. “The people who put it together didn’t invite him—they went outta their way to make sure he didn’t come,” a still angry Young told me. “They were just blackballing the guy for some reason—he definitely did not fit their program. I thought that was terrible.” Young managed to locate Edmunsen, and on June 27, there was an impromptu reunion at a local restaurant. “We’re the Squires,” announced Young to the audience. “This is our first gig in twenty years.”

  a big blur of images

  A large man in jeans with the zipper broken and a muslin shirt, both garments white, wanders around a big white Caddy with the engine running. We’re in the wilds of Topanga Canyon outside some woebegone hippie house, past its prime and oozing that Manson vibe. He’s annoyed, motioning for me to hurry. It takes me a minute to realize that the man is Bruce Palmer, the extraordinary bass player best known for his membership in Buffalo Springfield.

  Palmer is in a mood. He leads me around the messy house, bitching about losing a bet to his old crony Rick James the night before. “By the way—it is a wig,” he says of the funk clown. Big tanks of unnamed compounds lie askew on the floor, and in the corner is a Martin guitar bequeathed him by the late Tannis Neiman, a folksinger who had made most of the journey to California with Neil and Bruce so many years before. Palmer says he has to run an errand and will be right back. “Don’t go in the bathroom,” he says with a snicker. “That’s where I hide my dirty needles.” Bruce is making a little joke. Back in the sixties, his frequent drug busts would hasten Springfield’s undoing.

  When Palmer returns several hours later, his mood has not improved. He proceeds to shake me down for money to do the interview, getting about an inch from my face and demanding $500 an hour. “I’m a professional musician and that’s what my time is worth, man,” he screams, his hairy face going crimson. “Are you a narc? Are you with the U.S. government?”

  Late in the afternoon, a bunch of longhairs show up to jam. Apparently part of the latest shadow of the Springfield—this one called “White Buffalo”—they’re a motley bunch with bloodshot eyes. A pipe is passed. All I remember is some guy playing a wind instrument with his nose. In the hazy background, some haggard woman tends to the kitchen. Bruce hunches over his bass, huffing and puffing as he plucks strings, his eyes closed, lost in space. Legend has Palmer blasting off for Dimension X in the sixties and never really coming back, but for a fleeting moment he looks innocent, even blessed.

  “Playing with Neil onstage is probably the most intense experience … when you play with Neil, you’re playing for him,” Palmer told Mojo magazine in 1997. “You’re playing at such a high level of expectancy from him—you’ll never play with anybody else that’s so in tune with the way it should sound. And if you vary from what it’s supposed to sound like—if you go off into your own little world and start articulating something other than what he’s used to hearing—you’ll hear from him, in no uncertain terms, whether onstage right at that moment or later, when he gets you alone, haha. It’s quite intense. You either do it right and his way, or not at all.

  “It was always total control, never loose. The fine line that you walked was: It has to sound loose. Very loose … but he has to be able to know and be able to depend on every note that everyone plays. I’m not kidding—everything from the drummer on, he listens to it all at once. If I put in one extra note out of a thousand, he would pick up on it and he would mention it. You’d change that note, that one note—you’d just shake your head, and say, How did he know?”

  Neil would speak more highly of Palmer than just about any other musician, and indeed, he must’ve been something back in ’65. Rail-thin, with long hair and granny glasses, shy—but fearless when it came to music. “Brucey bassey,” the girls called him. Palmer would be a major catalyst in the life of Neil Young, but Neil would have to slog through the muck and mire of the Toronto music scene before finding him.

  “I know about old cars now, Comrie.” Those were Young’s first words over the phone to his old bongo-playing cohort, Comrie Smith, early one night in July 1965. Smith, who now had a band of his own, the Zen Men, was surprised. After Neil’s one scrawled letter shortly after he left for Winnipeg, Comrie assumed he’d been forgotten. Now Young was back in Toronto, apparently staying a night or two at the home of an old Lawrence Park friend, Rick Mundell, before heading to his father’s. Smith drove over to Mundell’s, where a party was going on and Neil was watching everybody get drunk. “He was really down on it,” said Smith, who recalls Young lecturing, “Look at all these people—they’re all sitting around here drinking. I can sit with one beer, I’ll sip this for an hour while these guys all get blasted.” Comrie was struck by how serious Young had become. “He was so much more mature.”

