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  Still a bit of a record hound, Young was obsessed with two in particular that summer: “Thou Shalt Not Steal” by Dick and Dee Dee, and an eerie girl-group record by the Jaynettes, “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” “Neil was really enthusiastic about harmony,” said Smith. “Just two voices singing together with his acoustic would do it. He had this feeling you could get this big huge sound.” Smith recalls that Young wanted to put together an Everly Brothers-type duo with him and began playing his electric guitar with a capo while in Toronto. “Neil got more influenced by the folkies there,” said Koblun, dismayed by this state of affairs.

  Tinkerbell—’47 Buick convertible … that was a great fuckin’ car. I bought it for seventy-five bucks, and it was worth every dollar. I didn’t have enough money for a) a license or b) a registration, but I still had a good time. Just a cool fuckin’ car. Finally had to just abandon it somewhere. You know how it is when you’re nineteen? Couldn’t quite keep it going, so I just left it. I don’t even know where. Too bad. I’d love to have it today.

  —Was Yorkville a burgeoning hippie scene?

  No—it was an old beatnik scene. It was turning into a folk scene.

  The Yorkville scene. I’d never seen anything like it. Music was everywhere. Two years before the Summer of Love. It was like this big deal, Toronto in ’65.

  I was just growin’ up. It was a great experience. I loved it. It was freedom.

  The Riverboat was an upscale thing—people who played there were really making a living. There was the New Gate of Cleve, which was just down the street—that’s where I saw Lonnie Johnson. And I think I saw Pete Seeger there, too, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

  “Sally Go ’Round the Roses”—dangerous. Fuck. That’s a wild record. Hey, you take that song, put that with any Dennis Hopper movie. I think you’ll have somethin’. *

  Two of the folkies Neil Young was hanging around with were David Rea and Craig Allen. Allen felt Young was turned off by the hokier aspects of the acoustic trip. “Neil could never come to terms with the sort of longhaired, lanky folksinging stuff. We sort of shared that, because my background was more country/western. He was interested in me for the western harmonies. We were each trying to learn the different guy’s style—he’d show me the rock stuff up the neck and I’d show him the block chords down the bottom and the finger picking.” From David Rea, Young learned tunings. “I believe I was the first person to show Neil the open-D tuning,” said Rea.

  As a rocker in the Toronto folk scene, Young would be something of an anomaly. “That’s what was odd about Neil in this group of friends,” said Craig Allen. “The rock people lived down the street.” Allen felt it wasn’t a case of Young denouncing rock and roll and going acoustic; he just wanted to adapt elements of the folk approach to further his own trip. “When Neil came to Toronto, he sucked in everything as he went through,” said Comrie Smith. “I think what he got out of Yorkville at that time was he sort of adapted his rock style into a folk thing. I don’t think it was ever an either/or for him. I didn’t get any sense of a struggle.”

  While Neil was learning from the folkies, nothing was happening with his group. Their new manager apparently had great faith in Neil’s talent but little understanding of his band, which he’d given a snappy new name, Four to Go. “Marty Onrot was a real Hollywood kinda guy,” said folksinger Vicky Taylor. Friends felt Onrot was pressuring Neil to dump his group and go solo as a folk artist, and both Terry Erikson and Bob Clark soon departed, replaced by still more new members. Four to Go never got beyond rehearsals. “I never played one of my own songs with a band in Toronto,” Young told John Einarson.

  Young ended up in a room at a shabby boardinghouse down by the tracks. Ken Koblun recalls Young’s stay at 88 Isabella as a bleak time, full of introspection and sad, sad songs. Whether it was depression or drugs or just the advancement of his own strange psyche, something was happening to unlock in Young a peculiar ability to write a new and different kind of song.

