1997 07 Neil Young Mojo

"instant feedback" 

Neil Young plus electricity plus us, the ticket-holders. It's been a volatile but vital combination for over three decades. On the eve of the great man's return to the heart of the hurricane with Crazy Horse, he talks exclusively to Sylvie Simmons. Meanwhile, band-members and bystanders over the years recall "the most intense experience" in live rock music.

In a misty redwood clearing an hour south of San Francisco, high up on Skyline off of Highway 92, sites the Mountain House Restaurant like a lost Twin Peaks prop. Wood-clad, fireplaced, folksy - fake owl on the mantelpiece, signed hockey-stick on the wall — local boys Neil Young and Crazy Horse once played a seven-hour electric set on the enormous verandah that soars out over a ravine. No use the neighbours complaining; the cops were enjoying the show.

Young’s ranch Broken Arrow is a 10-minute drive away — less if any of his cars were under 30 years old—but the Mountain House is where he chooses to do his interviews; on the rare occasions he chooses to do them at all.

It’s a little past 11 in the morning. Sitting outside on a fallen log, doing a good impression of a Rockwell painting of the Labourer At Rest, are Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro — Crazy Horse. Inside — black of clothes, bottle-white of hair, restlessly urban — film director Jim Jarmusch shelters vampirically from the Northern California sun. Watches are looked at. In timekeeping as in work, Young is notoriously unpredictable. But no, here he comes, barely 20 minutes late, pulling around the bend in a huge, black, gleaming Mercury Montclair—red stripe, rocket fins, a cruise-ship of a car that Young docks deftly in a corner and disembarks.

He’s wearing an equally antique but somewhat less pristine Buffalo Springfield T-shirt, a lumberjack shirt he might have polished the car with, and a battered, jaunty straw hat that looks locked in an eternal battle to offset the intensity of the gaze below. Hardly recognisable as the skinny, lank-haired, glowering rock’n’roller seen in the 1976 sequence of Jarmusch’s upcoming rockumentary, Year Of The Horse, Young has mysteriously morphed into a burly patriarchal woodsman. Or the bloke of indeterminate years in horror movies, who sits outside a dusty gas station in the middle of nowhere waiting for a car to come by.

Except for the intensity. Neil, says his father Scott in one of the movie’s backstage interviews, is “very intense”, qualifying the obviousness of the statement with the theory that his divorce from Neil’s mother might be to blame, having thrown their son “into a situation where he was the prime motivator”. Translation: bossy. The three men on the bench beg to disagree. Crazy Horse — the band that Young first played with 28 years ago and has gone back to time and again whenever he’s wanted to play rock’n’roll — is “all four us of,” says Ralph Molina; “The sound of one big guitar playing,” says Poncho Sampedro. “And the older we get,” adds Young, beaming, “the more we realise how special it is.”

The film is due here later this year — hence the presence of Jarmusch. Meanwhile, a live album is out mid-June — same tour, same tide, Year Of The Horse. It’s Young’s third live LP with Crazy Horse, and his sixth overall (counting Unplugged but not counting CSNY’s 4-Way Street). Yet such a seemingly considerable body of live documentation barely does justice to the length of time he’s been performing, and the different places he’s been, physically and emotionally — from playing wrestling match intermissions with The Squires to Woodstock with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; from the Whisky A Go Go with Buffalo Springfield, to Eddie Vedder’s spot in Pearl Jam at the Golden Gate Park.

Young’s favourite interview spot is a small, narrow balcony round the back where we perch in the sharp morning air to take a look back over three and a half decades of live.

First let's go back to The Squires and the early '60s. 

We used to just play on the weekends and practise a little bit during the week in basements or garages, and we played high school dances and community club dances and stuff like that in our dark glasses and our suits we had. Sometimes the band would share 10 bucks or something among us - that was pretty good, just the fact that we were getting paid something to do it was great, kind of reassuring in the beginning. We always took it seriously. It's always been fun though... We were kids, 17, 18 years old, just breaking away for the first time. It was just really innocent and cool.

What kind of equipment did you have — this was pre Marshalls?

Marshalls were a new thing, but I've never used a Marshall except rarely - I think one tour I used them. The equipment we used then was the same kind of equipment we're using today, basically - the same kind of amps. A little different - I had an Ampeg Echo Twin; instead now I have a Fender Deluxe that's older than the Echo Twin was. And I used to play a Gretsch guitar and now I play a Gibson, but they're both about the same vintage.

Like your car, you like old?

Well I like it - it just happened to get old with me. We both are good friends. And you can always develop new possibilities with the sound. I don't want to be limited to that, but right now it's just satisfying to hear that sound, so that's what I'm doing.

Can you recall your first gig with Buffalo Springfield, opening for The Byrds?

I think it was the San Bemadino County Fair — I vaguely remember it, although one of the last shows Springfield ever did was at the same place, the Orange County Fairgrounds or something. We were on a Cavalcade Of Stars kind of bill, four or five bands, which was really cool, because we only had maybe 35 or 40 minutes to play and that was it. Today I've gotten into playing these huge, gargantuan sets - which I'm not going to do, I don't think, this time around I'm going to focus more on songs. So in those days it was really cool because you had this condensed amount of time to work in - like a record was 40 minutes max for an LP and a 45-minute show was a long show, because you were always on a bill with somebody else. In 45 minutes you could really focus on what you were doing, and the best of what you were doing, what really mattered the most - and that's what made it good.

You went straight from that to a residency at the prestigious Whisky A Go Go on Sunset. What was that like?

We played five sets a night. In a place like that they want you to play and get out and then come back, because that stimulates getting up and moving around and ordering more drinks, all those things they want you to do in a nightclub.

Did it have the go-go dancers when you were there?

Oh yeah. In cages. It was great! We knew them all. We would look up there and say Hi to them - they were right there while we were playing, g haha. It was an inspiration.

What was it like being in a band in LA, 1966-'68, when The Doors and Love were around, and that whole scene was taking off?

There was just a lot going on in one place. It was an area where things could happen. There were all these bands, a lot of clubs to play, and the Whisky was the best one, so when we got in there it was great. And these bands were coming in and out all the time. I lived in the same piece of property with John Densmore, the drummer forThe Doors. We all knew each other.

How close a scene was it? Would Jim Morrison come on-stage with you and sing? Would you ask him if you could borrow his leather pants?

No, not that way. Rock'n'roll hadn't reached its jazz era, like it kind of has now. There's a lot of cross-mixing and everything going on. At that time bands were very independent a lot more, and there was a lot less jamming. We hardly ever jammed with anybody, not the way I remember it anyway. Around the late '60s, we started jamming with a lot of people.

Buffalo Springfield was an instant success, and successful bands attract groupies and drugs. Did you go for it wholeheartedly?

