by David Carr, The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/neil-young-comes-clean.html?src=me&ref=general&pagewanted=all&_r=0
“I can still remember how it smelled when I first pulled in here - I was
driving this car,” he said, recalling the trip in 1970 when he bought
the place and named it Broken Arrow, after the Buffalo Springfield song.
The author of some of the spookiest, darkest songs in the American folk
canon seemed jolly on this late-August day. Even if he was accompanied
by a reporter, generally not his favorite species of human, the motion
soothed him. “I’ve always been better moving than I am standing still,”
he said.
Young, 66, spotted this land out the window of a plane banking out of
San Francisco four decades ago and now owns nearly 1,000 acres of it.
His song “Old Man” is a tribute to the caretaker who first showed him
the place.
“I ran out of money, so I had to sell some of it,” he said. “That’s
O.K., because it was too big. Everything happens for a reason.” He kept
his eyes on the narrow road through the giant redwoods.
It was hard to reconcile the affable guy motoring along on a sunny day
with his past incarnations: the portentous folkie of “Ohio,” the rabid
anti-commercialist who gave MTV the musical middle finger with “This
Note’s For You,” the angry rocker who threatened to hit the cameramen at
Woodstock with his guitar. He was happy partly because he was here.
“For whatever you’re doing, for your creative juices, your geography’s
got a hell of a lot to do with it,” he said. “You really have to be in a
good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your
way from there.”
We would spend a few hours creeping along - he drove slowly but
joyfully, as if the automobile were a recent invention - on our way
there or on our way from there, the ranch where Young lives with his
wife, Pegi, and their son, Ben. His longtime producer and friend, David
Briggs, who died in 1995, hated making records here, deriding the
hermetic refuge as a “velvet cage.”
In addition to the studio, where more than 20 records have been made,
there is an entire building given over to model trains, another where
vintage cars are stored and another piled with his master recordings.
Llamas and cows roam under cartoonishly large trees. It seems like a
made-up place, an open-air fortress of eccentricity meant to protect the
artist who lives there. But what it has most of all is not a lot of
people.
“I like people, I just don’t have to see them all the time,” he said, laughing. David Crosby, his bandmate in
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, used to describe the complicated route into his ranch as “my filtering system,” Young said.
He made a bunch of rights and lefts through the forest before getting
out to unlock the gate. Others might have an electronic gate, but Young
likes the mechanical experience of slipping a key into a padlock and
swinging something open. He is fundamentally analog, despite the
occasional electronic excesses in his music. He likes amps with knobs
that go to 12 and things that click when you touch them.
I made it past the filtering system because Young was promoting his
autobiography, “Waging Heavy Peace,” which comes out next week. The book
is elliptical and personal, with little of the period poetics of “
Just Kids,” by Patti Smith, or the scabrous detail of
“Life,’’ by Keith Richards.
Young once promised he would never write a book about himself, according to Jimmy McDonough’s biography of him, “
Shakey.”
But time passed, and then Young broke his toe a year ago and needed
something to fill his time and refresh his fortune.
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to continue to mainly be a musician
forever, because physically I think it’s going to take its toll on me -
it’s already starting to show up here and there,” he said. Writing a
book, he added, allowed him “to do what I want the way I want to do it.”
“Waging Heavy Peace” eschews chronology and skips the score-settling and
titillation of other rocker biographies. Still, Young shows a little
leg and has some laughs. Yes, he partied with Charles Manson and tried
to hook him up with a recording contract.
He admits he saw a picture of
the actor
Carrie Snodgress
in a magazine before he courted her, married her and divorced her. He
pleads guilty to having been busted for drugs with Eric Clapton and
Stephen Stills. He even has a little fun with Crosby.
“I still remember
‘the mighty Cros’ visiting the ranch in his van,” he writes. “That van
was a rolling laboratory that made Jack Casady’s briefcase look like
chicken feed. Forget I said that! Was my mike on?”
But as the book progresses, the operatics of the rock life give way to
signal family events, deconstructions of his musical partnerships and
musings on the natural world. It is less a chronicle than a journal of
self-appraisal.
