Waging Heavy Peace (21 page)

Pegi and I with Ben and Amber at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Ranch, Spicewood, Texas, June 1984.

Chapter Thirty-Six

M
y daughter, Amber Jean Young, was born May 15, 1984. We brought her home to the ranch from the hospital in a baby-blue 1957 Chevy Bel Air wagon called the Mother Ship. She grew up relatively shy with others and showed a strong interest in art right away, painting first with one hand, then with the other, switching back and forth as she went. Her sense of color is so pleasing to me that I feel it in my heart every time I see one of her works. And now she has an MFA.

Rich with an artist’s sentiment, Amber Young today is a beautiful young lady, making her way through life’s guesswork and planning her future with grace, style, and conviction. Of course, she would never say that about herself. This is her father talking. I love her. She has been well raised by her mother, who has a natural sense for the art of mothering and nurturing. Amber’s art is as complex as it is beautiful, and the textures and boldness she uses speak to me. I get a visceral feeling from her colors, just like great-sounding music gives me. What a pleasure to watch her develop her natural talent. She really wants to be an independent artist, making her way with her art and not asking for anything. Amber works at galleries in San Francisco and curates exhibitions.

Looking at the poster for my new Jonathan Demme movie, I am especially proud of my daughter Amber’s art. She has done the titles, at Jonathan’s request, and the result is so cool. In her strong personality, she is a combination of her mother and my mother, two of my favorite people, plus a little bit of me thrown in there for good measure, along with that indescribably original thing that is just totally her. She is a true original, having created houses built of Ben Young’s feeding bags, tubes, and medical devices, heavy-duty construction vehicles made of felt, a wedding cake you can walk inside with beautiful felt roses adorning it, and countless works that hang on walls—works in wax, in paint, and in other mediums I can’t adequately describe at the moment.

There is nothing on earth like the feeling of a parent for a child that has matured as Amber Young has. She is my pal, sometimes my confidante—although I am careful not to burden her unnecessarily—and my muse. Named after my granny Jean, an active musician who worked in the copper mines of Flin Flon, Manitoba, during the day, handing out the metal ID tags to the miners before they descended and collecting them back, hanging them on nails in the wall of a little shack, when they finished their shifts, thereby becoming the first to learn of a missing soul in the mine. Then she was partying into the night, singing and playing a barroom piano or producing and playing in the local theater productions she created. She is my daughter, Amber Jean Young. Over the years her mother and I have tried to do our best raising her, and now it is up to her. She is well equipped, soulful and talented, wise and idealistic, and comes fully loaded with the Young/Morton temperament.

I remember once we were having some problems, and she told me I was gone too much when she was growing up and I missed a lot of things. She was so true, so right. Of course I felt terrible, but that was the price I had to pay for my choices. I followed my music and missed her moments. Amber was very honest with me. Who could ask for more? She’s my girl.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Another Word from PureTone . . .

I
think a lot about the music business and how it is reinventing itself. Streaming services like Spotify make ALL music available free instantly or through a subscription and a cool, easy user interface. This is completely different from the way I started, but I am open to it because it gets music to the people in a way that works with today’s expectations of the capabilities of technology.

The convenience is fantastic, with instant access to and discovery of the history of recorded sound, but you can’t
feel
it like you used to. I don’t want to complain and not have a suggestion about how to fix the problem—complaining without a solution is a waste of time. So I have developed a solution. It’s just a matter of dealing in the business world and offering people a new way to make money that reintroduces ongoing quality into the equation. I know a way to combine streaming services and PureTone, while improving the sound of streams and making some tracks in playlists available instantly in PureTone-master quality.

I keep thinking about this all the time because I want to make a contribution that lasts. I know I am obsessive about it. Music is an art form compromised by technology; this is not what technology is supposed to do. Maybe the music I make now will not have a huge audience like it once did, and my time in the light may or may not have passed, but I can reach more people than I ever have by helping to bring all kinds of music to them in a way that is superior to anything that has ever been presented in the history of recorded sound. I think
great
digital sound is the future of music, and we are a few steps away from delivering it. It could happen really soon, and that would be a massive sea change for the art of recorded music.

