Waging Heavy Peace (26 page)

Backstage with Larry Johnson (Larry in blackface for a Rust Never Sleeps show) and stage manager and friend Tim Foster, 1978.

Chapter Forty-Seven

T
oday I got another FedEx package from Gary Burden. Over the years I have received hundreds of these. Today’s is a songbook proof for
Rust Never Sleeps
. These books just keep coming out. It seems like we have done this one before. This is a new edition with a new publisher, and we are doing it again. Looking through the Pegi Young and Joel Bernstein pictures, I remember how wonderful that 1978 Rust Never Sleeps tour really was!

It all started on the
WN Ragland
. We were in the Virgin Islands—Pegi, pregnant with Ben, Captain Roger Katz and his girlfriend, Suzanne (Pusette), David Cline and his girlfriend, Leslie Tellier, David Briggs and Connie Moskos, and some crew members, notably Reynoud Bos, our sailing Aussie doctor, and Joe Trailor, a sailor and shipbuilder who was now helping out crewing with us. We were down in the Grenadines, near Grenada, and had gone ashore in Saint George’s to buy supplies. I picked up a school notebook, the kind with lines drawn on the pages. It was rough paper, like we used to have in the Canadian schools when I was a kid. It had a political leader on the cover, a prime minister probably. I suddenly came up with an idea for the next Crazy Horse tour!

It was going to be from the standpoint of a young boy dreaming. All the amps were huge and there was going to be a giant microphone. It was going to be like Tom Thumb in reverse. The roadies were all like Jawas from
Star Wars
! A cone-headed wizard was the lighting director, and some scientists in lab coats were the sound mixers. It was all like a hospital experiment, with the scientists appearing in lab coats during the performance taking notes on clipboards and the Jawa-cloaked roadies with their illuminated eyes raising and lowering amp cases over the top of the amps from the ceiling by pulling on ropes with pulleys.

A thunderstorm like Woodstock would have a “no rain” chant, and announcements about the bad acid that should not be taken would be played over the PA. The show started with “The Star-Spangled Banner” played by Jimi Hendrix as the roadies (Jawas) raised the big mic into position like the soldiers at Iwo Jima with the flag. It continued with things like that for about a hundred minutes.

I took the little Grenada notebook and drew charts with song titles, effects, action, lighting, sound cues, all in a sort of data-based sequence I had handwritten in this grade school book. When I showed this to Tim Foster, my stage manager, who loved doing things theatrically, he got really into it! He dove right in and explained to the crew that they would all be wearing these outfits and be onstage doing things throughout the show. I was not using actors; I was using my road crew: Larry Johnson as assistant director, his girlfriend, Miss Jeanne Field, as production, Briggs as onstage sound, Stephen Cohen as lighting director, Sal Trentino my amp tech, Joel Bernstein my tuner (and also a great photographer who took all the pictures)—everyone in the whole crew was involved! It was quite a shock when everyone showed up for a rehearsal at the Cow Palace in San Francisco and learned what we were doing and that we only had a couple of days to learn it.

The “roadeyes” (the Rust tour name for roadies) put on their black face and head racks holding the two battery-powered lights placed to shine as eyes under a giant hood. Crazy Horse had the music down and the crew knew the songs and instruments, but that was the easy part. The rest of it put everyone in a state of shock. Our first show was in a few days. We had all the costumes made and the props built. Tim Foster and Larry Johnson did a superb job making this concept happen. It was billed as “Rust Never Sleeps: A Concert Fantasy,” and it was even stranger for the audience because my brand-new album,
Comes a Time
, had just been released.

Comes a Time
had been a completely different type of music recorded in Nashville with a different band! At that time I was in the habit of performing all of my new songs live first, recording them that way, and then taking the audience out of the mixes. Then I released them as studio albums. Crazy Horse was great live, and that was the most fun way to do it.

Of course, that was before the Internet, and it’s not realistic to work that way anymore. Any experiment I try onstage is thrown up on YouTube, where people who think they know what I should be doing start shooting holes in it before it’s even finished. This is the single most daunting challenge the Internet has provided, along with all the good things. The stage used to be my lab, where I could experiment in front of a live audience and see how it reacted and—more important—how I felt while I was doing it. That is how I created and adjusted most of my best plays, tuning them by feel. I try to avoid reading about myself on the Web for that reason.

