Shakey Read online

  Making his way through the backstage maze out to the arena’s mixing station was Tim Mulligan, his long hair, mustache and shades making him look like the world’s most sullen Doobie Brother. Nothing impresses Mulligan. He’s been working on Young’s albums and mixing his live sound for decades. “Producers, engineers come and go,” said Sterne. “Mulligan hangs in there. He doesn’t have an opinion.” Tim lives alone on Young’s ranch, without a phone. “Mulligan has this incredible allegiance,” said longtime Young associate “Ranger Dave” Cline. “He lives and breathes Neil. It’s his whole life.”

  It took years for Mulligan to warm to me, and even then he wouldn’t give me an interview, just tersely answered a few questions. Getting any one of Young’s crew to talk was like breaking into the Mafia. They were fiercely devoted, and although they’d all been subject to the ferocious twists and turns of Neil’s psyche, most had been around for decades. And every one of them was an individual. “Innaresting characters,” as Young would put it. “They’re all Neil,” said Graham Nash. “They all represent a slice of Neil’s personality.”

  “Neil likes quirky people around him,” said Elliot Roberts, Young’s manager since the late sixties. “I think having quirky people around him lessens—in his mind—his own quirkiness. ‘Yes, I am standing on my head, but look at these two other guys nude standing on their head.’”

  His mane of gray hair flying, Roberts was on his ninety-sixth phone call of the day, either chewing out some record-company underling or closing a million-dollar deal. Not far away, a bearded, sunglassed David Briggs—Young’s producer—prowled the stage, palming a cigarette J.D.-style and looking like the devil himself. Briggs and Roberts were the twin engines that powered the Neil Young hot rod. Feared, at times hated, both men possessed killer instincts and had been with Neil almost from the beginning. Roberts was a genius at pushing Young’s career, Briggs at pushing his art. It’s an understatement to say the two didn’t always see eye to eye.

  Roberts and Briggs were two of the quirkiest characters around—difficult, complicated men—but then so was just about everybody and everything in Young’s world. “Let’s look at Neil’s whole trip—the ranch, the people he plays with,” said computer wizard Bryan Bell, who worked extensively with Young in the late eighties. “‘Easy’ isn’t in the vocabulary.”

  “Neil is wonderful to work for in many ways and very difficult to work with in many ways,” said Roger Katz, former captain of Young’s boat. “He’s able to control most everything.” As David Briggs put it, “It’s not fun at all working with Neil—fun’s not part of the deal—but it’s very fulfilling.”

  I asked Young’s guitar tech Larry Cragg what the hardest tour had been. “All of ’em,” he said. “They’ve all been rough—every one of ’em made workin’ for anybody else real easy. The tours are out of the ordinary, the music, the movies—everything’s out of the ordinary. We do things differently around here. That’s just the way it is.”

  Cragg was tinkering with Young’s guitar rig, which sat in a little area to the rear of the stage. A gaggle of amps—a Magnatone, a huge transistorized Baldwin Exterminator, a Fender Reverb unit and the heart of it all: a small, weather-beaten box covered in worn-out tweed, 1959 vintage. “The Deluxe,” muttered amp tech Sal Trentino with awe. “Neil’s got four hundred and fifty-six identical Deluxes. They sound nothing like this one.” Young runs the amp with oversized tubes, and Cragg has to keep portable fans trained on the back so it doesn’t melt down. “It really is ready to just go up in smoke, and it sounds that way—flat-out, overdriven, ready to self-destruct.”

  Young has a personal relationship with electricity. In Europe, where the electrical current is sixty cycles, not fifty, he can pinpoint the fluctuation—by degrees. It dumbfounded Cragg. “He’ll say, ‘Larry, there’s a hundred and seventeen volts coming out of the wall, isn’t there?’ I’ll go measure it, and yeah, sure—he can hear the difference.”

  Shakey’s innovations are everywhere. Intent on controlling amp volume from his guitar instead of the amp, Young had a remote device designed called the Whizzer. Guitarists marvel at the stomp box that lies onstage at Young’s feet: a byzantine gang of effects that can be utilized without any degradation to the original signal. Just constructing the box’s angular red wooden housing to Young’s extreme specifications had craftsmen pulling their hair out.

