Post by philly on Sept 27, 2012 1:11:22 GMT -5
Welcome to Neil's world
New autobiography follows Young on a journey of sex, drugs, rock and family
By Bruce Ward, The Ottawa Citizen
Canadian music legend Neil Young has no intention of burning out or fading away.
WAGING HEAVY PEACE: A HIPPY DREAM
Neil Young Blue Rider Press $31.50
Linda Ronstadt once warned her protege Nicolette Larson not to get involved with Neil Young. He doesn't live in the real world, she said.
Ronstadt was right. Young lives mostly in a world he has constructed for him-self, as is clear from the first pages of his remarkable autobiography Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream.
On page two, Young describes bringing his infant son Ben, born a non-verbal quadriplegic, into the room in which his sprawling model train railroad is set up.
"Sharing the building of the layout together was one of our happiest times," he writes. "He was still in his little bassinet when the Chinese labourers originally laid the track, thousands of them toiling endless hours through the days and night. He watched as we worked."
Young's imagination is such that he can turn himself into a low-paid coolie excavating a railway, and bring his baby son fully into this make-believe world.
A few pages later, Young recalls a day when David Crosby and Graham Nash were at his northern California ranch working on an album.
"I saw David looking at one of my train rooms full of rolling stock and stealing a glance at Graham that said, 'This guy is cuckoo. He's gone nuts. Look at his obsession.' I shrugged it off. I need it. For me it's a road back."
That passage reminds a reader of Young's wistful I Am A Child, a song he wrote for Buffalo Springfield's last album. "I am a child," the song begins, "I'll last awhile, You can't conceive of the pleasure in my smile."
Childlike or not, Young has lasted in the grimy world of rock music - 40 years and 34 studio albums through Buffalo Spring-field, his solo career, collaborations with Crosby, Stills & Nash, and his sonic experiments with Crazy Horse.
Through it all, Young has done things his way, at times alienating those closest to him. His fights with record bosses are legendary. He was once sued by David Geffen for making music "that was uncharacteristic of Neil Young." For that mess, Young blames "egos and Hollywood nightmares."
Young's daughter Amber affectionately calls him a "narky old buzzard" - a nick-name he enjoys and deserves.
Ronstadt's woman-to-woman advice to Larson is one of the few gossipy moments in Young's affecting memoir, which is shot through with regrets as much as triumphs in the rock world. (Incidentally, Larson ignored Ronstadt's advice and had her biggest hit with Lotta Love, a song Young wrote for her.)
Unlike Keith Richards, Young never brags about his conquests. He tells how he was shy sexually and experienced performance anxiety with the hippie girls he brought home after playing long sets with Buffalo Springfield at the Whisky A Go Go in Hollywood. As part of his sexual education, he got venereal disease more than once from his free-love partners.
Young writes movingly of colleagues who have died, particularly David Briggs, who produced 18 Neil Young albums - "the good ones," Briggs would say, not without justification - and Ben Keith, a top-of-the-line steel guitar player whose association with Young began with the Harvest album.
Talking to Bruce Springsteen shortly after the death of Clarence Clemons, Young realizes that, "Ben Keith was my Clarence Clemons. Clarence was Bruce's Ben Mink."
Young writes with great affection about Crazy Horse, his longtime backing band. One of his toughest decisions was firing Danny Whitten, the band's original lead singer, on the eve of a major tour. Whitten was strung out on heroin, and had to go. When he later died of an overdose, the police called Young's ranch in the middle of the night. They had found his phone number on a slip of paper in Whitten's wallet.
Young insists that Buffalo Spring-field would have been hugely successful if only Bruce Palmer, the Canadian bassist who played inventive R&B licks, hadn't been deported after getting busted for smoking grass.
After Palmer left, the band tore itself to pieces when egos - especially Young's and Stephen Stills's - got in the way of the music. He also concedes Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young never fully flowered as a band, thanks to their massive coke-fuelled egos.
Young deeply regrets that Nirvana's Kurt Cobain quoted the line "It's better to burn out than to fade away" - in his suicide note. Young says the lyric, from the acoustic version of his My My, Hey Hey (In The Black), applies to the spirit of rock and roll at any given moment.
"I wrote it for the rock and roll star, meaning that if you go while you are burning hottest, then that is how you are remembered, at the peak of your powers forever. That is rock and roll."
