THE LONER: NEIL YOUNG

The first time I interviewed Neil Young, it was February 7, 1987, and I was on an airplane flying back to San Francisco from Santa Barbara the day after attending the first Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion concert after David Crosby got released from jail and got his life in order. As I sat waiting for the plane to take off, Neil Young came walking down the aisle and took a seat a few rows in front of me. I waited until the plane took off, and approached him, introduced myself (I had seen him briefly backstage the night before), and asked if I could interview him for a story I was writing for Rolling Stone. He said yes. Eight years later he said yes again. This interview, which first appeared in 1995 in my online magazine, Addicted To Noise, appears in my new book, “Addicted To Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg,” a collection that includes interviews, features, profiles and essays, most of which were previously published in Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Chronicle, Cream, Downbeat, Esquire, New Musical Express and other publications, on such artists as Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Ramones, The Clash, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Sleater-Kinney, Brian Wilson and many more. Neil Young means so much to me. Here is a brief excerpt from my second novel, “The Flowers Lied”; I think it conveys some of what I feel about Young.

I dig Neil the most, beginning in his Buffalo Springfield days. Back then he’s the coolest freakster bro in the band with his fringed Buffalo Bill leather jacket. So so serious bummered-out lanky tall plays a big fat Gretsch White Falcon sings us his lonesome. Sure Dylan made up the whole trip, smart young white guy lays the deep poetry over folk-rock, but while Dylan has the East Coast vibe and by the time he plays rock & roll he has that English dandy thing going, Neil’s the stoned West Coast free spirit. Neil lays his heart out in those downer chords, not afraid to sing a bad line ’cause he knows the feel is the whole trip, the sound of the words he sings, and the off-kilter rhythm that shows up around Harvest but been in the works at least since “Mr. Soul,” and the ragged-ass electric guitar. Sometimes it’s as if Neil hangs on one note for the whole damn solo. So often growing up I felt lonely as the loneliest Neil Young ballad. “Oh, Lonesome Me” or the other one that’s equally downered and out, “The Losing End (When You’re On),” where he’s all sad-sack singing how he’ll never be the same, and yeah it’s pathetic, but sometimes it’s how I feel. Neil’s lonesome sound, sound of my own soul. WOODSIDE, CALIFORNIA—PINE TREES and redwoods are whipping by as Addicted To Noise business manager Steve McConnell and I tool down Skyline Boulevard in Woodside, a rural area of Northern California just south of San Francisco. “Song X,” a rousing rock & roll sea chantey off Neil Young’s brilliant collaboration with Pearl Jam, Mirror Ball, is blasting so loud we can hardly think. I am heading for a Woodside restaurant to interview Neil Young. In the parking lot, I see Young’s 1960 Lincoln Continental parked in the shade of a grove of trees. His dog, Bear, is inside the car, waiting patiently. I enter the rustic restaurant that Young and his entourage have taken over for the day. The restaurant is dark and cool—a safe haven from the heat. While waiting for Young, I hang with his manager of over 20 years, Elliot Roberts, Warner Bros./Reprise Records chief publicist, Bob Merlis, and MTV’s Kurt Loder, an old friend and writing collaborator who had flown in to do the MTV Neil Young interview. “Anything he seemed touchy about?” I ask Loder, who is brushing some kind of makeup powder off his double-breasted sport coat. He looked at me like I was crazy: “Of course not,” he said. “It’s Neil.” I interview Young at the back of the restaurant, light streaming through the window onto him. He is wearing a baseball hat, which conceals his long graying hair. At 49, Young is indeed the Grand Old Man of raw, primal (OK, I’ll say it), grunge rock. He has, simply, lived and experienced a lot. Sitting across the table from him, it is clear that this is someone “connected” to the creative well, one of the rare artists able to be open enough that the universe can, on occasion, speak through him. As the sun slowly sets through the trees, we talk. Michael Goldberg: I’ve been listening to Mirror Ball. I really think it’s a powerful album, with a raw, visceral quality to it. I know you recorded it in a relatively short period of time. What made you decide to do an album with Pearl Jam backing you up? Neil Young: I’d gotten to know them through playing a tour together in Europe a couple of years ago with Booker T. and the MGs [Young’s backing band for that tour]. Then Eddie inducted me into the Hall of Fame [January 1995], and that night I played a song, “Act of Love,” with Crazy Horse, which Pearl Jam recorded with a little DAT recorder, and they learned it. So two nights later I played it with them [at the Voters for Choice benefit in Washington, DC, on January 14]. And it sounded great. So we decided to go into the studio. Goldberg: But it was that spontaneous? Young: It happened eight days after the Choice show [Young and Pearl Jam entered Bad Animals studio in Seattle on January 26, 1995]. Goldberg: What was going through your mind once you sat down to write the material? Young: The material became a product of the feeling of not having the time to sit back and analyze. Not enough time for that. So, it was just a matter of opening up and finding what was inside me to write. Once I did that, the songs came really fast, and they were all based on things that were happening right around us at that time. A lot of information from people’s lives that were in the room with us. Discussions and talks and things that were happening during the sessions showed up in songs. Goldberg: What’s an example of that? Young: “I’m the Ocean.” Something in there about baseball players and football players and playing cards came out of a discussion that I had with somebody there. But there’s all kinds of things in there, personal things. You can’t really tie it to a distinct person. It could be three things that happened to three different people all get put together into the same moment. It’s just a matter of stream of consciousness. It’s not linear, organized. It just keeps coming out in a rhythm. The thoughts keep coming out. Then when you’re done this is as much news to me as it is to you. All I’m doing is writing it down and putting it in a cadence. Once I get into a cadence, then why should I even stop and wonder what it is? You can do that for the rest of your life, but when it’s coming out, you don’t want to stop it. Goldberg: Obviously it was a very creative period for you. Young: It was a good period. I’ve made other albums that way, in the past. I’ve made albums that have taken me years to make. It was just a high energy period. I saw a limited window to do it, because the band was leaving to go [to perform in Europe], and I thought, “God, this feels good right now, if I can stay with this.” So I recorded for two days and we got four songs. I was supposed to wait until they came back from a tour, and then we were going to get together and do some more. And that’s the way we left it. But after a while, two days at home, I started thinking about other songs. I called up and found out there were two other days they were available, so I said, “I’ve got a few more songs.” Then we recorded until I didn’t have any more [songs left]. But there was one day left so I said, “I got some more songs, if we can get one more day, we’ll do a couple more songs.” Then somewhere in the next couple of days, I wrote the songs. >>>