(Grins). Fantastic! Wouldn't want to spend my life doing that, but it was fun remembering it. It was sort of like a comet - it was really intense, and then it just trickled off. Over a period of, uh, centuries, haha.

What are your memories of playing Woodstock with CSNY?

This group of people that we kind of knew, that we'd met around the country — the heads, the hippies, whatever - it was the first time that we'd seen them all come into one area, and you could feel the strength of the numbers, like, Wow, here we are. But corporate America was watching too... I really didn't think it was that big of a deal when I was there. It just seemed like a lot of people - a lot of confused travelling, nervous people. When we got to the stage and the stage area, you could see all these bands and that was cool, but it was difficult getting in and out; a lot of different people were going back and forth, then were a lot of kind of on-the-spot plans being made. And we were nervous - it was like our second show or something - and I was especially nervous because I really didn't know the rhythm section that well, and' we really didn't have that much of a groove.

Why wouldn't you permit yourself to be filmed at Woodstock?

I didn't allow myself to be filmed because I didn't want them on the stage. Because we were playing music. I thought, if they were going to film they'd have to stay off the stage - get away, don't be in my way, I don't want to see your cameras, I don't want to see you. I'm still very much the same way. I really didn't see what television and films had to do with making music. To me it was a distraction - because music is something that you listen to, not that you look at. You're there, you're playing and you're trying to get lost in the music, and there's this dickhead with a camera right in your face. So the only way to make sure that that wouldn't happen is tell them that I wouldn't be in the film, so there was no sense in filming me - avoid me, stay away from my area. And it worked.

A bit rum coming from someone who's just made a concert movie...

All the shooting that we did for Year Of The Horse, you can't see. You don't see cameras around, there's nobody in front of us, and if they are it's not for long.

Were you the only one in CSNY who didn't want to be filmed, then? Did you have to make a stand?

I was the only person in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young who was, you know, not Crosby, Stills and Nash, hahaha. I just didn't want to do that.

Did you hang out with Hendrix at Woodstock?

I've met Hendrix, yeah.

Word has it you stole a pick-up truck together and went joyriding backstage.

You know, to tell you the truth it's been so long since it happened that... I seem to remember Melvin Beli being around a pick-up truck somewhere and Hendrix being nearby and something happening.

"It wasn't me, officer"?

Haha, it probably was me. I don't know. I can't remember. You know, at first it was pretty clear and then people started giving me so many different versions of how it was, I started going like, Well what do I know? I'm getting so vacant.

Is Hendrix a touchstone?

Hendrix is the best, nobody can touch him. I'm a hack compared to him, a hack. That guy - it slipped off his hands, he couldn't help himself. I've got to go in there and hack away with a machete to get through what he just walked through. I can aspire to be able to play that way and to approach it sometimes, so I'd get halfway there sometimes. When it comes to really playing, I've got a lot of emotion but very little technical ability. Jimi had them both. He was so smooth and so great and so special - and what a great attitude his music had. He can't be touched.

When you're playing as part of a team, like Springfield or CSNY, do you play differently to when you're Neil Young, band leader?

Well it really shouldn't make any difference at all, but it's a lot easier being part of a bigger group, because the centre of attention isn't so much on you.

A band at its best is a gang, if not democratic then at least collectivist. Yet we have an idea of you as a loner, a dictator.

You know, I could be called a dictator - I think you've got the right word there. But I have my fellow dictators too, haha. We're working together.

How the hell does a dictator manage to harmonise with Graham Nash, or play dual guitar with Stephen Stills, something that involves some sort of suppression of what you'd do on your own?

Well, you do it just because you're in a band. When you're in a band playing guitar with Stephen Stills at the time of the Buffalo Springfield, it was a lot of fun, it was great. We were just really discovering a lot of new things and experimenting, and the music that we played in that band together — which was never really recorded anywhere — was really good music. We had a great rhythm section, a really good beat live.

David Crosby once said that you and Stephen Stills used your guitars as weapons on-stage - backstage too, sometimes. That you'd both turn your amps up to 11 and try to drown each other out, playing against each other instead of playing with each other.

That's not how I remember it, because first of all you can only turn up an amp so far and then it doesn't get louder, it just gets distorted; even at half power they're as loud as they are at full power — at least, most of the ones I use. But even aside from that, getting right down to fighting with guitars, I think we communicated with guitars whatever was on our minds.

And was that belligerence more often than love?

If it was belligerent or if it was one thing or another, so be it, what's the problem? That's what music's all about. And there were also many more times when it was just beautiful, and the expression was just really good. A lot of the things that Stephen and I did, all our guitar playing in Crosby, Stills & Nash, was all just residue from Buffalo Springfield. It was from playing with the big beat and without the big star trip. It was from playing with the real thing, and we still remembered what it was like, and what you heard in CSNY live on-stage was more a shadow of Buffalo Springfield than anything else, because it was kind of blinding and star-like and way over the top. People remember CSNY because that's where everybody relates to, a certain generation; but when I think back on that generation musically, I more remember CSNY as a great acoustic thing, sitting around somewhere without the crowd, playing the music, and what I heard there is what I remember, and that really doesn't exist on record - Buffalo Springfield is the same thing. But as far as a band playing live on-stage, there was no comparison between those two.

Stephen Stills has said that you complemented each other perfectly as guitar players: he played too fast and you played too slow.

Right. Sounds perfect. Compared to him I do. He's on the top of the beat and I'm on the back of it. It was a constant battle. I'll tell you, we really rocked some nights. He's a great guitar player and a great, great singer too.

Your guitar style is instantly identifiable. Can you define it?

It sucks, haha.

Yeah, but it sucks like no-one else.

It's just a big, distorted mess. Occasionally other things come out of it a lot of clear things. I like that.

Sometimes you look possessed, your head seems to go into another place. Where is it and what do the signposts say?

I can't tell you. And actually I'm trying to not go there as much because I want to focus more on what happened right before that. I got so I was going there so much at the end of the song - I'd go off on these instrumental things - that the song was becoming secondary to the ending. And I'm currently trying to write songs that are real songs - and then they all can go nuts if they want to, but it's not in the form, you know; the form is just the song. I'm kind of, like, tired of some of the things that I've been doing.

Can you tell us what goes through your mind on-stage?

No, not if it's good. If it's bad 1 can say that I'm listening to one of the other guys in the band, trying to figure out what the hell's wrong with the sound and why the speakers aren't right. That's bad. Good is no memory at all. It's trance-like.

Your solos have been described as "seizures" — is it something that's linked in some way to your epilepsy, as if you're trying to placate it on-stage by coming up with your own seizures?

Well, it's hard to say, isn't it? You're way deep. I don't know.

With Springfield and CSNY, did you enjoy the gang element, the all-guys-together thing of being in a band?