John Lennon was scathing in rejecting Young's credo. "It's garbage you know. If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn't he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us. No, thank you. I'll take the living and the healthy."
Young began his memoir after breaking his little toe in the summer of 2011. He gave up booze and marijuana - the pot on doctor's orders - for the writing project, which left him "the straightest I've been since I was 18."
Waging Heavy Peace wanders down the years, circles back, repeats itself often, but never loses momentum.
At times, Young's writing takes a hippie-ish turn. Here he is describing Crazy Horse: "They are my window to the cosmic world where the muse lives and breathes. I can find myself there and go to the special area of my soul where those songs graze like buffalo ... That is the place where music lives in my soul."
Young generally wrote his songs while stoned, but he did some of his best while suffering through a bad case of the flu. "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," he writes.
Picking up the guitar, Young played awhile and came up with Cinnamon Girl. Then he started fooling around with the chords to Sunny, a top hit for Bobby Hebb in 1966, and that turned into Down By The River. Switching to A minor, one of his favourite keys, Young then wrote Cowgirl In The Sand. Three brand new songs in one sickbed session: a good day's work for a guy in a semi-delirious state.
Besides model trains, Young also obsesses over cars, guitars and amplifiers. He has a garage full of amps, including his first tiny Fender piggy-back, a gift from his mother Rassy.
Her son's biggest fan in the early days, Rassy also bought the 1948 Buick hearse that the 18-year-old Young and his Winnipeg band the Squires used to haul their gear in to gigs as far away as Fort William.
A few years later in Toronto, Young bought another hearse which he drove to L.A. with Bruce Palmer to reconnect with Stephen Stills. Young raised the money for the hearse by selling instruments owned by John Craig Eaton, a scion of the Eaton family who had a financial interest in Young's band at the time.
Scott Young, the author and news-paper columnist, believed that his son Neil wrote Old Man for him. Not so, although his son never told him. The song was inspired by a ranch foreman named Louis Avila who showed Young around the 140-acre spread he would buy and name Broken Arrow Ranch.
"How does a young fellow like you get the money to buy a place like this?" Avila wanted to know.
"Just lucky, I guess," replied Young, already a millionaire at 24.
Young loved his father deeply, de-spite the acrimonious divorce from Rassy.
Among the tenderest parts of the book are Young's descriptions of weekend mornings in tiny Omemee, Ont. His dad would drive him out to the main highway to pick up a bundle of newspapers for young Neil to deliver.
When Neil finished his route, his dad always made pancakes. The attic room where his father wrote was off limits but "Windy," as his dad called him, was always made welcome whenever he climbed the stairs.
Young's devotion to cars may have begun at Robertson Davies' house in Peterborough. His family visited Davies every year at Christmas, and Young would happily play charades with Davies' daughters.
Davies had a brand-new 1954 Buick, with a flashy grille and taillights that captivated Young. As a young rock star in L.A., Young came across a special Buick Skylark - one of only 1,690 that were made - and vowed to own one some day.
Now the prize of his collection is a 1953 Buick Skylark - body number one. The first one made.
His father was lost to dementia at age 75. Young, now 66, worries that the same fate awaits him. He has had several serious health issues in his life - childhood polio, epileptic seizures in the 1960s, back surgery in the early 1970s, and a brain aneurysm in 2005.
Young also writes tenderly of his wife Pegi, the love of his life, and his three children. Pegi is the Cinnamon Girl, he says, with the loveliest blue eyes in the world. "I would be an is-land without my ocean if we were not together in our hearts."
He is candid about the times he let her down.
When he turned up stoned at her hospital bedside after she had undergone a serious operation, Pegi kicked him out of the room.
Young has two major projects on the go. He's trying to get auto manufacturers interested in his Lincvolt prototype - a 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible turned into an electric car with a generator. It's hard to imagine a 19-and-a-half-foot luxury car as the future of American automobiles, but Young truly believes in it.
Then there's ProTone or Pono - a new music audio system Young is working on. It provides the highest digital resolution possible - the studio sound quality that musicians hear when they record.
Young figures Pono's sound is so much better than the product Apple delivers with iTunes that it could lead to the restoration of the album rock that ruled back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Young has neither burned our nor faded away.
