Waging Heavy Peace (3 page)

At almost five, fishing on a bridge over the Pigeon River, Omemee, Ontario, August 1950.

Chapter Four

Ontario

M
y bedroom in Omemee was the home of my first train layout. It was an L-shaped layout my dad made for me, and I had a Marx train. The couplers were flat and fit together in a way that made them stay together, but if you tilted them one way the cars would come apart and disconnect. I still remember that layout well, so it made quite an impression on me. It was right across from my bed in the corner where I remember emptying my Christmas stocking at dawn to see what Santa had brought me and finding a great barnyard set with tiny horses, cows, and fences.

It was where I remember being when the doctor, Dr. Bill, came one day with his black bag and told my mom and dad something important out in the hallway. I was about five years old. My mommy was crying, and my daddy said, “Sure, Doc, right away. We’ll go today.” Then, after breakfast, I was taken to the car. It was hard for me to walk for some reason. I slept on the floor in the back of the car. My older brother, Bob, was there with me in the backseat, and Mommy and Daddy were in the front with Dr. Bill.

The next things I remember are this big metal table and the biggest needle I had ever seen. It turns out I was getting a lumbar puncture. That hurt like hell and scared me to death. I really think that was my first big trauma. Then there was a hospital bed and a nurse who always sang “Beautiful Brown Eyes” to me. Then I was trying to walk across the floor to my mommy from my daddy in a little room. My mommy had her hands open and said, “Come on, Neil!” So I went over to her in stiff little steps and everyone was happy. The whole thing took about a week, and then I was on my way home. My brother Bob remembers it this way:

In November of 1951, Neil was six. It was prior to that, I believe in the spring, that he contracted polio. Salk vaccine had not been invented. It was a very serious situation. It was obvious that his life was on the line. I could feel it from both my mother and father, but I knew it anyhow. He was taken to Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto in our car, a 1950 or ’51 Monarch, with my father and Dr. Bill Earle, and Neil and me in the backseat. I think it was raining and dark. Neil was lying on a board on the floor. A lumbar puncture was done at the hospital and confirmed he had polio. The treatment was lengthy but it worked and he survived. When he came home he had to learn to walk again. I remember him trying to get from one part of the living room to another by hanging on to furniture to keep his balance. He was unsure of what had happened with his battle with polio. “I didn’t die, did I?” he said. It was a serious question. There were two children across the street, one of whom may have contracted polio also. I believe their family name was Goddard. I spent a lot of time as a child in Omemee being quarantined because of diseases that caught Neil. There was polio and diphtheria, measles, and others. His health has always been an issue. Later, there was epilepsy. We both had to deal with that. I do not know why Neil has had to contend with all these things. Later in his life, vertebrae in his lower back had to be removed as a result of polio. He wore a brace for a long time and even toured in that condition, including his famous concert recording at Massey Hall in 1971, which so many people hold close.

Walking was hard for a while, and my back hurt. We had a quarantine sign on our house that said P
OLIOMYELITIS
on it and warned people about not entering or something to that effect. No one wanted to be near me for a while. The neighborhood kids stayed away, and when they ran away up the street, I couldn’t catch them. I remember not being very good at sports, and my back hurt when I was skating and leaning over, so my position as a goalie was in jeopardy on the rink. I couldn’t skate that well, and the puck scared the hell out of me. I was not meant to play hockey—but my brother Bob was. He was great! He was so fast it was scary, and we went to his games for years, cheering him on. Then he gave up hockey and became a golfer full-time. Of course, it was summer when I got sick. I am just putting that together now.

With my brother, Bob, and our mom, Rassy Young, at Summit Golf & Country Club, Richmond Hill, Ontario, circa 1958.

We lived in a small Ontario town—O
MEMEE,
P
OPULATION
750, a sign at the outskirts of town said. That is where I remember growing up the most. We had a house on the main street, which was Highway 7, and my dad’s typewriter was upstairs in the attic. No one could go up there. Of course, I went up there to see why not. Daddy was always able to stop typing and talk to me. He called me Windy.

“What’s on your mind, Windy?” he would ask.

Then I would tell him about the turtles in my sandbox or something along those lines. He was a writer, and that’s what he did up there. That’s all I knew at that point. He went up there every day and sat down and wrote on his typewriter. It was a big old Underwood with ribbon, a truly amazing machine that my dad loved. My mother used to edit for him, cleaning up his spelling and grammar, I suppose.

