Shakey Page 18

  The Allen Ward Trio—they were good. They were kinda like a Peter, Paul and Mary thing—sometimes they had David Rea playing with them, and that made them cooler. David Rea was pretty far out. I kinda looked up to them because they had a real job. They could go play clubs—not all the time, but occasionally.

  That’s where I got high the first time. In David Rea’s apartment, with some members of the Allen Ward Trio—Craig Allen, Robin Ward. Hash. It was fun. A revelation.

  —About what?

  Y’know—about getting high. Just fun. There was nothin’ serious about it, I’ll tell ya that, heh heh.

  “My mother was an oil painter, my father played violin in the orchestra and sang through a megaphone,” said Bruce Palmer. Born September 9, 1946, Bruce was introduced to jazz and R&B through his brother Stephen. “He was probably the first guy ever in Toronto to live with a Negro and brought her home to dinner,” Palmer recalls.

  A love of B. B. King, Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Coltrane led Palmer into music. He was playing with a band called Jack London and the Sparrows when he saw Ricky James Matthews III, much later to become pimpfunk freak show Rick James, singing in an outfit called the Mynah Birds. “I saw him perform and it was the real deal,” said Palmer, who actually traded bands with their bass player to get in the group. James, born James Johnson in Buffalo, New York, fancied himself the next Mick Jagger, a claim particularly ironic since he was black, although as Palmer told Scott Young, “as far as we knew he was white then.”

  The Mynah Birds—in black leather jackets, yellow turtlenecks and boots—had quite a surreal scene going. The band was financed by John Craig Eaton of the Eaton’s department-store dynasty. Legend has it he poured money into the band, establishing a bottomless account for the band’s equipment needs. “We used to walk into Eaton’s department store, take the elevator up to John’s office and say, ‘We need about seven hundred dollars for lunch, John. Thanks.’” Apparently Eaton enjoyed being a rock and roll impresario. Outfitted in a trench coat, Eaton would march into the dressing room and, as Palmer told Scott Young, “stride up and down like Knute Rockne, telling us to go out there and knock ’em dead.”

  Into this rarefied atmosphere stumbled Neil Young. Palmer recalls bumping into him as Neil was wandering down the street carrying an amp. The Mynah Birds had just lost a guitarist, so, said Palmer, he told Young, “Come and join our band—there’s a Negro lead singer, we do rock and roll and hey, who cares that you can only play a Gibson twelve-string and sing like a fag?”

  So Young became a Mynah Bird. For the first time, he was a mere sideman. Those lucky enough to see any of the band’s few gigs say they were electrifying. “Neil had just the acoustic twelve-string with a D’Armond pickup on it, stuffed with newspaper to kill the feedback,” said Comrie Smith, who remembers a show stopping Young/James original—featuring the two of them singing harmony—called “Hideaway.” “Neil would stop playing lead, do a harp solo, throw the harmonica way up in the air and Ricky would catch it and continue the solo.”

  Young and James were running buddies for a brief minute. “Neil always described Ricky as having built-in soul,” said Smith. He and Young shared an apartment with James at 88 Charles Street, living on bakery deliveries James would lift in the wee hours of the morning. Their pad was your typical no-furniture musician shithole. “There were dustballs rolling like tumbleweed across the floor,” said Linda Smith. “Neil would just open a door and tell me to sweep ’em into the closet.” James also instigated Young’s short romance with amphetamines.

  The Mynah Birds were happening. Young helped himself to a new Rickenbacker six-string via the Eatons, and the band landed a recording contract. “We went from playing little clubs in Toronto to recording an album for Motown,” said Palmer. A white rock act fronted by a black singer, the Mynah Birds were given the full treatment. “Motown would issue membership cards that would buy anything,” said Palmer. “And if you got popped, you wouldn’t have to pay—you’d just go, ‘Motown recording artist.’” During sessions all the Detroit heavies wandered in and out, including Berry Gordy Jr., Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-Holland. “If they thought we weren’t strong enough, a couple of Motown singers would walk in,” Young told Cameron Crowe. “And they’d Motown us!”

