I was in the grocery with my wife the other day and while she bee-lined for the meat section trying to cope with the two hungry wolves at home, I checked out the books. There big as life was a book I knew would written someday but I had figured it was still many years away. The book was Neil Young's autobiography. I looked at the pictures, sped read it and put it down.
My connection to Neil Young began when I was a child in Louisiana. It survives to this day with some twists and turns. When I left Louisiana I was about eleven years old. My two sisters, my dog and I were told we could only bring what would fit in the trunk of our old Impala. I gave everything I had to my neighbourhood friends in the space of an hour. Save my guitar. That was non-negotiable.
My father announced the move the night before at supper with no explanation forthcoming and we all understood not to ask. My best friend's family owned the original Barq's at that time and he gave me a six-pack through the open car window as we sped off on a three day manic road-trip to some place in Canada called Vancouver. I am still particularly fond of good root-beer.
A few months before we left I had seen the copper-haired girl down the corner sitting in her yard playing guitar and singing. She was six or seven years older than me and I was too shy to ask her the name of the song she kept practising. I would just sit in my own yard and listen. One day they played it on WLCS 910 AM Baton Rouge and I got a fix on the name and the composer. It was Heart of Gold by Canadian, Neil Young. I loved the song, I loved the pretty girl and I decided I liked this Neil Young guy very much.
When we got to Canada we went straight to Lynn Valley in North Vancouver. It was December and the snow was drifted up and over the five foot fence of the elementary school I was to attend. We moved into an old beat-up apartment on the corner of Lynn Valley Road and Mountain Highway. I lost my savings learning the intricacies of a strange kind of pool called snooker. I lost to the manager's son and wound up shovelling the snow for the apartment building all that winter.
I heard another Neil Young song on the North Shore radio station CKLG 730 AM with host Terry David Mulligan and it sank into my soul permanently. It was called Old Man. I started school after winning a fight with the principal who insisted on placing me back a grade due to my bayou origins. He said I'd never catch up with the French. I told him to give me the two week Christmas vacation to catch up. Little did he know that one of my hobbies was studying languages at home with Berlitz books I bought with money I earned.
At home we children each got a gray and red striped Zellers blanket, a pillow, a toque and some Wellies. I learned half the French book for that year during the holidays and was more than ready come school-time. The teacher then took it upon himself to insult me in any way he could. I was placed in a chair at the back of the room and given a stack of Al Capp's satirical comic, Lil' Abner to read. He asked me in front of the class if we rode alligators barefoot to school in Louisiana. He was a pompous sack of shite and in spite of his continued efforts I maintained very good grades.
I brought my guitar to school for something to do at recess and soon met the other pickers. One guy who became pals with me was Howard Young. He lived across the street from the school. He had a Martin guitar and we made friends quickly. We went over to his place at lunch and played our guitars. He had the sheet music to the Harvest album of Neil Young and it had the chords to Old Man.
I went everyday to practice that song until I learned it. I couldn't then and still cannot read sheet music and Howard only read a little. When you like a song as much as I liked that one, it didn't matter. We figured that thing out. At this time I learned that Howard was Neil's cousin. I was truly blown away. I asked all the usual questions. Had he met him and talked to him? Howard replied in the negative but repeated what he had heard from his parent's conversation's about Neil and his family. There was another guy, Leif who was a musician and is still today with his own band in New York City. He played guitar and trumpet.
Outside of those two friends and maybe two others, I was culture-shocked, out-gunned and running on empty. Neil made a song he called Don't Be Denied. It was about his parents splitting up and him and his mother moving from Ontario to Winnipeg. It contained the lyrics, “The punches came fast and hard. Lying on my back in the schoolyard.” I lived the lyrics along with him due to the teacher-fuelled antagonism of my classmates.
Neil made another song about childhoods he called Sugar Mountain. It contained the lyrics, “You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain, though you think your leaving there too soon. Now you're underneath the stairs and you're giving back some glares to the people you just met and its your first cigarette.” I had my first cigarette in a hollow tree in Lynn Canyon with a little English girl from my apartment building.
One day after school my mother told me we were going to Beaumont, Texas without my father. We had been only six months in Lynn Valley. It was abrupt and now I got to wave good-bye to my few hard-won new friends. I still had my guitar and I heard Neil on every radio in every town we moved to. I played Old Man every day and taught myself to play some other songs of Neil's.
My father appeared suddenly in Texas three days later and the family moved two or three times within Beaumont and finally to my birthplace of Houston. I was back living on the same street I had lived on when I was born but now as a freshman in grade nine. I left all my new Beaumont friends and made only one close friend in Houston.
During my time in Houston heroin flooded in from Mexico and the returning addicted Vietnam vets. As it happened, all the boys in my neighbourhood were about ten years my senior. I watched them graduate, go overseas and many of the ones lucky enough to come home did so with monkeys on their backs. I went to more funeral parlours and morgues in a year in Houston than in the balance of my life before or hence. Many victims were in their teens and I saw first hand The Needle and The Damage Done.
