Waging Heavy Peace (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

H
ave you ever wondered what goes into writing a song? I wish I could tell you the exact ingredients, but there is nothing specific that comes to mind. It seems to me that songs are a product of experience and a cosmic alignment of circumstance. That is, who you are and how you feel at a certain time.

I have written a lot of songs. Some of them suck. Some of them are brilliant, and some are just okay. Those are all other people’s opinions. To me, they are like children. They are born and raised and sent out into the world to fend for themselves. It’s not an easy place to be, the world, for a song. You might find yourself on a tape in the garbage, or on a CD someone threw out, or you may even be in the bargain bin. You may be a forgotten song languishing on a vinyl record in the dump or, more hopefully, in an independent record store rack. In one of the worst cases, you may be relegated to being nothing more than another MP3 file with less than five percent of your original sound. However, someone had to create you, and that is our subject for now.

I have not written one song since I stopped smoking weed in January 2011, so we are currently in the midst of a great chemical experiment.

When I write a song, it starts with a feeling. I can hear something in my head or feel it in my heart. It may be that I just picked up the guitar and mindlessly started playing. That’s the way a lot of songs begin. When you do that, you are not thinking. Thinking is the worst thing for writing a song. So you just start playing and something new comes out. Where does it come from? Who cares? Just keep it and go with it. That’s what I do. I never judge it. I believe it. It came as a gift when I picked up my musical instrument and it came through me playing with the instrument. The chords and melody just appeared. Now is not the time for interrogation or analysis. Now is the time to get to know the song, not change it before you even know it. It is like a wild animal, a living thing. Be careful not to scare it away. That’s my method, or one of my methods, at least.

I was just thinking that I am putting a lot of pressure on myself to write a song. That never works. Songs are like rabbits and they like to come out of their holes when you’re not looking, so if you stand there waiting they will just burrow down and come out somewhere far away, a new place where you can’t see them. So I feel like I am standing over a song hole. That will never result in success. The more we talk about this, the worse it will get. So that is why we are changing the subject.

—

T
he Black Queen is a 1947 Buick Roadmaster sedanette fastback. Originally the Black Queen was found in Idaho in a church parking lot by a friend of mine who purchased it for $650. That was a great deal. I used this car exclusively during the recording of
Tonight’s the Night
. This is a beautiful car that is out of Feelgood’s right now, getting some work done on the transmission.
Tonight’s the Night
is an LP that centers in on the lives and deaths of Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten. Both tragic deaths were drug-related. There was an epidemic of these events going on in the early seventies, and I was not interested in referring to it directly. I did not want to be specific. These were just my friends. Actually,
Tonight’s the Night
centers in on the aftermath of those deaths. It is a wake of sorts.

Anyway, the
Tonight’s the Night
sessions, recorded on the Green Board by David Briggs, were done at SIR, Studio Instrument Rentals. Jan Berry of Jan & Dean, the surf legends, was an owner of SIR and the older brother of Bruce, one of CSNY’s roadies. So memorializing Bruce Berry, the little brother of Jan, at those sessions was particularly close to home. Danny Whitten, the original Crazy Horse guitarist and singer, was the spirit of the album, as was Bruce. The songs were all pretty down. Both Bruce and Danny had OD’d on heroin.

It was an LP recorded in audio vérité, if you will, while completely intoxicated on Jose Cuervo tequila. We would not start recording until midnight, when we were so fucked up we could hardly walk. One night Joni Mitchell came in and did “Raised on Robbery” in the most sexy and revealing version that song ever had. She still refuses to let me release it. I don’t know what the hell she was thinking when she joined us and sang the song. It kicks ass. What the fuck was that about? It was funkier than anything she has ever cut. A total gem!

I drove to SIR and home from SIR in the Black Queen nightly. The album was risky and real. It was a real mess of a recording, with no respect given to technical issues, although it sounds like God when played loud, under the able production of David Briggs. The original roughs were never remixed to our satisfaction, and the album was held up for more than a year, and released after one or two other albums were already done. Zeke Young used to use the rough masters on his toy tape recorder, practicing threading, winding, and rewinding the tapes for when he would grow up and be a big-time recording engineer.