  Unfortunately, everything screeched to a halt when James was busted in the studio for being AWOL from the navy. “We thought he was Canadian,” said Palmer. “Even though there are no Negroes in Canada.” A single, “It’s My Time,” was allegedly pulled the day of release, and the album recordings were shelved and remain unreleased to this day. The band’s manager, Morley Shelman, ran off with their $25,000 advance and promptly overdosed.

  —What was Rick James like to hang out with?

  Intense. Ricky was great. He was a little bit touchy, dominating—but a good guy. Had a lot of talent. Really wanted to make it bad. Runnin’ from the draft. I wasn’t a driving force behind the Mynah Birds—I was the lead guitar player, Ricky was the front man. He’s out there doin’ all that shit and I was back there playin’ a little rhythm, a little lead, groovin’ along with my bro Bruce. We were havin’ a good time. Up until the time I went to Toronto, I think the Beatles were my favorite of the English groups, but when I went to Toronto, the Stones kind of moved in—along with Rick James. He was really into the Stones. “Get Off My Cloud,” “Satisfaction,” “Can I Get a Witness”—all these songs we used to do. We got more and more into how cool the Stones were. How simple they were and how cool it was.

  We had a funky band. I like bein’ in the band. You don’t have to sing all the time. It’s a lot like playing with Bob. There’s somethin’ about that that’s cool.

  We were the only white band at Motown. We didn’t do too well in etiquette and choreography—how to be cool, how to move. I thought we fit in pretty good, considering.

  I think I met Bruce down at David Rea’s apartment below the Riverboat. Bruce was great. Bruce was one of the best guitar players I’ve ever heard in my life. Blues guitar. Neither Stephen or I played guitar half as well as Bruce. But he didn’t play guitar—he played bass. Bruce used to sing and play, and it was funky as hell. Funky blues man. He had an old Kay. He can still play the blues, just like that.

  —What did amphetamines do for you?

  Kept me up. I loved everybody. Stand in front of the mirror, look at myself and get happy. We used to pop amyl nitrates—but I didn’t do that for very long. It’s not good for ya.

  —Comrie felt when he visited your apartment something was going on he didn’t know about.

  Heh heh—when he visited the Mynah Birds? Oh, yeah. Whoa. I’m sure there were things goin’ on there that I didn’t know about.

  Back in Toronto after the Mynah Birds fiasco, Young bided his time playing checkers with Palmer at a joint called the Cellar, an all-night basement coffeehouse run by a half-dozen hipsters that was, as Comrie Smith put it, “a horrible Yorkville dive.” The ringleader of the bunch was Tannis Neiman, a rail-thin black-haired folksinger who was half Cree Indian and apparently a bit of a handful. “She was a cranky old broad,” said Janine Hollinghead, who, along with Neiman and an artist named Beverly Davies, helped run the place.

  Young, usually dressed rather mod in a snappy white shirt adorned by one large pink polka dot, sometimes played solo at the club. Beverly Davies remembers him performing one unforgettable number entitled “It’s Leaves and It’s Grass and It’s Outta Your Class.” For a while Young lived with Davies in an apartment on Avenue Road a few doors down from Webster’s, a twenty-four-hour restaurant and hangout.

  Tall, pale and sullen—not to mention painfully mysterious—the twenty-year-old loner had everything required to be a heartthrob, but most admirers soon became frustrated over Young’s seeming disinterest. “Neil was beset by women in those days,” said Hollinghead. “I think that everywhere he turned, he found adoring women, and he really didn’t know what to do with it or how to deal with it—Beverly was in love with him, Judy was
in love with him, Tannis was in love with him. Neil seemed to attract women like magnets—and yet he repelled ’em like crazy.”

  Meanwhile, the enormous and inescapable cultural pull of the Beatles was beginning to spawn weird hybrids in the States, as folkies and jug-band rejects plugged social consciousness and snips of real poetry in to the big beat. In mid-1965, teens and college-age kids were absolutely ripe for the stuff, and massive success came seemingly overnight for the likes of the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Mamas and the Papas and, at the very top of the heap, L.A.’s Byrds. “The Byrds were the beginning of ‘not straight,’” said writer Richard Meltzer. “It was about drugs. It was music to accompany the smoking of pot.” The Byrds, Young said years later, “taught me about cool.”

