Waging Heavy Peace (28 page)

A few weeks before the people who would found Crazy Horse (as yet unnamed), Danny, Billy, Ralphie, and me, got together in my Topanga living room, I had been sick with the flu, holed up in bed in the house. Susan was bringing me soup and good stuff, but I still felt like shit. I was delirious half the time and had an odd metallic taste in my mouth. It was peculiar. At the height of this sickness, I felt pretty high in a strange way.

I had a guitar in a case near the bed—probably too near the bed in the opinion of most of the women I had relationships with. I took it out and started playing; I had left it in a tuning I was fond of, D modal, with the E strings both tuned down to D. It provided a drone sound, sort of like a sitar, but not really. I played for a while and wrote “Cinnamon Girl.” The lyrics were different from how the song eventually ended up, but all those changes happened right there, immediately, until the song was complete.

The original “Cinnamon Girl” lyrics, 1969.

Then I took the guitar out of D modal and kept playing. At the time, there was a song in E minor on the radio that I liked, “Sunny” or something like that. I remembered hearing it in the drugstore at Fairfax and Sunset while I was shopping for something to ease the flu. The song kept looping in my head, endlessly, like some things do when I’m sick and maybe a little delirious. So I started playing it on the guitar, and then I changed the chords a bit—and it turned into “Down by the River.” I was still feeling sick, but happy and high. It was a unique feeling. I had two brand-new songs! Totally different from the last album!

Then I started playing in A minor, one of my favorite keys. I had nothing to lose. I was on a roll. The music just flowed naturally that afternoon, and soon I had written “Cowgirl in the Sand.” This was pretty unique, to write three songs in one sitting, and I am pretty sure that my semi-delirious state had a lot to do with that.

So there Billy, Ralphie, Danny, and I were in the Topanga house living room. It was all so easy, just like falling off a log. We played so well together. Simple, down-to-earth rock and roll. There is a cool picture of us all in that living room, grouped around a big chair Briggs and I had found at an antique shop in Echo Park and brought back to Topanga. The only thing wrong with that picture is the suit I had decided to wear. It was the suit I married Susan in. Should have left that one on the rack.

Anyway, I remember saying to the guys when we were playing “Cinnamon Girl,” describing the modal instrumental theme that introduces the song, “It’s like the Egyptians rolling giant stones up to a pyramid on logs. It’s huge and it’s moving. Unstoppable. Think Egyptians!” Soon we were in the studio recording those songs with Briggs at Heider’s. It was massive. I was so freed by this music. I was happy as hell.

Somewhere along the line I had suggested the name Crazy Horse after the great Indian chief, and the guys liked it. Neil Young
with
Crazy Horse. Not
and
. There was a distinction there. I am not sure why I did that, but I liked it being different. I liked that I was
with
them. Like we were together, not separate.

The idea was that the Rockets would still continue on. We asked Bobby Notkoff to play violin on “Running Dry,” and it was great. I think that was my first live vocal on an electric track; it is really different from all the other electric songs on that album. I know we all sang live on “Round and Round”: Danny, Robin, and me. All gathered in a circle like at Laurel Canyon, singing and playing. The vocals are so great—Danny singing on the top, and Robin’s rich voice on the bottom. Danny’s soulful acoustic playing. Amazing. That whole album is so pure. I love that music. I love that old feeling of just the music. Nothing else mattered to us then. I can remember singing that song with them in the studio like it was this morning. There was no success, nothing to live up to, just love and music and life and youth. That was a happy time. That is Crazy Horse.

—

I
n Cleveland, there used to be a little club called La Cave; Crazy Horse and I played one of our first gigs there. The club held about two hundred people, and we stayed in a funky hotel just a few blocks away. I was playing Old Black through my little Deluxe amp, and we all had these other little Fender amps, too. We sounded perfect for that size of room.