This album survived a memorable production cycle unparalleled in my history, from the great David Briggs to my three-year-old son Zeke, all having their way with those rough master tapes. Those original roughs were used in the final release.

Homegrown
had been recorded and
On the Beach
had already been released when Ben Keith and I played the tapes one midnight in what is now known as the Belushi bungalow of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont Hotel for Rick Danko of The Band and some other musicians. Rick said after hearing
Homegrown
and then
Tonight’s the Night
, “You ought to put THAT out! What the hell is THAT?” So we did. It was Rick Danko who brought it back.
Homegrown
, which I think is a great album, is still unreleased to this day. (It will come out, though, and we are preparing it now.)

When I played
Tonight’s the Night
for Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker at Reprise, as was always my habit to do when I handed a record in, Mo asked, “Neil, are you sure you want to put THAT out? It is really rough, and it may not be received well.” I said yes. He understood why, which makes him one of the greatest record men of all time, along with Ahmet Ertegun and Clive Davis. Then we got in the Black Queen and rode home to the ranch, at least a full year after
Tonight’s the Night
had been originally recorded. The car was there for every event tied to that record. Every night after those sessions, we rode the Black Queen home to the Sunset Marquis on Alta Loma in Hollywood, weaving down Santa Monica Boulevard at three or four in the morning, completely wrecked on tequila, and we made it, so there is a God.

—

W
hen I first went to Topanga, I still didn’t have a California driver’s license, because I was in the country illegally. I had no Social Security number. I had recently gone to Santa Ana and purchased the 1951 Willys Jeepster that I have told you about already.

One fine summer day Briggs and I were out by Mulholland Drive, cruising in the hills, smoking a joint. It was a nice sunny day and we were grooving with the top down. California really is beautiful if you’ve never been there. It’s worth a visit for sure. Anyway, we were driving along, Briggs, Danny Tucker (another good Topanga friend), and I, when a cop went by going the other way. He turned around and started following us. Briggs reached into his pocket and slipped me his license.

The cop pulled us over and asked me for my driver’s license, looked at it, looked at me, and said, “I’m going to have to cite you for no brake lights. Get that fixed.”

“Thanks, Officer,” I said as coolly as I could.

I was scared shitless. Something happened later where I fucked up and Briggs was left holding the bag. I am not sure exactly what it was or how it was resolved, but I do remember Briggs saying that I had to get those lights fixed so the cops wouldn’t be coming after him . . . Anyway, that was just another Briggs story, and there are a million of ’em. Point is, Briggs and I were brothers. He saw that cop coming and just slipped me his wallet without saying a thing. He was my best friend. Nobody can take that away from me. I always try to pay him back in any way I can. When he died years later, I did exactly what he asked me to do after he was gone, just like he asked me to do, some personal things that I know he would not want me to share with you. They had to do with how he felt about some people and how they should be dealt with.

The Black Queen leaving the Sunset Marquis Hotel parking garage en route to the Roxy nightclub to debut
Tonight’s the Night
live in West Hollywood, 1973.

A
s I said, I didn’t have a California driver’s license for a long time. I couldn’t get one. I was illegal. I needed a green card. I couldn’t even leave the country without a green card, because I would have to sneak back in if I did. Remember? The “United States has better roads” story?

Thank God capitalism saved me, and I was able to
buy
a green card. A real one! Through my lawyer! It took a long time to find the right lawyer in New York with the correct connections in the INS, but by the end of the sixties, I had a real green card! America is great, and capitalism rocks! Most folks don’t know how hard it is to get one of those cards. An American could do the job I am doing. There are plenty of other guitar players. I don’t really know how the lawyer did it, but it cost $5,000. I don’t know if that was his fee or whether he did it for nothing and the money was paid to someone else. But it was capitalism at work, I can tell you that. I can’t tell you how good it felt to be free in the USA without worrying about being deported at that time!