Sure. Still do. It's why I've got Crazy Horse.

Watching the film, it was fascinating to see how much a band Crazy Horse is. I figured you'd be the boss, and they'd come to you cap in hand. Instead they were giving you shit about how you sounded, and you were going, "OK, sorry guys..."

I'm really glad the film is the way it is, because it shows so much of what there is among the band, the kind of real relationship the band has. I think what you see is that these guys are their own people. They're not intimidated by me.

When did you know this was the right bunch and why?

I'd say 1969. It just felt right. There wasn't any of the pressure or the hyperness or posing that took part in the other bands - especially in the rhythm section, it was very, very hyper.

How did Crazy Horse recover from the trauma of Danny Whitten's death?

Any friend that you have that's as close as Danny, it would be a traumatic experience. I'm sure a lot of people have this experience.

But Crazy Horse didn't die. How did you recapture the chemistry?

We never did. We just got a different chemistry. It's as good, it's great, but it's not that chemistry. You can never get anything back. That's the beauty of moving along. If you don't spend time trying to get something back that you've lost...

I mean some songs I can't sing any more because they're just too high, and if I tune the guitar too low they don't sound like the song. It doesn't sound the same and it doesn't even feel the same because it's in a different key, and keys are all about psychology and where you are and how you are emotionally; depending on what key you're in, they all have a different effect on you, and not just mathematical. They are mathematical, but they're not just numbers and letters. So if a song has got to be demodulated into a new key because I can't sing it any more, then it may never be the same song it was again, and there may never be a reason to sing it again. That takes realising. You have to figure that out and say, These songs are just going to have to live the way they've been and I have to leave them behind. And then I go forward and try to find new things that fit with where I am now, instead of trying to hold onto them.

Besides not being physically able to sing some of the old songs, do you just go off some of them? Some songs just disappear, others are resurrected years later in different forms.

Yeah. Some songs you just forget. Other songs you just can't do any more. But some time down the road it may come back, I don't know why. I'm constantly searching through the hundreds of songs that I've written for the ones that feel right to do. That's the biggest part of practising and getting ready to go on the road, figuring what songs to do. It's more like, What songs mean something to me now when I sing them? Which ones make it so a little light goes on in my head going: this really works for me right now, I can sing this song from my heart because it's something that happened yesterday, instead of something I that happened 25 years ago? I constantly look for the songs that give me that feeling. Sometimes they're very obscure. That's what I'm doing this time-really trying to find the songs I can speak through.

Do you go back and listen to all your albums?

No. I just go through my head. Sometimes they'll bring CDs out and I'll look at the artwork, and the artwork will bring back feelings, and then I'll open it up to see the songs and see what I can do, and some times somebody else comes along with an idea, try this song. Or we look at albums that we never did on-stage, like the Mirrorball album - Crazy Horse never played any of those songs, which was just a couple of years ago. I only played those with Pearl Jam on a tour that I did for three weeks, so those songs are basically brand new territory for Crazy Horse and they're not worn out by me. So those have got a real good chance.

Reversing the picture, there are songs that you play on-stage but never put on an album - you'll drop them, or bring them back much later and rework them, giving us yet another new live version of something we've never had in a studio version.

Usually those are ones that I've never been satisfied with enough for a record and I'm still searching for the right interpretation. They haven't got to the stage where I go: Yes, this is it. Some songs never get there. And those are interesting songs, because you can always do them for the first time. There's nothing set in stone about the way those are, so it's always nice to have a couple of those in the show, if I can find the ones that'll do it for me today.

One song you revived last year was Tonight's The Night. When you originally played that on tour in '73, it was not well-received. Why play such stark, nihilistic, personal music to a post-Harvest audience, who might not understand?

It's good for them. Better that than something they understand. If you've got anything to offer that you don't think the audience is going to understand, you should get it out there immediately, I think. Because the audiences are very savvy - they understand almost everything that they get. If you've got a good audience, they know. They're not blown away by everything you do. Now, when you can transcend an audience and bring them up, so that they go nuts because they've just been moved, then that's a live performance.

Over the years your audience seems to have separated into different constituencies: the rowdier air-soloing crowd, the gentle old hippies. Do you have a clear picture of who they are?

Really I just try to close my eyes and feel what they all feel like. Sometimes they don't feel at all like what they look like. They're giving off something - that's the fuel of the whole machine, it's what makes it go, the audience. I go in there and I've got the right songs hopefully, and everything's together and we know the songs and we're in good shape and ready to play - and hopefully we're open.

There seems a bit of a love-hate relationship between performer and audience - you need them to affirm what you're doing, but sometimes they want you to stay in the same place.

People always want you to stay in the same place that they want you to be in, that's their nature. I think 90 per cent of people, when they come to see you, want something and they know what it is. And right there that's limiting on their success rate, because they may not get what they want, they may get something else. But it's how they feel that matters, not what they want and not what they look like. And you can tell — you go out and start playing, and pretty soon you can feel it coming back. You can feel if they're fucked up or they've been drinking all day; if it's a festival and by the middle of the night people are falling all over each other, you can feel that. Feel it. Sluggish, but it's out of control a little bit. You feel like you can drive it one way or another, and it doesn't respond like it does at five o'clock at night where you can hit them with something - bang.

If it's an angry crowd, does it make you play more angrily, or go the other way?

I'm always aware of the danger of the crowds. That's the one thing I'm always thinking about at the big gigs - not when I'm playing the music but between songs and figuring out what to play next. If it's that kind of a scene where things could get ugly, you want to be aware of it... Some places now it's almost like suicide for me to play by myself - I go out there and there's people who just don't know what I'm doing and it's just a lot of noise - I try to only do that when I really feel like I can carry it. Or sometimes I like to go out and really push it, where I know the song's not the kind of song they want to hear about, but I'll play it anyway. It just depends on how I feel.

In the '80s, the audience didn't always get what it wanted from you. You seemed to be playing with musical genres — your pseudo-Crickets band The Shocking Pinks, the R&B Bluenotes playing Harvest with Stax horns.

That was a period there when I was just changing palettes, doing different shades. It's not me, it's them. You just look at them and figure out what it is or ignore them completely. It doesn't matter. They're part of a long thing. They're like DNA.

Were all these genres and bands you were playing with like toys - something different to keep your musical pecker up during the rock star's equivalent of the male menopause?

Oh no, it was far too early for that, haha. I think I missed a lot of the stuff that you're supposed to get in mid-life.

Was playing with the youngsters. Pearl Jam, part of that?

No, I don't think so. But you know, maybe it was. It's got to be in here somewhere, right? I'm probably having that now. Somewhere in there there's a mid-life crisis.