  Dylan upped the ante with a shambolic howl called “Like a Rolling Stone.” Haphazardly recorded in New York City with a band of up-all-week accidents on the ride of their lives, this was surely one of the most cathartic records ever unleashed. Shattering the three-minute limit twice over, it was Dylan’s first Top-Ten hit, reaching number two at the end of August—and music that elicited catcalls from the hard-line folkies at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25. But petulant traditionalists couldn’t stop the impending tsunami. “By ’65, there was something happening,” said Meltzer. “It was just immense. It was a world cultural thing.”

  Young must’ve felt like the world was passing him by. He had bombed as a folksinger, he owed everybody in town money and he was tied to a band whose leader was now in jail. Things weren’t exactly looking up. His father remembers running into him that winter, walking down the street, his hands bare in the subzero temperature. Scott offered to buy him gloves, but Neil declined and wandered off. They would not see each other again for three and a half years.

  Young hatched a plan with Palmer for an escape. They now had a friend in the States, Stephen Stills—supposedly in California, although nobody really had a clue as to where he actually was. Beverly Davies remembers the prophetic day they were all hanging out at Webster’s, and the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” wafted out of the jukebox.

  “Let’s go to California and become rock stars,” proclaimed Young.

  That sounds like a Canadian story to me. That sounds too real to be true.

  I had a goal. First I wanted to quit school and go to L.A. Then I modified my plan—quit school, go to Toronto. I thought that if I made it in Toronto, it would be easier to make it in L.A. So I went to Toronto and I couldn’t make it. So I said, “Fuck Toronto—I’ll go to L.A. and make it. If I make it in Toronto, all I am is big in Toronto. If I go to L.A. and make it, then I’m big in the fuckin’ WORLD” Then I’m talkin’ to more people—I got a bigger audience, and an audience is where it’s at.

  The more of an audience, the more experimenting you can do, the bigger you are and the bigger chance you have for a lotta people to like ya, even if they all don’t. I was aware of it right from the beginning—why spend a lotta time making it big in a place that it didn’t matter? If you’re gonna make it big somewhere, why not go where if you make it big, it matters right away?

  I thought the Byrds were great. They looked different, y’know—it was like “Wow, must be a trip down there.” I don’t know that I wanted to go down there and look like them, but I did want to go down to L.A. and see what the fuck that was all about.

  They were the new thing. They were the marriage of folk and rock and roll. All the folkies were gonna start playing electric music. Some of them were scared and some of them weren’t. But they all knew that there was more to a song than just The Songs and The Lyrics, and that was scaring some of them. Because when you do it with a band, it puts a third thing that’s just as big right up there with it. So that was what I heard when I heard the Byrds, and it didn’t scare me at all because I already knew how to play the electric guitar. I felt good about it.

  —Dylan has described his music as “attempting to do something that’s never been done before.”

  Well, I think he’s done that. How ’bout me? No, Bob did it, heh heh. I don’t know … I don’t know.

  For me, Dylan is the greatest that ever lived in the singer/songwriter/poet vein. He’s an original, like Woody Guthrie. From a literary sense? This guy’s over the top. He’s like Longfellow or one of those fuckin’ guys, that’s what Dylan is. He even named himself after a poet. He knew who he was, heh heh.

  There was a time when his essence was coming out strongly—really strongly—so it affected this whole generation. Everybody related to his voice, what he was saying, and you could really get into it. Not many people had that kind of impact—Woody Guthrie had that kind of an impact. Hank Williams.

  He was a heavy influence on me at the beginning. The thread of his music—not so much the musical thread, but the soul of what he was doing … what he was putting together. His music was a unique kind of music, too, like Jimmie Rodgers, Woody Guthrie. Plus, at that point in my life, the whole thing of “Who do you want to emulate? Who do you want to be like?” That makes a big mark on ya.

  Early on, when Bob decided to play with a band, everybody else perceived it as a radical change. I thought it was great, I was fuckin’ knocked out…. I had already played rock and roll and folk music. I was goin’ back and forth from one to the other, so to me it never made any difference. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. You play electric guitar, you play acoustic guitar, who gives a shit? What’s the big deal? Only the people that try to put a label on it. They try to label you—they all thought they had him figured out.