  Comrie listened to Young’s tales of Fort William and Mort, and for the next eight months they would be pals again, although Comrie noticed his friend had become somewhat reclusive and mysterious. “Neil just disappeared,” said Comrie Smith’s then girlfriend and future wife, Linda Smith. “He never answered to anybody … he did what he wanted when he wanted.”

  Young summoned Ken Koblun and Bob Clark, starving back in Fort William, and soon his scraggly bandmates started arriving one by one at his father’s house on Inglewood Drive. The writer’s fancy home must’ve looked slightly surreal after all the dumpy motels and hotels of Fort William; Terry Erikson remembers Scott pushing a button to reveal a hideaway bar. “He was very friendly but businesslike,” Erikson told John Einarson. “There wasn’t a closeness between Neil and his dad, but he was courteous and offered to help us out.” Some friends felt that Young’s visit was more than a pit stop. “I think when Neil went to Toronto he was really looking for approval to continue on,” said Ray Dee. Neil was respectful of his father’s rules, issuing a one A.M. curfew for his bandmates and chewing them out when it wasn’t adhered to. “He ran that band like Field Marshal Kesselring,” said Scott.

  For the next few weeks, Scott put up his son and a couple of his bandmates. He also found the group a place to rehearse and put $400 in a trust account that Neil could draw a $40-a-week allowance from throughout the summer. Neil also contacted the manager of the Allen Ward Trio, Martin Onrot, who agreed to represent Young’s band. But Toronto proved to be very different from the supportive, insular scenes of Winnipeg and Fort William.

  “Toronto is a wanna-be city,” said Joni Mitchell. “It wants to be New York.” Few Canadian musicians I talked to had pleasant things to say about the place. Mitchell was struggling to make a living in coffeehouses around the time Young arrived. “The folk scene was very competitive, and it took a hundred and sixty dollars to get into the musicians’ union, which I didn’t have, and as a result you couldn’t work at all. I mean, union men used to show up at these little gigs where you’d get fifteen minutes, fifteen dollars a night—and they’d show up in trench coats for their cut. It was really small-time thuggery.”

  Yet music was thriving in Toronto, particularly in a section of town called Yorkville. “There wasn’t really one Yorkville scene, there were several,” said folksinger Murray McLauchlan. In a two-block stretch between Avenue Road and Yonge Street lay a clutch of coffeehouses like the Penny Farthing and the Purple Onion that catered to a beatnik-turning-hippie scene that revered such homegrown stars as G
ordon Lightfoot and Ian and Sylvia.

  Bar-band rock and roll flourished in joints like Le Coq d’Or, where Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks (soon to be nabbed by Bob Dylan) had been tearing it up. Le Coq d’Or was “more Damon Runyon than hippie,” said Murray McLauchlan. “Heroin users who wore sharkskin suits, had pomps and looked like Waylon Jennings.” Toronto, said Bruce Palmer, was “the most hard-rocking city of its time.” But musical camps were strictly divided, and there would be no outlet for the weird crossbreeding Young had been developing in Fort William. “I didn’t see much folk-rock in Toronto,” Young said decades later. “It was either folk or rock.”

  Young showed up a lot that summer at Comrie Smith’s Toronto home at 45 Golfdale. He was piloting a new piece of heavy iron: Tinkerbell, an old Buick convertible with a clattering engine and a rusted-out exhaust. It also sported a tube radio, which invariably seemed to be blaring “Good Vibrations” upon his arrival. “Neil was adorable,” said Linda Smith. “He was a con of the first order. How else could he get fed? He didn’t have a cent.”

  Young had come a long way since miming along on the ukulele to Danny and the Juniors. “Gee, Comrie, you started playing guitar before I did,” Neil told his old friend. “Now I’m better than you are.” Comrie watched in awe as Young serenaded his sister with a weird version of “Clementine” that left her spellbound. “It was hypnotic,” said Smith. “He’d stare you right in the eye, every word. It was like Neil put the notes directly into your brain.” Young made his time in Fort William sound like Robert Johnson’s trip to the crossroads. Comrie said he and his bandmates “were thinking of heading to Thunder Bay. There was this mystique because of Neil.”