Somehow, it's still brings a smile to think of him charging down a California highway in a vintage Caddy, radio tuned to rock and roll.
www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Welcome+Neil+world/7293593/story.html
New autobiography follows Young on a journey of sex, drugs, rock and family
By Bruce Ward, The Ottawa Citizen
Canadian music legend Neil Young has no intention of burning out or fading away.
WAGING HEAVY PEACE: A HIPPY DREAM
Neil Young Blue Rider Press $31.50
Linda Ronstadt once warned her protege Nicolette Larson not to get involved with Neil Young. He doesn't live in the real world, she said.
Ronstadt was right. Young lives mostly in a world he has constructed for him-self, as is clear from the first pages of his remarkable autobiography Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream.
On page two, Young describes bringing his infant son Ben, born a non-verbal quadriplegic, into the room in which his sprawling model train railroad is set up.
"Sharing the building of the layout together was one of our happiest times," he writes. "He was still in his little bassinet when the Chinese labourers originally laid the track, thousands of them toiling endless hours through the days and night. He watched as we worked."
Young's imagination is such that he can turn himself into a low-paid coolie excavating a railway, and bring his baby son fully into this make-believe world.
A few pages later, Young recalls a day when David Crosby and Graham Nash were at his northern California ranch working on an album.
"I saw David looking at one of my train rooms full of rolling stock and stealing a glance at Graham that said, 'This guy is cuckoo. He's gone nuts. Look at his obsession.' I shrugged it off. I need it. For me it's a road back."
That passage reminds a reader of Young's wistful I Am A Child, a song he wrote for Buffalo Springfield's last album. "I am a child," the song begins, "I'll last awhile, You can't conceive of the pleasure in my smile."
Childlike or not, Young has lasted in the grimy world of rock music - 40 years and 34 studio albums through Buffalo Spring-field, his solo career, collaborations with Crosby, Stills & Nash, and his sonic experiments with Crazy Horse.
Through it all, Young has done things his way, at times alienating those closest to him. His fights with record bosses are legendary. He was once sued by David Geffen for making music "that was uncharacteristic of Neil Young." For that mess, Young blames "egos and Hollywood nightmares."
Young's daughter Amber affectionately calls him a "narky old buzzard" - a nick-name he enjoys and deserves.
Ronstadt's woman-to-woman advice to Larson is one of the few gossipy moments in Young's affecting memoir, which is shot through with regrets as much as triumphs in the rock world. (Incidentally, Larson ignored Ronstadt's advice and had her biggest hit with Lotta Love, a song Young wrote for her.)
Unlike Keith Richards, Young never brags about his conquests. He tells how he was shy sexually and experienced performance anxiety with the hippie girls he brought home after playing long sets with Buffalo Springfield at the Whisky A Go Go in Hollywood. As part of his sexual education, he got venereal disease more than once from his free-love partners.
Young writes movingly of colleagues who have died, particularly David Briggs, who produced 18 Neil Young albums - "the good ones," Briggs would say, not without justification - and Ben Keith, a top-of-the-line steel guitar player whose association with Young began with the Harvest album.
Talking to Bruce Springsteen shortly after the death of Clarence Clemons, Young realizes that, "Ben Keith was my Clarence Clemons. Clarence was Bruce's Ben Mink."
Young writes with great affection about Crazy Horse, his longtime backing band. One of his toughest decisions was firing Danny Whitten, the band's original lead singer, on the eve of a major tour. Whitten was strung out on heroin, and had to go. When he later died of an overdose, the police called Young's ranch in the middle of the night. They had found his phone number on a slip of paper in Whitten's wallet.
Young insists that Buffalo Spring-field would have been hugely successful if only Bruce Palmer, the Canadian bassist who played inventive R&B licks, hadn't been deported after getting busted for smoking grass.
After Palmer left, the band tore itself to pieces when egos - especially Young's and Stephen Stills's - got in the way of the music. He also concedes Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young never fully flowered as a band, thanks to their massive coke-fuelled egos.
Young deeply regrets that Nirvana's Kurt Cobain quoted the line "It's better to burn out than to fade away" - in his suicide note. Young says the lyric, from the acoustic version of his My My, Hey Hey (In The Black), applies to the spirit of rock and roll at any given moment.
"I wrote it for the rock and roll star, meaning that if you go while you are burning hottest, then that is how you are remembered, at the peak of your powers forever. That is rock and roll."
