Shakey Read online

  —Ever think you’re guilty of preaching in your songs?

  Probably I am—but I’m preaching to myself. Ya gotta remember that. The person that I talk to in my songs is mostly me. When I say, “You gotta blah, blah, blah,” I’m talkin’ to myself.

  —Are you preaching in “Throw Your Hatred Down“?

  I don’t think I’m preaching. I’m reflecting. Maybe talkin’ to myself—I dunno. I hate to take responsibility for every word that I say.

  —Francis Bacon once said, “I can’t be held responsible for the products of my subconscious.”

  I agree with that. That’s what art’s all about—if you wanna get it out there. Well, I think that applies to songwriting, but it doesn’t apply to life. I’m not sure how far that goes.

  —More than a few of your songs mean completely different things to different people.

  Open ambiguity. It’s not stated, it’s understood. Something’s there that’s understood, but you can’t put your finger on it. It’s a feeling you have that “Yes, I’m not hearing it all, but I can put it together from what I’m getting.” Y’know what I mean? So that’s part of what happens in my writing naturally. I think that’s my style. What comes out of me is full of those things—where you leave out the connection and assume that the person knows the connection just subliminally. Just keep on goin’. Leave out key words and stuff and it still makes perfect sense—but it doesn’t mean literally what it means … if you read it out word by word, it means one thing, but if you say it all in a line, it means something else—that’s what I think songwriting is. That’s the mystery. The mystery of art.

  One day in the fall of 1965, Neil had Comrie drive him by all their old Toronto haunts. There were glimmers that Young was feeling the pull of his dreams, feeling the urge to move on. He insisted they stop at their old school, Lawrence Park. “I have to do this, Comrie,” he said, and then sat on the steps with his guitar and played song after song.

  Driving around, they ran into one of the woeful characters Young had defended back in grade school: Gary Renzetti. As Smith tells it, “Neil’s in the backseat and goes, ‘Look, there’s Renzetti! Stop!’ I stopped the car, and Neil jumped out the back door and yelled at the top of his lungs, ‘Renzetti, you old fart!’ Neil runs up, shakes his hand, got back in the car and said, ‘Someday he’ll remember this. Neil Young’ll be somebody.’”

  One night at 45 Golfdale, Young and Smith, guitars in hand, tromped up to the third-floor attic and made some music. Neil embellished a couple of the songs with what he called his “Dylan kit”—a harmonica in a holder hanging around his neck. Comrie set up his reel-to-reel recorder and let it roll. The tape, which Smith held on to all these years, is a revelation.

  There are six Young originals and one cover, “High-Heeled Sneakers,” and they run the gamut from folk to R&B. “Betty Ann,” with a dual vocal by Neil and Comrie, points to the sort of folk-duo ideas Young was toying with. “Casting Me Away from You,” “Don’t Tell My Friends,” “There Goes My Babe,” are all forlorn ballads of lost love. “My Room Is Dark ’Cepting for the Light of My Cigarette,” is an angst-ridden coming-of-age song (“Who’s to say my hair’s too long?”) with a weird, rolling-rhythm guitar part that’s pure Neil.

  But the frenetic performances of “High-Heeled Sneakers” and “Hello, Lonely Woman” are particularly illuminating, conclusive proof of the depth of Young’s feeling for rhythm and blues. Few white people can pull off singing about wighats convincingly, but Young, only nineteen years old, does just that in “High-Heeled Sneakers.” I had falsely assumed it was Crazy Horse’s Danny Whitten who uncorked Neil’s really raggedy-ass side, dragged it out of him and made him work it. But in Young’s life, there are surprises everywhere, and “Hello, Lonely Woman” is one of them.

  For the first time, you can hear everything Young absorbed from those late-night transistor-radio sessions, lying there transfixed by the otherworldly Jimmy Reed. “Just come in when you feel like it,” Young directs Comrie, his nasal voice sounding nervous and a bit under the weather. Then they lurch into “Hello, Lonely Woman,” and I do mean lurch, because at times the guitars are extremely tenuous and the song sounds ready to swallow itself, but the suspense excites in the same way Crazy Horse would years later, when you wonder if the band has a prayer of making it to the end of the song without totally collapsing.