Pearl Jam and Booker T & The MGs were the only bands you played with who were famous in their own right — usually it's session musicians. Did you team up with Booker T and Pearl Jam to keep you on your toes?

Both those things happened very, very naturally. I played with Booker T at the Bob Dylan celebration at Madison Square Garden because they were the house band, and I did a couple of Bob's songs, and we hit it off. Pearl Jam, they came and did the Bridge show, I met them there and we jammed at my house a little bit, and they felt real sensitive and real committed, and things started. They were a band - and that's exciting to get to play with a band. That's what was exciting about Crazy Horse and Booker T & The MGs, that they'd played together for a long period of time. It's not like just playing with one person.

Why do you make live albums of some tours and not others, like the Booker T shows?

They're all live albums. I've made every one of them. It's just we put out some of them and didn't put out others.

Is making albums something you do in order to go on the road, or do you go on the road in order to be able to make albums?

I don't think either one of those apply. To me an album and going on the road are two separate things. People look at them from a corporate point of view, they think they must go together because everybody does something for a reason and it must be to make money. I think an album is about making music: you put out the music, see what the album's like, because in the long run nothing else is going to matter. The album's going to matter: it's going to have a title and it's going to be in some package and you can pick it up in 10, 15 years and listen to it. But the tour is just a moment in time. It's over as soon as it's over. It's instant gratification, or instant feedback. You get it and it's over. You're out there for a while and it's almost like a vacation from another way of life. They go back and forth.

What does a 52-year-old do in a tour bus? 

Have a good time.

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SIDEBARS

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What's it like to share the boards and backstage hospitality with Neil Young? The survivors tell their tales

Burton Cummings
Frontman, The Guess Who

WHEN NEIL WAS IN THE Squires, I was in a rival band in Winnipeg, The Deverons. But it was The Guess Who [then Chad Allan And The Reflections] that was the big local band, and we all looked up to them because they were so much better. Randy Bachman was a big influence on Neil. One night in 1964 we were playing a little place called the Cellar in downtown Winnipeg, and Neil came in with his guitar and actually played with us on our version of Phil Upchurch’s You Can’t Sit Down. It was the first time I had seen a guy just walking around town with his guitar slung over his shoulder, and then just walking into a club and plugging in. The Squires were pretty good and played every weekend. They did a lot of cover material, and had an instrumental single [Aurora/The Sultan] that was kinda like The Shadows. There’s a whole generation that bows down to Hank Marvin, and I believe Neil is one of them. It wasn’t unusual for us, Neil included, to write to Keith Prowse in London and order Shadows albums that you couldn’t get in Canada. England was so alluring and magical.

All the bands played community clubs and schools and churches, not bars, because the drinking age was still 21. They were very innocent times — the music was the high — but Neil was always very, very ambitious. He talked about leaving Winnipeg before anybody did, and in fact did.

We did a very special thing in 1986 when they had a Shakin’ All Over Reunion in Winnipeg, with Chad Allan, Randy Bachman, Fred Turner [of Bachman Turner Overdrive], myself, and Neil, and we were all given the Order of the Buffalo. The big jam that evening was sensational. We did Down By The River for about 15 minutes, American Woman, and Chad did Shakin’ All Over, and Neil did Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues. People were mesmerised, because the stage wasn’t that high and here was a group of musicians whose combined record sales must have been in the region of 100 million.

Dewey Martin
Buffalo Springfield

IN THOSE DAYS, NOBODY IN THE BAND could play that great, except Bruce [Palmer] and myself. They learned how to play on electric instruments. But they learned fast. I had already played with much better musicians — down in Nashville with Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison. We had arrangements like we did it on record, built to where we would go into a jam. The Beach Boys took us on tour with them and they cut a lot of our stuff live. I’ve never heard it, but if they got us as good as we thought we were playing at the time... At least 50 per cent of the time we were able to get through songs without somebody getting angry and smashing their guitar because the other guy wouldn't let him in - prima donna stuff. Neil locked onto this One-Note Wonder thing that you could do all kinds of thing with. He’s got up to where he does several notes now. 

Bruce Palmer
Buffalo Springfield

PLAYING WITH NEIL ON-STAGE IS probably the most intense experience. There’s showbiz-orientated playing to an audience, and then there’s playing for yourself, giving yourself a stroke. But when you play with Neil, you’re playing for him. You’re playing at such a high level of expectancy from him - you’ll never play with anybody else that’s so in tune with the way it should sound. And if you vary from what it’s supposed to sound like - if you go off into your own little world and start articulating something other than what he’s used to hearing - you’ll hear from him, in no uncertain terms, whether on-stage right at that moment or later when he gets you alone, haha. It’s quite intense. You either do it right and his way, or not at all.

It was always total control, never loose. The fine line that you walked was: it has to sound loose. Very loose. Or wide. But he has to know and be able to depend on every note that everyone plays. Because he listens to every note that everyone plays. I’m not kidding — everything from the drummer on, he listens to it all at once. If I put in one extra note somewhere out of a thousand, he would pick up on it and he would mention it. You’d change that note, that one note — you’d just shake your head, and say, How did he know? That’s how close he’s listening.

When we started out we were all searching for the answer to what makes you comfortable playing. Sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn’t. And the formula was always elusive. But you rack up a number of years, the formula’s been found and can be applied as a furtherance of that whole intangible. Relative to the way we used to play, it was loose and he wasn’t as demanding. He couldn’t be — because he didn’t know either, he was just as in the dark as the rest of us. We fumbled through it, but the qualitative level of the music that we had attained, even in those early years, was quite high.

There was a time the Springfield were playing Ondine’s in New York. It was a great place — everybody used to come in, Otis Redding used to come in and jam with us — and Neil had just been diagnosed with epilepsy a month or so before. And still it hadn’t entered into his consciousness or reality that he had this epilepsy, because the occurrence was not all that frequent. So we’re all on-stage and he collapsed into one of his fits. And nobody knew what to do. What do you do? The poor fellow’s up on the stage. I had to pick him up and physically carry him off-stage, lay him down and try to figure out how to get him out of what he was into. Primarily it was nothing more than calming him down — talking to him, telling him what was going on. It wasn’t grand mal or anything like that. I don’t know whether his playing was apt to trigger it, so after that I would keep an eye on him.