Now, here I am with my computer, sixty years later, finally following in my dad’s footsteps. I am well prepared. It turns out he taught me everything I need to know, and it’s just now that I have gotten around to using my training. He said, “Just write every day, and you’ll be surprised what comes out.”

He was a good dad. We spent a lot of good time together. For a while after my parents broke up, my mom was always bad-mouthing him, but I always knew he loved me. He stayed in Omemee when my mom and I moved to Winnipeg—I wish I had seen him more in my formative years. (What the hell is a formative year compared to a normal year? That is a ridiculous phrase.
Formative years.
I am striking that from my repertoire.) I really loved him, and he loved me. Once, years later, when I needed his sage advice, I told him about a big problem I was having, and he just kept staring forward in his chair. I realized he couldn’t answer me. He was there and not there. That’s when I saw it for the first time. Dementia, Alzheimer’s, you can call it whatever you want. It’s just a name. He was gone. His eyes and hair and face were all turning gray at once. He never answered. Once he told me he couldn’t write anymore. He said he couldn’t remember what he was writing about. I said, “Try poetry, it’s short.” He said that wouldn’t work. Damn. That was at his farm.

The last time we were at the farm, we went for one of our many walks. We always took long walks in the forest together when I visited him, at the farm or anywhere. Once in Ireland, when he was living there, we went for a long walk on the heath, crossing fences and covering a lot of ground. But on that day when we were back on the farm walking, Daddy got lost. That really was the last walk we went on together. All good things must pass. Why? When he died in 2005, I cried like a baby at his funeral service. Completely lost it. Life.

With Elliot Roberts at the USA Film Festival, Dallas, 1973.

Chapter Five

D
avid Briggs used to say, “Life is a shit sandwich. Eat it or starve.” David was my producer. He worked on all of my good records, as he used to say. His records were the ones that invoked the memories of the artistry created by Roy Orbison. He always mentioned Roy to me at critical times, knowing I admired him and his unique voice and songs, his willingness to be different. David was hard to work with for many of us, but we all loved him because he was the best. “Be great or be gone” was another one of his favorite expressions. I could go on and on about each session I had with David, the drugs, the women, the booze, the rock and roll, the fights, the laughs—but not yet. I am sure this will all come out eventually as I meander through my experiences in this walk through life. He was also my best friend, then Larry Johnson, my filmmaking collaborator, was after David passed, and now Elliot Roberts is. Earlier in the scope of things, Elliot was my manager and the necessary strength in my dealings with others. Sometimes he was seen as a villain, sometimes as a savior.

Although unpopular at times with my musician friends, Elliot is consistently there for the art, there for the artist, protecting me from the sharks, while sometimes being accused of being a shark himself. Elliot is the friend I call every day at least five times, no matter what. We live through every deal together, every project. I am harder and harder for him to deal with as I get older and more certain of my opinions on business matters, but he still protects me from others and tries in vain to protect me from myself. I will do anything to get started on something. I will use my own money when I shouldn’t just because I hate waiting. That may be why I have spent so much money and built so many things. I just like to do it myself. I hate waiting for approval, because I have my own Approve-o-Meter. It works like a charm.

I put in the money to do it myself and do whatever I need to do to get the money, promise that I will deliver a record and get advances, anything I can do to get the cash to make something happen the way I envision it. So I get into a lot of trouble, though I also get a lot of things done. I did it with Shakey Pictures’
Human Highway
,
Greendale
, the Lincvolt movie in progress, the PureTone videos in progress,
Journey Through the Past
(my first film), the Lincvolt construction and development, the Lionel TrainMaster Command Control development, the Lionel RailSounds development, the Lionel LEGACY Control System development, and probably some others I have forgotten. None of these things would have happened if I hadn’t done them myself. No one believes in my ideas until I actually do them. I am never able to get backing for anything I want to do other than records because I am the only one with money who believes in them—and I don’t do them to make money. I am entrepreneurial. I do them because I can see it before it happens. That is the good, the bad, and the ugly, all rolled up into one big ball.

Mostly now, though, Elliot is able to save me from myself. As I said, he is a true friend, and also one of the funniest people on the planet. We have at least one disagreement a day. Whatever deal he gets, I ask him for more. And mostly he gets more. I have learned that taking less is not that good. It’s not the money; it’s the respect. And the money.