  “I know you, lonely woman, I know what’s on your mind / I won’t ask you any questions, I’m familiar with your kind,” mutters Young in a menacing growl, stomping his foot in time. The harp solo—nearly four minutes long—falters a bit, like everything else, but there are moments where the playing so completely unhinges, it is every bit as thrilling as anything Young would later achieve. Young might have first experienced his signature trance-out while playing “Farmer John” during an afternoon show in some dive in Fort William, but here he was, getting just as gone, learning to summon it up at will on a song he created, with Smith there to record it. It was, as Comrie compared it to the old days when Neil would nervously flick his fingers and go flush, a real “red-faced night.”

  Not everyone found Young’s abandon so exhilarating. “Neil was up there chanting away,” recalls Comrie, “and my mum said, ‘Y’know, there’s somethin’ about Neil, somethin’ about his eyes tonight that really worries me.’” Then Young disappeared into the night. Smith would spend much of the next month trying to find him.

  On October 30, 1965, Young’s band would play their one and only gig since leaving Thunder Bay, and they would have to venture into the States to do it. Wobbly Barn was a ski resort in Killington, Vermont, looking for a band to play the winter season. Four to Go lasted exactly one engagement.

  Young and Koblun headed for New York City, where they looked up Richie Furay, a friend of Stephen Stills. Born May 9, 1944, in Dayton, Ohio, Furay was a harmony addict who had grown up on country music and early rock and roll, and in late 1964 wound up in New York City, where he joined Stills in the Au Go-Go Singers. Furay was a rare commodity in the music business: a nice, uncomplicated guy. And he could sing like a bird. Young played Furay some songs, including “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” which Furay started performing as a solo folkie. The two would soon meet again.

  When he got back to Toronto, Young broke up his band. Smith recalls driving Neil around as he fumed, particularly upset about telling Ken Koblun it was over. Young seemed especially furious with Martin Onrot, complaining that the manager never understood the first thing about the music he was trying to make. Out of the gloom came a prophecy. “One day, Comrie, it’ll be Neil Young. It’ll just be me. I’ll be alone out there on the stage.”

  Koblun was handing out flyers in front of the Riverboat when Young told him the news. He had followed Neil through thick and thin all the way from Winnipeg, and it had led nowhere. “I was upset,” Koblun said with characteristic understatement. Ironically, Koblun got a job doing the lights at the Riverboat, and when Neil showed up at a hootenanny for one of his first solo appearances, playing songs on an unamplified Gretsch, Ken was manning the spotlight.

  Somehow around this time Young snagged his first audition for an American record company, Elektra. Undoubtedly excited, he returned to New York City, but if the performance preserved on tape is any indication, it was a dismal experience. Young nervously rushes through seven songs, including “Clancy,” playing second banana to a shorting amplifier during one tragically funny performance of a song entitled “I Ain’t Got the Blues.” Nothing came of the ordeal.

  “Just turn it on and let it run.” That’s what the guy said at the beginning. Judy Collins was doing something in the studio. I thought I was goin’ in. Turned out I was goin’ in the tape vault to do this demo in there. In New York, in a little room by myself, with my guitar. Sitting on an amp. Couldn’t even record in a real studio. Went all the way there and they gave me a fuckin’ tape machine. Told me to press start. I could’ve done that at home. But then, bless them, they didn’t sign me. So things
do work out.

  It was a humbling experience. A slow, sinking feeling as I realized, “My shit’s not very good—but I’m here. I’m here playin’ it and it’s not too good. My shit’s no good.” All by myself, makin’ a tape for nobody. The funny fuckin’ thing was, I was sitting in the tape library with all these Elektra masters, on an amp with a speaker in it—a magnetic speaker. They put me in there—nobody said, “Don’t put it near the tapes.”

  “I Ain’t Got the Blues”—Now, if I’d done that song with a band and had it developed a little farther, it probably woulda been more innaresting—but as it was, it was definitely just at the very beginning of my songwriting. It was like “I’m gonna write a song that has the word ‘blues’ in it,” y’know what I mean? When you look at your early stuff, it’s really funny. But as embarrassing as it is, those things have a place.

