Neil Young: 'It gets spooky 'cause we were spooked' – a classic interview from the vaults
Neil Young isn't out to win any popularity contest. Just as he reached the top of the heap three years ago with the huge-selling Harvest, Young divested himself of the look and the sound of superstardom and began to rework his music and image from scratch.
It wasn't out of fear that he turned away from the crowd and its expectations. Young's projects since Harvest – a film, three albums and several concert tours – have (whatever their aesthetic worth) been intensely, uncompromisingly personal. He hasn't stopped putting himself on the line; on the contrary, his post-Harvest work seems to be part of a continuing quest for some difficult truths.
Now Young has an album he cares so much about that he's willing to return, at least temporarily, to the world of media conventions to get the word out about it. Face set with the look of determined congeniality, glass of orange juice in hand, Young (who generally cares so little about "promotion" that he didn't bother to include any songs from the-then new On the Beach in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 74 tour repertoire) braced himself to face the press, a few at a time in manager Elliot Roberts' Sunset Strip office, a fortnight before the release of Tonight's the Night.
His hair grown long and ratty since his CSN&Y appearances, still wearing the two-toned gangster-style shoes that made a match with the dark secondhand suit he'd worn to the previous night's album preview party. Young didn't so much look consciously anti-style as vacantly non-style. But he was game about this pop music business nevertheless. During his single day of interviews, he'd seen not only Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe but also radio questioners who'd come in from places like Seattle and Albuquerque for the occasion. Having, just the day before, completed a critique of Tonight's The Night (an album I'd found so harrowingly personal that it had kept me awake on the nights I had worked on the piece), I was eager to find out whether Young had been as unsettled during the making of it as I had been by listening to it.
In the room with me were Young, Elliot Roberts, the guy from Seattle (later replaced by the guy from Albuquerque, Crowe and Art, Young's proletarian dog).
"The record business," Young sighed, in response to the invisible forces that caused him to be sitting in this smoky room on a perfectly nice day. "I don't even think I'm in it any more, I really don't. I've never done anything like this before – interviews and the party and everything. But I never had a record you could party to and interview to before."
"You feel particularly good about this record?" I asked. When he affirmed that he did, I said that Tonight's the Night seemed like the inevitable culmination of the path Young blazed with Time Fades Away – his jumpy, nearly-out-of-control live album – and the intensely introspective On the Beach. But why begin making these raw, personal albums just at the moment of peak popularity, in effect resisting superstardom?
"It's odd." He seems genuinely perplexed for the moment. "I don't know why, it was a subconscious move, I think Tonight's the Night is the most grand example of that resistance. It was actually recorded in August of '73 at SIR [LA's Studio Instrument Rentals], where we had the party last night. Everything on Tonight's the Night was recorded and mixed before On the Beach was started, but it was never finished or put into its complete order till later. Everybody said that Harvest was a trip. To me I'd happened to be in the right place at the right time to do a really mellow record that was really open, 'cause that's where my life was at the time. But that was only for a couple of months. If I'd stayed there, I don't know where I'd be right now, if I'd just stayed real mellow. I'm just not that way anymore. I think Harvest was probably the finest record that I've made, but that's really a restricting adjective for me. It's really fine, but that's it."
What about his live performances? "In concert what I play all depends on what I feel. I can't do songs like Southern Man. I'd rather play the Lynyrd Skynyrd song that answered it. That'd be great. The thing is I go on a different trip and I get a different band together, or I group with some old friends, then they don't know how to play the stuff I did with some other group and I have to show them. That takes a lot of time and I'd rather be working on new stuff.
"So a lot of it is just laziness. I don't even know some of the old songs with the bands, you know? I'm not going to even try to do Tonight's the Night. If I go out this fall I probably will take this band I'm working with now. We could get into doing these songs any time, but I'd have something new in my head by then that I would be even more into. We'll do some of them.
"I'm working right now on recording, that's what I'm mainly interested in, because I have a lot of new songs that I haven't finished recording."
The conversation swung back to the new album. "Tonight's the Night didn't come out right after it was recorded because it wasn't finished. It just wasn't in the right space, it wasn't in the right order, the concept wasn't right. I had to get the colour right, so it was not so down that it would make people restless. I had to keep jolting every once in a while to get people to wake up so they could be lulled again. It's a very fluid album. The higher you are, the better it is. And it really lives up to that, a lot of records don't … you should listen to it late at night."
"I tried that," I ventured, "and I couldn't go to sleep afterwards. It scared the hell out of me." Young was – yes – pleased. "That's great. That's the best thing you could tell me."
The title song, one of the album's most jagged and discomforting, tells the story of Bruce Berry, a friend of Young's who, the lyrics state, "died out on the mainline". Who was he, we wondered in unison.
"Bruce Berry was a roadie, he used to take care of Steve's and my guitars and amps."
"That line about his dying comes out and hits you," someone noted.
"Yeah … those mixes were a little unorthodox. Like it's real music. Sometimes I'd be on mic and sometimes I'd be two feet off it. Sometimes I'd be lookin' around the room and singin' back off mic … we'd have to bring it way back up in the mix to get it. And you can hear the echo in the room. We were all on stage at SIR just playing, with the PA system and everything, just like a live thing.
"I got tired of … I think what was in my mind when I made that record was I just didn't feel like a lonely figure with a guitar or whatever it is that people see me as sometimes. I didn't feel that laid back – I just didn't feel that way. So I thought I'd just forget about all that … wipe it out. Be as aggressive and as abrasive as I could to leave an effect, a long-term effect, that things change radically sometimes, it's good to point that out."
Roberts points out that a number of the songs on Young's recent albums have come directly from actual experience. "They're threads of life. Although Neil's portraying a character, the character he's portraying saw all these things go down."
What about the chilling Tired Eyes, with its straightforward description of a dope-dealing vendetta that ends in bloodshed? Has he seen that sort of thing?
"Yeah … puts the vibe right there … that's what I was saying, at SIR, when we were playing, and these two cats [Berry and Danny Whitten, the leader of Crazy Horse, who'd worked very closely with Young] who had been a close part of our unit, our force, our energy, were both gone to junk, both of them OD'd. And now we're playing in a place where we're getting together to make up for what is gone and try to make ourselves stronger and continue. Because we thought we had it with Danny Whitten. At least I did. I thought that a combination of people that could be as effective as groups like the Rolling Stones had been … just for rhythm, which I'm really into. I haven't had that rhythm for a while and that's why I haven't been playing my guitar: because without that behind me I won't play. I mean, you can't get free enough. So I've had to play the rhythm myself ever since Danny died. Now I have someone who can play rhythm guitar, a good friend of mine."
Who's that, Nils Lofgren?
"No, Nils is a lead player, basically. And when I use Nils – like on Tonight's the Night I used him for piano, and I played piano on a couple of songs and he played guitar. In the songs where he plays guitar he's actually playing the way Bruce Berry played guitar. The thing is I'm talking about him and you can hear him. So Nils just fits in – he plays that hot rock'n'roll-style guitar.
"It's just that there was a lot of spirit flyin' around when we were doin' it. It was like a tribute to those people, you know? Only the ones we chose no one had really heard of that much, but they meant a lot to us. That's why it gets spooky. 'Cause we were spooked. If you felt that I'm glad because it was there."
Young leans back on the sofa he's sitting on and laughs softly. "The first horror record, a horror record …"
Read the rest of this interview here.