Back to the Words zone
Back to HyperRust Home Page
I Build Something Up, I Tear It Right Down Neil Young at 50
by Nick Kent - Mojo, December 1995
(Scanned for HyperRust by Steve Kitchen.)
"In the field of opportunity / It's ploughing time again"
crooned Neil Young back in the late 70s.
Yet at no time have those eager sentiments seemed more
appropriate to the Canadian singer-songwriters mercurial career than in the
90s. Right now, in fact, in 1995 - the year he celebrates his 50th birthday
this November 12.
In the first two months alone he was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of
Fame, playing there backed by Crazy Horse, then recorded an entire album of
new material in four days backed by Pearl Jam in Seattle. He also re-signed
to the troubled Warners record division in a 'prestige' deal that, as a spin-off
from the divisive boardroom squabbling that has so publicly embarrassed
the company of late, ended up netting him (according to Vanity Fair) many
more millions of dollars than he might otherwise have merited on previous
record sales alone.
The new head of Warners who inked this extravagant deal was Danny Goldberg,
previously the manager of Kurt Cobain, the haunted young rock star who'd
quoted Young's line It's better to burn out than to fade away in his
suicide note back in April 1994. Young was apparently devastated when he
heard about it, and since has staunchly refused to address the subject
directly, even though Cobain's ghost hangs heavy over his last two albums,
Sleeps With Angels and Mirror Ball.
In early spring, he sat down in the studio with just an electric guitar and
thumbed a series of melodies and themes, some familiar, some brand-new, to
provide music for Dead Man, New York director Jim Jarmusch's black and white
cowboy drama starring Johnny Depp and Robert Mitchum. Young had never heard
of Jarmusch before, but, when approached via his management, fell in love
with the movie's rough cut.
Not only did he soundtrack the film, but he turned up with Depp and Jarmusch
at the Cannes Film Festival in May to promote it.
Next, he regrouped with Crazy Horse, cut a couple of new songs he'd written
for the group, and played lead guitar for the band's soon-to-be-released
album featuring songs written by the other members. He also found time to
cameo on new albums by Bobby Charles and his old Canadian guitar hero, Randy
Bachman.
By this autumn, Goldberg was no longer Warner Bros Records president, but
Neil Young, fresh from an ecstatically received tour of European festival
gigs, was very much part of the rostrum - indeed, now suddenly boasting his
very own record label, Vapor, and a list of upcoming releases including
the Dead Man soundtrack and a West Coast rock band called
The Stonecutters.
Most interesting of all, Young and his manager Elliot Roberts have signed one
of the few rock iconoclasts perhaps even more bloody-minded than he is himself
- Jonathan Richman. A new record is finished for imminent release.
As if all this was not enough, Young devotes his spare time to an alternative
vocation. Inspired by his quest to communicate as fully as possible with his
severely retarded and crippled 17-year old son Ben, Young invents devices,
including, this year alone, a specially modified electric wheelchair and
computer - "Ben is my assistant; he's my tester" - that can help the
handicapped to express themselves. He is also involved with, and partly
funds, the Bridge Foundation, a special school for handicapped children
run by his wife Pegi. "I don't really do much" he'll shrug; "I'm just a
figurehead, public relations kind of guy. My wife does all the work."
Most recently, Young made a take-over bid for Lionel Trains, a toy company
beloved by he and his son.
At six-foot-two with a weathered face and suspicious, penetrating eyes, Young
is an imposing figure at the best of times, and his renowned antipathy
towards journalists (his first ever review, back in Canada in 1964 described
his songs as "just a string of cliches", and he seems to have borne a grudge
ever since) can make him a nerve-wracking interview. But during the two
sessions (October 1992 and June 1995) from which this interview is culled,
when his frosty veneer cracks, you feel his warmth, sincerity, argumentative
idealism and generosity of spirit rise to the fore. He is, above all, a very,
very funny man with a dry sardonic wit bubbling just under the surface
whenever he speaks.
Young's 11-year-old Amber accompanies him to our 1995 interview in San
Francisco. The youngest of his three children (his eldest Zeke, now works for
a record company in Los Angeles), Amber is the only one not to suffer from
cerebral palsy. She has her mother Pegi's blonde hair, a glowing West Coast
complexion, and a pair of remarkable eyes the living spit of her father's.
During a short filmed interview with Young for MTV, she manages to get
herself filmed briefly standing next to her father, and then spends the rest
of the afternoon haranguing him to make sure she appears in the finished
report. He, of course, has other ideas. "Listen honey," he mutters, "Take
your old man's word for it, OK? You don't need the exposure."
Mojo:
On one of your most poignant and best-loved songs, Helpless, you sing
about a town in North Ontario which you keep returning to in your mind for
comfort. I've always presumed you're singing about the town in which you
were born?
Neil:
Well, it's not literally a specific town so much as a feeling. Actually,
it's a couple of towns. Omemee, Ontario, is one of them. It's where I first
went to school and spent my 'formative' years. Actually I was born in
Toronto... "I was born in Toronto..." God, that sounds like the first line
of a Bruce Springsteen song (laughs). But Toronto is only seven miles from
Omemee.