I remember doing Danny’s “Look at All the Things.” It’s too bad that Danny didn’t get to sing more of his own tunes back then. It must have been frustrating for him to be so great and not be heard completely. Everything he contributed had that special edge. We were really great and we knew it. We were playing for ourselves. I would go out and play five or six songs acoustic, and then the Horse would come out and we would rock the place. We never did “Cowgirl” and “Down by the River” in the same set. We saved the long jam songs for the end, and focused on the shorter songs in the beginning. Every set had one of Danny’s songs.

When we were finished at La Cave, we went on to the Bitter End in New York for a week in the Village. While we were in New York we stayed at the Gorham Hotel. It was a funky, soulful place on West 55th Street (now closed), and I stayed there every time I was in New York for years afterward. Once I played Carnegie Hall solo and the set list was written on Gorham stationery and taped on the top of my guitar.

Anyway, the tour continued, and when Crazy Horse finally arrived in Providence, Rhode Island, we were playing down in the shipyards. I noticed when we arrived that there were a lot of slot machines in this club. I’m talkin’ a
lot
of slot machines. A funny feeling was in the place. It was not like the other gigs. The owner was friendly enough, but nervous.

We set up our equipment and went out for something to eat. BJ was our roadie at the time and stayed back with the equipment. It was always necessary to watch the equipment in these gigs. We never left it alone. It was irreplaceable. We returned to play, and eventually people started showing up. This was a club with almost no chairs, maybe some around the edges with a few tables, basically a dancing kind of place, so people were standing around looking at the stage, which was not a stage. We set up on a riser, possibly six inches higher than the floor. At least it was a one-nighter, not a weeklong gig.

My set list taped to my Martin D-45 guitar for a show at Carnegie Hall, 1970.

Night was falling, and the shipyards took on a different look, with the bright lights outside shining down on the decks of a few ships being serviced and loaded with cargo. There was no acoustic set. We just started playing, and soon the crowd was into it. During the second set, we were doing an extended version of “Cowgirl in the Sand” when a fight broke out on the floor. All hell broke loose, and people were leaving! The fight got really big. A lot of people were just beating up our audience. We just kept on playing. One of the cardinal rules of club gigs is KEEP PLAYING in a fight situation. Stopping is taboo. It was very surreal, playing this long jam while people were getting beat up all around us. We still don’t know quite what happened that night in Providence, but it was clear that our audience had the shit beaten out of them by unknown thugs from somewhere else.

We packed up and left without getting paid. There was no money.

—

I
n mid-1970, on the last Crazy Horse tour with Danny, our final show was at the Santa Monica Civic. All of our friends were there, and it was a big success. We played great. We had also played the Fillmore East on that tour, and a performance series CD was recently released that documents our shows there. I am really happy that I recorded all of that and have something to show for it, because there was nothing like it in any of the Crazy Horse records made at that time.

One of my instruments, a very rare and valuable D’Angelico New Yorker guitar, was missing after that tour. It was never found. I’m not sure there was a connection, but I had a suspicion that one of our roadies had sold the guitar for drug money. I don’t blame them, but junkies will do almost anything to score, and there were a few junkies with me. Danny was using heroin, and I didn’t know it. Jack Nitzsche was playing piano with us on that tour. Bruce Berry was a roadie on that tour, too. So was BJ.

One day after that we had a group meeting at the Lookout Management offices in the Clear Thoughts Building. I made a big speech about the group not being able to go on if Danny was still using. It didn’t feel right even as I was saying it, the wrong approach. Danny was hurt, the other guys were with me but uncomfortable. I hadn’t learned how to deal with a dependency or addiction. It was a stupid thing to do and didn’t solve anything. I think that was the last time the group played together for a long time. I went off with CSNY to San Francisco and recorded
Déjà Vu
.

When I returned to Topanga, Dean Stockwell came by the house with a screenplay called
After the Gold Rush
. He had cowritten it with Herb Berman and wanted to know if I could do the music for it. I read the screenplay and kept it around for a while. I was writing a lot of songs at the time, and some of them seemed like they would fit right in with this story. The song “After the Gold Rush” was written to go along with the story’s main character as he carried the tree of life through Topanga Canyon to the ocean.