Neil, when we first met, was playing a Gibson 12-string as a folk artist — and trying to play lead guitar on a Gibson acoustic 12-string is very odd and is not done. It’s not only not done, it isn't done. So with the Springfield he was given an orange six-string Gretsch and he had to learn to play rock’n’roll. It was that cut-and-dried. He picked up the style, that unique sound he uses to this day, within months — not years but months. You could compare his sound to a very antique tube-analogue amplification unit. He uses a Fender Champ amplifier — one of the smallest versions of amps you can buy — and he mics it, and behind that is probably the most enlarged Fender amp. Over 30 years of experimentation, he’s come up with a sound that nobody else in the world can imitate, even with sampling. It has to sound like he wants it to sound, or else it doesn’t fly at all. And his styling is erratic, to say the least, haha. There’s no style — but it’s the no-style that’s his style — that sets him totally apart from every guitar player in the world. I consider him one of the most underrated guitar players in the world, and yet he’s the best. If you’ve ever gone to a live performance where he solos for half an hour, haha, and takes you where he takes you, you’d understand why.

Nils Lofgren
Pianist-guitarist on Tonight’s The Night and Trans tours, and 1993’s Unplugged. ..

MY BAND GRIN, IN WASHINGTON DC, WERE ABOUT TO GO to Los Angeles to look for a record deal. About three weeks before we left, Neil played his first Crazy Horse date in DC at a little club called the Cellar Door. I’d been a big Springfield fan, so 1 went down to see the show and snuck backstage and started asking a lot of questions. I was a bit of a nuisance, but Neil kindly handed me his Martin guitar. 1 sang pretty much the entire first Grin record to him. 1 watched him do four shows in two nights. We stayed in touch while he was on the road. A month later we were in LA. David Briggs [Young’s producer] took Grin under his wing. A year later, Neil asked me to join the After The Goldrush project.

After I helped to make the first Crazy Horse album, Danny Whitten came back to Maryland with me and was going to join Grin. But at this point it became clear to me how sick he was, and he went back to California and died not long afterwards. I think with Tonight 's The Night, even though it was a dark record with a lot of frustration and anger, rather than sit around and mope about Danny’s and Bruce Berry’s deaths we all purged ourselves by making that album. In a strange way we had a case of the Fuck-lts. Neil was clear that his intent was to let people see how a record is before it gets all polished and nice. Ralph Molina and I constantly asked Neil if we could fix this or that little part, and he’d say no, he wanted it just as it was.

The tour was a concept, like the record. We basically performed the entire record, starting and ending with Tonight’s The Night. There was all kinds of crazy stuff going on on-stage. He played a lot of piano, and I played electric guitar. I’d go to the piano occasionally too. Throughout the tour I'd wear these heavy combat boots and ankle weights, because the music was so slow and plodding that I needed them to sink down into the groove of the songs. There would be some very fierce interplay between the piano and guitar, eventually ending in a crescendo of chaos. On Tonight’s The Night, Neil would start pounding on the piano and going into these insane raps off the top of his head — raps about Bruce Berry and sticking guitars in your arm — and I’d wind up on top of the piano. Another highlight is Word On A String, where you had this nasty funky de-tuned riff mixed with some beautiful sections where Ralphie and I would sing rounds of harmonies. When I’d switch to piano for other songs, I’d play in this very melodic, honky tonk stvle, and Neil would play these thick chords on his old black Les Paul, and we’d marrv those to Ben Keith’s beautiful, bizarre steel. It was a haunting sound with a lot of anger and bite in it. Again, the tour was kind of dark, but I was having a ball — I was still 20, 21 years old playing with as great a songwriter as there has ever been. We all had a sense of humour about it.

I was especially excited to go to England, just because so many of my influences were British. All the English fans looked at Neil as this dark, brooding god, but I’d known him since I was 17 and had gotten a more complete picture of him. The audience in general was freaking out that Neil wouldn’t play anv of his old hits. He was trying to turn them on to something, which he’s always done, but this was an extreme example. There were a couple of nights where the audience was so rude that Neil finally stormed off-stage, really upset. One night he came storming out and launched without telling us into a 15-minute searing version of Down By The River, which was basically Neil’s way of saying, “Is that what you want?” People who saw the tour come up and say that at the time they didn't enjoy the show, but now realise it was one of the greatest gigs ever!

Russ Kunkel
Drummer on CSNY reunion megatour, 1974

I WORKED WITH NEIL FOR ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF, AND IT was one of the high points of my whole career. We played stadiums all over the world, and the thing I came away with was this: that when you’re playing with Neil live, when he has his guitar on and he’s standing in front of you and you happen to be the drummer, he turns around and looks at you with a look in his eye that says, “I may die during this solo, so you’d better go with me.” He plays on the edge every single moment. He has no preconceived idea where he’s going, he may not even know what key he’s in, but he’s gonna go for it. It was completely terrifying that somebody would be that serious, and yet completely elating. He doesn’t follow anybody, he leads. And he’s always taking that leap of faith, always stepping off the edge of the cliff. It’s the closest thing to jazz in rock’n’roll that I’ve ever heard.

Joe Vitale
Drummer on short-lived Stills-Young Band tour, July 1976

NEIL LIVE IS A PURE ROCK’N’ROLLER. HE GIVES 110 PER CENT, 110 per cent of the time. He’s a trooper. He focuses so much on what he does that he drives everybody else along with him. The funniest thing about the Stills-Young tour was that we rehearsed for three weeks and the tour only lasted two! So we played a lot more up at his ranch than we did on the road. The vibe between Neil and Stephen was really good too, which is why I was so puzzled about Neil’s leaving. Neil and Stephen are so different, and yet so alike, that when they play together they’re better than when they don’t. They inspire each other, they play off of each other, and they just fulfil each other’s live needs. There’s never a dull moment playing with them. That’s the way Neil was with the rest of the band too: if I were to do something exciting on the drums, he would respond by turning around with that crooked smile of his. They had a little jam session around that time with some of the Springfield guys, and when they started playing, within minutes it was like 1967 again. It’s just because the two of those guys have a chemistry. It’s fabulous to watch them go at it together. They’re both very competitive, but they’re also both respectful of each other. You’ve got two lead singers and two lead guitar players there. Sometimes it works incredibly, but sometimes it gets a bit too intense. Neil would play something, and then Stephen would play off of that, and then Neil would play off of that. They each sounded totally different and complementary, but occasionally one would get in the other’s way. I still believe to this day that basically they’re really good for each other and make each other play better.

We played for two weeks, big crowds and great shows. It was a hell of a band: Neil and Stephen, George Perry on bass, Joe Lala on percussion, Jerry Aiello on keyboards, me on drums. We did Springfield songs, CSNY songs, Stephen songs and Neil songs. The one that was so different from the original record was The Loner. It was just full-blown, kick-ass rock’n’roll. Stephen had come up with this new guitar riff and Neil immediately adhered to it and it was killer.

We ended up in Atlanta with a day off, and we got these telegrams from Neil. They weren’t, like, “It was fun while it lasted”, they were more like he was really glad to have experienced it but he had other things in mind. He was never clear as to why he was leaving. To this day, I wish I knew what the exact reason was why one day he woke up and decided to quit. I would have understood it a little better if Stephen and Neil had had some major blow-out or arguments, but they’d been having such a good time. It’s like when you look at a happy marriage and everything just seems peachy-cream, and then there’s suddenly a divorce.

