Neil Young, From Nixon To Bush

Neil Young, from Nixon to Bush

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1805195,00.html

Southern Man
Click Here

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday June 25, 2006
The Observer

A big black vintage Buick stands, gleaming and immaculate, in the empty car park of an otherwise nondescript studio complex on the southern outskirts of San Francisco. The car's owner, who drove here this morning from his 180-acre ranch in nearby San Mateo county, is of a similar vintage, but looks altogether less well-tended. His 60-year-old frame, once impossibly gangly, has filled out, and is clothed in a faded cotton shirt, ill-fitting denim jacket and baggy, khaki-coloured trousers that give way to white socks and scuffed trekking sandals. The thrift shop-meets-great outdoors look is topped off by a battered safari hat of dubious provenance which sits atop a straggly mess of long, greying hair. Everything about him looks slightly faded, windblown, weatherbeaten.

And yet this ageing unkempt figure exudes a timeless cool, a languorous, dishevelled grace that only those who truly don't give a hoot what the world thinks of them exude. Despite what style magazines might tell you, it is a look that cannot be bought or styled. It takes a lifetime of not caring to perfect, and if you were to ask Neil Young about it he would look at you like you were mad, and maybe fix you with that gimlet stare of his that has chilled many an interviewer's soul.

'People were always afraid of Neil,' his long-time manager Elliot Roberts once remarked when asked about his charge's legendary hair-trigger temperament, 'but he was actually very frail. He sort of glared at people and they'd freeze. He was so intense, nothing was casual.'

The glint in his eye is still there but today, at least, it seems more mischievous than malevolent. And Neil Young, though he has had a recent brush with mortality, no longer appears frail, but robust and hearty. When he finally ambles into the back room of the studio he seems relaxed and affable, and, despite his longstanding aversion to interviews, comes across initially as shy rather than wary.

'I'm doin' good,' he says, grinning, when I tell him how well he looks. Last year he underwent brain surgery to remove an aneurism that had gone undetected for years, and there were some unspecified post-operative complications he is loth to talk about. 'I've come though, and I feel kind of blessed.'

There is no evidence to suggest that this recent illness has made him ease up on his relentless work schedule. If anything, the opposite is the case. He recently released Living With War, hismost controversial album to date. It signals another major change of direction, both musically and politically, the abrasive sound matched by lyrics that pull no punches in their anti-war, anti-Bush message. 'Let's impeach the President for lyin'.' runs one song, 'and misleading our country into war/Abusing all the power that we gave him,/And shipping all our money out the door.'

He cut the album in a couple of weeks and initially released it on the internet. It followed close on the heels of last year's wistful and reflective Prairie Wind, several songs of which were written and recorded in the fortnight between the diagnosis and the removal of his aneurism. 'I had to wait a few weeks because the doctor wasn't available to do the operation,' he says matter of factly, 'so I just headed up to Nashville and started working.'

Last year, too, he played a pair of intimate shows in Nashville which form the core of new concert film, Heart of Gold, directed by his friend Jonathan Demme and due for release here in August. There is also a late summer stadium tour scheduled where he will once again be reunited with the equally grizzled Crosby, Stills & Nash with whom he has conducted a fitful and often fraught working relationship. 'When we were younger we fought like brothers,' he says, 'but we've got some history on that now.' One wonders, though, what's in it for him; as a rueful David Crosby once remarked, 'Neil needs the three of us like a stag needs a hat rack.'

In the meantime, in this very studio, he is overseeing the final stages of an exhaustive - and, among fans, semi-mythical - archival project which will culminate in the release of a series of CDs of unreleased material spanning his 40-year career. 'I've be en real busy this year, even by my standards,' he laughs. 'I kind of picked up a head of steam back there after the illness, and I just went with it. Plus,' he says, without a discernible trace of irony, 'I reckon I'm finally getting pretty good at what I do.'

What can you say to that? I just grin back at him and shake my head. If truth be told I'm feeling slightly nervous-going-on-starstruck in his presence. Journalistic objectivity be damned, I'm just grateful to be meeting the great man. We go back a long way, Neil and me, back to my teenage years in the early to mid-Seventies when his songs as well as his high prairie voice and his brooding outsider persona held me in their sway like nothing since.

For a long time back there, like many closet romantics, I was mesmerised by the very notion of Neil Young, and by the promise his songs carried of another altogether more gilded life among the impossibly bohemian denizens of America's fabled West Coast. A life lived in thrall to the highway and the desert and spent in the blissful company of all those dreamy sunkissed Laurel Canyon ladies. A life where you simply hung out and got high and wrote song after song about the heartbreak and despair of unrequited love. What could be finer?

