Young Neil - Neil and Me

B ESIDES THE ILLUSTRIOUS sources quoted in the text, many thanks for information, advice, and help to Grahame Reed, Paul Makos, Andy Cox, Comrie Smith, Jack Harper, Mary Froman, New Musical Express editor Neil Spencer, Toronto Life editor Marq de Villiers, Elliot Mazer, Joel Bernstein, Shirley Wilson, Doris Adler, Peter Goddard, Steve Babineau, all the mighty roadies, and editors Jennifer Glossop (1984 and 1986 editions), and Peter Buck (the 1997 edition).

The author makes grateful acknowledgement for permission to use the following copyright material:

To Silver Fiddle: For four lines of Ambulance Blues, copyright 1974, and one line of Yonder Stands the Sinner, copyright 1973, both on page 52. For six lines on pages 523 and four lines on page 324 of Dont Be Denied, copyright 1973. For two lines on page 167 of Motion Pictures, copyright 1974. For fifteen lines on page 173, four lines on page 175, one line on page 183, and four lines on page 184 of Tonights the Night, copyright 1975. For six lines on page 174 of Albuquerque, copyright 1973. For three lines on page 174 of Roll Another Number (For the Road), and twenty lines on pages 1745 of Tired Eyes, both copyright 1975. For one line on page 235, one line on page 277, and one line on page 351 of My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), copyright 1978. For two lines of Coastline, and one line of Stayin Power, both copyright 1980, both on page 240. For four lines on page 264 of Lookin For a Love, copyright 1975. For two lines on page 272 of Like an Inca, copyright 1982.

To Cotillion Music Inc. and Broken Arrow Music: For twenty-two lines on pages 623 of Sugar Mountain, copyright 1968. For two lines on page 132 of Tell Me Why, copyright 1970. For two lines on page 163 of Southern Man, copyright 1970. For three lines on page 272 of After the Gold Rush, copyright 1974. For four lines on page 276 of Cripple Creek Ferry, copyright 1970.

To Cotillion Music Inc., Ten East Music Inc., and Springalo Toones: For two lines on page 92 of I Am a Child, copyright 1968 and 1974. For six lines on page 94 of Nowadays Clancy Cant Even Sing, copyright 1966. For eight lines on page 96 of Out of My Mind, copyright 1966. For four lines on page 96 of Flying On the Ground Is Wrong, copyright 1966 and 1974. For five lines on page 96 of Broken Arrow, copyright 1967. For four lines on page 97 of Mr. Soul, copyright 1967 and 1974.

To Broken Arrow Music: For seven lines on page 151 of Old Man, copyright 1971.

All rights are reserved by the copyright owners for all of the above song lyrics.

H E HAD BEEN ON HIS RANCH about five years the first time I went to see him there. Hed asked me a couple of times but the distances were great and he had his life and I mine, so usually I saw him only when he was on tour and came to Toronto. In the middle 1970s he asked me again. Pegi was only on the edge of his consciousness then, their marriage three years away, and he was living a bachelor life after a brief marriage to Susan Acevedo in the late 1960s and an early 1970s relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, which was almost as brief but in 1972 did produce their son Zeke, my first grandson. Maybe I had sounded down in a letter, or maybe he just wanted to be in closer contact again, because he called and said, Any chance you can get out here for a while?

The evening I arrived in San Francisco he was recording, so he sent a friend to meet me. We drove south into San Mateo County then turned off on the dark and narrow forest road into Neils property. A few miles later I could see two distant tiny lights puncturing the surrounding night and then we were pulling up at the kitchen door of Neils modest old house. When the engine stopped I could hear a piano playing, and when I walked in and he left the piano and embraced me I could feel his thinness and the thoughts flashed of the roly-poly little boy he had been and then the gangling youth and now this man.

We hadnt seen one another for more than a year, and we had a beer or two and talked while he showed me around. It didnt take long. In the tiny, and only, bedroom his bed was set on a pedestal, close enough to a big pot-bellied woodstove that he could feed it without getting out of bed. Everything was well used and comfortable. The washstand outside his bedroom door held a porcelain basin old enough that it had no drain but was on a swivel that allowed it to be flipped over for emptying into a pail below. The living room had an old dining table and chairs, two pianos, a rocking chair, other old-fashioned furniture and lamps. In an hour or two, at bedtime, he took me into a room hed added to the original house to hold speakers, turntables, and stereo equipment. A single bed stood in the middle of the floor. Zekell be here tomorrow and this is his room, he said. But you use it tonight. At the time Zeke, then three, was living in Los Angeles with Carrie but visited Neil often.

When I wakened early, Neil was still asleep. I roamed outside in the nearly total country silence of the sunny morning. By his house, set among great oaks, was a pond dotted with mallards, geese, coots, and other water birds. When I walked down the lane towards the low-slung verandahed house of his farm manager a hundred yards away, dogs barked. Barns and other well-worn farm buildings and corrals stood beyond. Bison grazed on steep slopes nearby, and I could also see herds of shaggy Highland cattle; hed been trying to cross-breed them to get either the worlds shaggiest buffalo or humped cattle, depending on the roll of the genes. A little later, after Neil made breakfast, we got my bags and he drove me across the ranch on a narrow winding road through giant redwoods and onto a 700-acre spread hed bought not long before because it abutted his original 140 acres. Not letting someone else buy it was privacy insurance. Soon we swung left past some small houses and into a glen of towering redwoods through which a fast stream ran. At the bottom of the glen beside the stream was a sprawling white ranch house where coffee was on and people were moving around Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot, and Frank Sampedro of Neils band, Crazy Horse, and a few others including a young woman who normally worked as a Playboy bunny, the friend of a friend of Neils not there at the moment. A slim and lively American girl in her early twenties, Ellen Talbot, married to roadie John Talbot, lived nearby in what was called the Little Red House and, since everyone there was expected to pull weight, cooked and cleaned and shopped for the floating population, now including me, that lived in the ranch house. When I went shopping with Ellen in and old pick-up later she asked me if I had heard of a writer named William Saroyan. I said he was one of the heroes of my boyhood. Hes my uncle Willie, she said.