Now I try to work things out in private while I develop ideas. That way I have a chance to present the first time to a large audience, the way I envision it. Unfortunately that is not as adventuresome for me. The first couple of performances of
Rust Never Sleeps
were full of disasters, from things not working right to not working at all. If that was today, the rap on the show would have been so bad on the Net that the show would have been killed before it even was fully born. That’s life!

Things change.
Rust Never Sleeps
was named Album of the Year that year by
Rolling Stone
. The production of the concert got some awards as well and was seen as bold at the least. That made Briggs and me feel pretty good. The movie we made of the concert is one of my favorites.

Original performance notes and cues for the Rust Never Sleeps tour, 1978.

Chapter Forty-Eight

It’s better to burn out than to fade away.

J
ohn Lennon disagreed with that.

Kurt Cobain quoted it in his last letter.

People have asked me about that line since I first sang it in 1978. I wrote it referring to the rock and roll star, meaning that if you go while you are burning hottest, then that is how you are remembered, at the peak of your powers forever. That is rock and roll.

At sixty-five, it seems that I may not be at the peak of my rock and roll powers. But that is not for sure. The idea that I should have died earlier is not the point. There really is more to life than its charged peak, because other things continue to grow and develop long afterward, enriching and growing the spirit and soul.

I wrote that song right after the death of Elvis Presley, one of my childhood heroes, and sang it first for Bruce “BJ” (Baby John) Hines, part of the original Crazy Horse family. He was visiting the ranch for some reason, and I had just finished the song. It was written as an acoustic song. Rather reflective.

During the filming of
Human Highway
when I played it with Devo, Booji Boy sang it in his crib, pounding on a synthesizer. I played it on Old Black. I remember seeing the video of that, and the peace signs and doves on Old Black’s strap played against the visual of Booji Boy, and the image created a feeling I can’t describe. It was the feeling of the hippie generation and the new punk generation juxtaposed. Devo’s influence and where they came from is something that I have never seen adequately described. They were true originals. It was just one of those moments.

That was the defining original rock version. Booji Boy added some new lyrics and sang, “It’s better to burn out, ’cause rust never sleeps” or “than it is to rust.” I’m not sure which. One of the Devo members later told me that there was a sign on a shop in Akron, Ohio, where Devo originated, that read R
UST
N
EVER
S
LEEPS
. It was a maintenance and rust-prevention service. As is the case with many of my songs, some of it came from real-life things other people said or did.

Another time that happened was on my bus with Poncho. We were cruising along in the mountains between Spokane and Seattle. Something about the Berlin Wall and the recent unrest was on TV. “Keep on rocking in the free world,” said Poncho. I said, “What?” Then I wrote that whole song and we did it that night. Poncho thought he should have credit for that and told me years later he had always felt that way. Now he gets credited and paid whenever that song is involved.

It’s part of the process. I just do what I do and keep my ears and eyes open. Things are happening all the time. You put it out there and shit happens. Yesterday we were on our way to the movies and I heard some guy pouring his heart out in some song on the radio. I said to Ben Bourdon, Ben Young’s caregiver and friend, “That sounds like Jimmy Fallon doing me. What the heck does that mean?” It was funny. It really did sound like me. We laughed our asses off! Ben Young thought that was really hysterical. Fallon sounded like a twenty-year-old me. Maybe not as good. Maybe better.

How about that Jimmy Fallon? He is a classic. He does me so well, I don’t have to bother anymore. He looks great, and I am an old guy who doesn’t want to be on TV, so Jimmy has done all of my television performances for the last year or so. Thank you, Jimmy!

As an aside to you, the reader: Writing this has been a lot of fun so far, even the tough parts where I have lost some of my best friends. As we make our way through this experience and I grab some thoughts out of the bag while waiting patiently for ideas that come out of the blue, inevitably we are going to get to some of the longest run-on sentences in history, ending in places I may have been avoiding, but not if I can help it! Seriously, though, there are still quite a few boulders to climb out from under.