Mojo:
Was there a lot of music in the house when you were growing up?
Neil:
When I was growing up, I remember guys like Frankie Laine. See, around
the same time as Elvis, there was also Rawhide and all that cowboy stuff.
I loved that stuff - I even covered one of his songs on the Old Ways album.
The Wayward Wind. It was one of his biggest hits up in Canada. See, I used
to walk by a rail-road track on my way to school everyday. There was even a
real 'hobo's shack' there. The song and the image have always stayed with
me. When I hear it, I always think of being five or six walking past that
old shack and the rail-road tracks gleaming in the sun and on my way to
school everyday with my little transistor radio up to my ear.
Another song from that period that I loved, and also ended up doing a
version of with Crazy Horse and Jack Nitzsche on piano, that's going to end
up on Archives - it's a country waltz called It Might Have Been recorded by
Jo London. It was a big hit in Canada though it didn't mean anything in the
States. Great record. Real, real soulful rendition. Unfortunately on my
version, I screwed up almost all the words (laughs).
Mojo:
Were your parents musically oriented?
Neil:
Well, of the two of them, my father was definitely more musically-oriented.
Mom and Dad used to listen to the old big bands, Lena Horne, Della
Reese, Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller Orchestra, Cab Calloway. . .
Mojo:
When you were just beginning your teens, your father Scott Young, a well-known
Canadian journalist, left your mother to live with another woman. At
16 you decided to drop out and become a full-time rock musician. How
supportive were your parents?
Neil:
Well, as my Dad wasn't living with me at the time, he didn't have the
perspective on it that my mother had. If he had, he'd have seen how 'into
the music' I was, but at the same time he'd have been pushing me to stay on
at school, just like my mother was. And I definitely think he'd have
certainly been stronger at persuading me to stay on. But the classic thing
that happens in family break-ups...the perspective gets changed. The father
will always have a negative reaction to what the mother does particularly
if she's being 'soft' on the child. Without the true understanding of
what's going on, he'll just say that 'it's wrong'. It's a reaction created
out of frustration over not being able to really voice an opinion. So... to
say that my father was less into my music than my mother would be unfair.
Although my mother was more supportive.
Mojo:
You started playing at 14. What was your first guitar?
Neil:
My first was this little plastic Arthur Godfrey ukulele, then I seem to
remember a baritone 'uke', then I had a banjo. So I had all these different-sounding
instruments which I played the same way. I played electric lead
guitar first. Then I started rocking out in a community-club teenage band.
First we were called The Esquires. Then we changed it to The Stardusters.
And after that we settled on being called The Squires. Kinda like Spinal
Tap's early days!
Mojo:
Legend has it that Don't Cry No Tears from Zuma is the first
song you ever wrote...
Neil:
No, that was only one of the first 30 or 40 songs I wrote! Oh yeah,
there were a lot of them from back then. Unfortunately, we only have
'glimmers' of most of them but we do have actual recordings of five of them
which you're going to hear when the Archives finally appear. I really
love these tracks, by the way. I'm not embarrassed by them or anything
because I'm so young. I mean, some of them I wanted to hear over and over
again, whereas others were clearly not so successful. I think it's real
interesting when you hear the 'bad' ones with the good ones....
Mojo:
After The Squires, you joined a band called The Mynah Birds in '65 and
apparently even recorded an album with them that never came out. . .
Neil:
Yeah, there are tapes of me and The Mynah Birds but I've not been able
to get hold of them. I only sang a little bit in that group... Rick James
and Bruce Palmer were in the group also. Right after I left The Mynah Birds
I took up as a solo folk singer. Come to think of it, I did a bit of that
before The Mynah Birds also. After I arrived in Toronto I tried to keep my
band going and then tried to work with several others. But it just never
worked out for me there. I could never get anything going in Toronto, never
even got one gig with a band. I just couldn't break into that scene. So I
moved instead towards acoustic music and immediately became very
introspective and musically-inward. That's the beginning of that whole side
of my music.
Mojo:
From the outside, it looked like Canada in the early '60s had a very
creative scene going for it, with people like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell,
Gordon Lightfoot, Ronnie Hawkins and The Band. But from the inside, was
there really a 'scene' at all and were you a part of it?
Neil:
Not really, no. They were all way above me at that time. The Hawks were
the best band in Toronto which is the biggest city in Canada, musically.
And I'd just come from a place called Thunder Bay which is between Winnipeg
and Toronto. We'd done really well there but couldn't get a gig to save our
lives in Toronto. All we ever did was practise. So I ended up cruising
around by myself on acoustic guitar, playing my songs at coffee houses for
a while, just showing up at these places. It was quite an experience! I
remember it now as. . .Wow, this is really out-on-the-edge! Walking around
in the middle of the night in the snow, wondering where to go next!