Back then, in the grey, rain-drenched dreariness of small-town Northern Ireland, I listened to Neil Young's albums incessantly, poring over the sleeves, the credits, the lyrics. I even had my mother sew patches of an old rug on the backside of my Wranglers in homage to that photograph of Neil's jeans on the back of After the Goldrush. He was the brooding West Coast-rock troubadour par excellence. And wherever Neil went I journeyed with him, even along the druggy, desolate back roads he travelled on the ragged masterpiece that was Tonight's the Night, even across the remote, whacked-out terrain he was stranded in on On the Beach

Not even the great punk purge of the late Seventies, which consigned most of his complacent contemporaries to the dustbin of musical history, could shake my faith in the man or his music. I stuck by Neil and he responded accordingly, releasing the magnificently twisted Rust Never Sleeps, the album that bequeathed us his most infamous and oft-quoted line: 'It's better to burn out than to fade away'. Fifteen years later that same line would come back to haunt him when the dismal Kurt Cobain, much to Young's dismay, scrawled it on his suicide note.

But to everyone's surprise, including his own, Young neither burnt out nor faded away. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, it seemed like the only thing he knew how to do was to keep on keeping on. It's been quite a journey. Or, as Elliot Roberts once put it: 'It's not like the art is separate from the life, it's one and the same with Neil.' Only Dylan, indeed, has walked that line with the same kind of devil-may-care determination and utter disregard for the vagaries of musical taste. Only Dylan walks on to a stage trailing such a mythology, such a surfeit of startling songs, such a devoted to-the-point-of- obsessive following. Put simply, Neil Young is one of the last great maverick geniuses of rock, and bone fide living legend to boot. Not that he gives a hoot about that either.

'It's strange but I now have the kind of fame that comes with just being around so long,' he says. 'I have all the people who have been with me for a long time, and know my work, and have made the journey with me. But I also have all these other people who know who Neil Young is but don't really know shit about me. It all gets kind of strange sometimes.'

We are gathered here ostensibly to talk about his latest album, Living With War, a bunch of what he calls 'rough and ready, simple, straight-ahead folk songs about the war in Iraq'. In typically perverse fashion he has set those songs to storming electric guitar riffs and employed a 100-piece choir to ram home the anti-Bush message. The whole album, he tells me proudly, was recorded 'live and fast and with no overdubs'. The most catchy, and controversial, song is called 'Let's Impeach the President', which I can't imagine has received much mainstream radio play in America.

'More than you'd think, actually,' he says, eyes glinting. 'Which surprised me, too. A big part of what this record is about is just getting the information out there that Americans have a conscience about what's happening, too. There's a lot of people in America who didn't want this war to happen, who just want to be able to express themselves about this situation, but for various reasons they are not being heard. In a way this record is not for me, it's for them.'

Why, though, did he make a 'metal-folk' record that's heavier on the metal than the folk - and then bring a choir on board? 'Well I just went with my instincts as always. I was trying for a sound that really resonates so that's why the choir's on there. I wanted something so utterly simple and unarranged that people could sing along with it and play along with it, just like those old stirring folk songs. So when we play them live, anyone can get on board. There's no arrangements to learn, no fancy harmonies. It's stripped-down folk really, but I wanted it to sound angry and agitated and raw, too. My voice, and what I think as an individual, is much less important on this project. It's the project itself that's the important thing. It's about making yourself heard.'

Living With War is indeed an angry record but one that manages to sound somehow patriotic, too. Young says he waited a long time to make it because he was hoping that 'maybe a younger artist would stand up and write these kinds of songs'. That never happened, or at least not in the high-profile way he thought it would. 'For a while, you know, I didn't feel it was my place. Being 60 years old, and being who I am, it just didn't feel appropriate,' he continues, getting into his stride. 'Plus, after 9/11, we were told by the government that expressing dissent was not patriotic. I mean, I trusted the government back then. I was one of those guys who thought the Patriot Act was an OK idea when it first came out. I got behind it.' He shakes his head at his own folly. What, I ask, changed his mind? 'Bush did. The government did. We need a leader who's more cautious, not so reckless with things they don't understand. Other cultures need to be respected. Culture itself needs to be respected. I mean, I feel Saddam was bad and had to be overthrown, but are we smart or are we stupid? At this point in our evolution, with all the technology that we have, there has to be a better way of doing this than bombing a country into oblivion.'

End Part I

I read somewhere that the anger that underpins Living With War was precipitated by a newspaper article he had read about Iraq. 'Well, it was a picture on the cover of USA Today actually. A cargo plane full of soldiers who we re doctors ready to take off for Iraq. The story was about how medicine had made such leaps and bounds in this war, how doctors had learned so much from this conflict. Man, that was just too much for me. Are you really trying to tell me that the positive side of the war is the medical experience gained from all those wasted people. There's really something wrong with that picture.'