  He’d always been a folkie, he had this following and they all hated rock and roll music. They were intellectuals, they were the beatnik hippies, they were cool. They weren’t goin’ for this rock and roll shit.

  That’s a classic case of someone trying to nail you into a corner. He just did what he did—he played folk music up to a point, made records, sang, became a folk hero, did the whole thing, then decided to move on—so there really wasn’t that big of a deal. The big deal was the reaction to it.

  The audience was upset because they knew that other audiences had been upset, so they were gonna get upset, too. It’s like the Trans thing, when I wore the vocoder and people booed me. That was on a much lower scale than what was happening with Bob, but that’s what I can relate it to.

  They were exposing themselves—the audience. For not being free-thinking. For being closed-minded. Heh, heh. Bob just kept playing. He’d seen people expose themselves before, so I don’t think it stopped him at all. Pretty funny.

  Bob had a great band, too. That first band was awesome. Mike Bloomfield. Al Kooper. Man, that was bad. Mike Bloomfield especially. What a guitar player. I can remember hearing “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio. I was walkin’ down a sidewalk, I think I’d been up all night—I was comin’ home from the Eatons’ house, walkin’ back to Yorkville either by myself or with Rick James. A walk through the city, and I heard it. I was out on the street. I think it was on a transistor radio, I’m not sure. I’m hearing all these great lyrics come pouring out over this track, all these images and everything, and I’m going, “That is the coolest shit I’ve heard.” It was out there. “Like a Rolling Stone” was over the top when it came out.

  And I was relating to it big-time. I just loved it. Made me wanna keep doin’ it. Great words, great beat—the whole emotion of the whole thing was very much like a lotta these bands today who sing their songs, and they’re seemingly abstract? It’s the same fuckin’ thing, it’s exactly the same thing, the same feeling. I can relate to “Like a Rolling Stone” the way these kids can relate to Eddie Vedder or Nirvana or Soundgarden.

  I always listen. There isn’t a record that he’s made that I haven’t listened to. Dylan’s somethin’ so good you don’t wanna have too much of it. I mean, I think I liked Bob’s music so much that at one point I actually had to consciously not listen to it because it affected me so much. I realized at one point, “If I listened too much I’d become like him.�
� Because I’m like a sponge.

  There’s a song that I wrote because I heard “Positively 4th Street” that’s terrible. … What the fuck was the name of that song? * There was this chick that was kinda leading me on and then wouldn’t fuck me. And I left her. And I got all fuckin’ bent out of shape and wrote this song. It was a nasty song, it wasn’t very nice. I realized you could be an asshole in a record and tell somebody exactly what you thought of them. I realized all this new territory that could be covered….

  After Bob moved on and became a band member as well as a singer/songwriter, then basically he kind of advanced along. He’s made some radical changes, but Bob really has been pretty steady. His changes aren’t as radical as Bobby Darin’s. He’s still my favorite when I listen to writers. “Tom Thumb Blues”—I love that song. I like the melody and I like the words. The girl. The guy. Images of the housing project. It’s almost like a movie, that song. Real free-floating. Typical Dylan, lettin’ it go. Lettin’ it out. Heh heh.

  I’d like to do a tour with him someday—where we both play in the same band—his band. You could record a great album with Bob in about three days.

  Dylan. He’s so funny. He came up to me in Europe, first time we actually shared a concert bill and not a benefit. He’d just done a great fuckin’ set. They just slammed. Bob came over and whispers—“Well, I got ’em all warmed up for ya” … Oh God. I like him.

  He’s a brutally honest guy. He loves to tell the truth, heh heh. He even enjoys it.

  “All of a sudden Neil phoned me up one Sunday,” said Comrie Smith. “I hadn’t heard from him. He said, ‘I gotta deliver this equipment to the Tee Pee Motor Inn in Pickering. Is there any way you can help me?’” Smith whizzed over to Charles Street, where Young was loading stacks of the Mynah Birds’ equipment into a clapped-out red Econoline van. The leftovers were stuffed into Comrie’s ’41 Plymouth. Unbeknownst to Smith, Young and Palmer had decided to sell the equipment Eaton had bought them to subsidize the trip to California. “I didn’t have a clue,” said Smith, who cheerfully drove the hot goods out Highway 401 to the drop-off in Pickering.