IT WAS SUPPOSED to be something holy, for God’s sake, when old Ernie sat down at the piano . . . I swear to God, If I were a piano player, or an actor or something, and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap at the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddamn closet.
HOLDEN CAUFIELD, The Catcher in the Rye
MY PARENTS OCCUPIED the bedroom directly above mine while I was growing up. Luckily they were heavy sleepers, and loud music late at night didn’t seem to bother them much – unless, of course, it was the high-pitched guitar or vocal work of Neil Young. On such occasions, my mother would trudge downstairs, rap at the door and stand there with a look that suggested the wrath of every deprived sleeper over the ages.
“Are we going to listen to this man baying at the moon all night?” she would invariably ask, on behalf of my father and herself.
There was a time, sure, when I tried to explain to them what it was to be a Neil Young fan. “How important is an in-tune vocal?” . . . “But it’s great when he hits the same note thirty-eight times in ‘Down By The River.’ ” Here was an artist, as opposed to an entertainer. Here was someone who would never turn up hawking his wares on some talk show.
Neil Young’s popularity would soon speak for itself. In 1972, my parents would hear “Heart of Gold” played in the supermarket, find it tuneful, and begin to see things differently. When Neil Young announced he would be playing San Diego, our hometown, on a rare concert tour, it became a family outing. My sister, my teenage cousins visiting from Kentucky, my parents and I all went to the show.
Neil Young appeared right on time, nervously walking out in front of the screaming crowd, one arm upraised. He looked skittish and tired as he picked up a guitar and began to sing an acoustic song, one of the first he ever wrote, called “Sugar Mountain.” The audience rushed the stage, shouted for the electric songs and Young called his band out onstage. But instead of Buffalo Springfield chestnuts and standards like “Down By The River,” they played a set of reckless new music, causing no small tension in the arena.
Then, during the final song of the evening, the pressure seemed to cause Neil Young to crack. He began to shout, “Wake up San Diego, Get up San Diego . . .” A few minutes later, the houselights were turned on and the hall was filled with an eerie silence.
“He acts like a drunken monkey,” said one of my cousins. The rest of the family didn’t say much. We didn’t talk about Neil Young for the next few years.
Recently, I found myself back in the same old room late one night, typing this article and listening to Neil Young records, when a familiar knock came at the door.
“Well,” said my mother with a note of sentimentality. “A survivor.”
THE FACT THAT NEIL YOUNG CAN barely relate to his successful current album, Comes a Time, is typical of his career, and perhaps one of the reasons he is a survivor. He’s thirty-three and he’s spent twelve years in the forefront of the most fickle of businesses, shattering expectations. “It’s in the middle of a soft place,” he says of the album. “It was made to come out a year ago and got hung up with pressing problems. I hear it on the radio and it sounds nice . . . But I’m somewhere else now. I’m into rock & roll.”
Held up because Young had approved a faulty test pressing of the album, and then bought back $160,000 worth of the already printed record because of his mistake, Comes a Time is a complacent Neil Young album. In the time that it took for the LP to come out, something in music changed. Much of the music made by artists who came to popularity in the Sixties and Seventies began to fall on deaf young ears.
“I first knew something was going on when we visited England a year and a half ago,” says Young. Sitting in the half-light of his ranch home in northern California after the end of his Rust Never Sleeps tour, Young speaks with an urgency. “Kids were tired of the rock stars and the limousines and the abusing of stage privileges as stars. There was new music the kids were listening to. As soon as I heard my contemporaries saying, ‘God, what the fuck is this . . . This is going to be over in three months,’ I knew it was a sure sign right there that they’re going to bite it if they don’t watch out. And a lot of them are biting it this year. People are not going to come back to see the same thing over and over again. It’s got to change. It’s the snake that eats itself. Punk music, New Wave. You call it what you want. It’s rock & roll to me, it’s still the basis of what’s going on.”
RELATED
The Songs That Make Thom Yorke Cry
‘Chrome Dreams’: A Track-by-Track Guide to Neil Young’s Newly Unearthed Seventies Album
Neil Young had given up on touring and was working on his second movie, a comedy/fantasy/musical called Human Highway, in which he plays a folk singer named Neil Young, when his friend Dean Stockwell (who plays Otto, the manager, in the film) told him about the New Wave band, Devo. Young knew immediately that this was the band he wanted for a nightmare episode in the film. He even had the song they would play together, the new one called “Out Of The Blue” that he’d written with the Sex Pistols in mind (“It’s better to burn out/Than it is to rust”).
Members of Devo were flown in from their base in Akron, Ohio, to shoot the nightmare sequence in front of an audience at the San Francisco punk club Mabuhay Gardens. Devo introduced Young as “Grandpa Granola,” and played the song live and in a local studio before flying back to Akron. Later, listening closely to the tape, Young heard two of the members chanting the phrase, “Rust never sleeps.”
He called them in Akron. “What is ‘Rust never sleeps’?”
Two of the members of Devo, it turns out, used to be in advertising. They had devised the phrase during a campaign for the rust-remover Rustoleum and decided it fit the song. To Young, it fit his very career, and his battle against the dreaded, creeping disease of trying to make a good thing last. Suddenly, Young once again felt the pull of the road, felt the pull of rock & roll. He booked a six-week tour with Crazy Horse, plotted a fully scripted show with filmmakers/directors L.A. Johnson and Jeanne Field, and took off on Rust Never Sleeps.
“I knew I had to get out there and rock,” he says. “But I also knew that I couldn’t see myself out there doing it the way it had always been. Standing out there with a microphone. It’s got to continue to be as new as when it started.