  Onrot wanted to do the best he could. He just didn’t know what the fuck he was doin’ … I don’t know what his real job was. But at least he was interested in managing me. Felt that I had something going. He wanted to be a manager, and I wanted to be an artist. Neither one of us really were what we thought we were—but we wanted to be. So the two of us were a good match.

  First I wanted it to be a band. And then I just decided, “Well, fuck, I’ll try it on my own.” And I went back and forth on that a couple of times before I got out of Canada. If there wasn’t a band, I was alone. If there was a band, I was in the band. If it was my band, it was my band.

  Breakin’ up the Squires—that was a decision I never shoulda fuckin’ made. What a stupid asshole. That’s too bad. Son of a bitch. We went the wrong way again.

  Legend has it that Neil Young first encountered folksinger Vicky Taylor as he was being ejected from a Toronto Folk Guild hootenanny. “Take your squeaky voice and get outta here,” said Riverboat owner Bernie Fiedler to Young, who responded, “Someday you’ll beg me to come back here.” Both Fiedler and Young insisted the story was false.

  Taylor claimed she witnessed the event, then took Young back to her place. “Neil had a vision,” she said. “He was very focused, and it was like you could feel this energy and talent coiled inside. I got the impression he wasn’t extremely healthy—that in spite of his burning talent, there was a very fragile spirit there. I wanted to protect him from life.”

  Taylor was a raven-haired singer with a rapid-fire vibrato whose big number was entitled “The Pill” and, according to her friend Janine Hollinghead, “it was twenty verses long—she could get through half a set just on that song alone.” Taylor earned fifty bucks a week as the resident folksinger at the Mousehole, a club run by Bernie Fiedler’s wife, and lived in a $90-a-month flat above the Night Owl on Avenue Road that served as a communal home to many starving musicians. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, John Kay of Steppenwolf (known then as the Sparrow), David Rea and Craig Allen all passed through Vicky’s apartment, sleeping on the floor, jamming with other musicians and subsisting on a no-budget concoction Taylor whipped up called “guck.” “I was kinda like the mother hen,” said Taylor.

  “Vicky was the only one on the folk scene that was nice to me,” said Joni Mitchell. “Every time she went to an audition, Vicky would insist on dragging me along. Vicky fancied that she looked like Cher. She had long black straight hair and bangs. She was thin and pale and I guess she was neurotic—she was the first person I met that went to a shrink. People in Canada didn’t go to shrinks, and she had to go out of town to go.”

  Taylor’s adventures in mental health led to poor treatment at the hands of professionals, in addition to access to endless prescriptions. Pills weren’t the only drugs plentiful in the Avenue Road flat. Draft dodgers were flooding in from across the border, many of them carrying pot. Denizens at Taylor’s began experimenting. “A friend of ours came back from Israel with a four-dollar Hershey bar of hash in her brassiere,” said Craig Allen. “And we proceeded to clean it up. We lost three months with that brick of hash.”

  Taylor described Neil as vulnerable and wary. “He was like a brother to me. But he didn’t have a lot of trust in women. I think he just felt so different inside that he was terrified of people. Neil and I shared a fear of that fine line between sane and insane.” Taylor recalls Young having “anxiety attacks, but they were probably precursors to epileptic attacks. I would give him some Valiums or something…. I always had a thousand of those kinda things.” Impending visits with his father often seemed to bring on the panic. “Neil was very intense. There was a little invisible wall around him. He would sit there in the corner, writing songs, and nobody ever bothered him. He was just tuned out.” Young immersed himself in Taylor’s collection of folk records, listening to people like Bert Jansch, Phil Ochs and Hamilton Camp.

  Writers have gotten much mileage out of a Stephen Stills quote claiming Vicky Taylor “convinced Neil that he was Bob Dylan.” During this period Young did start to perform around town solo, with little success. “‘Clancy’ is sort of a narrative, now it sounds okay,” said Craig Allen. “But in those days it was so vague, club owners didn’t want him to sing that kind of rambling stuff.” Complicating matters was Young’s insistence on featuring mainly original material. “I’m sure he could’ve gotten jobs if he would sing Bob Dylan stuff and Phil Ochs stuff,” said Taylor. “But Neil wouldn’t bend.”