  Toward the end of September, Tinkerbell was gone and so was his beloved Gretsch, which some friends say he was forced to pawn to start paying his father back (Young maintains it was to buy a Gibson twelve-string). Comrie Smith saw a change pass briefly over Neil, a fleeting attempt to conform, settle down, maybe in an attempt to please his father, whom he told, “I gotta get a job.” Scott took him down to Mr. Ivan’s, got him a $4 haircut, and Neil promptly landed the first job he applied for. “He had always been self-sufficient,” said Scott. “Neil always had money that he made himself, delivering papers, whatever it was. So I always thought him walking down the street from the barbershop straight into Coles and getting a job as a stockroom boy was fairly typical.”

  Koblun visited Neil on the job and, feeling sorry for his frail friend, wound up moving heavy boxes of books. “I remember Neil sitting in the basement smoking while I was doing the work for him,” he said. Five weeks into his new career, Neil came down with a mysterious illness that landed him under his stepmother’s care for a few days. The last few years had brought the first glimmers that Young’s internal chemistry could suddenly go awry. Koblun remembers one gig in Winnipeg where “we were playing a song and I could start feeling his vibrations. He was really weird—he started playing guitar and couldn’t stop. I had to knock him on the arm.” * Jack Harper remembers having to drive Young home when his vision abruptly blurred. As Young’s life and career intensified in the coming months, so would these incidents.

  The sickness cost him his job. “I kept phoning Coles, saying, ‘Neil can’t come in,’” said Astrid. “Finally they said, ‘Don’t bother.’”

  I was a stock boy. I wasn’t very together. I used to stay out late and come in in the morning … I wasn’t meant for that kind of life.

  I remember sitting on the floor and writing “Clancy.” And for sure “Peggy Grover” and “Don’t Pity Me, Babe.”

  ;—Difficult period?

  I don’t remember things in that frame. It was part of the deal. Just another chapter. I’m sure I didn’t enjoy it, but I knew I was by myself, anyway. On my own. Things weren’t going that great, but still—what have you got to lose—you’re nineteen, who gives a shit. At that point I had nothin’ to worry about, compared to the kids who are growin’ up out in this mess.

  —Were you gaining an awareness that songs could be as complex as you wanted to make them?

  Yeah. About the last eight months I was in Toronto. When I wrote “Clancy.” I thought it was pretty good. Because obviously there was so much to it. I knew it was long.

  —Did anything provoke “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing“?

  I don’t know. It’s just a product of my life at that point. That’s all I can say. There was a lot on my mind.

  —What do you think you were trying to accomplish with that song? I don’t know. Just writin’ a song. It’s so long ago. I don’t remember much about Clancy. I really don’t … except what he looked like, a little … He’s an incidental character who somehow had his name in it—no more important than all the characters that didn’t.

  “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” was a landmark for Neil Young, one of the first major works in which he blends opposed realities in the peculiar way that would become a characteristic of his more abstract songs. Young cuts up time and place in a way not unlike the films of Nicolas Roeg or the writing of William Burroughs, but their methods are perhaps not as powerfully primitive or emotional as Young’s. In Young’s hands, it is not an intellectual exercise, and there is a naïve, almost preposterous beauty to many of his cutup songs. He uses lyrics to replicate the inner experience. The images rush out the way feelings do, imperfectly, veering from high to low without a road map and sometimes without logic. Listeners can dig all sorts of meanings out of the ambiguity, finding jagged little bits of their own lives poking through.

  “Hey, who’s that stompin’ all over my face / Where’s that silhouette I’m tryin’ to trace.” “Clancy” is a strange song, full of surreal
imagery that conveys some sense of dreams being fucked with, even stopped: “Who’s puttin’ sponge in the bells I once rung.” But lurking within are glimpses of real events and real people. Part of the song relates to Ross “Clancy” Smith, someone Young encountered back in Winnipeg while at Kelvin High. Smith, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, rode his bike to school, sang in the hallway and endured the derision of his fellow students. Clancy was just the kind of misfit Young admired and empathized with.