I felt so free when I got my first driver’s license in California that I was floating on air! Not looking around for cops all the time, not hoping I didn’t get stopped and busted, deported. I was one paranoid person before I got my license. That was two or three years of looking over my shoulder. FREEDOM ROCKS! Hey. Is that a song or what? I might be having a breakthrough moment . . .

Chapter Twenty-Two

A Note About Ronald Reagan

L
et’s have a word or two about Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America. I don’t know what you think of him, and it doesn’t matter that much, really. What matters to me, though, is when people get an attitude about somebody and paint that person all one color.

I was sitting on my bus in New Orleans, backstage at a concert in the mid-eighties, recording what turned out to be
A Treasure
. We were playing music that I was getting sued for because it was deemed “uncharacteristic of Neil Young” by my new record company. My new record company was run by people who liked to get their way. Success was measured in sales. My first record for them,
Trans
, was a bit of a departure from what they expected. First off, the owner of the record company, David Geffen, listened to the record
Island in the Sun
, which I thought was done, and told me to do more. I wanted to get started on a good foot, so I added another dimension, vocoded (electronically synthesized) voices, that made it into
Trans
.

Logically to me that would have been my second record for them, but they didn’t want the first record I gave them, which was a fucking great record. I knew it was a great record, but then I wouldn’t have wanted to release it if I didn’t like it. I was used to Mo Ostin, who understood art. My new record company wanted me to make a hit as big as
Harvest
and thought that I had ripped them off by not repeating myself and making them look like a great record company. I have never thought it was my job to make a record company look great. I thought it was the other way around. The record company has to recognize when something is a statement by the artist or whether it is commercial enough to be a hit and do a good job of presenting either option to maximize the release.

Not every record made by me is designed to be a hit. Some are expressions in an artist’s life. They tried telling me what to do so they could have their hit. They told me they wanted rock and roll, so I gave them
Everybody’s Rockin’
by Neil and the Shocking Pinks! Then they tried canceling my sessions and interrupting my creative flow to show me they meant business. Then, in their apparent frustration, not being able to have their own way, they decided I was purposefully making records that made them look like losers. Then they sued me for making records that were “uncharacteristic of Neil Young.”

This, of course, made me look like a hero.

Anyway, in that climate, a pair of AP reporters came to my bus to interview me. I did quite a few interviews during that tour. Elliot had set up another one. These guys were supposed to be good. They came on the bus and started right off making derogatory remarks about Reagan. They were presumptuous; I could see they thought they had me all figured out. I was that hippie who wrote “Ohio” and “Southern Man” and sang with that group CSNY. The more they said to ingratiate themselves, the more I didn’t like them. I asked them if they’d ever met Reagan. They hadn’t. Neither had I, I reasoned. I told them I did not believe in painting someone with one brush, that there must be more to a person than that, and I liked Reagan for some things he had said. Reagan had talked about the need for communities to come together to help themselves in ways that I thought were reasonable, and I told them that I did not believe that he was the villain so many had painted him to be. Just because you don’t believe in some things a man says does not make him a bad man. There is good to be found in most people.

I also said that the guy is the president, so
someone
must think he is all right. Not everyone is against him.

I could tell they weren’t buying it. Reagan was an asshole as far as they were concerned. So they wrote a story that made it sound like I was some all-out Reagan supporter, and I heard about it everywhere I went. One of my peers, who I respect, was calling me a buffoon, saying I didn’t know what I was talking about and raving away about Guatemala.

Since the moment I met those two AP jerks, I have been trying to straighten out what they said. What they said
I
said. So in the end, I hate interviews, although I still do them every once in a while. I want people to know what I am up to if it supports my music in some way and brings awareness that a new recording exists. Sometimes that is the only way to get it out there. That certainly was the case in the eighties, although I don’t think it is now. Things are better now, because we have tools to get information out there, and if you’re smart enough, you don’t have to talk to two dickheads on a bus anymore. And that’s all I have to say about Ronald Reagan.