Forever Young
COVER STORY
From E25 exhausted beauty. Young’s lean, impressionistic lyrics often nail complex emotional states without a single wasted syllable; Kurt Cobain even quoted his ‘‘It’s better to burn out than fade away’’ line in his suicide note.
Musically, too, Young is unusually adventurous. He’s happy to pick out a delicate country tune on a banjo one minute and blast out feedbackheavy hard rock the next, making brief stopovers at punk, rockabilly and even primitive techno along the way. Young has never been afraid of changing technology; he’ll quite happily experiment with synthesisers or run his
‘You and me are getting on great, ’cos you’re asking interesting questions, but if you ask irritating questions you get a whole other person.’
quavery voice through a Vocoder if he thinks it will serve the song.
Technology is getting the better of him today, though. ‘‘Hang on. I gotta find some earphones. It will make it a lot easier for me to hear you.’’ An unholy scraping rebounds down the line as Young scratches around next to his laptop. And then – silence. We’ve been cut off.
He calls back. ‘‘Sorry about that. Where were we?’’ We were talking about the diversity of your records. How do you decide what kind of album to make next? ‘‘I don’t. Really, there’s very little thinking involved. When I made Americana it was because I wanted to play with Crazy Horse, and I was writing my book and remembering all those old songs I did with my real early band, The Squires. Crazy Horse were already in town, so we started putting together a few old songs, and it started sounding good, so we dug up a bunch more. There was no plan. We did three or four sessions every month, around the full Moon, then we had it done. When that was over, we just kept goin’ ’cos it was sounding so great, and that’s when I started writing new songs for Psychedelic Pill.’’
Why does he only record on the full Moon? You will find out if you read his autobiography. You’ll also learn far more than anyone should ever need to know about long-time Young obsessions, such as model trains, electric cars, and the unbearable crapness of MP3s. Written during down-time while recovering from a broken toe, Waging Heavy Peace reveals that Young once hung out with mass murderer Charles Manson at a party, got busted for drugs with Eric Clapton, shagged around a lot and got a few STDs, and has been sober for the past year after 40 years of heavy pot and alcohol use.
The prose has about as much structure as a jelly, but all that discursive rambling gives a much clearer idea of how his mind operates than would have been the case had he used a ghost writer.
‘‘A ghost writer?’’ gasps Young with faux-alarm. ‘‘I can’t imagine anything scarier. Using a ghost writer would be terrifying! But yeah, I just let the book be what it was, which is pretty loose. That’s the way I am, and if somebody doesn’t like it, they ought to just give the f---en book to somebody else! I don’t care! That way somebody else doesn’t have to buy it ’cos it’s already been bought. Some people really like it, and some people are real upset it doesn’t follow a straight line, but those people should just go buy a straight-line kinda book. It’s just a story. Take it or leave it. It is what it is.’’
And with that, in a great clattering of clangs that sounds like an out-take from his Live Rust album, the connection breaks again, and this time, there’s no call back. It appears that my audience with the man who calls himself ‘‘Bernard Shakey’’ is over.
And then, two hours later, Young does call back, this time on a borrowed cellphone. He had forgotten to discuss his beloved Pono music system, ‘‘pono’’ being a Hawaiian word meaning ‘‘righteous’’. According to Young, the reason music has become so devalued in contemporary culture is not that the songs are rubbish; it’s just that digital music sounds so bad. Driven demented by substandard audio, Young has spent a fortune developing a new highresolution digital music download system. ‘‘Pono’s an obsession for me. I can’t stop thinkin’ about it, because I really want to change something that’s wrong.’’
He goes rummaging in the fruit bowl for a suitable metaphor. ‘‘When you were a kid you’d go to the store and buy these beautiful oranges. You’d peel off the skin and each little slice would be bursting full of flavour, and you really dug it, you know? Now, your orange costs far more than it used to, and when you eat it you think ‘Hey! There’s something wrong with this orange! It doesn’t taste right. It’s still an orange, but it’s lost all its colour and flavour and freshness’.’’
Most digital music’s exactly like this, he says; you can still recognise the song, but something’s seriously wrong with it. ‘‘I’m saying, what if music sounded so good, you just wanted to sit and listen. It’s no longer just crappy wallpaper music, but so detailed and rich you can’t get enough of it. Music can be really rejuvenating, and we have the technology now to hear digital music with that sort of clarity and depth, so that it sounds just like what the artist did in the studio. I’m hoping to have this little Pono player on the market by 2013.’’
And with that, our time is up, and what do you know? I am unscathed. War stories abound in the music industry of terrible encounters with this man. Some journalists have been made to wait days for scheduled interviews; others have found him hostile and monosyllabic.
But, today, Neil Young has been pretty charming. It seems I got lucky. ‘‘Well, the people who say I’m hard work to interview are usually the people who asked me stupid questions. You and me are getting on great, ’cos you’re asking interesting questions, but if you ask irritating questions you get a whole other person. Really, you get what you deserve. Interviews are hard work, so I just do ’em when I feel like it, which isn’t often. After I’ve finished talking to you, that’ll be it for a whole year. I have too many other things to do to spend time on interviews, and on those rare occasions when I do wanna do ’em, I can, because nobody ever says ‘No, sorry, can’t do it. I’m way too busy to talk to Neil Young’.’’ Neil Young with Crazy Horse New Zealand tour: March 19, TSB Arena, Wellington, Ticketek, ph 0800 842 538 or ticketek.co.nz; March 21, Vector Arena, Auckland, Ticketmaster, ph 0800 111 999 or ticketmaster.co.nz.