It has to be said that Young himself is a complicated political creature and his allegiances have often been decided with the same kind of impulsiveness that underpins many of his artistic decisions. (This is a guy, after all, who plots his creative course according to the lunar cycle, scheduling recording dates and even live shows to coincide with the full moon.) In the late Sixties, when Nixon was in office, he wrote one of the great American protest songs, the tense and accusatory 'Ohio', a visceral response to the shooting dead of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University. In the Eighties though, when he hit one of his more sustained fallow periods - releasing a series of albums that prompted his label boss and former friend David Geffen to sue him for making wilfully uncommercial music - he briefly came out publicly for President Reagan. It was a move that would have terminally scuppered the credibility of many a lesser artist.

More recently too, just after 9/11, he recorded the bullish 'Let's Roll', the kind of song you could imagine a fired-up fighter squadron listening to before they took off for Iraq. Consistency has never been one of Neil Young's characteristics, in his life or his art, but one senses that, following his illness and the recent death of his father, he finally has adopted a more centred - even, dare I say it, less contrary - world view.

'We need to discuss this stuff, you know, just address it in public,' he says, sounding impassioned but focused, when I press him on his anti-Bush stance. 'There's been too much silence, too much phoney news. That's why I have put the Living With War videos on my website with all the news info running through them. Let's debate. Let's discuss. It's an open sore on this country, this war, and you can't just put a band-aid on it. You gotta lance it, and drain it, and let it heal. Might take a while but what's the alternative?'

Young, whose faith in the internet as a 'tool for getting the truth out there' is almost total, has even created a link on his website called 'The Great Debate' where fans and critics alike can express their feelings. 'There's been a lot of viciously negative reviews and we've stuck them on there too,' he grins, ever the iconoclast. 'It's not the Sixties any more, it's not about rock'n'roll, it's a different world now. It's about the things people feel and fear today, and those feelings and fears need - and have a right - to be expressed too.'

Almost four decades have passed since the frail and shy 20-year old Neil Young drove another big, black, vintage car - a '53 Pontiac hearse, to be exact - all the way from his hometown, Ontario, to the promised land of Los Angeles. Four decades since he and his sidekick, the late Bruce Palmer, met up with Stephen Stills on Sunset Boulevard and formed Buffalo Springfield, the most promising - and in many ways most disappointing - West Coast rock group of the Sixties. The restlessness that precipitated that epic journey from Canada to California, an acoustic guitar and a bag of grass for company, has remained a constant in his life and is perhaps the key aspect of Young's extraordinary and often wilfully impulsive creative odyssey.

'I guess it's pretty constant, yeah,' he nods. 'I don't like to stay. Got to move on. Even when I'm writing songs I need to up and move, even if it's only down the block. Soon as you change the scenery something happens, and the words start coming. Anything but staying in the same place. That ain't ever worked for me.'

Where does he think that restlessness comes from? 'Growing up, I guess. Up in Canada we were always going to different places - down to Florida in the wintertime, back up to Ontario in the summer. As a kid I grew up with that sense of movement, the highway, the prairie rolling by. My dad was a writer and he liked to keep moving, too.'

His father, Scott Young, died last year, aged 87, and his spirit hovers over many of the more reflective songs on Prairie Wind. By all reports, Scott was a bit of a maverick himself. He worked as a sports writer of some repute in his native Canada and once moonlighted to write an illuminating book, Neil & Me, about the often troubled relationship he had with his more famous son. Neil Spencer, former editor of NME and now an Observer writer, remembers Scott turning up at the NME offices to trawl though the back issues while researching the book. 'He was quite a dashing figure, tall, handsome, well-dressed, extremely charming. He stayed all afternoon and you could see he was very rigorous and thorough. He chatted easily about Neil. I remember him saying he was "real proud" of him.'

The father-son relationship, though, was for a long time a troubled and fractious one. Scott Young was another itinerant soul, who had upped and left the family home when Neil was 15, leaving both his young sons in the care of their mother. According to Young's biographer, Jimmy McDonough, the indomitable 'Rassy' Ragland Young was a hard drinker who, until her deathbed, never forgave her errant husband for his betrayal.

Neil Young's life has also been mapped out by impulsive relationships with strong women. He married his first wife, Susan Acevedo, in 1968, and divorced her just as swiftly in 1970. That same year he moved in with Carrie Snodgrass, an actress he first saw and fell for while watching the film Diary of A Mad Housewife. She was later immortalised on the baroque ballad 'A Man Needs A Maid', on which he sang, 'I fell in love with the actress/ She was playing a part that I knew so well'.