The book, like today’s drive, is a ride through Young’s
many obsessions, including model trains, cars like the one we were
touring in and Pono, a proprietary digital musical system that can play
full master recordings and will, he hopes, restore some of the denuded
sonic quality to modern music.
Although he rarely meets the press, mostly out of lack of interest,
there is no reluctance on this occasion. A plain-spoken Canadian from
the tiny town of Omemee, Ontario, and a son who has done the work of his
father - Scott Young, a Canadian journalist, wrote more than 30 books -
he wants to be understood.
Every question is mulled and answered
directly, without ornamentation. But each time when I guessed which way
we were turning, on the road or in conversation, he almost always went
the other way. “Too many decisions to make with no sign of what to do,”
he said, laughing as he steered around a hairpin onto a side road.
Young has routinely fled success, severed profitable musical
partnerships, dumped finished records and withdrawn when it was
precisely the moment to cash in. He is a person who will never leave
well enough alone. “Sometimes a smooth process heralds the approach of
atrophy or death,” he writes in “Waging Heavy Peace.”
Doing as he pleases has worked out pretty well for him. As a young
musician torn between the crunch of the Rolling Stones and the lyricism
of Bob Dylan, he avoided the fork altogether and forged his own path.
Over the course of more than 40 records and hundreds of performances
that date to the mid-’60s, he has backed Rick James, jammed with Willie
Nelson, dressed up with Devo, rocked with Pearl Jam and traded licks
with Dylan. Some of it has been terrible, much of it remarkable. He has
made movies by himself and with Jim Jarmusch and Jonathan Demme.
He
called out Richard Nixon, praised Ronald Reagan and made fun of the
second Bush. And he has little interest in how all of that was received.
“I didn’t care and still don’t,” he said, then went on: “I
experimented, I tried things, I learned things, I know more about all of
that than I did before.”
His longtime manager and friend Elliot Roberts describes Young as
“always willing to roll the dice and lose” and says: “He has no problem
with failure as long as he is doing work he is happy with. Whether it
ends up as a win or loss on a consumer level is not as much of an
interest to him as one might think.”
His records don’t sell as much as they used to, but while many of his
contemporaries are wanly aping their past, Young takes to the stage
surrounded by mystery and expectation.
And now he’s doing so again on
tour with Crazy Horse, a thunderous, messy concoction of a band that has
backed him over the years and been a source of constancy amid all the
hard turns in his career. “We’ve got two new albums, so we’re not an
oldies act, and we’re relevant because we’re playing these new songs, so
that gives us something to stand on,” he said.
It’s safe to predict that people will come, critics will rave and a
66-year-old man afflicted with epilepsy and serious back problems (and
who has had polio and suffered an aneurysm) will rock hard enough to
become a time machine back to when music was ecstatic and ill
considered.
Dylan, in a note his manager passed to me, says it’s clear why Young has
not tumbled into musical dotage: “An artist like Neil always has the
upper hand,” he says. “It’s the pop world that has to make adjustments.
All the conventions of the pop world are only temporary and carry no
weight. It’s basically two different things that have nothing to do with
each other.”
“Waging Heavy Peace” faithfully catalogs the disappointment Young has
produced in those around him, but he expresses little regret today. “I
work for the muse,” he said. When he swerved into techno and country
after Geffen Records signed him in the early ’80s, Young was accused of
making “unrepresentative” music.
He responded by taking a pay cut of
half a million dollars for each of his next three albums. “I’m not here
to sell things. That’s what other people do, I’m creating them. If it
doesn’t work out, I’m sorry; I’m just doing what I do. You hired me to
do what I do, not what you do. As long as people don’t tell me what to
do, there will be no problem.”
Two nights before, at the Outside Lands festival in
Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, Young headlined with Crazy Horse,
their sixth performance this year after going the better part of a
decade without playing together.
Beck went on before them and covered
“After the Gold Rush,” and Foo Fighters followed, with Dave Grohl
mentioning that the sooner he got done, the sooner they’d all get to
hear Young play (he stood at the side of the stage afterward for
Young’s entire set).