=============================

"togetherness"

They've endured a death in the family, they've been neglected in favour of more glamorous company, but Crazy Horse have always been there. Sylvie Simmons meets Neil Young's faithful retainers.

CRAZY HORSE GO WAY BACK WITH NEIL YOUNG - ALMOST 30 years for Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, 22 for new boy Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro. They’ve been his band when the mood took him, left on the sidelines when it didn’t, or slotted like film extras into different outfits with different musicians and different names. There’ve been times when he’s railed at their musical limitations, times he’s sworn he’d never work with them again. Yet he always comes back to them. Together they’ve made a lot of Neil Young’s best music.

They were always more than a backing band, even if, unlike Dylan’s Band, they soon stopped making albums without him. They were a band when Young first met them: Danny & The Memories, later The Rockets — Billy, his friend Lou Molina, Lou’s cousin Ralph and Danny Whitten. They had a record deal. Young sat in with them at the Whisky after his solo tour. Then, stuck at home with the flu, he wrote Cowgirl In The Sand and Down By The River, asked them up to his studio to try them out. “The truth is,” he says in the film, “I probably did steal them.” A moment of justification: “What they were doing wasn t going anywhere at the time. But that’s the hardest part, the guilt at the trail of destruction I left.” Danny Whitten died of a heroin overdose in 1972. Five years later, Billy and Ralph brought Poncho along to Neil Young s studio. What Crazy Horse have got is “strength”, says Young, “massive amounts of pure energy and strength.”

In the movie you looked very much a band band, not humble, cap-in-hands sidemen.

Poncho: I always kind of laughed to myself at rehearsals because people can say, "Play this, do that..." But when you get on-stage you can do whatever you want, haha. And if somebody doesn't like it they'll tell you later, but they still can't stop you.

How much of what Neil Young and Crazy Hone do as a live unit is rehearsed, and how much spontaneous?

Billy: Well, we learn the songs, and sometimes the songs have extended solos where it's a matter of us playing together, improvising We're not jazz musicians, we play rock'n'roll, but at the same time it's an improvisational thing, and that takes us to other places that you could never rehearse 

Poncho: Even when we learn the songs, it doesn't guarantee that we're going to remember them, or Neil's going to remember the lyrics, or we're going to sing the chorus or anything. Once we get going, anything can change at any time, and you just have to keep your head up rather than down. You just have to be really there with each other. It's not like every night we're going to play the same arrangement - that never happens, never. That's boring. I went to an Eagles concert once, talking to this girl I was with, and I forgot we were at a concert - it was just like the radio was on in the background. And I like The Eagles. But it was so much like the record, note for note and lick for lick, not something exciting that you wanted to pay attention to. You were just sort of there.

When Neil goes off into one of his wild, rambling extended guitar passages, how the hell do you know when it's going to stop and it's time to get back to the song? A secret signal?

Billy: It's like the wind is blowing, and you're at the beach, how do you know when the wind is dying down and the end of the day is coming? Do you know what I mean? You just feel it. 

Ralph: It's like when you're making love with somebody, how do you know when it's going to reach its highest point? You feel it. You're going along, you get to certain high points, you know you're going to mellow back down, and all of a sudden you're back into the song.

When you've got something that close and that good, does it piss you off when Neil will suddenly take off and say, "See you in a few years, guys. I'm going to find some other musicians and go through my changes"? 

Poncho: I think when I was younger I got pissed off. Now, as I get older, I recognise the fact that Neil always comes back to us, and all these other bands he doesn't go back to. We are the one and only Neil Young band that survived all the cuts. So you get a certain sense of good feeling and security from that.

What do you do in the meantime - do you play as a band, back anyone else, make records?

Billy: We live. Be normal. Have families. Go to K-Mart. Wash the car. We still play music together. Even if we're not playing together we're thinking about music separately.

When you get the call from Neil to get back together, it doesn't take too much to dick back in?

Billy: Now we know each other so well, we don't have to be together all the time; that spirit that we managed to create in the earlier years just carries on and on and on. It's like a family: you might not see your aunt or uncle for a few years, but when you get together you have a lot to talk about and you're happy.

Ralph: It takes a little bit of jostling, but usually you find the pegs fit the right holes and everything's OK again.

Paint us a picture of one such reunion - do you jam, get drunk, play covers?

Billy: Sometimes we just play one chord for a long time. D or B or one of those G things.

Neil once said about you: 'Billy is a massive player who only plays two or three notes. People are still trying to figure out whether it's because he only knows two or three notes, or whether those are the only notes he wants to play."

Billy: Well, I figure if I'm going to play a note I'm going to play it with everything I have, whether it's two or three or 15 or 20.

Does Neil give you enough space to express yourselves on-stage?

Poncho: At all of our shows, the music's wide open, we can play whatever we want at any given moment and nobody can stop us — we're jamming, we're out there. It's not like you were in The Eagles and all of a sudden you started playing some weird licks and everybody would look at you and go, "What the hell is going on?" We have opportunities every night to play stuff we never even dreamed of playing.

Billy: Rehearsing and going to play live are two very different things. I find I stay restrained during rehearsals, then on-stage everybody's playing music. 

Poncho: We suck at rehearsals. We just don't have any attention span, haha. We don't give a shit.

Ralph: We learn the songs but we're more of a feel band, an emotional band. When we get on-stage is when it happens.

Poncho: It's like a big sharing experience out there - you get going and the audience starts giving something back, and things just get better. If you're all alone and just playing, who are you playing for?

That thing you all do, gravitating towards each other in the centre of the stage until your heads are surgically attached - instinct or choreography? 

Ralph: It's the pocket of sound. It's not just us wanting to be really close together, although that's what happens and we want to be close together to feel the vibes.

Poncho: It's the centre of energy too - you just want to get in there. You can hear the sound of all of us together and we're right there together. I don't even realise it's happening.

After Danny Whitten's death, did you ever think you would find that sense of chemistry again?

Billy: When Danny passed on, we didn't think of it happening again; I don't think Ralph or I thought about it happening again. A year or two went by and we naturally wanted to play, and we got together and did the Tonight's The Night album with Neil - Ralph and I and Nils Lofgren and Ben Keith. And after that, I ran into Poncho, and he made me think that we could do it again. We went down to Mexico and bought some cheap Spanish guitars and we were in a hotel room jamming, and in that jamming was this freedom and this innocence. We just wanted to play music and feel good about it. Poncho's attitude was just that. He didn't have some big ideas about what he was doing, he was just innocently playing and jamming. We weren't replacing Danny Whitten, but it was something that I felt at the time just might happen - give it a shot, maybe we'll all have fun together. And, thank God, it worked out.