We have to have control. We fight for it tooth and nail. My father-in-law, T. A. Morton, Pegi’s dad, lived by the fifty-one percent rule. You need that much for control. I have tried to be true to that, but some ideas are just too big for me to carry by myself. I hate the fact that the PureTone idea is probably going to get out of my absolute control one day. I hate waiting for other people to okay what I want to do. Ideas are the driver. There is nothing worse than having a great idea and losing it because you can’t control the process. Working with me must be hell under those circumstances. I don’t feel bad about it, though. I know I work well with people who want to get things done.

—

I
dislike firing people. Since my first high school garage band, I have had to make those decisions and have those conversations. Although I always was the leader, there were times when I have been a wimp and had others do my dirty work, but I have learned that is not the way. No one can do that and feel good. Honesty is the only thing that works. It hurts to be honest, but the muse has no conscience. If you do it for the music, you do it for the music, and everything else is secondary. Although that has been hard for me to learn, it is the best and really the only way to live through a life dedicated to the muse.

Sometimes I am in a groove and everything is going great with the band—and then I wake up one morning and its over. I can’t say why, but it is definitely time for change. This change is not arbitrary or capricious. It is spawned from an underlying sense of what is needed to keep the creative process alive and thriving. Sometimes a smooth process heralds the approach of atrophy or death. So the change must be made, disruptive as it may be. Then the hard stuff starts. People have families, need money, have obligations, need security. Or everyone thought it was cool, and it was, but now it isn’t. The muse says, “If it isn’t totally great, then don’t do it. Change.”

“Be great or be gone.” Thanks, David Briggs.

“Quality whether you want it or not.” Thanks, Larry Johnson.

“How can I help you?” Thanks, Elliot.

These are my guys. Whether they are still breathing or not, they are in me, in my music, in everything I do. But there is a lot of damage. A lot of times, spontaneous change is seen as irresponsible, uncaring, and self-serving.

—

S
o what do I do now that I’m sixty-five? Retire? Nope. I can’t stop moving long enough to do that. I am going to go to Hawaii tomorrow and will keep writing this. I love it there and I kind of decompress. Pegi is going to Hawaii, too, in a few days, but I can’t wait that long to get over there. She has just made a great record and wants to finish up all the business around it before she joins me. But it won’t be long and we’ll be together again. I love that. She is my life partner. My confidante. I can tell her anything. After all these years together, I am still getting to know her. I would be an island without my ocean if we were not together in our hearts. I am the luckiest man on the planet to be able to go to Hawaii and rest for a while and wait for her to join me. Not that I really know how to rest like others do. Creative work and writing are relaxing to me.

Seeing my friends Marc and Greg and Lynne and Vicki over there will be fun, too. Greg and Vicki have the Napa Valley Wine Train, among many other things. Marc and Lynne have Salesforce.com, and Lynne has the Homes for the Holidays program. Pegi has the Bridge School and her career as a singer/songwriter. We all have our jobs. We are lucky as hell. Pegi and I have shared some really good times with these friends.

I wrote the song “Leia” for Marc and Lynne’s little girl. Her name is Leia. (See how creative I am?) We were just hanging in the house one night, the six of us and Leia, and I went over and started playing the piano so she would come over and play it, too. She is musical. She came right over and started some jazzy stuff while I was playing a simple percussion part. Next thing I knew, I was writing the song in my head. Lynne loved the chorus or bridge . . . I don’t know what it’s called. It goes:

Old people
watchin’ with their eyes
aglow

Mother gently smiling as she watches the
show

Leia, Leia, Leia

She is a little sweetheart.

Love is everywhere. Marc says, “There is a river of love.” I’m holdin’ on to that thought.

—

T
he Bridge School, started in 1986 by Pegi and two of her friends, Jim Forderer and Marilyn Buzolich, is dear to my heart. It is a school that teaches communication through technology to children who have severe speech and language challenges. Quite often these students have cerebral palsy like my son Ben.

Recently I was sitting at a Bridge School board retreat in San Mateo, California, and we were all talking about the future of the school
.
Later in the day the board broke for the evening, and I asked Bryan Bell, a board member, and Brian Morton, Pegi’s brother who is also on our board, if they would like to go to a local toy store, Talbot’s Toyland, with me.

