Untitled Document

Reflective Glory
by Steve Sutherland & Kevin Cummins

Thirty years and unbowed by the pressures of the music industry, Neil Young is possibly the last great musical outlaw, though it seems to think Pearl Jam may just be able to carry the torch when he's gone. Steve Sutherland finally gets his dream interview with the warrior chief of the great rock 'n' roll plains. Neil Young and a tree: Kevin Cummins
It is said of Crazy Horse that, in preparing for battle, he'd sprinkle a little dirt thrown up by a burrowing mole over his hair and over his pony so that the mole's blindness might be transmitted to his enemies and render him invisible. He was never captured or defeated in battle.
Crazy Horse was an Oglala Teton Sioux who always wore a rock on a thong between his heart and the enemy. A bold warrior and a brilliant military tactician, he slaughtered the vainglorious Custer at the Battle Of Little Big Horn but he would never allow any sketch, painting or photographic image to be taken of him, lest he surrender a part of his soul.
Crazy Horse is also reputed to have said that , when he died, his bones would turn to rock and his joints to flint. In moments of crises, he could dream himself into the „real world", thus evading the pain and dangers of this temporal one.
When he was finally murdered by „friendly" soldiers on September 5, 1877, he refused to lie on a prison cot to ease his demise, electing instead to remain on the floor. As Ian Frazier says in his book „The Great Plains": „Lying where he chose, Crazy Horse showed the rest of us where we are standing. With his body, he demonstrated that the floor of an army office was part of the land, and that the land was still his."
It was surely no accident that, way back in '69, when Neil Young felt the need of a rock 'n' roll band, he named his hirelings after Crazy Horse. Young was on the run from a lot of things at the time. From the shallow pop success of Buffalo Springfield. From the constrictions of a folksy first solo LP that failed to deliver the sounds he heard in his head. From his first terrifying realization that he suffered from epilepsy. From the narcs who were combing Lanois to bust prominent examples of degenerate youth.
Crazy Horse was the point where Neil Young stopped running, the place he made his stand. He's been standing ever since. And, judging by the number of young musicians who, to paraphrase his mighty 'Cortez The Killer', have come to gather round him like leaves around a tree, it's the strongest place to be right now.
Thirty years after staring out playing his native Canadian folk club circuit with his band The Squires, Neil Young wakes up on an azure blue San Francisco morning to discover himself the most important rock icon in the world. He scratches the bald bit at the back of his head, the bit he hides under his cap (his sole concession to vanity) and laughs heartily.
„Yeah, they've started calling me Don Grungeone. I kinda got this fatherly happening right now. Don't ask me why. I'm just here, where I always was, doing what I love to do." It is precisely Young's steadfastness, his refusal to compromise, his rugged belief in the robust mystery of his talent, his dogged pursual of his own shooting star, his cheer joyful addiction to noise, and his firm sense of dignity that attracts these young disciples. In times of shifting brand loyalties and corporate, soul-owning sponsorship, a floundering generation is drawn to Young like a drowner to a rock.
Budding stars who wished to proceed without guilt, and those who need to believe that rock 'n' roll can be still a renegade's hideout, have found things have grown so rotten out there that Neil Young may well be their last and only refuge, their sole resource.
He has achieve this status without surrendering one morsel of his decency or giving one inch of his ground. Young is justly perceived as a true hero in a time when heroism has been confused with celebrity and people are revered for their public image rather than for what they have actually achieved. Like the leading man in a John Ford western, Young has always done what he had to do. And he is now, 50 years old, his hair long and grizzly gray, laughing like a crone, showing off teeth that have seen better days, understanding all this intuitively. It's not about thought processes for him, it's about being struck by the urge, like lightning strikes a rod.
Young is a semi-aware that he has just recorded an entire album about the nature of heroism. It's called „Mirror Ball" and it's about how we all feel the need for heroes and how they always let us down because they're only human and that's what human do. It's also about how life is the most precious gift of all and yet there are still some causes worth dying for.
„Mirror Ball" is an album about these mighty contradictions and more, themes Young has hacked at throughout his whole career, articulating them as best he can but endlessly arriving the only possible conclusion: that there is no solution. So live with it.