With book art director and friend Gary Burden, on the beach in Malibu, 1975.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

M
y very first recording session was on July 23, 1963, at CKRC radio in Winnipeg. I was seventeen years old. Harry Taylor was the engineer behind the board, and Bob Bradburn was the producer, a CKRC DJ. The Squires were there to make a record! The first day we played all of our songs so we could hear how they sounded when recorded. It was very exciting, and I was really jacked up. Just before and just after the sessions, we played at the Crescentwood Community Centre and earned $35 the first night and $36 the second night. As you can tell, we were hot.

The CKRC studio had a pair of mono tape recorders, some EQ, some echo, and a control board. The mixing was done live. It was at this session that I first sang on tape. I had a couple of songs, one of which I called “I Wonder.” It was the best one that I sang, but we decided, because I had a “different” voice, that the Squires would be an instrumental recording group. I knew that I had to work on my singing, and I knew I felt good when I sang. Those songs meant something to me. I had written several instrumentals that we were also playing.

The two tunes picked from the audition session were “The Sultan” and “Image in Blue.” During the second session we practiced recording these, working on the arrangements. At that time it was decided that “Image in Blue” needed a name change so that Bob Bradburn could say the title at the end of the record in echo. “Aurora” was the new title. They thought of the title and had the idea. I was so young and eager, I didn’t complain. I was just happy to be making a record. I did like that a prerecording of a gong was added to “The Sultan” to give it that special sultanesque, desert-tent vibe—we knew all about that in Winnipeg.

After a few long weeks of anticipation, the record was released on V Records, a local company that mainly did polkas but was just getting into rock and roll. We were very excited. Then the big moment came, and we heard “The Sultan” on the radio! I was in my mother’s car with my bandmate Ken Koblun, driving somewhere. I felt so good. I am sure I was walking on air for weeks. The Squires were recording artists. My mother was telling everyone she knew. I could hear her on the phone calling all of her friends. She was my biggest fan!

There are a few of these 45 rpm singles available on eBay every once in a while now. I have one signed by the band that Jack Harper, our original drummer, gave to me. The Squires on that record were Ken Koblun on bass, Ken Smyth on drums, Allan Bates on guitar, and Neil Young on guitar. Unreal! Listening to this today, I can say we were pretty good. We needed better equipment, but we played well and it was a good instrumental. What a rush!

—

A
lthough there was never any art for the Squires’ 45, album covers are very important to me. They put a face on the nature of the project. I know albums are viewed as passé by some today, but I am an album artist and I am not ready to give up on my form. I think it has a future and a past. The album cover and liner notes reached out to the music lover, filling them with images and helping to illuminate the story behind the music, the feeling coming from the artist. My first album cover told a lot about me, without words.

I first met Gary Burden while shooting the CSNY cover for
Déjà Vu
, my initial album with CSN. Gary and I became good friends and we immediately worked together on the album cover for
After the Gold Rush
. I loved what he did with the photographs. Gary and I have been working together since that time, and I have done the great majority of my album art, my ads, and my songbooks with him. He is one of my closest compadres. Gary and his wife, Jenice, still work with me on every album cover. We are doing our life’s work together.

One of my favorite album covers is
On the Beach
. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn’t matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us; then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picked up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men’s shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood dumbfounded, watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: S
EN.
B
UCKLEY
C
ALLS FOR
N
IXON TO
R
ESIGN
. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight’s the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica Beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding an airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.

On the Beach
LP cover.

Collaborating with Gary has been a joy over the years. We have really maintained a wonderful friendship to this day, no matter where we are on the planet. I hung with him a lot after my breakup with Susan and before I moved north to the ranch. Then I sold my Topanga house to him. A few years ago when Gary married Jenice Heo, an artist he met at Reprise Records, I was his best man.

When CDs came along, it was more of a challenge to present our art. The CD package was about twenty-five percent the size of an album. Everything had to be small. The lyrics were not legible without glasses for anyone over a certain age. So our whole palette was changed by the advent of the CD. Of course, the audio quality also took a dive, with a maximum of fifteen percent of the sound of a master, but if you don’t know how I feel about that by now, you should put this book down. Go directly to your doctor’s office and have your eyes and ears checked.

Now that online music has taken hold with Spotify, Rhapsody, and the other online services, art has become challenged again. Quality has taken another hit, and tactile album art has an unknown future at this point. Things are changing. I have faith that there is a place for tactile art like physical books and album covers and think that we will settle into something new but recognizable. I am not totally sure of this, though. I do think that the future for books is in over-the-top quality printing, paper, photography, and binding. The high price of that quality may enable the survival of the printed and bound hardcover book.