Mojo:
Robbie Robertson once said that the power of the songs he wrote for The
Band about America came from the fact that he had the perspective of a
foreigner arriving in the promised land. Did you feel that way when, at the
very beginning of 1966, you left Toronto and drove to Los Angeles in an
undertaker's hearse. Is the drive a good memory?
Neil:
It's pretty good, yeah, but I got burnt out somewhere around Albuquerque.
I just collapsed basically. We'd met a bunch of hippies and ended up
crashing in their 'pad'. I slept for a couple of days, then went to the
hospital for exhaustion. They told me to eat, sleep and rest - the usual.
In retrospect, I'm really not sure what it was that kept me up for so long.
I'm not sure if any chemicals were involved.
Mojo:
You drove down with Bruce Palmer, looking for Stephen Stills and Richie
Furay, whom you'd met playing in a folk revue in New York City. Legend has
it you bumped into each other in a traffic jam...
Neil:
Yeah, that's true. Well, it took us about 10 days to find them but we
knew Stephen and Richie were down there. I was looking to hook up with
Stephen in particular. When we met them in February '66 The Buffalo
Springfield began the same day.
Mojo:
It's been said that at that time, Stills was a folkie who was just
beginning to rock. Meanwhile, you were a rocker who was starting to get
interested in folk-music. . .
Neil:
Yeah, that's pretty accurate but I'd been into Dylan since '63 when I
heard his very first album; that left a big impression on me. And later,
The Byrds were great. What they did was deeply 'cool'. They really
impressed me.
Mojo:
What made you want to work with Stills?
Neil:
His voice. He was a really great singer. He had the beginnings of
being an electric guitar player too. Somehow we could play lead guitar
parts simultaneously and not get in each other's way. And that's real rare.
It gave the sound a real edge. And it has absolutely nothing to do with
what he does by himself and what I do by myself.
Mojo:
Apparently, just as The Buffalo Springfield was starting to get
successful, your epilepsy began...
Neil:
Well, I had been that way before but yeah, I started to have big
seizures when the Springfield started to happen.
Mojo:
You actually had a fit on-stage while playing. Can you remember what
triggered it?
Neil:
(After long pause) I'm not sure. Now when it happens, I can control it.
I don't know whether I just couldn't control it or whether there just
weren't too many new things happening to me. Whatever it was, I'd
just get this feeling inside of me and I'd just go. . ! Now, when I get
that feeling, I'll lay back or turn off everything. Close off the input
for a while. It's a little hard to do that when you're on-stage in front
of a lot of people. Although I still do it I haven't had any 'events' for
almost 20 years. None of any real consequence anyway. But I have had...
y'know, 'tremors'. I sense it's still there.
Mojo:
Buffalo Springfield played the fabled Monterey Pop festival in 1967.
You didn't.
Neil:
No, I was out of the group at that time. Actually, the reason I
initially left the group was because I didn't want to do the Johnny Carson
Tonight Show. I thought it was belittling what The Buffalo Springfield was
doing. That audience wouldn't have understood us. We'd have been just a
fuckin' curiosity to them.
Mojo:
At that time you were linking up creatively with arranger Jack Nitzsche,
as well as a group called The Rockets who'd become Crazy Horse.
Were you actively looking for other people to work with at this time?
Neil:
Yeah... Well, I just liked these people. I wasn't looking, I just found
'em. All of a sudden, there are these other people and I'd sorta go back
and forth between them and the Springfield.
Jack taught me a lot: I mean, he'd already worked as an arranger for
Spector and had played piano on recording sessions with The Rolling Stones.
I met him in a club in Hollywood right when the Springfield first started.
We were introduced by Greene and Stone who were our managers then. We
just liked each other and always had a great time together. I love
listening to all his ideas. Plus I liked 'hanging out' with him because he
always got all the new records sent to him every week and he'd sit and
listen to them, forming his opinions... He worked as an independent
arranger back then. He was a very 'sought-after' guy.
When I quit the Springfield, I was living at Jack's house with him,
his wife Gracia and his son, 'Little' Jack. 45s would be coming in every
week and I remember the day we got the first Jimi Hendrix Experience
single - this was way before the first album had been released - and all
of us were just awe-struck at how 'raw' the guy sounded. That first album
of mine was basically just Jack and me.
Mojo:
Six months after your first album comes Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
in which you introduce the world to Crazy Horse - and also the sound of you
playing guitar in D modal tuning. It gives your songs a very singular power
and tone best represented on Cinnamon Girl, for example. Did you actually
discover that sound and tuning from playing with Crazy Horse?
Neil:
Actually, no. Where it comes from originally is...Stills and I on
Bluebird. We discovered this D modal tuning at around the same time in '66,
I think... We'd play in that tuning together a lot. This was when 'ragas'
were happening and D modal made it possible to have that 'droning' sound
going on all the time, that's where it started. Only I took it to the next
level which is how The Loner and Cinnamon Girl happened. You make a
traditional chord shape and any finger that doesn't work, you just lift it
up and let the string just ring. I've used that tuning throughout my career
right up to today. You can hear it on everything from Fuckin' Up on Ragged
Glory to War Of Man and One Of These Days on Harvest
Moon. Lots of songs.