One day Dean brought an executive from Universal Studios to my house to meet me. It looked like the project was going to happen, and I thought it would really be a good movie. It was a little off-the-wall and not a normal type of Hollywood story. I was really into it. Apparently the studio wasn’t, because nothing more ever happened.

I went on to record most of the album in the studio I had built in my house. Ralphie and Greg Reeves were the rhythm section, with Nils Lofgren mainly on piano and also on acoustic guitar on one song. Nils had come to LA after I met him in Washington playing a solo gig at the Cellar Door a month earlier. Nils was very young and had a lot of energy for the music. He came to LA to get started, and Briggs was going to produce him.

Nils, probably because he had no money, had walked to Topanga from the airport, about fifteen miles. Greg Reeves had just done
Déjà Vu
with CSNY, and I put him together with Ralphie and Nils to see how it would go.

We had finished a lot of the recording when word came through Billy that Danny had cleaned up. He came out and we played “When You Dance I Can Really Love” with him, Billy, and Jack. Crazy Horse was back together again. We rerecorded a lot of the chorus vocals with Danny singing, and they were a lot better than what we had before. It was great having Danny back! It really made the record better, and it felt so good to play with Danny again. Jack, too! Jack’s piano on that track is unreal. We were really soaring! But that was it for the original Crazy Horse with Danny and Jack.

Chapter Fifty

I
n 2010, I decided to make a record with Daniel Lanois, a great record producer. I have always, with few exceptions, had a direct hand in the production of my own records. This is how I do things. When I started this studio recording with Daniel, though, I said to myself,
At this time I don’t like participating in the production as much as I like writing songs and performing them. I just want to do that and leave the production to someone else.

Daniel had always seemed interesting and creative to me, so I called him up and asked him to produce a record with me. I wanted to do a solo record. I could see myself doing a collection of new songs in the folk tradition, acoustic and live, similar to Bob’s earliest recordings. He was interested. I had written a few new songs in Hawaii, so I was already started. It’s very simple to write songs and play them, and I wanted to return to those roots.

We got together at Lanois’s house in Silver Lake in Los Angeles and started. When I arrived there, I was very impressed with what he had going on. He had prepared a group of rooms for me to play in and set up the sounds in advance, even prepared some instruments for me to try. It was a very interesting way to start. He had really done his homework. Dan’s team consisted of Mark Howard (engineer), Adam CK Vollick (cinematographer), and Margaret Marissen, a lovely Canadian lady who supplied hospitality and food. Keisha, who lived in Dan’s guesthouse, also helped Margaret at the sessions. I don’t want to forget to give credit to them for what they contributed to the recording. I also met my new guitar tech, Ian Galloway.

I told Dan I wanted to cut the album on the full moon and the days leading up to it every month until we were done. That’s the way I like to do it. I noticed early on that a lot of my best recordings were cut on a full moon, and I started to make it a habit to schedule sessions around the moon cycles. It seems very natural to me.

For the first sessions I drove to LA with Eric Johnson in my old Cadillac Eldorado, a white ’57 Biarritz convertible that is all original. The ride down was magnificent. Taking Highway 101, we carved our way along the California coast and inland, through Gilroy, Salinas, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, to Ventura and into LA. That trip really opens up my head. Ben Keith and I had done that same ride many times. I checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, into a bungalow with a nice fireplace and a peaceful vibe. There was a grand piano in the room as well. I felt very good. We started recording the next day. It took me a while to loosen up, and the first couple of things I tried we didn’t end up using, but eventually we hit a groove and recorded “Love and War” and “Peaceful Valley Boulevard,” two songs written in Hawaii, and an older song called “Hitchhiker” that I hadn’t cut yet. The previous night I had added a couple of new verses and changed some words to make it more relevant to me now, and it was “a good ’un,” as Ben used to say. I did that song on Old Black through some amps Daniel had set up, and it sounded rockin’!