  Cradled in a stand in front of the amps is the fuse for the dynamite, Young’s trademark ax—Old Black, a ’53 Gold Top Les Paul some knothead daubed with black paint eons ago. Old Black’s features include a Bigsby wang bar, which pulls strings and bends notes, and a Firebird pickup so sensitive you can talk through it. It’s a demonic instrument. “Old Black doesn’t sound like any other guitar,” said Cragg, shaking his head.

  For Cragg, Old Black is a nightmare. Young won’t permit the ancient frets to be changed, likes his strings old and used, and the Bigsby causes the guitar to go out of tune constantly. “At sound check, everything will work great. Neil picks up the guitar, and for some reason that’s when things go wrong.”

  Meanwhile, things were starting to pick up backstage. The usual music-biz ninnies and nincompoops were filtering in—a record exec here, a rock critic there—along with the requisite local celebrities, among them such actual friends of Young’s as actors Russ Tamblyn and Dennis Hopper. After the show, most would’ve given up waiting by the time Young would finally emerge from the dressing room.

  Show time was fast approaching. I saw no sign of Shakey, but everybody seemed to be walking a bit straighter backstage. I figured he must be holed up in his bus. Zeke Young, the product of Neil’s troubled, long-ago liaison with actress Carrie Snodgress, confirmed it. Zeke’s furrowed brow, crooked grin and lonesome, lost-in-a-dream look made him a dirty-blond ringer for his father circa 1971. Looking toward Pocahontas, Zeke clued me in to the meaning of the California state flag draped inside the big front window: “The flag with the bear means chill. Nobody goes on the bus.”

  Which meant Shakey would come out when he felt like it. Out in the house, Joel Bernstein—a baby-faced longhair who made the leap from fan to Young’s primary archivist—put it succinctly: “Neil does what he wants to do when he wants to do it and doesn’t do what he doesn’t want to do when he doesn’t want to do it.”

  Here in the summer of 1991, Bernstein was deep into a career retrospective of Young’s work, and he was excited. Little did Bernstein know that it still wouldn’t be finished ten years later and he’d have a few new gray hairs to show for his trouble.

  The Neil Young Archives, a projected multi-CD set of Young’s entire recorded output—released and unreleased—is emblematic of his tenaciousness and perversity. Numerous tentative release dates have come and gone since the project began in 1989. Exhaustively seeking CD technology refinements, Young has transferred his mammoth analog tape vault to digital not once but three times—so far. He’s blocked any attempts to corral Archives into a practical size and driven everybody crazy by repeatedly abandoning the project to create new music. A booklet mock-up was designed only to be immediately rejected; Young wanted a four-hundred-page book. His vision encompasses every aspect of the project down to the box cover, and rest assured, one way or another it will be carried out. Like everything else, it’ll be the way Neil Young wants it, or it won’t be done at all.

  Everybody keeps putting their own concept on this Archives thing—what songs should be in it, shortening it, doing all this shit that has nothing to do with what I’m going to do, y’know? So what I’ve done is, I’ve just stopped all that from happening—no one can complete anything.

  —They, uh, noticed, Neil.

  They did?

  —Oh, yeah. They noticed big-time.

  It was a helluva try. Real good. But it’s not what I want. I don’t mind the suggestions about what are good songs … But the pieces of shit should be there, too.

  —Why?

  So you know the difference. Some of it is good, some of it is cr
ap that wasn’t released—there’s a reason. Take a look, see what it is. That’s what a fuckin’ archive is about, not “Here’s Neil Young in all his wonderfulness—the great, phenomenal fucking wonderfulness.” That’s not what I want.

  I want people to know how fuckin’ terrible I was. How scared I was and how great I was. The real picture—that’s what I’m looking for. Not a product. And I think that’s what the die-hard fans want—the whole fuckin’ thing.

  And when I’ve done the Archives, selected everything and it’s all finished, I’m gonna destroy everything else.

  —Really?

  I’m gonna bury it.

  —You’re not being glib? This is a decision you’ve made?