  The last verse of the song deals with betrayal. Young once explained the lyric to his then manager Brian Stone, going into great detail about how he actually looked through the floorboards somewhere and saw his girlfriend with another guy. All stitched together, the song conjures up confusion, frustration, alienation and paranoia. Recorded the following year with Buffalo Springfield, it would resonate deeply with many embarking on the murky and explosive journey of the sixties. *

  In 1967, Young would give an interview to Los Angeles reporter Jeffrey C. Alexander, talking in detail about the song. “Many people I know tell me they don’t understand ‘Clancy.’ They can’t figure out all the symbols and stuff. Well, I don’t think it’s possible at all for them to know who he really is. For listeners, Clancy is just an image, a guy who gets comedown all the time.

  “He was a strange cat, beautiful. Kids in school would call him a ‘weirdo’ ’cause he would whistle and sing ‘Valerie, Valera’ in the halls. After awhile, he got so self-conscious he couldn’t do his thing anymore. When someone who is as beautiful as that and as different as that is actually killed by his fellow man—you know what I mean—like taken and sorta chopped down—all the other things are nothing compared to this.

  “In the song I’m just trying to communicate a feeling. Like the main part of ‘Clancy’ is about my hang-ups with an old girlfriend in Winnipeg. Now, I don’t really want people to know my whole scene with that girl and another guy in Winnipeg. That’s not important, that’s just a story. You can read a story in Time magazine. I want them to get a feeling like when you see something bad go down—when you see a mother hit a kid for doing nothing. Or a frustration you see—a girl at an airport watching her husband leave to go to war….

  “Just because I wrote a song doesn’t mean I know anything. I don’t know very much about all the things that are going on around here, all the scenes, all the questions. All I know is just what I’m writing about. And even then I don’t really know. I’m just trying to convey a feeling.”

  Probably the first time Young had ever seriously addressed songwriting, this interview—just a couple of paragraphs buried deep in a newspaper column—is about the most specific he has ever gotten concerning a lyric. Neil Young would rarely be so revealing of his intentions again.

  I don’t know where it comes from. It just comes out…. Seems like even when I’m happy, I write about bein’ lonesome. I don’t know why.

  And you’re askin’ about images I write, like “the burned-out basement” and all that—I really don’t know where that comes from. I just see the pictures. I just see the pictures in my eyes.

  And sometimes I can’t get ’em to come, y’know, but then if I just get high or something, and if I just sit there and wait, all of a sudden it comes gushing out. I just gotta get to the right level. It’s like having a mental orgasm.

  —Interview with Elliot Roberts,

  Wim van der Linden film, 1971

  The song comes out…. You don’t make up a song. The song comes through you … if I’m in the right place, the song comes through me on a piece of paper. It’s not that I sit and think, “I’m gonna make up a song now.”

  —1982 Italy press conference

  You read the newspaper and you watch the television and you go to sleep and you wake up and write a song. Twenty people become one person … if you break it into this is this, or this is that, it doesn’t make any sense. The whole idea is a confusion.

  —1987 Rome press conference

  Neil Young has been remarkably consistent on the subject of songwriting over the years: It happens, I don’t understand it, I’m grateful and it’s pretty pointless to talk about it. I pity the poor fool who attempts to crack the meaning of his lyrics as if breaking a code. It can’t be done—not with Young’s help, at least, and he doesn’t care. Although he’d never put it this way, I get the feeling Neil Young views songwriting almost superstitiously, like a conjurer’s gift. Define it—question it—fuck with it too much, and it might just go away.

  I don’t feel the need to write a song. It’s not like that. It’s almost like the song feels the need for me to write it and I’m just there. It’s not like I’m not doing a job.

  Songwriting, for me, is like a release. It’s not a craft. Crafts usually involve a little bit of training and expertise and you draw on your experiences—but if you’re thinking about that while you’re writing, don’t! If I can do it without thinking about it, I’m doing it great.

  —You’ve written songs that feel well crafted, like you’ve worked at them.

  Yeah—and they are the most boring songs that I’ve ever written, probably.