The youthful festival crowd wore little more than tattoos on this damp
summer night. Young and Crazy Horse took the stage looking like the
Friday-night band at the local V.F.W.: big shirts, work boots and hair
gone gray or just gone. Given the growing chill and a restless crowd, it
would have made sense to begin with a song reminding the audience that a
Big Deal Rock Star was at work.
Instead, the band kicked into “
Love and Only Love,” a remarkable song from Young’s 1990 album with Crazy Horse, “
Ragged Glory,”
but hardly a singalong. It lasted 14 minutes, with Young shredding huge
reams of noise and mixing it up with his fellow guitarist Frank
(Poncho) Sampedro.
Seeing them play was like watching an ancient steam
shovel unfurl, claw the night air and dig in. “We thought it was
important to introduce ourselves, to remind people what Crazy Horse is
all about,” Sampedro said later.
Young, who has never been a graceful stage presence, lurched to the
front. He is old - he began playing in this town more than 40 years ago -
and bent over his guitar, but he is not old and bent. Young has never
been physically whole, but that brokenness has annealed rather than
slowed him. He is anything but a frail man when he has a guitar in his
hand.
His musical ideas work, whether plugged into a stack of amps or plucked
on an acoustic guitar. As his solo career veered from unadorned folk
into multiple genres, critics scratched their heads and fans felt
whipsawed.
But the “Rust Never Sleeps” tour in 1978 was bifurcated into
acoustic and electric sets, a set of tracks he still switches between,
which, along with his refusal to license his music for ads, has made him
an emblem of authenticity for the next generation, the keeper of rock’s
soul. And after all his side trips, he always came back to Crazy Horse,
as he had tonight.
Derided by more sophisticated players over the years, Crazy Horse is as
much an ethos as a band. As Young says in his book: “The songs the Horse
likes to consume are always heartfelt and do not need to have anything
fancy associated with them. The Horse is very suspicious of tricks.”
The band’s music with Young is built around a long-running sibling
argument between Young and Old Black, his painted-over Gibson Les Paul
guitar. Young, born in 1945, is the older brother to Old Black, made in
1952.
Through the years, Old Black has been souped up, tweaked and
rebuilt, but it has never been replaced as his musical partner. When he
plays it, he often looks and sounds furious (in explaining the
equanimity that characterizes his book, he writes: “Sometimes it’s
better not to blow up at someone. I can save that anger and emotion for
my guitar playing”).
Young can plink out a song on a piano, and play harmonica when it
serves, but he has an intimate, if savage, relationship with his
guitars. “If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar,” he said to Patti
Smith onstage at a book convention earlier this year to promote “
Waging Heavy Peace.”
He played that night as if he were mad at Old Black, even if he smiled
into the squall. The crowd remained enthralled as he tortured a single
note with the whammy bar, although this kind of indulgence has worn out
some of his other playing partners. “We’ve played that note, can we move
on, Neil?” Stephen Stills says with a laugh over the phone as he
recalls playing with Young.
The guitar owned the night, but the secret to Young’s durability is his
voice, a nasal-inflected borderline whine that was never a luxurious
instrument, but remains intact. He sounded as he always did, yelling the
chorus to “
Powderfinger” or plaintively singing “
The Needle and the Damage Done.”
Jonathan Demme, who has made three concert films with Young, including
“Neil Young Journeys,” which came out in the summer, finds Young’s
playing and visage “irresistibly cinematic.” “I saw Neil after a show
and told him how amazing it was, and he said: ‘Well, it better be
amazing. Those people out there paid a lot of money to be here.’ ”
Part of the reason they pay to see Young in concert is that he respects
the form. And they show up expecting the unexpected.
“You never know what you are going to get in a Neil Young concert
because he never knows exactly what he is going to do,” says Willie
Nelson, a friend who started Farm Aid with Young and John Mellencamp in
1985. “That way everyone is surprised.”
Tonight, he was feeling playful, telling the crowd, “I wrote this one this morning,” before starting into “
Cinnamon Girl,”
one of a trilogy of songs, which also includes “Cowgirl in the Sand”
and “Down by the River,” that he wrote in a single-day fever back in
1968.
Later, he stepped to the mike and introduced a new song by saying:
“We can’t help ourselves, we’re trained like chimps. They trained us to
write songs, and we don’t know how to stop.”