I like to wind down at the toy store after Bridge meetings. It’s kind of a habit. I used to always go with Larry Johnson back in the day. He was a board member, too. He was our technology guy. Larry really gave a lot to the Bridge School. It is immeasurable what he did. He took kids to hockey games, using my set of season tickets for the San Jose Sharks while I was on the road, and he would take Ben Young with him all the time, too.

Anyway, Bryan Bell followed me over to Talbot’s to kill an hour before we had a Bridge School board dinner at a nearby restaurant. When we got there, I asked him to jump in my ’78 Eldorado in the parking lot and listen to PureTone.

Afterward, we went into Talbot’s Toyland, where a new Hudson steam locomotive was waiting for me. This was the first Chinese-built model of the venerable classic 5344 NYC Hudson first made by Lionel in the 1930s. This engine represented the pinnacle of Lionel’s expertise at that time and was the flagship product for the first hundred years of the company. Now the trains are manufactured in China, and Lionel and I had packed in every feature known to man, and had almost introduced the next revolutionary feature unknown to man, but not quite. (It wasn’t ready, so we left it out of this model.) I was pretty jacked about getting it and taking it back to the train layout after the Bridge retreat was over the next afternoon.

At Talbot’s, I met Keith from the train department. He broke out the Hudson from its brown made-in-China box with the familiar orange Lionel box inside, then we put a piece of track on the counter and hooked up the Lionel LEGACY Command Control System to the track. The remote was on the counter, and Bryan commented on how cool it looked. I got a good feeling from that. A lot of love went into its design. It is a pretty cool-looking retro modern remote, kind of old, with levers and sliders as well as a rotary throttle, but it has a soft key grid. We put the Hudson out on the track where I tested it with the remote to make sure everything was working correctly. I got it going, and we listened to the incredible LEGACY RailSounds system, the smoke puffing perfectly synched with the chuffs while the wheels were turning, the bell swinging back and forth while it rang, the steam coming out of the whistle every time I blew it with varying intensity from the sprung slider on the remote.

Bryan was intrigued. It was the first time he had ever seen the Lionel LEGACY system in action, and this was a top-of-the-line steam locomotive with every available feature. I eagerly, as always, demonstrated the loading effect technique by applying the train brake and listening to the heaviness of the chuffs increasing against that added load. Those little engines have so much technology in them . . .

I am very proud of the work I did with Lionel. I was instrumental in creating a series that celebrated Lionel’s history with a bunch of made-in-the-USA classics that we reissued with the new sound and command control systems I had developed and tested in California along with the first generation Lionel TrainMaster Command Control. I had paid for that development myself, and it was helping to save the company. These were the last Lionels built in the USA. All we had to sell was collectibility, and we did it really well in that instance. It was all we could do, and it kept us alive during an assault of brand-new Chinese-manufactured models from our competition.

Lionel made the move to China years ago to keep competitive with another American train maker who was kicking our ass with Chinese detail and low manufacturing costs. I became an owner of the company when that happened, because as the company was being sold, I was able to parlay my investment in technology development into ownership participation. It was sad. But we hung on with the Postwar Celebration Series and “celebrated” our way through our transition to Chinese manufacturing by making products in the USA. Although the competition eventually caught on, copied our sound, and developed a proprietary control system, we made it over to China just in time to avoid bankruptcy. So here we are today, still manufacturing in China. Another great American brand, no longer being made by Americans. What a story. It was either go to China or go out of business. That NYC Hudson engine was kicking ass in that little toy store.

The next thing model trains need to do is abandon modeling the sounds by user input and become real. The effort involved in pulling a load needs to be measured, and algorithms that used to be based on user input need to be newly based on the locomotive’s effort measured to pull the load or perform the task. Then there is little to do but drive the train down the track, allowing it to measure its own efforts and trigger sound and smoke effects and speed changes to reflect the laboring that is being measured. That is the next step, the future of modeling, or at least part of the future. Everything is there now in the Lionel system to make this happen on a basic level, except a good measurement of the effort being put out by the locomotive model to pull its load. Not just some gross measurement like measuring the electric motor effort, but an electromechanical high-resolution capturing of each nuance of the laboring. That will be nirvana, and I will be celebrating my ass off when that happens! And it almost happened on that 5344 Hudson at Talbot’s. Almost, but not quite.