Neil Young

Never Gets Old

They were dancing across the water—just like Cortez’s ships in that song. But they stood on fiberglass boards and rode rainbow-striped sails through the glistening patches of sunlight on the water’s surface. We sat in a huge, dusty pick-up truck watching them. Neil Young, Elvis, and me.

         I had met Neil at the San Francisco airport, catching him on the rebound from a day of business meetings in L.A. Elvis, Neil’s blue-tint hound dog, waited in the cab of the truck.

         “You left the dog in the truck the whole day?” I asked as I witnessed a sloppy mouthed owner-pet reunion.

         “He doesn’t mind. He’s a hound dog. He likes to hang out and watch the world go by.”

         “Smart,” I said, meaning the dog.

         “We’ve been going to dog school, me and Elvis,” said Neil, slamming the truck’s door shut. “I’ve gone three or four days. He’s gone three weeks. That’s how much smarter I am than him.”

         The truck spurted out of the parking lot while Neil got the L.A. out of his system. His long time friend and current owner of his contract, David Geffen, had, in effect, just fired Neil from the label for not being commercial enough. Lately, Neil had been experimenting with electronica (re-act-or and Trans), country (Old Ways), rockabilly (Everybody’s Rockin’), R&B (This Note’s For You), everything but disco. Why would this surprise his record company? Hasn’t Neil’s unpredictability always been part of his appeal? The same guitar that could weep through a ballad like “Cinnamon Girl,” also blazed on “Hey Hey My My (Into The Black).” But no one is immune from the Entertainment-Industrial Complex, even if you’re Neil Frigging Young who has given, under his own name, with Crazy Horse, or with Buffalo Springfield, classic albums such as Déjà Vu, After The Gold Rush, Harvest, Comes A Time, and Rust Never Sleeps.

         “It really doesn’t matter,” said Neil, relieved to get out of city traffic and open up the engine on the highway, heading north. “I’m concerned about what’s going on today and tomorrow, more than yesterday. I’ve been trying to unlock old habits and just accept change into my life—with varying degrees of success.”

         Elvis, in the back seat, leaned his ample snout between Neil and me. Neil stroked the dog’s nose as he drove, calming both of them. “You find yourself getting bored with yourself, it’s time to change. Not just music. It can be anything. Gotta keep life fresh, gotta embrace the change, embrace the strange.”

         He took a few swigs of a fruit-protein juice, part of a seven-day fast, a periodic cleanup. “It alters my whole state when I go on the juice diet. It cleans me when I don’t feel quite right inside. Not just my body, but my mind, too. I hear the music different. I’m not saying it makes you young again, but when you get older, you start to numb out a bit, and it’s easy to kind of accept that and get into really liking that numb feeling. And it’s not always just about getting old. Plenty of young people want to be numb, too. I used to smoke so much grass that I didn’t know what was happening and I liked that. I liked being numb because it hurt too much when I felt things. I don’t want to do that any more. Ever. I’d rather be hurting and feeling.”

         We drove into a man-made lake area surrounded by highways and massive electric towers. The wind surfers sailed quietly on the water as we talked softly, almost whispering, watching them.

         “What if electricity causes cancer?” said Neil. We silently watched a man tacking across the almost still lake. “Back in Atlantis, they used to wind surf. Right Elvis?” The dog woofed in confirmation. “Sport of kings back there.”

         “Maybe they could fly and didn’t need boards to wind surf,” I added.

         Contemplating that made Neil thirsty enough to take a long pull on the fruit juice. “They had something going for them. I think of them using bamboo boards and sharkskin sails. I bet you could really haul ass with a sharkskin sail.”

         “I would do it listening to ‘Like A Hurricane.’”

         “Yeah,” said Neil. “It’s like rock ‘n’ roll out on the water when you go real fast and get real clear in your head.”

         The truck roared to life and we sped back onto the highway, pivoting around acute curves and churning up steep inclines with the abandon of Junior Johnson on a moonshine run. White knuckling the dashboard, I was too scared to be properly nauseous. Elvis licked my face reassuringly.

         To get my mind off the road, I asked Neil my interviewer questions.

         “Old Ways is country, but it’s pure Neil Young, you’ve been doing this for—”

         “It’s the same fucking music I do,” said Neil, the adrenalin of the drive fueling his anger, or maybe his aggression at his record label fueled the fast driving. Either way, I just wanted to get out of the damn truck intact. “It’s a fucking great album. I thought I was doing a fucking incredible job. I don’t have hit songs. ‘Heart of Gold’ was my biggest hit. But the record company, they tell me,” and here his voice takes on a nasal accountant’s twang, ‘Well, gee, Neil, that’s not a single. We’re not sure if this record works with a pop audience.’ Thanks a lot, guys. Geffen jacked me around. Man, they served papers at my house. At my house. They sued me. They thought I lost my mind. They went fucking nuts. They stopped me from recording. Cancelled sessions. They wanted me to do Harvest again, followed up by After The Gold Rush again, then On the Beach again. I can’t do that. I have to do what I have to do and hope it serves me well. But they fucked me. Sorry, man. I have feelings about this, strong feelings I can’t just sit on. We kinda straightened things out eventually, but I went through a lot of shit because of that. It’s nothing compared to what other people go through, but still you gotta say what you gotta say.”

         “You know I’m probably going to get fired if I publish this interview as a cover story.” Facing certain death, I was in a confessional mood. In those days, I was the Editor-in-Chief of RockBill and controlled every part of the monthly production, but I didn’t own it. The publishers, friends of Mr. Geffen, told me in no uncertain terms that I could not print a cover story on that washed up hippie grunge punk Neil Young. I knew if I hijacked the production schedule and published it anyway they would fire me. (I did and they did—but I was 24 and didn’t give a damn. Idiot!)