On „Mirror Ball", though, the natural incompatibility of these forces has been raised into shocking relief by one disciple choosing an unfeasibly extreme interpretation of Young's message. When Kurt Cobain quoted, „It's Better to burn out, than to fade away." In his suicide note, citing Young's lyric as artistic justification for ending his inconsolable anguish, Young was shaken to the bone. Always an advocate of allowing the listener his or her own individual path through a record, he was so devastated by Cobain's personal reaction to a song that was basically written as a celebration of Punk that he was impelled to record the „Sleeps With Angels" album in lament.
Perversely, it is testament to Young's emotive power that Cobain should choose his words as an epitaph, but it is something Young still visibly shudders from. Once a song is out there on the radio, the reasons, it's not anyone's responsibility anymore.
„It's the machine and the fuel. It's over now. I'm not behind the wheel at all. It's gone. It's over."
As for Cobain, he mutters: „I don't wanna talk about that. I just don't know what to say. Obviously his interpretation should not be taken to mean there's only two ways to go and one of them is death."
He laughs a cold, dry laugh.
It's rumoured that Young was trying to contact Cobain at the time of his suicide, that he somehow foresaw the tragedy coming.
„I don't wanna talk about it," says Young. „ I really don't because I respect the fact that he's a guy who did what he did and, y'know, he did what he had to do and I don't wanna get any ..." He falters and recomposes himself behind alarming blue shades. „I prefer to not be involved at all. I certainly don't wanna take advantage of talking about something like that for the interest of somebody else I've never met and selling myself in paper in the process. I'd rather you just left it out It's just distasteful to me."
What Neil Young is talking about when we first meet him is golf. He's a half hour late when he appears, waving cheerily, around the bend at the wheel of a curvaceous powder blue '50s Cadillac convertible. As he pulls into the Mountain View Restaurant. His local bar on the hushed , piney slopes of Skyline, some 20 miles south of San Francisco, he is engaged in a conversation about golf with his longtime manager Elliot Roberts, a man who, over the years, has also worked with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and Jackson Browne.
„Shhhhh", says Roberts theatrically as the Cadillac pulls up in the lot out front. „You can't talk about golf. The press is here!"
„It's, OK," we say, remembering how much Young appreciated Dinosaur's Jr. Version of his 'Lotta Love' on the Young tribute album, „The Bridge", „J Mascis plays golf."
„Yeah," laughs Young. „And Pearl Jam plays golf."
Ah, Pearl Jam, Young's chosen Backing band on „Mirror Ball". There must surely be some measure of making amends on Young's part in the forging of this mutual appreciation. It surely cannot have escaped Young's notice that Pearl Jam - and in particular Eddie Vedder - where both Kurt Cobain's complement and nemesis. Courtney Love has publicly bemoaned the fact that it wasn't Eddie rather than her husband who took that awful option. And, in recoiling from the limelight in horror and grief, it surely isn't too fanciful to suggest that Vedder is seeking solace and strength from Young's battered resilience.
Young says he met the band, „two or three years ago on tour" and immediately established a rapport. „It wasn't that they were good., I could relate to what I would do if I was playing with them. And I could see myself doing it. The music worked. It had this drive. There's this big machine in there. I like that power."
Pearl Jam, like many of their contemporaries, were already covering Neil Young songs in their live set when they met him. But it was only after the shared trauma of Cobain's suicide that they teamed up. Initially, Young invited Pearl Jam to join his annual Bridge School Benefit Concert last year and marked the occasion by reintroducing the „burn out" song 'Hey Hey My My (Out Of The Blue)' into his set despite reports that he would never play the song again. Poignantly placed the set just after 'Sleeps With Angels', Young's requiem for Kurt Cobain, it was a symbolic statement of his intent to reclaim rock music from the darkness. Working with Pearl Jam on „Mirror Ball" can be taken as his next regenerative step.
There is a song on the album that couldn't say it much plainer. It's called 'Throw Your Hatred Down'; one of those songs in which Young miraculously turns the negative into positive through the cleansing power of his sheer physical exertion and his unerring grasp of an epic melody. In other words, like many of Young's great songs, it sounds like what it is saying. It works.
„Throwing Your Hatred Down I kinda hard to describe visually," says Young, struggling to articulate what comes naturally to him. „It is a physical thing that might have been in my head. I still can see this ..." He lunges forward, bringing his arms down from over his head like he's wielding an axe. „ ... but I can't see what it is."