Mojo:
You recorded another album with Crazy Horse in '69 straight after
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, that also had Jack Nitzsche on piano. It
was apparently a sort of country-rock affair and most of the tracks were
recorded live. Then you scrapped it all of a sudden and put out Goldrush
instead. Why?
Neil:
Well, it wasn't really scrapped (pauses). It exists (longer pause). See,
things were moving very quickly at that time so it's hard to say. . .exactly
why I went for Goldrush instead of that project. I just remember thinking
that Goldrush was the next logical step after Everybody. Just after I'd
begun playing with CSNY, I went out on the road and did some really funky things
that indicated that our next album would be in that particular vein. We
recorded Wondering, Dance Dance Dance, It Might Have Been, Winterlong and
several others. They'll appear on the Archives, I've had them transferred
to digital.
Mojo:
Let's move on to After The Goldrush, then. Many of the songs were inspired
by a film screenplay written by the actor Dean Stockwell. What was the film
actually about?
Neil:
It was all about the day of the great earthquake in Topanga Canyon when a
great wave of water flooded the place. It was a pretty 'off-the-wall' concept,
they tried to get some money from Universal Pictures. But that fell through
because it was too much of an art project. I think, had it been made it would
stand as a contemporary to Easy Rider and it would have had a similar effect.
The script itself was full of imagery, 'change' . . . It was very unique
actually. I really wish that movie had been made, because it could have really
defined an important moment in the culture.
Mojo:
With After The Gold Rush you became incredibly successful. At the same
time, you had this image of someone very confused, isolated, emotionally fragile and
introspective. Was that a fair evaluation of your condition?
Neil:
No, not really, I didn't see myself like that, I always thought there was a
funny side to my music. But see, my sense of humour hadn't really been
appreciated at that point in my career. Shit, it hadn't even been noticed
(laughs). I mean, Last Trip To Tulsa. . .that's my idea of a really
funny song and that's just one of 'em.
Mojo:
Were you concerned about this image?
Neil:
What image? Listen, there was nothing to be concerned about. I really just
wanted to make music... My only concern was to make the fuckin' records sound
right. When I finally got the studio together and played, I think, Running Dry
[on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere], that was my first live vocal.
As was almost the whole of Goldrush after it. . .
Things like I Believe In You - that's when I started recording live.
Mojo:
Yes, but an image is created when you stand in front of an audience and
perform and they treat you like a counter-culture icon...
Neil:
Well, it's like a mirror. And you can't get away from a mirror if you stand
in front of it all the time, right. But if you step away from it, you don't
notice it any more. And that's what the stage is like for me. See, an image
becomes meaningless in as much as it's always temporary.
Mojo:
After the overwhelming success of Harvest, your next new music was
Time Fades Away, an abrasive-sounding live album from a 1973 stadium
tour that you'd apparently rather forget. Over 20 years later, the memory of that tour
and the subsequent record still seems too uncomfortable for you...
Neil:
Well, we didn't put any of Time Fades Away on Decade, if
that's what you mean. See, Decade's good for that reason. It makes a
statement about my work from my point of view. Things were added in abundance and
omitted. There's different angles in there. It's not like an even editorial.
Mojo:
But Don't Be Denied for example is one of your best songs. It's also your
most openly autobiographical...
Neil:
Yeah, certainly. It's one of them, anyway. The other one's called Hitch-Hiker.
It's a contemporary of Don't Be Denied from 1975 and it was all about all the
different drugs that I took. I started at the beginning and ran right through my
years of drug usage up to that time, drawing parallels with other stuff. It's a
very interesting song (laughs). Eventually I mutated it partly into a song
called Like An Inca [on Trans]. Only the chorus lived, though
all the verses were gone. Hitch-Hiker is now probably bootlegged 'cos I
played it six or seven times on some acoustic tour I did in the '90s.
Mojo:
Then in 1973 you went out to record Tonight's The Night - meditation on
life, hard drugs and death that's gone on to stand as one of your greatest, if bleakest
albums to date. I've always been fascinated by the rumour that you wrote and
tried to produce a Broadway play based on the record...
Neil:
Yeah, we did. The plot was about a roadie who made it and then OD'd on drugs.
From Roadie To Riches was the name of it (laughs).
For Broadway in 1974 it was a little ahead of its time, as you can imagine.
Mojo:
Straight after recording the album, you took it on the road for a series of
extremely controversial gigs...
Neil:
Oh, that was a fabulous tour, one of my best. Over in England, The Rainbow...
Bristol was the best ever... the Festival Hall... those were magical gigs. I did
an encore at the latter with nobody there but Ahmet Ertegun who owns Atlantic
Records. I said, "Ahmet, I played so good tonight I think I deserve my own
private encore." So we went out and played Tonight's The Night for the
fourth time that evening (bursts out laughing) with no-one left in the theatre.