         “Yeah?” asked Neil, taking his eyes off the road to look at me.

No! I wanted to scream. Watch the damn road!

“Well, you wouldn’t be the first person to get fired because of me. Welcome to the club. I even got fired for working with me.”

         “It’s funny because people like me think people like you, rock stars, don’t get messed with.”

         Hysterical laughter on Neil’s part, wiping a gurgling of fruit juice from his nose with the back of his hand. When he recovers, “Yeah, I’ve got a little fame, I’ve acquired things, I’ve made money, but if I stop making money, the things I have would start collapsing. It’s not so much the things I care about, but I have a family, a home. I need to keep my family together.” Neil has two sons with cerebral palsy and a daughter with epilepsy. His yearly Bridge Concerts, organized with his wife, Pegi, raise money for a school for special needs children. “I’m in a position where I have to relate to an economic reality.”

         The road skirted around a sheer rock face towering above a ravine. I pressed my face against the window certain I would soon be impaled on the tops of the redwood trees below us, sharp as bristles. “That’s some cliff,” I gulped. “What’s the speed limit?”

         “No problem,” said Neil, that boyish grin crinkling his face. “Long as you don’t look down.”

         Back to the questions. “Do the different characters you write about clash?”

        “Yeah,” said Neil, spinning the wheel away from gaping maw of oblivion. “There are different personalities in me, and they’re always at battle with each other, wrestling with each other for a place on the album, even though the characters in the songs range from some love-struck, heartbroken dude to a guy who got blown away on a cocaine deal. You know how people say about my stuff, ‘I can’t listen to that, Fuck! I liked the last one, but this one sucks?’ that’s what the characters in my head say about each other.”

         Okay. I’m driving eighty miles an hour in an old truck with an angry rock star who has multiple personality disorder. At least, I think I’ll be forever known as that guy who crashed off the cliff with Neil Young.

         “I think you like messing with people,” I say. I swear he speeds up, messing with me.

         “But not too much. I like to make friends with people, you know.”

         Yeah, by scaring them in this death trap of a truck. To add insult to injury, Elvis is sleeping peacefully in the back seat.

         “Well, okay,” Neil reconsiders. “I do like to rile people up a bit. I like to bend them up. It’s a lot of fun that way, keeps things interesting. They expect one thing and get another. Listen, I’ve been making records for fucking decades. That’s a long fucking time to care. I do care. I really fucking care what goes on out there and what goes on in here. I would do even more shit if not for the fucking record company.”

         “You sound like a guy in a bar after his shift complaining about the job.”

         “I love what I do and couldn’t do anything else, but when you get right down to it, and forget all that other stuff, that rock star bullshit, I’m just another guy working for a living, taking care of his family, living day to day. That’s the core of our whole civilization. Working, living, trying to be as sincere as you can, helping each other out. It’s what we’re supposed to do. There’s a lot of other things, a lot of problems, but it doesn’t seem too bad to get up in the morning, go to work, come back, eat dinner, watch TV, play with the kids, maybe make love, and go to sleep. That’s not newsworthy, but that’s life. And maybe you dream of other things. Maybe you write or create things. And maybe your dream is to teach your kid how to play football.”

         I think of Neil’s sons, one in a wheelchair, and I remain quiet.

         “There’s a lot of people on automatic, or feeling trapped in their jobs or in their lives, who don’t have anything fulfilling, and maybe they’re dying inside, but you still have to go to work and support your family, there’s always that, and that’s what keeps you from being dead. That and the other things they write good country songs about.”

         The truck comes to an abrupt, dust-blowing rest on the edge of the thin road. The sudden stop almost wakes up Elvis. His ears go flippity-flop. We’re facing west and the sun looks like a yellow pink rose blooming through the misty mountains. Evergreen and redwood trees line up like a standing army over the slopes and valleys. A lonesome train horn howls somewhere making Neil smile because he loves trains and has one of the most elaborate miniature train collections in the world. The whistle inspires the birds to write songs to each other. We’re parked on Neil’s mountain. He owns this, as much as anything can be said to be owned.

         “You want to roll down that window so Elvis can get his nose out there.”

         I barely crack the top before the bloodhound wiggles his twitching snout out to take the whole magnificent scene in with a hearty breath.

         “You know what the Chinese say,” I say, “one sniff is worth a thousand words.”

         Neil and Elvis remain justifiably silent at my joke. We sit there then for longer than feels comfortable in a city, but seems natural and right out here. The twilight wind whispers in the trees and there is nothing worthwhile for any man to add. We watch the day push against the night until it finally surrenders and sinks off the world. To celebrate its victory, night releases the fireworks of infinite stars.

         Yet, all I’m thinking is great, now I have to drive with this maniac in the dark.

         “You have to think there’s a reason for living,” says Neil as we take off again, bold headlights sluicing back the deep country dark. “Without that, it’s kind of empty, isn’t it? We can’t know what’s going to happen to us, but change comes, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, like in nature. The one thing we can’t change is that we have to change. That’s how we know we’re alive.”

         I leave Neil at his ranch on the top of the dark mountain. There’s a light on in the house. Inside are his wife and his kids, his trains, his guitars, his heart. I shake his hand and give my fellow traveler, Elvis the hound dog, a farewell scratch behind the ears.

         Wait a second, I think as he closes the door. How the hell am I going to get down from here?