Young is such a physical guitar player that I once described watching him play as like watching a labourer dig a road and „Mirror Ball" is harder than anything Young's ever recorded. It sounds as if it's a work detail breaking rock 'n' roll on a chain gang of fame. Can you picture the movie? Young as the seasoned lag teaching the rookies from Pearl Jam how to keep the spirit alive?
The sessions that produced „Mirror Ball" were raw, quick, sweaty and cleansing; just the way Young likes it.
„That's great. It's not a macho display like, y'know, some bands have this strutting thing where they get up there and move around and they sweat and they pose and they need to work out just to be in shape to go through all that. I mean, those guys are in great shape!"
„But the sweating we do is because we're so far into it that we've forgotten how to not sweat. Y'know, I'm thinking about the breathing and everything. I start hyperventilating, my nose gets really cold and I feel this cool breeze blowing in my face when it's about 110 on stage. It's like you just get to that point where nothing else is there, it's just all gone and you're taking off and everybody is way into it and then the whole crowd goes with you."
„You see, in the '60s, that used to happen a lot. That's what music was all about. Every band would jam on everything and the crowds would go berserk. I don't mean they were yelling for hits. I mean they just became a mass and they were lost in the music. It was truly an idealistic kind of musical experience."
„And I think that happens more today than has happened in the last 25 years, because of this movement and Nirvana and Sonic Youth and related bands like that who have come along and made a big turn away from the mainstream while retaining all the values of pop music. It started turning all of it on the establishment. All this pessimistic music that says, 'You created it, now listen to it!' y'know?' and now people are hearing it."
„It makes a lot of sense to me to do it the way they're doing it. Now people go to a show and people are listening and they're playing and it's one thing. It's a bond that's consistent with the '60s ... Or maybe I just don't have any f---ing idea at all what's going on and this has been fine for years and everybody was doing this!"
He laughs. „The Sex Pistols, yeah, they were getting together, right , and everybody was into it and I didn't notice and I just woke up from a big dream!"
Young laughs again. It's his defense mechanism, his selfdeflating decoy whenever he gets uncomfortably close to articulating how it all works. You see, Neil Young doesn't trust words, never has. The Cobain thing served to justify his suspicion that words and thoughts are not to be relied upon. Feelings and actions are what Young believes in. Put up or shut up.
„What I'm really happy about is that I can see people relating to people who are singing directly to them and they feel the same way about things, about the commercialization of their world and everything being sold before it's even finished and everything being kinda out of control and that their dreams probably won't come true as opposed to, in the '60s, everybody's dreams were gonna come true, y'know, eventually. But here, these kids, they know. You can go all the way through school and not get a job. You can do all these things that we used to rely on are not there."
Young sees in Pearl Jam a genuine attempt to discover a new set of values. Pearl Jam see in Neil Young a man who has, at worst, survived and, at best, positively thrived on sticking to his guns.
„I think becoming cynical is the first step of reaction," he says of the much - publicized slacker / grunge ethos. „But, after that, you can only be cynical for so long, then you move on. It's not that being cynical is not good because it's an expression of this pessimistic thing. It's good to get that out - this is how you feel, then fine, you gotta say that. Better that than carry it around. You might as well unload it. But then, after you've got that out, OK, great, now what's next? That's where Pearl Jam is going and it's good."
„Mirror Ball" was recorded in two short sessions in Seattle's Bad Animals studio back in January and February with Pearl Jam's producer Brendan O'Brien in charge. Young had performed 'Act Of Love' with the band at a Pro-Choice benefit in Washington and the original intention of the sessions was just to record that song. At least that's what Pearl Jam thought.
„I don't like to go in the studio and work on just one song. Some people work for months on one song but I think I'd go nuts. I wanted to try and get more. So I just started thinking about them, who they were and who I was and we tried four songs - got three the first day and one on the second day. Left. Booked two more separate days and got three more the first day. I had no songs, just ideas. For the second day, I was writing the songs the night before and on the morning of the session." He laughs. „They were there, though. They were there OK. Sometimes I have to do that to myself to jar it loose."
„The beauty of the record, for ma, the thing that really gives it a depth, is who's playing and when. Where they decide to play is so great and shows so much more wisdom and than their years. You see, there was no direction. There was not one word spoken to do with, y'know, 'You play here, you play there, let's do this, let's do that.' Nothin', not one word. We just started off, I'd play a little bit on the guitar and show them the changes and then play it and sing it and by the fourth time, it was over."

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