John Lennon was scathing in rejecting Young's credo. "It's garbage you know. If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn't he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us. No, thank you. I'll take the living and the healthy."
Young began his memoir after breaking his little toe in the summer of 2011. He gave up booze and marijuana - the pot on doctor's orders - for the writing project, which left him "the straightest I've been since I was 18."
Waging Heavy Peace wanders down the years, circles back, repeats itself often, but never loses momentum.
At times, Young's writing takes a hippie-ish turn. Here he is describing Crazy Horse: "They are my window to the cosmic world where the muse lives and breathes. I can find myself there and go to the special area of my soul where those songs graze like buffalo ... That is the place where music lives in my soul."
Young generally wrote his songs while stoned, but he did some of his best while suffering through a bad case of the flu. "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," he writes.
Picking up the guitar, Young played awhile and came up with Cinnamon Girl. Then he started fooling around with the chords to Sunny, a top hit for Bobby Hebb in 1966, and that turned into Down By The River. Switching to A minor, one of his favourite keys, Young then wrote Cowgirl In The Sand. Three brand new songs in one sickbed session: a good day's work for a guy in a semi-delirious state.
Besides model trains, Young also obsesses over cars, guitars and amplifiers. He has a garage full of amps, including his first tiny Fender piggy-back, a gift from his mother Rassy.
Her son's biggest fan in the early days, Rassy also bought the 1948 Buick hearse that the 18-year-old Young and his Winnipeg band the Squires used to haul their gear in to gigs as far away as Fort William.
A few years later in Toronto, Young bought another hearse which he drove to L.A. with Bruce Palmer to reconnect with Stephen Stills. Young raised the money for the hearse by selling instruments owned by John Craig Eaton, a scion of the Eaton family who had a financial interest in Young's band at the time.
Scott Young, the author and news-paper columnist, believed that his son Neil wrote Old Man for him. Not so, although his son never told him. The song was inspired by a ranch foreman named Louis Avila who showed Young around the 140-acre spread he would buy and name Broken Arrow Ranch.
"How does a young fellow like you get the money to buy a place like this?" Avila wanted to know.
"Just lucky, I guess," replied Young, already a millionaire at 24.
Young loved his father deeply, de-spite the acrimonious divorce from Rassy.
Among the tenderest parts of the book are Young's descriptions of weekend mornings in tiny Omemee, Ont. His dad would drive him out to the main highway to pick up a bundle of newspapers for young Neil to deliver.
When Neil finished his route, his dad always made pancakes. The attic room where his father wrote was off limits but "Windy," as his dad called him, was always made welcome whenever he climbed the stairs.
Young's devotion to cars may have begun at Robertson Davies' house in Peterborough. His family visited Davies every year at Christmas, and Young would happily play charades with Davies' daughters.
Davies had a brand-new 1954 Buick, with a flashy grille and taillights that captivated Young. As a young rock star in L.A., Young came across a special Buick Skylark - one of only 1,690 that were made - and vowed to own one some day.
Now the prize of his collection is a 1953 Buick Skylark - body number one. The first one made.
His father was lost to dementia at age 75. Young, now 66, worries that the same fate awaits him. He has had several serious health issues in his life - childhood polio, epileptic seizures in the 1960s, back surgery in the early 1970s, and a brain aneurysm in 2005.
Young also writes tenderly of his wife Pegi, the love of his life, and his three children. Pegi is the Cinnamon Girl, he says, with the loveliest blue eyes in the world. "I would be an is-land without my ocean if we were not together in our hearts."
He is candid about the times he let her down.
When he turned up stoned at her hospital bedside after she had undergone a serious operation, Pegi kicked him out of the room.
Young has two major projects on the go. He's trying to get auto manufacturers interested in his Lincvolt prototype - a 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible turned into an electric car with a generator. It's hard to imagine a 19-and-a-half-foot luxury car as the future of American automobiles, but Young truly believes in it.
Then there's ProTone or Pono - a new music audio system Young is working on. It provides the highest digital resolution possible - the studio sound quality that musicians hear when they record.
Young figures Pono's sound is so much better than the product Apple delivers with iTunes that it could lead to the restoration of the album rock that ruled back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Young has neither burned our nor faded away.
Somehow, it's still brings a smile to think of him charging down a California highway in a vintage Caddy, radio tuned to rock and roll.
www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Welcome+Neil+world/7293593/story.html