Mojo:
Actually, you didn't release Tonight's The Night 'til 1975. Instead,
you put out On The Beach, a record you are still cagey about releasing
on CD. Are a lot of your previous albums too personal to listen to comfortably now?
Neil:
I'd say so, yeah. There are several records like On The Beach and
Time Fades Away. See, that's something you have to understand: I
don't make a habit of listening to my old stuff. Ever. I listened to Weld
once since I've finished it. Freedom I've heard once. I spend so much
time making them that when it's over, I just never want to listen to 'em again. I
just send 'em out into the world like an evil father. "Okay, get out of here now.
Be sure to write if you find a home!" (laughs)
Mojo:
At exactly the same moment On The Beach was released, you chose to
relocate with CSN for a financially lucrative but musically unbalanced tour
in '74.
Neil:
Well, 1974 was the swan-song of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for me.
Mojo:
On that tour, you performed a number of excellent songs you've still
never released. I'm thinking of titles like Traces, Love-Art Blues and
Pushed It Over The End. What happened to those songs?
Neil:
Well they'll probably be out on the anthology too. Listen, if they'd had
new songs with the authority that their old songs had, we could've knocked
off four and five of mine so that just the best two surfaced... That would
have truly been CSNY. But it wasn't to be, so the record never came out.
Mojo:
Let's move on to Zuma. After that dark stretch, it sounded like you'd
suddenly been liberated. The most renowned composition on Zuma has to be
Cortez The Killer. I've always been intrigued about your personal opinion of
the great explorer. Where did you get your information from?
Neil:
It was a combination of imagination and knowledge. What Cortez represented
to me is the explorer with two sides, one benevolent, the other utterly
ruthless I mean, look at Columbus! Everyone now knows he was less than great
and he wasn't even there first (laughs). It always makes me question all
these other so-called 'icons' (smiles).
Mojo:
Another musical venture you embarked upon in the mid-'70s was a short tour
of West Coast bars with a group called The Ducks...
Neil:
Oh, The Ducks was basically me having fun and taking a musical vacation.
It was a great band and a friend of mine managed them, so I got into them
because it presented me with a perfect vehicle for playing in a band without
being the leader or having to sing too many songs. I wrote a few songs with
them but I was really just the lead guitarist.
Mojo:
After that, you returned to the studio to make Comes A Time, your most
mellow, middle of the road recording since Harvest...
Neil:
Well, I was going one way and then needed to move in entirely the opposite
direction just for some kind of 'release'. My career is built around a pattern
that just keeps repeating itself over and over again. There's nothing surprising
about it at all. My changes are as easy to predict as the sun coming up and down.
Mojo:
It's become something of a cliche to say that Rust Never Sleeps, the
raucous follow-up to Comes A Time, was very influenced by the UK
punk-rock scene at the time...
Neil:
No, I wasn't really influenced by that scene. Most of the songs on that album
had been written well before the Sex Pistols were ever heard of. The
Thrasher was pretty much me writing about my experiences with Crosby, Stills
& Nash in the mid-'70s. Do you know Lynyrd Skynyrd almost ended up
recording Powderfinger before my version came out? We sent them an early
demo of it because they wanted to do one of my songs.
Mojo:
Surprising, that. After all, Lynyrd Skynyrd put you down by name on Sweet
Home Alabama, their first hit single....
Neil:
Oh, they didn't really put me down! But then again, maybe they did! (laughs)
But not in a way that matters. Shit, I think Sweet Home Alabama is a great song.
I've actually performed it live a couple of times myself.
Mojo:
After the major critical and sales success of Rust Never Sleeps, you embark on
yet another long unsettling journey away from the mainstream. A journey that begins
with Hawks And Doves.
Neil:
Well, it's what you might call a transitional album for me. But that's not to
say there aren't some really interesting things on there. Comin' Apart At Every
Nail is good and I really like Union Man. It's no big thing: just a funky
little record that represents where I was at and what I was doing at that time.
Mojo:
Re-ac-tor reunited you with Crazy Horse again. But the music on
that record sounded so wilfully primitive and brutal.
Neil:
We didn't spend as much time recording Re-ac-tor as we should've. The
life of both that record and the one after it - Trans - were sucked up
by the regime we'd committed ourselves to. See, we were involved in this programme
with my young son Ben for 18 months which consumed between 15 and 18 hours of every
day we had. It was just all-encompassing and it had a direct effect on the music of
Re-ac-tor and Trans. You see, my son is severely handicapped,
and at that time was simply trying to find a way to talk, to communicate with other
people. That's what Trans is all about. And that's why, on that record,
you know I'm saying something but you can't understand what it is. Well, that's the
exact same feeling I was getting from my son.
Mojo:
You seem to feel Trans is particularly underrated?
Neil:
Underrated! Well, let's say I don't underrate Trans. I really like it,
and think if anything is wrong, then it's down to the mixing. We had a lot of technical
problems on that record, but the content of the record is great.