  Young also played Monday-night hootenannies at the Riverboat as part of a folk group with Vicky Taylor, Donna Warner and Elyse Weinberg dubbed the Public Futilities, but that was strictly for laughs. Young was mostly a nonentity on the folk scene. “I was by myself, just me and my guitar traveling alone, just showing up at these places,” Young told writer Nick Kent. “It was quite an experience. The strong image I have now of that period is one of me walking around in the middle of the night in the snow, wondering where to go next! A part of me was thinking, ‘Wow, this is really out on the edge!’ The other part of me was thinking, ‘What the fuck do I do now?’”

  In Toronto I went out and played a whole bunch of gigs by myself. The twelve-string gave me a chance to do that. They weren’t very good gigs…. I played one night when somebody was not available at the New Gate of Cleve. And they knew a couple of days in advance, so I filled the bill—for that one night they let me in. Somebody was down there and reviewed me. It wasn’t a big review. My first review said that my songs were cliché-ridden.

  —How did that strike you?

  “Marty, what’s a cliché?”

  Then there was a place in North Bay—the Bohemian Embassy. That’s where I first did “Oh Lonesome Me.” I had the arrangement before I left Toronto—that same arrangement, the chord changes and the rhythm. I did other songs that I wrote myself that I can’t remember.

  I couldn’t get paid to play—I had to go for an open mike. Some kinda situation where I could be brought in if somebody was sick or something. I wasn’t in the union, so that was a problem, too. In Canada, y’know, it’s very complicated. Now it looks simple when I look back on it. But I’m sayin’ for me in Canada it was very complicated, heh heh. Once I made it all the way into the States and got stopped by U.S. immigration at the bus depot in Detroit. They sent me back. Tryin’ to get back and forth between the United States and Canada, my first run-in with the border…. I remember sleepin’ in this one chick’s basement. It was nighttime, it was too cold and I didn’t have anywhere to go. She brought me back to her house and her parents were there. She convinced them I was okay. I got up and left before they woke up. I didn’t really know where I was, though. I don’t know how I got outta there.

  I couldn’t get into Detroit once because I couldn’t get across the bridge with my guitar. Tried to sneak across, take the bus across. I think on my way back I went and visited my uncle Bob who lived in Windsor. Stayed there a couple of days, then I did a show there. Pretty big place. Those were like my first solo shows.

  I had a series of gigs—maybe Joni and Chuck Mitchell might’ve gotten these gigs in the Detroit/Ann Arbor area—solo acoustic, before the Mynah Bird
s. Chess Mate coffeehouse, an old folk club in Detroit, Livernois and One-eleventh. Very near there is where the White Tower is. “The Old Laughing Lady”—I was having some coffee and wrote it on napkins. I don’t know what prompted it. It came out on a napkin, no guitar. Hangin’ out in a coffee shop.

  —Did you feel part of the folk scene in Toronto?

  Almost. I really didn’t get too much of a chance, ’cause I wasn’t there that long. I was at the bottom, kinda like the new guy. I wasn’t that good, y’know. My songs were pretty dumb. You can hear ’em on that Elektra tape … they were what they were.

  Vicky Taylor was just a good friend. She had an apartment above the Night Owl—I lived there a little while. She was a little bit crazy. She would get real sad about things … but not for long. She was a real party girl. Had a little bit of money, liked to have a good time. Let me sleep on her floor—me and John Kay. The original Sparrow were great—Dennis Edmonton on guitar: Mars Bonfire. They had that Toronto sound, funky and good. John showed me funky little guitar things—little finger-picking things on the bass guitar strings. A lot of the basis of my rhythm-playing came from John Kay.

  Vicky Taylor had this record—Bert Jansch, his first album—and I used to listen to that all the time. Some of the greatest guitar playing I ever heard. I could go on for years about this guy, how fuckin’ talented he is. Every note destroyed me. Bert Jansch—great acoustic guitarist, unreal. Him and Dylan—same thing. Bob Dylan’s a great guitar player—a really good acoustic guitar player, a great rhythm guitar player and he’s gettin’ to be a good lead guitar player. He’s just very expressive.

  —Who turned you on to Phil Ochs?

  I’ve always been aware of Phil Ochs. Since the early folkie days in Toronto. Great singer/songwriter. Very melodic. Innaresting character. *