  Definitely. I’m gonna dig a big fuckin’ hole, dump it all in there, cover it all up. And it’s gonna go away.

  —But people have shovels. People close to you.

  People close to me have shovels?!

  —Are you the right guy to put the Archives together?

  Hey—it’s already together. All you have to do is make sure it’s in chronological order, pick the art that goes with it, pick the packaging, put it out.

  Y’know, I don’t give a shit whether anybody BUYS it or not. I just wanna do it. And there may only be two hundred copies, signed by me. But it’s gonna fuckin’ exist. When it’s done, people can do whatever the fuck they want, make any fuckin’ order they want out of it. But they’re gonna have the whole fuckin’ thing to choose from. They’re not gonna get part of it. Everything—the good, the bad, the ugly.

  —Should I approach the book the same way?

  No—music’s different. If you put everything in the fuckin’ book … First of all, the book would be fuckin’ twenty volumes long and you’d never finish it. Second of all, it’d have all kinds of shit in it that might hurt people.

  At the same time, it shouldn’t be a book that makes me look like I’m great and that everything I did is perfect and that the whole book is contrived and put together to justify every fuckin’ thing I ever did.

  —YEAH, RIGHT.

  So obviously it’s not gonna be that kinda book. But that’s the one thing—I really don’t want to hurt people. There are ways to say things where the reader can put things together. Draw their own conclusions.

  The weakness of an autobiography is the lack of perspective of the person who’s writing it. So, for that reason, I’ll never write an autobiography. Never. I told Pegi, “Never let me do it.” There’s no reason.

  People keep telling me that my music has helped them through periods of their life, and I’ve never understood how that happens, but it must happen because of the way I do it. The way I do things is I give enough facts to make people get a feeling—and then they can associate their own lives with these images that make it seem to apply directly to them. Like the song was written for them. They can’t believe it’s so directly and obviously about their life. That’s because it’s not so specific that it eliminates them.

  To write an autobiography would go against the grain of all that. Plus it would be too hard. I’d rather make records. That’s where my thing is. Now you say something.

  —I’m gonna be institutionalized.

  Fuck, we can make a lifetime outta this. This could be worse than the Archives, heh heh. We’ll make an art project out of it if it fuckin’ kills us. It’s a book. As far as what’s in it—that’s up to you. I’m not gonna read it.

  The show at the L.A. Sports Arena opened just like the other fifty-two on the tour—with the gut-crunching chords of “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” A lean look at the demon that sometimes is rock and roll, it sports that infamous line “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Some take it as an anthem, while others are outraged. I thought it was funny, beyond cliché. Like many Young songs, it means different things to different people.

  The number had the crowd bouncing off the walls. And Shakey wasn’t just preaching to the choir. There were kids, lots of them—mere babies when the song was first released—all totally lost in the moment. Young’s surname is to the point: Neil Young, perhaps more than any of his peers, understands what rock is. “Rock and roll is just a name for the music of the young spirit—of what is happening right in front of us,” he said. “Something you can’t plan for. Something that you didn’t expect.”

  Tonight Young was onstage with his greatest rock band, Crazy Horse: Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot. Three musical misfits, and a band only Young could love. At any given moment, they’re capable of flubbing notes, speeding up, slowing down and generally stumbling through songs they’ve been playing for twenty years. The Horse are far from virtuosos, and so-called professional musicians have snickered at them for years. But I’d take ten hours of Crazy Horse at their absolute worst over the complete solo works of Clapton or Sting—at least it’s rarely dull. Will the song take off like a rocket or collapse before it starts? Anything’s possible with the Horse. That’s the thrill.

  In the nineties, touring behind a critically acclaimed “comeback” record—Ragged Glory—Crazy Horse suddenly found themselves the most unlikely institution in rock. Not that it’s been a big picnic. Young has kept the Horse alive the only way he knows how: by leaving to play with other musicians, then returning when things are fresh and the urge hits. It keeps the band relevant, keeps the edge. But the toll on the Horse has been heavy. Married, then divorced, then married again.