Mojo:
The release of Trans began your ill-starred liaison with Geffen Records.
Actually, hadn't you already offered them an album entitled Island In The Sun
which they refused?
Neil:
Yeah, I offered that to Geffen just before Trans. It was a tropical
thing all about sailing, ancient civilisations, islands and water. Actually two or three
songs ended up on Trans.
Mojo:
Then came Everybody's Rockin', a curious and underwhelming collection
of '50s rock pastiches and easily your most mystifying record to date. You lost a lot of
your audience with that record, I reckon...
Neil:
Well that was as good as Tonight's The Night as far as I'm concerned. The
character was strong, the story was great but unfortunately, the story never got
to appear on the album. Before I got a chance to finish it - I got stopped from
recording. Geffen cancelled a couple of sessions where I was going to do two
songs - Get Gone and Don't Take Your Love Away From Me - that would've
given a lot more depth to The Shocking Pinks. But if you didn't see the shows
you wouldn't be able to get into it fully. Of course, it wasn't anywhere near as
intense as Tonight's The Night. There was very little depth to the
material obviously. They were all 'surface' songs. But see, there was a time when
music was like that, when all pop stars were like that. (Ardently) And it was
good music, really good music.
See, when I made albums like Everybody's Rockin' and everyone takes the
shit out of 'em...l knew they could do that. What am I? Stupid? Did people really think
I put that out thinking it was the greatest fuckin' thing I'd ever recorded? Obviously
I'm aware it's not. Plus it was a way of further destroying what I'd already set
up. Without doing that, I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing now. If I build
something up, I have to systematically tear it right down before people decide,
"Oh that's how we can define him."
Mojo:
Peter Buck once told me that you and R.E.M. had been planning to record an
album together in the mid-'80s (possibly using material that ended up on Landing On
Water), but you couldn't enter a studio with them without being sued by
Geffen....
Neil:
There was certainly something like that going on back then. Actually it's
funny: R.E.M. were going to go with Geffen, then they heard I was being
sued and everything, they just dropped all contact with Geffen and signed with
Warner Bros instead. Geffen actually lost R.E.M. simply for suing
me over Everybody's Rockin'!
Mojo:
At the end of your problems with Geffen, you got back together with Crosby,
Stills & Nash to make American Dream. The experience was not a happy
one. Yet you still talk about possibly reuniting with them in some form.
Neil:
Damn, you'd have thought our performance on Live Aid would have been enough
to finish off any wave of nostalgia, wouldn't you? (laughs) Seriously though, I
think CSNY reminds people of a certain feeling. Our audience want to see it alive
again because somehow it verifies the feeling that they're alive too. CSNY - when
it works - can make music that is very committed, heartfelt and sincere. It's not easy to
get it out and it's not easy to overcome some of the bullshit around it. American
Dream was an attempt that failed to reach anything like its true potential.
But that's no reason for me to not try it again sometime.
Mojo:
After that, you suddenly seemed to get back to a state of real creative focus.
Firstly with Eldorado, then Freedom shortly followed by
Ragged Glory. What changed for you?
Neil:
I really can't say. Just 'life' - I've been doing this a long time. When the
'80s started, I'd been making music for 15 years professionally. Now the '80s are
usually the period that people tell me they lost me or I lost them. What happened was that
I just wasn't being accessible. See, as far as I'm concerned, those records (Trans,
Everybody's Rockin', Old Ways) are as good as any record I've ever made.
Maybe my '80s music should just be looked at as one record. Maybe it would be easier
for people to understand.
Mojo:
You regrouped with Crazy Horse for Ragged Glory in 1990 with
spectacular results - Yet after the Rusted-Out Garage Tour in '86 - '87, you
publicly vowed never to work with them again...
Neil:
Well, that was a bad period for us. We weren't playing well then. Overall the material
wasn't up to much. I made a film about that tour, the legendary Muddy Track!
(laughs) I still want the films I directed to come out in a special six-pack:
Human Highway, Rust Never Sleeps, Journey Through The Past ..... Muddy Track
is really my favourite of all of them, though. It's dark as hell. God, it's a heavy one!
(laughs) But it's funky.
Mojo:
On Ragged Glory I notice a real jazz feel to the way you improvise now.
In fact, the way you operate puts me in mind of Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Neil:
Miles and Coltrane yeah, they're two of my favourites. My guitar improvisations with
Crazy Horse are very, very Coltrane-influenced. I'm particularly taken by work
like Equinox and My Favourite Things. Miles I love just
because of his overall attitude towards the concept of "creation", which is one of
constant change. There's no reason to stay there once you've done it. You could stay
for the rest of your life and it would become like a regular job.
Mojo:
One person we haven't mentioned who has been an almost constant musical cohort of yours
is your producer David Briggs, whom you've been working with for 25 years. Could
you define your working relationship with him?