The fourth song of the night was “Walk Like a Giant,” from the forthcoming album with Crazy Horse, “Psychedelic Pill”:
I used to walk like a giant on the land
Now I feel like a leaf floating in a stream
I want to walk like a giant.
The song ended with a solid four minutes of a repeating, thudding note
as the band stomped in big steps, dinosaurs in full frolic. Boom. Boom.
Boom. The audience tried clapping but finally gave up until the amps
died down. It sounded like a hair-metal parody, but in Young’s hands it
had the aura of ceremony.
While Young played, I stood stage right with his son Ben, a quadriplegic
with cerebral palsy who is unable to speak. When he was born, Young and
his wife, Pegi, a singer and musician, put everything else aside to
help him develop his motor skills.
Now 34, Ben goes on every tour. “He’s
our spiritual leader in that way,” Young says. “We take him everywhere,
and he’s like a measuring stick for what’s going on” (Zeke, Young’s
son by Snodgress, has a very mild case of cerebral palsy and works at
Home Depot. Young’s daughter, Amber, is a talented young artist who
works in San Francisco).
Ben Young, which is how his father often refers to him, was bundled
against the chill and surrounded by friends. He looked over at me at one
point, and I found myself wishing I knew what he thought about the
proceedings. “I tell Ben everything, and he listens,” Young would tell
me later. “He knows everything, but who is he going to tell?”
Sitting with Young in his bus after the show as he ate a salad and drank
lemonade - he’s been sober for a year, the first time in decades that
he has worked without drinking or smoking pot - it felt as if we were
inside a guitar, the bus’s rococo interior constructed out of layers of
redwood sheets, built exactly to Young’s taste.
Money doesn’t seem to
matter much to Young unless he is out of it, but things matter plenty.
With assorted companions, he builds and tweaks guitars, cars, buses and
trains.
Sampedro, along with the drummer Ralph Molina and the bassist Billy
Talbot, passed through, all of them clearly pleased with the night.
Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts, talked mostly about how cold it got,
but Young said, “All I felt was a cool refreshing breeze every once in a
while.”
True enough, the wind had picked up at the end of the set, when Young
played “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” a version of which poses one
of rock’s eternal riddles: Is it better to burn out or fade away?
In the
book, Young acknowledges that Kurt Cobain quoted the line in his
suicide note and John Lennon disagreed with its premise. Young settled
on a hedge: “At 65, it seems that I may not be at the peak of my rock
’n’ roll powers,” he said. “But that is not for sure.”
For no reason other than it pleases Young, the
model-train barn near his home is framed by two actual rail cars. Back
in the day, he and his pals used to snort coke and drink wine and tinker
with the model layout until it grew into 3,000 square feet of track and
trains.
Young picked up a controller that appeared to be capable of landing a
rocket on an asteroid and reminded me that, as an investor in
Lionel Trains,
he invented Train Master Command Control (which allows you to run
multiple trains at once), as well as RailSounds (which provides
realistic railroad audio). Young lost a lot of money on his investment,
but he’s still a board member at Lionel and ended up with a lot of cool
gear, so it all sort of worked out.
As different trains began to move slowly, Young choreographed and
narrated. “There’s all different buttons I can press to make them go
fast or slow, but they’re all going the same speed, so they’re not going
to run into each other except at a crossover,” he said. “I am the
Wizard of Oz in here. I can make anything happen because I know how it
all works. Music is math.”
When Young finds something he likes or cares about, he has a single
mode: all in. With a team of technologists and investors, he has been
working on an electric car for years - the
LincVolt
- and when there was an accident and it burned, he just started over.
He still has plans to drive it to the White House and make a movie about
the car. He can speak with authority about biodiesel, Chinese battery
manufacturing and the specific optical properties of 16-millimeter film.
“I worry about global warming,” Demme says, comparing himself to Young
as a man of action, “but I’m not out there meeting with scientists and
funding research.”
Young gets most worked up when he talks about Pono, the music system he
has developed. It is beyond the hobby stage: Warner Brothers has agreed
to make its catalog available on Pono, and Young and Roberts are
negotiating with other record companies and investors.