Neil Young at the Boarding House, San Francisco, 1978.

Photo by Michael Goldberg

THE LONER: A CONVERSATION WITH NEIL YOUNG By Michael Goldberg

>>> Goldberg: When I first heard “Song X,” it sounded like this incredible sort of rock & roll sea chantey [Young smiles as I tell him this]. I was imagining you and Pearl Jam, this gang of outlaw rockers, heading out to sea. Tell me your impression of that song. Young: “Song X” was written around the same time as “Act of Love.” It’s really a story about choice. Both those songs are based around the choice issue: [Whether] to have a baby; the responsibility; why is it always the mother’s responsibility? It’s so easy for the guy to get out of it. Do people know what they’re doing when they’re in the act of love? Do they know what’s next? Do they know what the fruit of love is? Is anybody thinking about that? Then there’s the murder, however you want to look at it, the murder of the fetus, or the murder of the person that did the abortion. The murder aspect brings it into the God-is-on-my-side kind of righteousness of holy war. The whole thing’s related [to] the act of love and the willingness or non-willingness of someone, usually of the guy, to accept responsibility for what’s happened. Those first two songs are centered on that ’cause that’s what I was focused on, because of the benefit. Goldberg: How did you learn to let yourself be open, to let what’s going on around you somehow get through you, into a song? Young: I didn’t always know that it was happening. When I started living out here [in Woodside] I started to realize it. I stayed out of the mainstream for a long time and kind of hid down here in my house back in 1970. When I hid out here in the trees, all I wrote about were the trees and what was happening in the country. Then I realized, well, that must be because I’m here. And that’s all I write about here. So I should go to New York for a couple of days and come back. So I could see, well, wait a minute, this seems to be directly linked. If I’m going to write, I’m going to be writing about all these things [happening around me at the time]. I just need a jolt of this or that. I’m not looking for anything [in particular], just what you pick up along the way. You don’t have to get anything in particular, just be there. Besides being in a relationship, it’s also location. It has a lot to do with what you write down. Where you are. I use those things to keep going. Goldberg: So you started to realize this 25 years ago? Young: When I took away the variety and then noticed the music reflected that, I put the variety back in and noticed the music

Neil Young, live, 1973.

Photo by Michael Goldberg

reflected that. I concentrate on one thing—you can only see something so many times before you start to count on it in your plan for how you’re going to do things. Goldberg: Did you start consciously taking note of being open? Young: You can’t improve it by being self-aware of it. It’s better to not be aware of it. It’s not something you can use as you would a tool. But it’s something that you can know. I’m open all the time. There’s never a shortage of things to write about, if you pay attention to other people. If there’s nothing going on in your own head, that doesn’t mean anything. It’s like you, him, him, especially him. [He points to Addicted To Noise business manager, Steve McConnell, who is videotaping the interview, and then to Elliot Roberts, who has entered the room.] I’ll be singing about you, OK? You’re next. Goldberg: I was told that in titling Mirror Ball, you were thinking of the mirror ball that hung from the ceiling at the Fillmore West in the early ’70s. Is that true? Young: I was just thinking of a mirror ball. To me, all the pictures and scenes in the album, if you close your eyes and try to go with where the lyrics are taking you, they’re flying. There’s movement that keeps going from one place to another all the time. Just like a bunch of little square pieces of mirror all stuck together on a ball that’s rolling along. You can only look at one at a time, so you just get to see a little glimmer of this, a little glimmer of that. It’s like if they were all little television sets and you were looking in them, up into this ball of televisions rolling along, and they all had different things on them. [That’s] sort of what it is. We ought to go build that right away, build a mirror ball television. Four hundred and fifty TVs all on at once rolling down the road.

Michael Goldberg has been interviewing and photographing musicians since he was 17. He was a senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine for a decade. His writing has appeared in Esquire, New Musical Express, Creem, DownBeat, New York Rocker, Trouser Press, Musician, New West, Vibe, New Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. He has had three novels published: “True Love Scars,” “The Flowers Lied,” and “Untitled.” In May 2022, “Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey” (HoZac Books) was published. “Addicted To Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg” (Backbeat Books), was published on November 1, 2022.