Halfway through grade nine we moved back to Lynn Valley in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I found myself at the local high school and I found that my few friends from elementary were still there. We had all grown a lot but we regrouped although the bonds of friendship were never as tight as before. Howard, Leif and I still played guitar. We were old enough now that everyone was busy with jobs and other pursuits. My parents split up yet again. I thought of a Neil Young lyric from his album On The Beach. The song was Walk On. It said, “Sooner or later it all gets real. Walk on.”
My mother remarried with an alcoholic and one night I was having dinner with my new step-father and his two daughters. The eldest girl had brought along her boyfriend. Her father was skunk drunk and he greatly disliked the young man his daughter had chosen. The boyfriend was suffering a barrage of verbal abuse in three languages and he reached his limit of toleration. My stepfather was a Danish pipe-fitter and the boyfriend was a Chilcotin cowboy and there was going to be blood. My step-sister brought my guitar and asked me to play. I took the instrument and played Old Man. My step-father fell happily asleep, the cowboy cooled his jets and all violence was averted.
I quit high school two weeks before graduation after changing high schools and towns three times since grade nine. I only saw Leif twice more after that and Howard, I never saw again. I worked with Howard's mother when I was twenty and took a job as a bank manager in training at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in Lynn Valley. The job was not my cup of tea and a lady I worked with phoned me once and warned me to get out while I still could. I heeded her advice. I thought later of a lyric from one of Neil's songs that said, “You're all just pissing in the wind. You don't know it but you are. And there ain't nothing like a friend who can tell you your just pissing in the wind.”
Howard had been with me when I purchased my first real guitar to upgrade from the drugstore guitar I had dragged around learning on since the Christmas of 1966 in Baton Rouge when my parents presented me with it. I bought myself a Yamaki and it cost all my savings from working at a Lynn Valley butcher shop.
That guitar was my friend and companion where ever I went. I traveled between Texas and the Valley many times by bus, car, plane and any other way I could. I wanted to spend time with my grandparents. I bought my Swedish grandpa the Harvest album. He was a man who had spent fifty years at sea and had been orphaned at birth. He heard the song Old Man and made me play it for him every time I was back in town. As soon as I turned eighteen and got my passport, I crossed the ocean and for the next several years I and my Yamaki saw many ports of call. It was a pillow, a desk, a weapon, a wallet and an art gallery of stickers.
I was on a Greyhound bus once, crossing the Texas pan-handle and there was a fellow from Oklahoma on board. He was about my age and he loved Neil Young's music. Turned out he knew how to play all the songs that I didn't and I knew the ones he'd yet to figure out. I asked the bus driver if we could swap songs. The driver was another Okie and he got on the loudspeaker and asked the passengers if they'd mind being entertained for free. They said unanimously that we could play.
For the next couple of hours we played and sang one for one taking turns. We both sang every song we knew how to play and found out we knew about three in common. The folks loved every minute of it and I remember them saying that it should always be like that. I opened with Old Man.
On another trip through Texas, while passing through Houston, I got to see Neil Young at an outdoor concert at the University of Houston. It was the only time I have seem him with my own eyes. He sat in an old oak chair in a white shirt and played his new song Long May You Run.
I married a girl from North Las Vegas when I was twenty who had a horse in her yard. It later struck me that she may have been my Cowgirl In The Sand. She met me because a friend of mine from Beaumont was getting married in Vegas and had asked me to play Neil Young songs at his wedding. I met the girl during these festivities because she was also a guitar player and songwriter who loved Neil Young's music.
In my travels around the world, Neil Young songs have been a passport in themselves. I remember being in Monterrey, Mexico with a buddy. We were without accommodations and it was late at night. A pretty young woman saw my guitar case and asked if we would escort her home. Due to the hour, she said it wouldn't look right in her culture to be out alone as an unmarried woman. She promised to show us a church where we could find safe haven on the way to her casa.
We arrived at a massive colonial church and she got on the phone and called Padre Nacho who was away in Mexico City on church business. I heard her mention that I could “toca las canciones de Neil Young, muy bien” when she was describing to the priest who it was that needed refuge for the night in the church. We were admitted to the hallowed ground and the lady said she would send some friends to keep us company.
About thirty minutes later a half dozen people came to the church with several guitars. Blessed with the finest acoustics I have ever enjoyed, we had a Neil Young jam session that I shall never forget. Later, I was in Baja and I wanted to hike to the sea. It was quite a few miles away and I began to become lost after several hours in the solar furnace.
An old man showed up from a side trail in the baked clay and sand landscape. He was a fisherman and most of his teeth were gone. You could tell he would misdirect a person just to giggle about it later. Accordingly, I didn't trust him so I didn't ask him for any directions. We spoke a bit about the weather. Hot. Yeah, Hot!