  The 1991 tour was particularly grueling, with everybody at one another’s throats by the end. But tonight Shakey was giving his all, blasting notes from Old Black that hurt—some of the best, most extreme music of his life. Not bad for a forty-five-year-old. “You can feel he surrenders,” said James Taylor. “Neil surrenders.”

  Being real: This is what Young constantly strives for. Few other musicians of his stature have gone to such lengths to keep things real. He’s never put out a greatest-hits package, unless you count 1977’s Decade, an eccentric three-record career retrospective that didn’t even have his picture on the front cover. Young has abandoned entire albums, dumped bands and tours in a heartbeat, walked away from massive success to release drunk, out-of-tune albums guaranteed to sell three copies, all to follow his muse. You know those one-hit wonders from days yonder, cherished because their thrown-together cacophanies somehow capture a moment in time? Nearly all of Young’s work contains that crazy spark. And as rock has gotten bigger and slicker to the point of absurdity, Young’s tried to remain as defiantly raw as ever.

  “Neil’s run by his art,” said Elliot Roberts. “If Neil perceives he’s being jive, he can’t do it.”

  You have to be ready to give everything you have, and you have to make sure you’ve really got a lot to give. Because if you go out there and you’re not ready to give everything you have—and you’re not strong enough to give as much as you possibly can—to go right to the end of the candle, to right where it’s gonna melt and be gone, then you’re nothin’. You shouldn’t even be there. You’re just markin’ time….

  —Interview with Laura Gross, 1988

  Ten months later, Young was out on the road again, playing a six-day solo stand at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. Watching him alone on the stage, encircled by acoustic instruments, I found it hard to believe that this was the same guy who’d been thrashing bent notes and noise out of Old Black. “Neil likes playing in groups, but basically he’s a solo artist,” the late Horse guitarist, Danny Whitten, had said. “Deep down he knows he has to do the gig by himself.”

  The Beacon shows were as tranquil as the Horse shows were deafening, a completely different animal. “I get into each thing I do—to the point where nothing else matters. I guess I’m an extremist,” said Young in 1989.

  A chameleon, Young has thrown himself whole hog into everything he’s done, from fifties rock and country to R&B and techno pop, but it all spirals out of two extremes: raw, rampaging four-piece rock and roll or lonesome, naked solo acoustic. “Neil can captivate
an audience and hold ’em there for two hours—just him and his guitar,” said Willie Nelson.

  But here he faced your typical New York City crowd—hungry for blood. They wanted the hits, they wanted Old Black and they wanted anything but what Young was giving them—a bunch of tender new songs they’d never heard before. He sparred with the audience, yelled at them, cajoled them, but most of all he kept right on playing. “What a fuckin’ horror show,” Young said later. “They sure didn’t wanna hear any of those songs—but they did anyway, didn’t they?” Young would have the last laugh, as usual. Harvest Moon, consisting of the songs the audience had been so impatient with, would be one of the biggest hits of his career.

  Compared to the Ragged Glory extravaganza, the Harvest Moon tour was bare bones—a handful of crew guys, Shakey and his bus. Golfing would take the place of rehearsals, and Young seemed to revel in the unpredictability of the shows. I went skulking around backstage, hoping to nab an interview. Little did I know I’d have to chase Young for another year and a half. The usual celebrity flotsam milled about—tired hipster comedians and the latest rock nonentities, all groveling. But one guest was being mentioned only in reverential whispers: Bob Dylan.

  Dylan attended all six of the Beacon shows, hanging out in Young’s tour bus between performances. Two of rock’s greatest iconoclasts sitting around shooting the shit. They’ve been friends for decades and, since the mid-seventies, have played the occasional benefit together, with Young also showing up at a few Dylan shows, guitar in hand. Young has covered Dylan songs, most notably “All Along the Watchtower”; Dylan, to my knowledge, has never returned the favor (outside of singing along on a ragged “Helpless” during a 1974 benefit). Four years older than Young, Dylan had done it all first and best, and without him you’d have no Neil, who has no illusions of where he stands in comparison. “I’m, like, a B student of this fuckin’ guy—he’s the real thing.” But these days, who was there after Dylan?