I'd like to have been there when Neil, going through his theatrical phase, presented the idea of the show to you: "Hey guys, I've got this great idea, we have a bunch of midgets dressed up as monks..."

Billy: They weren't midgets, they were all the people who were with us on the road - truck drivers, everyone in the road crew. We just got them involved. Neil had a few small ideas and they became the road-eyes, and someone else was the doctor and everybody got a part. First some of the people didn't want to do it, but then, as it grew, they got into it.

I'm sure there were midgets on-stage. Do you have a very short road crew? 

Billy: No, they were some little children, kids of ours.

Sorry I called your children midgets.

Billy: That's OK, they were at the time.

Ralph: I loved those shows because everybody who worked on the show was in the show and you all shared something.

Poncho: All the truckdrivers were all putting on blackface and getting their outfits on, instead of going, "Oh, here comes the band, they've got it easy..." It was really togetherness, which is a beautiful thing.

Neil in three words?

Poncho: A ricocheting bullet...

Ralph: A bolt of energy...

Billy: (pause) So they say. 

===============================

Ed Cassidy
Spirit drummer, father-in-law of the late Randy California

WE HAD ALL KNOWN NEIL FOR QUITE SOME time, because we’d all lived up in Topanga Canyon at one time and jammed together at the old Topanga Corral. We also had David Briggs in common as a producer [Briggs had already produced Young’s first two albums when he worked on Spirit’s 1970 classic 12 Dreams Of Dr Sardonicus]. I don’t know if Neil would even remember this, because he was under the weather... if you get my drift. Anyways, he came on-stage during a Spirit show at the Santa Monica Civic in 1977 and started singing along with Randy on Like A Rolling Stone, just out of nowhere. And it was really a very inappropriate thing to do, to say the least. Consequently, Randy let him know, tout de suite, “You shouldn't be here.” It would have been one thing if Randy had invited him to come up, but it just was not very professional. I got up, because we had stopped playing, and told Randy we had to carry on. 1 said we had to ease Neil offstage, but we couldn’t get crazy about it. And that’s sort of what happened, and we did carry on. Of course the press took care of it, as you folks will, and blew it up into a big deal. It wasn’t the first time anything like that had happened in our business, and it probably won’t be the last.

Craig Hayes aka 'Vito Toledo'
MC and baritone sax player on Everybody’s Rockin' tour, 1983

NEIL AND BEN KEITH WANTED ME TO MANAGE THE SHOCKING Pinks, who were on their own bus and needed babysitting to make sure they stuck to the one-beer-before-the-show rule. On the fourth date out, we hit Meadowlands [New Jersey], and Ben handed me a baritone sax and said Neil wanted to do some blues during the Pinks’ set. I hadn’t played sax since sixth grade, but they wanted fairly simple pads behind Neil, with Ben on alto and Larry Byrom on trumpet. I managed not to overblow for the next 48 dates.

Neil was starting the shows with a solo acoustic set, and then he’d put on the shades and put the vocoder round his mouth and do five or six songs from Trans before coming out with the Pinks. Now I’m an R&B nut, mostly into vocal groups and doo wop, and I had my R&B books with me. Neil saw this and said he wanted a little something between his solo set and the Pinks’ set, because he needed time to get into his outfit So 1 dressed up as a kind of Mafia hit man, with the hat and shades and cigar, and I was Vito Toledo, the jet Pilot of Jive, the Duke of the Downhomc, the Count of Cool... I’d pump the audience a little, and I’d go through my shtick of, “Well, we’re on our way to New Orleans to play with Fats but I might just be able to persuade the Pinks to come out and play f’youse” - y’know, psyched ’em and jived ’em and bullshitted ’em. And then the band would come out in the pink outfits and saddle shoes and black tight pants, and they were all playing vintage 1954 instruments. They did all the stuff from Everybody's Rockin’, and maybe a Larry Williams medley.

Neil was having the best time in the world. He had his wife Pegi and youngest son Benny with him, and his youngest daughter Amber was conceived on that tour. He’d have Pegi and various guys’ wives dress up in the little hoop skirts and come out and dance towards the end. Four songs in I’d come out and say, “Whaddya think o' mah boys?" And everybody would go woof woof, and then I'd slide back and play bari sax again. When they came off I’d be in the car, a different car at every venue — generally a vintage Cadillac or Eldorado - and Neil and the band would get in the car. Generally we were always on our way to New Orleans.

Neil’s dad Scott was with us on the road and afterwards wrote his book Neil And Me. Another thing is that Neil was a major train buff. Oftentimes the two buses would veer off an interstate and, boom, we’d be at a train yard with Neil climbing all over these old steam locomotives. He sure did love trains.

Steve Cropper
Guitarist, Booker T & The MGs

NEIL PLAYED WITH US WHEN WE WERE INDUCTED INTO THE Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1992. And the night before we did the 30th Anniversary Bob Dylan Celebration at Madison Square Garden, we played the Lone Star Roadhouse and Neil sat in with us—a lot of fun. At the ’Bobfest' we did All Around The Watchtower, and it was probably one the best performances on the show.

Not long after that, Neil called me and said he was going out that summer, and would we like to be his backup band. I said, “Wow, I’m supposed to be on the road, but lemme call Booker." Duck [Dunn] and I were down in Australia with The Blues Brothers when we finally got a call from Booker, and the Neil tour was on. We set up a time when we got back to go in and rehearse for about three weeks. About two weeks in, Neil turns around and says, “Boys, I think we got it.” The next night we were on stage at the Waldorf! Neil with his business mind knew exactly what he was doing: I’ll throw' ’em to the wolves early! Rehearsals were just great — Neil was having so much fun with this band. He even admitted to us — with all due respect to everyone he’s worked with — that it was the tightest band he’d ever played with. He said to me, “1 never really have been able to relax on-stage. I’ve always been worried about this guy or that guy. But with you guys I don’t worry about anything, I just go out and play.”

It was perfect playing alongside Neil, ’cos I love playing rhythm and finding little grooves. I never really played Neil Young music before, I’m an R&B guy — not that he doesn’t have any R&B in his sound, but it’s more of a rock-folk kind of thing, so it was a challenge. I really had forgotten how many great songs he had written. That was what really blew me away — the expertise of his lyrics and his messages, his way of weaving them through this rock music. He got so excited at rehearsal that he would sit down on the couch in his barn and pull out boxes of his sheet music, and be goin’ through them trying to figure out another song we could do. He knew all the lyrics to these songs, and he’d just jump in and start playing them. And every time he’d do that, Duck and I would look at each other, and our eyes would get this big and we’d go, not another one to learn!