Neil:
I'll show you how we work, OK. He told me what was wrong with my performance at
Bob-Aid. Everyone else was telling me how great it was. He didn't belabour
the fact that it was great. His opinion was: "Yeah, it was great, OK. It was great
BUT forget about that because what was wrong was... this, this and this. You sang it
in the wrong key, your voice was too low, the drums weren't tight enough 'til half-way
through... No-one'll probably notice but... It's not usable." (Laughs) And I always
listen to what he has to say and take note of it.
Mojo:
It was great to hear the return of Jack Nitzsche in your music on
Harvest Moon...
Neil:
Yeah, on Such A Woman, that's our sound (smiles). Expecting To Fly has that
sound too. That's what that track is supposed to relate to.
Mojo:
Didn't you have a serious falling-out sometime in the '70s though?
Neil:
Yeah, we did. We get on great now but, at a certain point, Jack made the call on me that
I had copped/sold out. Maybe it was something I did in the early '70s, during
Harvest or Goldrush - I don't know when exactly it happened,
but somewhere along the line it happened. It was his opinion that I wasn't living up to
my potential even at that early stage. He was one of the guys who could see how fucked up
I was compared to what I could really do. He was one of my earliest critics. He was a
trailblazer in that respect.
Mojo:
Before your current union with Pearl Jam, there was apparently serious
talk about you recording with Sonic Youth, possibly for the album that
became Sleeps With Angels.
Neil:
With Sonic Youth? Well, that sounds like it came from a news story that
was in fact wrong. Hell, if they wanted to play, I'd be there. It sounds
like too much fun to pass by. Sonic Youth are great. Same with R.E.M.:
I'd love to work with those guys if the right conditions prevailed.
Mojo:
Sleeps With Angels seems deeply haunted by the spectre of Kurt Cobain
and his sad end...
Neil:
Sleeps With Angels has a lot of overtones to it, from different situations
that were described in it. A lot of sad scenes (pause), I've never really
spoken about why I made that album. I don't want to start now.
Mojo:
Has it anything to do with the similarity of Kurt Cobain's death to
Crazy Horse Danny Whitten's death in 1972? They both looked so much alike...
Neil:
I just don't want to talk about that. That's my decision. I've made a
choice not to talk about it and I'm sticking to it.
Mojo:
Let's not discuss Cobain's death then. But what about his life? Did his
music inspire you?
Neil:
He really, really inspired me. He was so great. Wonderful. One of the best,
but more than that. Kurt was one of the absolute best of all time for me.
Mojo:
Scenery on Mirror Ball seems equally haunted by Cobain's doomed
image. It's like there's OJ Simpson on one side and Kurt Cobain on the other: two very
different victims of celebrity madness?
Neil:
Well, the problems with celebrity and rock'n'roll start with the fact that
nowadays it gets way too big too fast. Back in the '50s and '60s, rock'n'roll
was 'big' but it was only 'big' to people who cared about it. Now it's big to
people who don't care about it. So they can't begin to understand it. They just
make ill-informed judgements on performers without first comprehending why or
what it was that made the person famous in the first place.
In the '60s there was a bond between the artists and the audience. It's harder
to see now because so much these days is simply down to image projection. But
today's pessimistic bands have a vision and an attitude that's unified their
generation just like the 'peace and love' groups helped unify the '60s
generation.
Mojo:
This brings us neatly to the subject of Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder. I can't
help wondering whether you truly sympathise with Vedder when he moans on and on
about the price of fame. Doesn't it all come with the job?
Neil:
The way most people seem to regard Eddie - it's a little out of perspective.
No matter what he says, it all gets taken down and quoted back at him. Who else
do you know who's his age and going through the things he's going through
because he just wants to make music for a living and travel around a bit? Hopefully
though, he'll get used to it. People will get used to him being around and they'll leave
him alone a little more.
Mojo:
Surely you're no stranger to obsessive fans yourself. Have you had your share
of stalkers and lunatics running all over your property?
Neil:
Oh, yeah, I've had all kinds of people trying to get to me over the years. I've
had some real nutcases looking for answers that I couldn't begin to give 'em.
There's only one way to deal with them: ignore them and escape them as quickly as
possible. Because the more you dwell on those people and their problems, the worse it
gets for you. You just end up being the dickhead all your worst critics think you are
anyway. (Laughs) You need to surround yourself with regular people - people who
can treat you like a human being. If you don't have any of those in your life, you're
finished.
But by the same token, if you have a good situation and can make music whenever
you want with a whole bunch of people who are cool and you have nothing else to do,
then it's ultimately going to get shallow. Because there's not enough challenge going
on in your life. That's why I went out of town over to Seattle to make this record.
Recording Mirror Ball was like audio verite, just a snapshot of
what's happening. Sometimes I didn't know who was playing. I was just conscious of
this big smouldering mass of sound.