“The music business is so big these days, I feel dwarfed by it. I mean, I put out a record and, you know, it does okay. Somebody like Foreigner or Boston, they come out with a record and sell ten times as many as I do. I think that’s great. But I still feel like this . . . little guy.”
A set was designed in which huge amps and a huge microphone were constructed before the audience’s eyes by Young’s roadies. Now they were Road-Eyes, dressed in blackface and hoods not unlike Star Wars Jawas. (When Young explained the concept to his puzzled crew, he instructed them to “wave yourself goodbye for a few hours then move with fervor and purpose.” Young himself would play a child dreaming about rock & roll.) Beginning the shows with “Sugar Mountain,” he moved through a cross section of old and new songs, ending with a phenomenally loud set with Crazy Horse. “I wanted people to leave saying that Neil Young’s show was the loudest fucking thing they’d ever heard.” It was a heavy-metal tour de force, and somewhere in the middle of the tour, Comes a Time, Young’s most subdued album since Harvest, was finally released.
“You know,” says Young, confidently, “I do the same thing over and over and over again. It has a slightly different look to it every time. This tour seemed to wrap something up. It’s a retrospective, but it’s looking back on right now. I think I broke through to another arena; now, people won’t be surprised if I enhance the program with actors and diverge totally away from music, then come back out of it into music again. It’s making rock & roll more visible to me.”
He is struck with an idea. “I’m lucky,” says Young. “Somehow, by doing what I wanted to do, I manage to give people what they don’t want to hear and they still come back. I haven’t been able to figure that out yet.”
I FIRST MET NEIL YOUNG IN 1973, ON A bus to San Luis Obispo. He had come along to play guitar with the Eagles at a small benefit for the Indian community there. Young sat playing banjo, a grinning cipher in reflector shades. I was instructed not to talk to him, that he had nothing to say.
After the show – which climaxed with a fiery “Down By The River” that Young and the Eagles still talk about – Young plopped down in the seat next to mine. His shades were off, and his eyes were dark, sunken shadows below an Indian-like forehead. But they were mischievous, adolescent eyes. Dennis the Menace eyes.
“Hey,” he said, “Bernard Shakey.” We shook hands, and he began to tell me that he was an amateur filmmaker, that he was working on his first film (he was finishing Journey Through the Past at the time) and was a little nervous about it. He talked excitedly, punctuating his words with a smirk. “Tough business. I’d hate to go back to shooting Hyatt House commercials.”
I turned to look out the window, remembering my impression of Neil Young as a depressed loner. Now here he was – a joker. I turned back around. He was gone, of course, and I was right back where I started.
Young must have remembered the conversation or enjoyed my gullibility. Two years later, when he was releasing his most antipop album, Tonight’s the Night, I received a phone call saying that he was ready to do an interview.
There was a listening party in Los Angeles, his first-ever such media function, and we made plans over beers to meet at manager Elliot Roberts’ office. I arrived the next morning to find Young, cheerfully cordial, discussing the album with three hungover disc jockeys. “I just wanted to obliterate everything that I was, you know,” he was saying, “and wipe the slate clean.”
After the conference, Young remained on a sofa drinking orange juice and playing with his dog, Art (“Art is just a dog on my porch”). He sized me up and smiled.
“You need some sun,” he said. “You look like people expect me to look. Let’s go for a ride.”
We walked across Sunset Strip and Young rented a red Mercedes convertible for the occasion of his first extensive interview in five years. A sweltering afternoon, we took a ride out Pacific Coast Highway. After a few attempts at small talk, Young turned and announced: “My uncle played ukulele. Outside of that, I don’t really come from a musical family.”
There was a lengthy silence. A car full of surfers made a dangerous swerve through traffic to pull alongside for a look. “Hippies,” he cracked.
I asked him about his childhood, a question that met with a good two minutes of silence. I began to wonder if the interview was already over. Young was born in Toronto, the son of a sportswriter for the Toronto Sun, Scott Young. Young’s parents split up when he was ten, and Neil moved to nearby Winnipeg with his mother, Rassie.
“I know the newspaper business,” said Young, who was a Sun paperboy. “I had a pretty good upbringing. I remember really good things about both my parents. I don’t feel the need to communicate all that much with them. I think back on my childhood and I remember moving around a lot, from school to school. I was always breaking in.” He looked over. “I liked to play jokes on people.”
Jokes?
“Same old shit,” he continued talkatively. “Once, I’d become a victim of a series of chump attacks by some of the bullies in my room. I looked up and three guys were staring at me, mouthing, ‘you low-life prick.’ Then the guy who sat in front of me turned around and hit my books off the desk with his elbow. He did this a few times. I guess I wore the wrong color of clothes or something. Maybe I looked too much like a mamma’s boy for them.
“Anyway, I went up to the teacher and asked if I could have the dictionary. This was the first time I’d broken the ice and put my hand up to ask for anything since I got to the fucking place. Everybody thought I didn’t speak. So I got the dictionary, this big Webster’s with little indentations for your thumb under every letter. I took it back to my desk, thumbed through it a little bit. Then I just sort of stood up in my seat, raised it up above my head as far as I could and hit the guy in front of me over the head with it. Knocked him out.
“Yeah, I got expelled for a day and a half, but I let those people know just where I was at. That’s the way I fight. If you’re going to fight, you may as well fight to wipe who or whatever it is out. Or don’t fight at all.”
He looked over again, offering me a vision of my own amazement in his shades.
“Few years later, I just felt it,” he concluded cheerfully. “All of a sudden I wanted a guitar and that was it.”
IN HIS MIDTEENS, NEIL YOUNG HIT the Winnipeg dance-band circuit with his band, the Squires, and his own songs – stinging instrumentals heavily influenced by the Shadows and the Ventures. Then came the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and Young started to write lyrics.