When the moon started to wane, I returned to the ranch with Eric in the Eldorado. It had been a good start. I loved the low sound that Dan was triggering from my bass strings. He certainly had some ideas I had never used before. We went along for a couple of moons, and I went out on the road, doing a solo tour, using the effects Dan and Mark had crafted on my guitars while I was playing both electric and acoustic. I took my old pump organ, my grand piano from
Tonight’s the Night
that Amber had painted, and my old
Gold Rush
piano that I had rented when I made that record, then loved so much that I purchased it. I was happy with the way the tour was developing.

We decided to do three-week runs throughout the year with that show and intersperse trips to LA to record at Dan’s house. The house was actually a mansion from the thirties. I loved the architecture of the place. It was so Old Hollywood! It reminded me of the film era, with its spiral staircases and Mediterranean look; the beautifully designed windows and arches everywhere were pleasing to the eye. Dan was recording analog masters and using a digital recorder from Canada called RADAR. Things sounded good, and I was happy with how things were going. Dan told me that the analog masters were not working for mixing because we were doing so many dubs that were dropped into the digital. I was cool with that. I loved the dubs he was doing with Mark. It was very creative, and we were getting a quite unique sound. I assumed that the digital was recorded at the highest resolution.

In the midst of recording, Dan and Keisha were involved in a motorcycle accident; word at first was that Dan might not survive. I was devastated. I called the hospital and found out that the reports I had gotten were greatly exaggerated, although Dan did have some broken bones and was confined to a wheelchair for a couple of months. I got him hooked up with the best doctors, and they took good care of him and Keisha, who had suffered some broken bones in her arm.

When I first heard the news of the accident, I was thinking about Larry and Ben, both of whom had passed in the last year, and I was wondering whether I was jinxing people close to me. Thankfully that thought passed.

Dan recovered, we resumed, and when the album was done I loved it. It was a mixture of electric and acoustic solo performances with dubs. I called it
Le Noise
, after Dan. It was a French Canadian joke, a very English way of saying
Lanois
. I was doing a show that introduced a lot of the songs, and things were going great. I was very happy.

Recently, I got my very first Grammy for a track on
Le Noise
in the category of Best Rock Song. We also won Juno Awards in Canada for the record. That was a great honor. The whole team, Daniel Lanois, Mark Howard, Adam Vollick, Margaret Marissen, and myself, were all Canadians! It was a massive amount of fun.

There were some dark spots, though. When I put the master to one of the songs from
Le Noise
on my PureTone demo player, I noticed it did not have the same openness and fidelity as the other tracks. Checking with the studio, I had them analyze
Le Noise
’s “Walk with Me,” the strange-sounding track. It was a low-resolution digital master! It was recorded several steps down from high resolution. I couldn’t believe it! We checked with Mark, and he verified it. It was a complete surprise to me, and it sounded decidedly inferior to all of my other high-resolution masters. There is no extra work involved with making something high resolution. It is just a matter of having the correct equipment and pressing the right buttons. If that can happen to me, imagine how many other contemporary artists record at suboptimal resolution. In the future, those recordings will be seen as unfortunate.

After a few months, I decided to do one more leg of the Le Noise tour and film the last show with Jonathan Demme in Toronto’s Massey Hall. It turned out to be a great night. Everyone was very happy because we had captured it. During a review of the digital files, we realized that the resolution was not full; it was a stepped-down quality, not the best it could be. My own team’s excuses were not adequate, because I was not informed of the decision to go to a lesser quality. Lesser quality is so accepted as normal now that even I had used it unknowingly! I went back to Massey Hall and set up a PA system like the one I used at the show, played back the mixes through the PA, and rerecorded the house sound at the highest resolution. I did the best I could with a bad situation. It does sound great now. Thankfully, the PA mix was only one step down from the highest resolution, so when it resonated in the hall and was rerecorded at the highest level, a high-resolution hall sound was captured.