  —So you don’t write songs, you just get the fax?

  I don’t know how to describe what I do. I’m waiting to see what I’m gonna do next. That should give you some indication of how much planning goes into it.

  —How important are lyrics?

  Well, it depends on the song.

  —What about an abstract song like “Cowgirl in the Sand“?

  The words to “Cowgirl in the Sand” are very important because you can free-associate with them. Some words won’t let you do that, so you’re locked into the specific fuckin’ thing the guy’s singin’ about…. This way it could be anything.

  The thing is, as long as there’s a thread that carries through it, then when you imagine what it’s about, there’s gonna be a thread that takes you to the end, too. You can follow your thought all the way through if you happen to have one—or if you don’t, you realize it doesn’t matter.

  —Do all the songs you write make sense to you?

  No. That’s not a requirement. It doesn’t have to make sense, just give you a feeling. You get a feeling from something that doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make sense—it kind of gives you a sense. Like “Last Trip to Tulsa” or “Rapid Transit” don’t make a lotta sense. Some do, some don’t. It’s not important to me.

  —So are your songs autobiographical?

  It’s not about information. The song is not meant for them to think about me. The song is meant for people to think about themselves.

  The specifics of what songs are about are not necessarily constructive or relevant. Songs come from a source and the source may be several … It could give credence to the theory of reincarnation, where you’ve been a lotta different places but obviously you haven’t. What the fuck am I doing writing about Aztecs in “Cortez the Killer” like I was there, wandering around? ’Cause I only read about it in a few books. A lotta the shit I just made up because it came to me.

  —And you were open enough to receive it?

  Yeah … I believed in myself enough to let it come in.

  —Does believing in yourself have a lot to do with writing songs?

  I don’t know. Did Kurt Cobain believe in himself?

  —How does stream of consciousness work in your writing? If it’s a steady stream of consciousness for me, and I can follow the picture all the way through, you can just go smoothly through it on another level. You’re listening to the sound of the words and the pictures and the melody—and they go together. It transcends any one of the elements—so y’know, you just keep going. You’re not thinking about this word or that word, you just get a big blur of images. That’ll happen with me when I’m singing the song and I’m seeing some image that’s unrelated to the words—seemingly unrelated. If I see it and keep seeing it, y’know, the next time I sing it, it may come back. Keeps coming back for years sometimes, a little glimmer of something. If
that happens with me, then I think that everybody is gonna have their own identifying place with the song that’s gonna carry them all the way through, too, and they’re gonna think I’m singing directly to them.

  —Any songs of yours cut the closest?

  Nope.

  —Not “Will to Love“?

  It was a good song, but its weakness is it was a one-shot deal. I mean, that was it. I can’t even sing it. I can’t remember it. I can’t remember the melody. I can’t even … that’s perfect. To have it like that—so every verse is different and it’s all just comin’ out. It’s real good to get it like that. But uh … I don’t think that’s the only one—several have that vibe … “Goin’ Back” is one of my all-time favorites.

  —Did smoking pot have an effect on your writing?

  Yeah … I was just writing, I don’t know if it had to do with smoking any grass or not smoking any grass. I don’t think it mattered, but it had an effect, yeah. What it was, I don’t know. ’Cause I can write both ways. Y’know, I can write in a car, I can write while I’m asleep. And all of a sudden I’ve got a melody or words or both—the whole fuckin’ thing….

  —Do you have a policy on song editing?

  Well, try not to edit. Sometimes you write too much. You take a verse out, whatever. The time to edit is the only important thing. Try not to judge and edit yourself unless you’ve completely finished what you’ve done. Because to start second-guessing yourself as it’s coming out of you, you’re gonna jam it up and it’s not gonna come out. Thinking in songs—that’s where it gets lost. Either playing it or writing it.

  —Has your writing changed over the years?

  I think it has—it’s the same basic kind of writing … it’s evolved. I’ve gotten more sure of things. Less thinking.