I asked him if he liked guitar music. He nodded with a look that betrayed his negative expectations of whatever the gringo would do next. As I played the first few bars of Old Man, his face split into the biggest grin I have seen this side of a Halloween pumpkin.
“Pinche cabron! Neil Young!” he exclaimed and did a Mr. Bojangles dance in the sand until the song was over.
He put his arm on my shoulder like a father would have and gave me perfect specific directions to what I sought and warned me of the hazards on the way.
Once, in Paris Metro there was a guy playing for spare francs. He had a guitar festooned with old coins he had glued on. His upturned black beret was empty and he was barely strumming in his discouraged state. Busy people buzzed to and fro and ignored him completely. I was between guitars and dying for the chance to wrap my hands around one. I asked him if I could play a tune.
I looked so road-worn that he agreed after sizing me up. I opened with Old Man and followed with a song of my own composition called White Trash. People started to drop francs into the beret at a rate that alarmed both of us.
While gas-fitting in North Vancouver, I was on a call in West Vancouver in a rich neighbourhood. The client was Terry Jacks, a local one hit wonder star. His duet with Susan Jacks, Seasons In The Sun was a chart-buster when I first set foot in North Vancouver. He had a massive house with an indoor swimming pool. I was hooking up gas ranges, water tanks, furnaces, pool heaters and boilers. Terry was at home as I worked.
He was wearing a blue fuzzy bath robe in the kitchen chatting to me while I hooked up the pipes. We heard a loud thump on the gigantic glassed front wall facing the sea. A bird had gone wrong and crashed into the glass. His cat had duly pounced on it before he could go outside to save it. He came in the kitchen, held it in his hand and sobbed for half an hour.
There were some photos on his granite top in the kitchen and when he had settled down and fetched us mugs of coffee, I asked if I could look at them because I had seen guitars. The Polaroids were dated from the weekend prior. He said that he had thrown a party and some friends had popped by. I recognized Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell straightaway. They were sitting around the very indoor pool that I had just done the new piping for.
I was passing through Lake of the Woods and Kenora, Ontario once. It was during a local event called the Smoke and Fish Derby. I had been hitch-hiking and was ready for a rest. The derby was an annual event and the prizes were bricks of marijuana. One for the smallest fish and one for the largest. It would begin in the morning but the festivities were well underway. I found a pub. I met a local guy and we got to talking and drinking beer.
A guitar player showed up to entertain. He was real good and though I had never heard of him by name, I knew I had heard his playing before somewhere. My drinking buddy asked me if I had my guitar on me. I said I hadn't brought it this time. He looked pained and said that the performer was coming to his place after the show and I could play his guitar there.
True to his word we all go into a boat and went to a small island in the lake where my host lived. The picker was called Doc Tibbles and he played for Gordon Lightfoot. That was why I recognized the style. He said I could play his guitar. I respectfully opened the case of this masterful finger-picker and bluegrass style working studio musician.
When I lifted the instrument out of his case I saw some Polaroids in the bottom. I asked if I could look at them and was told yes. They were taken in Hawaii on a beach. They were dated about a week prior. They were shots of Doc and Neil Young relaxing and playing guitars. I had a good talk with Doc and played him my rendition of Old Man. When the morning came, the guys tried to give me a guitar to take to my destination which was Morocco. Then they drove me out to the highway ramp.
Years later in Vancouver a few hundred yards from where I typed this essay up, I lived in a duplex. I had finally gotten a copy of one Neil Young album that I had wanted for many years. I do not have a complete collection nor do I want one. There are certain songs Neil has written that I cannot ignore and others that I don't care much for. That album I did want and I finally got permission from an old friend to use his vinyl to make myself a cassette copy of it.
The song on that album I wanted most of all was Comes A Time. I played the tape day after day. One evening in the Fall I was on the front walk chopping some wood for the fireplace. The tape was playing as usual. We were having high winds and intermittent heavy rains. I went in to stoke the fire. A bit later I went on the porch for a smoke. Comes A Time was playing and I left the door cracked open so I could hear it.
In the song the lyrics say, “Comes a time when your drifting. Comes a time when you settle down. Comes a light. Feelings lifting. Lift that baby right up off the ground. Oh, this old world is spinning 'round. It's a wonder tall trees ain't laying down. There comes a time.”
The line about tall trees laying down happened to exactly coincide with a massive gust that toppled a tall cedar across the street and it did lay down on the power line taking out the electricity on that side of Main St. until a hydro crew came to buck it up with chainsaws. I went back to my fire.
I don't idolize Neil Young and wouldn't call myself a fan. There is something running through his music that vibrates close to something that runs through me. I get many of his lyrics. I have found his truth all over the globe from Squamish to Manila.
It is like climbing a mountain and someone is ahead of you going the same way. You see traces and hear reports of them from other people coming down. You never see them save for fleeting instants through the trees but it is a solid comfort to know that they are there. Neil, we are not out of the woods yet brother, but lots of us have your back.
fin