Though he made some of his finest music in the Seventies, the decade was also marked by a series of personal tragedies. In 1972 his first son, Zeke, was born, and soon after diagnosed with cerebral palsy. That same year Young lost his guitarist and close friend 27-year-old Danny Whitten, and his favourite roadie, Bruce Berry, to drug overdoses. Then, six years later, having married his current wife, Pegi, Young's second son, Ben, was born with an even more severe form of cerebral palsy.

'It took time to get used to the fact that it wasn't one but two,' Young told Time magazine in 2005, one of the few times he has publicly commented on this appalling twist of fate. 'Eventually Pegi and I just came to the understanding that we had been chosen, and this was one of the things we were going to do with our life, turning this situation into something positive for all kinds of kids.'

To this end Young and Pegi, his wife of 28 years, founded the Bridge School in Hillsborough, California in 1986, which specialises in providing communication through technology for non-verbal, physically challenged children. Each year Young hosts and headlines a concert there and has cajoled the likes of Paul Simon, Tom Petty and Pearl Jam to appear.

Ben, now 28, quadraplegic and unable to speak often accompanies his father on tour in a coach that Young has fitted with a hydraulic lift. The singer's obsession with model trains - he is part-owner of Lionel, the model train company - is also bound up with Ben's condition. Young has developed a command and control system that allows his son to operate the vast model train track he has installed in the converted barn near his home. For the last 36 years Young has lived on that same sprawling ranch near San Francisco that he bought with the royalties of the first CSNY album, Deja Vu, and christened 'Broken Arrow' after one of his early songs. (His third child, Amber, aged 22, is studying fine art.)

'The ranch has given me root,' he says, 'and I have family now. Things tend to be a bit more planned these days. Didn't use to be, though.' He shakes his head and laughs. 'I used to just up and go where I wanted to, never tell anybody.'

I put it to Young that the family is now a recurring motif in his later work, just as the notion of movement and restlessness was on his earlier albums. 'Oh yeah. I'm glad you picked up on that. The whole underlying story on Living With War is the bond of the family, and the effect that living with war has on families, not just in Iraq but here in America. I mean, the news doesn't focus too much on the bodies of the kids that come home. That's the part that's heartbreaking to me. I'm a family man to the core.'

How, though, has he managed to balance his family commitments with the nomadic life of the rock musician? 'Well I try and take my family on the road with me. You have to commit to the family and the work, give them both the respect and the attention they deserve. With me, I have to go with the work when it takes me. I can wait around for the songs to come but I got to go with them when they do. My wife, Pegi, she's just a great woman, and it's worked largely because she's been so understanding of that. She's intelligent and she's a hell of a lot of fun. You got to have that stimulation in a relationship,' he says, grinning like a big, goofy kid, 'I got a lot of work to do just to keep up with her.'

I ask Young if his recent brush with mortality has affected the way he writes songs. 'That's a hard question to answer,' he says, staring off into the corner. 'I mean, when it comes to songwriting I tend not to analyse it too much. I just let if flow out from the subconscious, unedited. I figure if you don't question it too much you keep it pure. I don't analyse and I don't question, and I don't do too much editing.'

So he doesn't get hung up on mistakes? 'Hell, no. If I did I'd still be working on my first project. I can't afford the time. I'd rather do something new than try to fix something I already did. I got to move on. It's always the next thing with me. Always.'

What would he do if the muse suddenly forsook him, if the songs dried up? 'Shit! Who knows? I mean, I'm not threatened by the thought of not having an idea. It's happened before and I just waited it out. I just look at it that the Great Spirit has given me a break. I'd think, time to go sailing! Time to go swimming! Time to go to Hawaii and look at some fish! Man, there's so many other things to do.'

He thinks this over for a long while, looking around this overcrowded room at all the various fragments from his archives, the old tour schedules, the track listings, the photographs of his younger self, the CDs full of old familiar songs, and new songs and live songs. All the map reference points from his restless, song-strewn life. Then he says, 'what I do, it's all about energy. Always. But the energy comes from knowing when to hit it. I don't do it because it's on the schedule. It's not about a schedule. It's not about writing songs that are going to be accepted, or songs that are going to make a lot of money. None of those reasons are good enough anymore. You've got to have a valid reason if you want to make the kind of music I play. You really have to want to make music, and have something to say. That's what I'm committed to.'

Still restless then, and still searching, even at 60 Neil Young remains a law unto himself. Long may he run.

End

This should be enjoyable while listening to the Harvest album.


"There's a world you're living in

No one else has your part

All God's children in the wind

Take it in and blow hard.


Look around it, have you found it

Walking down the avenue?

See what it brings,

could be good things

In the air for you."