We walked out of the train barn past a Hummer that runs on biodiesel and
hopped in yet another car, a ’78 El Dorado, to listen to the Pono
system. Right now, it needs a trunk full of gear, but Young and Roberts
are working with a British manufacturer to come up with a portable
version. He gave a demonstration that replicated MP3s, CDs, Blu-ray and
then the full Pono sound.
“You are getting less than 5 percent of the original recording,” he said
at first. He put on Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and then switched to
Pono. The horns jumped and the car was filled with lush, liquid sound.
He madly toggled between different outputs to make sure I was getting
it.
In the wake of “
Americana,”
a collection of folk songs recorded with Crazy Horse that was released
last spring, he is already making another album and writing another
book, this one about all of the cars he has owned.
Roberts handles
Young’s business and artistic interests with a great deal of savvy, so
Young is good at making money - which helps, because he is also good at
making it go away. “I spend it all,” he said. “I like to employ people
and make stuff. It will be my undoing.”
He has dropped a fortune making films, directing five under the pseudonym
Bernard Shakey, including “
Rust Never Sleeps,” “
Human Highway” and “
Greendale,’’ and sharing credit on several others. His memoir is of a piece with his moviemaking impulse, but it’s less pricey.
“Writing is very convenient, has a low expense and is a great way to
pass the time,” he says in “Waging Heavy Peace.” “I highly recommend it
to any old rocker who is out of cash and doesn’t know what to do next.”
He decided to do it sober after talking with his doctor about a brain
that had endured many youthful pharmaceutical adventures, in addition to
epilepsy and an aneurysm.
For someone who smoked pot the way others
smoke cigarettes, the change has not been without its challenges, as he
explains in his book: “The straighter I am, the more alert I am, the
less I know myself and the harder it is to recognize myself. I need a
little grounding in something and I am looking for it everywhere.”
Sitting at Alice’s Restaurant on Skyline Boulevard near the end of the
day, he elaborated: “I did it for 40 years,” he said. “Now I want to see
what it’s like to not do it. It’s just a different perspective.”
Drunk or sober, he can be a hippie with a mean streak. He broke off a
tour with Stephen Stills without warning and sent him a telegram -
“Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a
peach, Neil.”
I asked if he was a good person to work with or for. “The fact is that I
can be really irritable when I’m unhappy about stuff,” he said. “I can
be a nit-picker about details that seem to be over the top. But then
again I’m into what I’m into, so a lot of people forgive me because of
that.”
In the book, over and over, he is there, and then he is gone - from
Buffalo Springfield, from Crosby, Stills & Nash, from his love
affairs - and not given to explanations. When he loses interest, he
loses interest.
After we left the restaurant, we drove back to his ranch, but we stayed
in the car near the house, because his daughter, who was visiting, did
not feel well. Of all the obsessions that live on the thousand acres of
his ranch, the family is the one that enables all the rest, he said.
Young could have crawled inside himself and remained there, huffing his
own gas and reprising a storied, moldering past as so many of his peers
have. But family life - a complicated, challenging one - suits and calms
him.
He and his wife, along with Roberts and a group of interested
parents, created the
Bridge School,
a private institution for profoundly handicapped children located in
Hillsborough, Calif., because the existing ones nearby were insufficient
for Ben’s needs. In a benediction near the end of “Waging Heavy Peace,”
Young says much of his current battle is to be a person good enough to
be worthy of his family’s love.
In our crisscrossing the ranch, at one point we stopped in an outdoor
graveyard of old cars, a white-trash tableau of desiccated, rusting
sheet metal. He stroked the giant fin of a ’59 Lincoln and said it may
yet roar to life. “Every car is full of stories. Who rode in ’em, where
they went, where they ended up, how they got here.”
3. Sleeping In The Ground (17:54) [Solo (19:17)]
4. Under My Thumb (22:16) [Solo (23:45)]
5. Can't Find My Way Home (28:17) [Solo (30:11) and (32:29)]
6. Do What You Like (34:02) [Solo (35:54) and (37:02)]
7. In The Presence Of The Lord (39:21) [Solo (41:39)]
8. Means To An End (45:38) [Solo (48:07)]
9. Had To Cry Today (49:51) [Solo (52:13)]