The whole record was recorded in four days and all the songs, barring Song X and
Act Of Love, were written in that four day stretch. I played Act Of Love
with Crazy Horse in January at the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame. Then, the
following night, I played it with Pearl Jam at a Pro-Choice benefit concert and
the version was so powerful I decided there and then to record it with them as soon as
possible. On a purely musical level, this is the first time I've been in a band with
three potential lead guitarists since The Buffalo Springfield. Plus there's
Jack Irons, their drummer, who was just unbelievable. He just played his ass off on
every take at every session. I can't say enough good things about him.
I didn't even think about recording a whole album when we went in to cut Act of
Love. I had two days with Pearl Jam initially. Two days and just two songs
- that wasn't enough for me so I had five written by the time I went in. Recorded five of
them, left one out. Then I came back for another two-day session with two more new songs.
Plus I re-recorded the fifth one from the first session again. Then the day after that,
I wrote another two new songs. Throw Your Weapons Down - maybe. Maybe not, tho.
There's a large part of making this new album that's pretty foggy... (laughs)
Mojo:
The song Act Of Love is about the issue of Abortion. It throws together images
like Rockin' In The Free World did....
Neil:
Yeah, there's no bias so you have to make up your own mind, finally. See,
personally, I'm pro-choice. But the song isn't! This isn't an easy subject to confront
head-on. People who say that human beings shouldn't have the right to dismiss a human
life - they have a point. You can't dismiss that point. But then there's the reality.
There's idealism and reality, the two have got to come together yet there are always
major problems when they do. Maybe that's the crux of what I'm trying to say in this
new album. It's also a commentary of the differences between my peace and love '60s
generation and the more cynical '90s generation. Like this term 'love'. We hear
the word so much it gets devalued and you need to - if not redefine it - then at least
re-examine what it really stands for. We all need to get back inside ourselves and take
another look. You can't just keep coasting along on the previous analysis because it
isn't working anymore.
Mojo:
I'm The Ocean strikes me as one of the most blatantly autobiographical songs
of your career. The line "people my age don't do the things I do/They go somewhere
whilst I run away with you." The 'you' is your audience, the people who listen
to your music. . .
Neil:
(Pause) I think so. Definitely. I'm referring to the people who listen to music -
they don't have to be there with me but they're still out there listening. We're
together because we're both escaping through the music. It's like that line "I'm a drug
that makes you dream." That's me trying to define the power of music.
Mojo:
Now you're 50, how do you physically manage to do what you do?
Neil:
I just work out a lot. Make sure I stay in good shape. If you'll notice, I'm not
exactly that skinny-looking guy from the '60s and '70s any more. I weigh over 40
pounds more than I used to back then. And none of it is fat - it's all muscle.
Mojo:
After the Ragged Glory Tour, you started suffering from tinnitus and had to
stop playing electric rock music for a couple of years. How's your hearing now you're
confronting the heavy volume of Pearl Jam?
Neil:
I made Harvest Moon because I didn't want to hear any loud sounds. I still
have a little bit of tinnitus but fortunately now I'm not as sensitive to loud sounds
as I was for a year after the mixing of Weld. My hearing's not perfect but
it's OK. I'm not sure what's going on but the point is I can still hear well enough to
get off on what I'm doing. There's still a lot of detail I can pick up. I'm a fanatic
for hearing detail and that's not been lost, tho' I've got these other sounds I have to
deal with too.
Mojo:
Joni Mitchell recently admitted she suffers from a wasting disease known as
post-polio syndrome...
Neil:
I've had that too. It affected me particularly in the mid-'80s, when I
couldn't even pick up my guitar. My body was starting to fall apart on me. That's when I
started 'working out'. It's proven to be my salvation too. Lifting weights and
exercising have completely changed everything for me, with regard to my health.
Mojo:
Let's return to the forthcoming Archives project. How has it been sifting
through your past so meticulously?
Neil:
In a lot of ways, it's been a real inspiration to me. It re-orientates me to
the things I've done. In certain ways, it's been a lot of fun though I wouldn't want to
spend a lifetime doing it. Plus it's woken me up to certain things about my talent.
Mojo:
Such as?
Neil:
Well, it's weird. The things I thought weren't very good are really good. And
things I thought were really good - where I thought I was really at the top of things -
aren't so good. They sound more shallow somehow. Maybe when you think you're being real
good, that's when you're not. At least that's what doing this project has got me thinking.
Mojo:
Is this the right time for that kind of thing?
Neil:
Well, there is no right time for this kind of undertaking, I believe. It was
just something that had to be done. I need to get up to date. I want to catch up to
'now'. I'm doing the Archives so my work will be organised so that people
will know what I thought. They won't have to guess. Everything'll be in there. There'll
be grades and chronological orders. In the end I want to leave a record of what I've
done that's definitive and organised. Not because I want it out of the way. I want to
get up-to-date. I've been 30 years behind myself.
Mojo:
Finally, how easy is it being as prolific a songwriter as Neil Young?
Neil:
Oh, it's pretty easy (laughs). Just as long as I don't try.
Back to the Words zone
Back to HyperRust Home Page
|