The Finsbury Park gig was pretty awesome, I’d have to say. And there was a good one in Scotland, where Van Morrison played. I thought we did a good one in Paris, but Neil was a little upset — I never did figure out why. Belgium was good, and there was a big outdoor festival in Germany, with Nirvana on the bill.

Neil and David Briggs kept egging me on to get more interplay with Neil, so some of these things were so long that the ride-outs are longer than the songs themselves. We had moments where we’d wonder where Neil was going. A song I thought was real interesting—this being Booker T & The MGs — was Southern Man. Motorcycle Mama we had a lot of fun with: I had a really good rig and set-up and a really good sound, and I had this foot-switch with a tremolo in it called a Tremulator, and I’d turn it all the way up and make it sound like a big Harley. I didn’t play many solos — one on Helpless, one on Dock Of The Bay, and on the fade-out of Like A Hurricane, which was unbelievable. We did some acoustic things: Harvest Moon always went down really well. We had a ball with Neil.

Jim Keltner
Drummer with Booker T & The MGs

YOU’VE GOT TO GIVE ALL you've got to keep up with him. A few times the groove got so deep that we left our feet for a few bars, but then landed them all together. That kind of thing can’t be rehearsed. He’s the most powerful performer I’ve played with on-stage.

Nicolette Larson
Backing singer

IF YOU’VE RECORDED WITH NEIL, you've worked with him live. He just is live. I’ve sung backup a lot, and I'm good at reading people’s lips. With Neil that’s real important because he never sings things the same way twice. I sang with him at one of the concerts for the Bridge school, and a couple of times at Farm Aid. When I sing live with him, I just feel like I’m there. It’s like a dance, like Fred and Ginger.

I just like making that sound that happens when our voices are together. The biggest compliment he ever paid me was when he told Cameron Crowe [rock journalist turned film screenplay writer and director] that Nicolette Larson made him want to sing in tune. We did one of the Bridge school gigs right after Bill Graham died, and Neil sang Birds. His face was just wet with tears, but his singing never changed, and that was just amazing. For me, if I cry when I’m singing I can’t sing— it just chokes me up.

With the Unplugged taping [1993], the night we rehearsed it, it sounded really hot — I sang Old Man with my daughter on my shoulder, and it was so happening. But then when we taped it, the sound was different and he wasn’t happy. When we redid it, I stood next to Neil so I could see his mouth, and Nils Lofgren would be watching my mouth!

Jim Jarmusch
Film director, documentarist of Year Of The Horse

I’M A BIG NEIL YOUNG AND Crazy Horse fan. I did a video for a song on their last record. Big Time — most of it shot on Neil’s ranch, all on Super-8. Neil liked the way it looked and he called up and said, “We’re going to go on tour — why don’t you come and let’s make a longer film that looks like that?” I said, "How long a film do you want to make and what do you think we should do? ” And Neil said, “When I write a song I don’t think about how long it should be. You decide what sort of film you want to make. We'll just start shooting and see if we like it, and if we don’t we’ll just throw it away."

It’s just a rock’n’roll movie. One thing I think it makes clear is the music comes from all four of them. They’ve all invested a lot of their lives into Crazy Horse; they’re not yes men, they’re a band. And they're emotional people, not cold, poseur rock star-type guys. They have to feel it. It's like Poncho says, when they just take off when they’re playing, “I have to shut off my mind and just go with it—if I start thinking, I'm lost." It's something very transcending. They remind me of John Coltrane’s sheets of sound.

Neil is almost shamanistic about his art. He has to have a circle drawn around him so that he has this place to go where nothing is going to interfere with him - all the bullshit business or social things — so that what he has inside could come out. He knows what process he needs to use and he’s very demanding about having it, as he should be.

On the road, they don’t like to go to parties all night; they've done all those things. Now he likes to be more relaxed - to go to his room and go on-line on the computer. They all work out, they exercise; they just stay pretty calm - a very different pace to what it would have been 25 years ago. If they kept that up - like in the 76 footage - they wouldn't even be here any more.

Robert Plant
Rock star and fan

IT WAS GREAT to do the Hall Of Fame jam with Neil [January 12, 1995].

We had three guitars going including mysell on Les Paul, and it was a real noise. In fact, when I played guitar on the remake of Down By The Seaside for the Encomium album, I was going for that really fractured sound he attained on Down By The River.

Scott Young
Father and backstage bystander in Dublin, 1996

WHAT IS A SOUND CHECK? IT IS BASICALLY what it sounds like. The Crazy Horse musicians and Neil and other members of the crew were there, all busy with various things to fine-tune the sounds they wanted for the night’s concert.

Voice of Neil: “I just need a little bit of the keyboard and a little bit of the voice.”

Then Neil, on organ: “Is it coming out?... the monitor is louder than the organ... Now take us down just a little bit... Now let’s get the vocals...” And in a few seconds, “Now a few more... That’s real funny sound.”

Neil is at the organ, calls: “Now, will that volume be the same? That’s a pretty good sound.” At that point Crazy Horse appear on-stage, trying out sounds.” And a little later: “That’s good!”

And we left to go back to the hotel. We had dinner. Everyone was packed and ready. Luggage was being taken down to the van for the quick take-off. And it was when we were having dinner that night, just the few of us, that I suddenly remembered the big question.

“Hey, Neil,” I said. “The driver who brought me from the airport yesterday told me that one time you were here before, he was sure he saw you at Central Station, sitting on the floor and playing your guitar and singing while people dropped coins into whatever you had with you.” 

“Yeah?” he said.

“Did that really happen?”

He seemed to think it over for a few seconds, then looked around the table, everyone was all ears.

“Yes, I did that once,” he said.

There was laughter and a few unclassifiable sounds of belief or disbelief as I asked, “How did you make out?”

“Pretty good,” he said. “I took in about a pound, maybe a little more.” More laughter, exclamations, and so on.

I asked, “Why did you do that?”

Again, a thoughtful few seconds. “I just wanted to know how it felt.” He told me later that the incident had been filmed by the crew that’s always in attendance, mostly unseen. “We film everything, for my archives,” he said. “But it’s never been shown.”

The concert a few hours later in Dublin had some of the same qualities as earlier concerts on the tour — the real rock’n’roll fans got their kicks, but maybe the fans of his early folkie days could have used a little more of the sweeter side of Neil Young. Still, everyone said it was a great crowd, and great music deserves a great crowd.

When the band came off the stage at the end, I patted Neil on the shoulder. His clothes were soaking wet. He plays that way, all out.

Neil And Me by Scott Young is available now at £12.99 from Rogan House, PO Box 12728, London SW1P 4FB, and in all good bookshops from July 30.

Interviews by Barney Hoskyns, Dave Di Martino and Sylvie Simmons. Additional research by Dave Lewis and Johnny Rogan.