Gruff diamond
 
Burhan Wazir
Sunday April 7, 2002
The Observer

In an exclusive interview, Neil Young, country rock pioneer, model train fan and grunge godfather, tells why his past weighs him down - and talks for the first time about Kurt Cobain's death 

Back in the autumn of 1971, Neil Young recalls inviting Graham Nash to Broken Arrow, his sprawling ranch in northern California. Nash, one quarter of America's biggest-selling group, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, had asked to hear his friend's recently completed Harvest record. Broken Arrow, spread over 140 acres, houses peacocks, cattle, llamas, corrals, barns and a mountain-top swimming pool. And Harvest - a Seventies landmark that brought country rock to its widest audience - had been conceived in a studio on the estate. Young rowed Nash to the middle of his lake. His roadies, meanwhile, set up a pair of concert-sized speakers, hauling one into a barn on the far shore of the lake. They placed another by a window inside the house. As the opening bars of 'Out On The Weekend' began to filter across the water, Young busied himself with coordinating the volume levels from the boat, yelling, 'I need more barn!' one way, then 'I need more house!' another. 'I was trying to get the warmth of the sound across,' he said, sitting in an LA restaurant last Tuesday, 30 years after the fact. 'I needed the space to allow the sound waves to breathe. Music needs to be otherworldly.'

In the case of Neil Young, 'otherworldly' might be considered an understatement. His recorded works, generously preserved over 37 solo albums, have an outlandish honesty. Even now, his voice still sounds, to all extents, generation-proof.

Before Harvest, there were monumental albums with CSNY and his previous group, the constantly warring Buffalo Springfield. And of the solo sets, each sounds robustly different from the next. Country jams, punk hits, acoustic narratives, blues workouts, big band soul ballads and pile-driving rock anthems. He has followed up Top 40 hits with commercial disasters - in the Eighties, he was, bizarrely, sued by his then record label Geffen for handing in an album that didn't sound like a Neil Young record.

Taken individually, the records are examples of Young's distractions and preoccupations over a 40-year career. Together, the albums show an almost mercurial need for independence. It's not a career strategy but a personal necessity. There he is, always working, but as deliberately obscure as he wants to be.

I find him, in 2002, still running from his place in musical history as if it points to an early grave. He declines most interview requests, preferring instead to keep doing what he has done for most of the past 40 years: touring ('I love my bus and I love those small two-lane roads') and recording with new musicians ('Every day is a clean slate').

His friends described him to me without exception as 'intense', 'shy' and 'incredibly honest'. Two of them, one a former lover, laughed when I asked them to sum up his independent streak: 'Neil is a typical triple Scorpio,' they both said.

Young laughed out loud last week when I related to him the thoughts and anecdotes of his acquaintances. 'Hah! A triple Scorpio!' He poured himself some green tea and frowned at the taste. His history is etched on his face - those wrinkles, the prominent sideburns, the eyes set into a deep gulf of optimism. We expect stars of his magnitude to crash and burn. Or at least to succumb to the temptations of plastic surgery. But Young looks almost childlike. Certainly better than Nancy Reagan, who had earlier hobbled past me to get to her table.

'Well, I don't know much about being a typical triple Scorpio,' he said, solemnly. 'But I must be intense. I'm pretty sure I am. As a person I have this huge baggage, this huge coat I have to wear all the time. I can take it anywhere. And unless you don't recognise me or know nothing about me, I'm wearing this coat. It's my history, or whatever other people think about me before I open my mouth. It's not good or bad: I just wish it wasn't there. It muddies the water.'

I have made several attempts to interview Young. Early last year, when I was granted access to Crosby, Stills and Nash in New York, Young politely declined to speak. He never takes press inquiries on show days, I was told. More recently, though, he agreed. Three weeks ago, I flew to San Francisco as CSNY criss-crossed the Western plate on their US tour. Young, unfortunately, fell ill. He rescheduled the interview for Seattle. But I came back empty-handed after he succumbed to a serious cold. In LA, on Tuesday, he apologised. 'I'm sorry about that,' he said. 'It was a long way to travel.'

He should know. In March 1966, at the age of 20, Young threw in the towel on his native Canada and moved to Los Angeles. He was looking for glory. He drove the 2,000 miles in a Pontiac hearse: the car was home for several months. For a while, he had it parked outside a house in West Hollywood. And, while looking for gigs and recording contracts, he used the family's post box to receive his correspondence. He'd make appointments to meet people at the car. He joined Buffalo Springfield, 'the greatest band in the US', according to Roger McGuinn of The Byrds. But the group was racked by bitter in-fighting between members.

His second group, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, came close to fulfilling Buffalo Springfield's promise. But Young, a loner at best, would often break ranks to find other projects.

When I met him, he looked fit: lean and full of coiled energy. The previous evening, during a three and a half hour CSNY show at the downtown Staple Centre, Young premiered four new songs from his latest record, his thirty-eighth, Are You Passionate? As his three partners stood still Young pulled at his guitar like a man trying to reel in fish double his weight. And while he never said it he seemed to be having fun.

Are You Passionate? is his most bruised collection of songs since 1994's Sleeps With Angels, his eulogy to the late Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain. Recorded almost entirely with the world-class accompaniment of Booker T and the MGs - previously the house band for Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin - Are You Passionate? shows a velvety restraint that has been missing from recent excursions.

More specifically, the 11-track collection demonstrates a set of anxieties unique to men of his age. In Young's case, the panicky realisation of his daughter's coming of age. And his admissions of emotionally failing his wife, Pegi.

The record's opener, 'You're My Girl', sets the lamenting tone for the album. Over a square blues riff, Young mourns the impending loss of his daughter, Amber - she is off to college this November. 'Well I lit a candle on the fourth of July/ But it didn't bring you back to me.' Later, on the meditative soul of 'Mr Disappointment', Young offers an apology to his wife for a lifetime of long absences: 'I'm taking the blame myself/ For living my life in a shell/ And now I'm breaking out/ But will you still be there?'

'It's just real life - it's real,' he told me. 'And sometimes music is the best way to express things for me. So if I have a lot of things on my mind, or things I need to say, music works well for that. A lot of the things on there are not things you think about all the time. I mean, they're not on the surface. They're going on inside.'

Only 'Let's Roll' - a dog-tired three chord jam that takes its inspiration from the final words of Todd Beamer, a passenger who uttered the words to his wife over his mobile phone before attempting to take control of the 11 September hijacked Flight 93 - is a blemish. Undoubtedly well intentioned, the song pursues a brand of simple iconoclasm Young has avoided throughout his career. It's the only bum note on an otherwise flawless record.

'It will be misinterpreted,' he says, a little defensively. 'I wrote it because the story struck me as an act of heroism so pure - so incredibly pure. But it will be misinterpreted. As all the things I have written so far. There is no interpretation. Songs are for people to interpret. So for me to say there is misinterpretation is to cloud the issue.'

Like much of his previous work, the new album deifies the natural world. 'I've always felt better away from the city,' he says. 'Nature is a retreat, an enigma.' In Young's songs, love falls victim to raging storms; his protagonists search for the truth amid an ocean of lies; and spiritual clarity often arrives in the form of clear skies. A few weeks before meeting him, I emailed the administrator of a Young-inspired internet fanzine, 'The Thrasher'. I outlined a sketch for my interview, and asked the 'The Thrasher' for his thoughts.

I received a reply in 15 minutes. 'Ask him about the moon,' read the message. I had considered the concept - the moon has been a symbol of Young's preoccupations throughout his career. Half an hour later, 'The Thrasher' e-mailed me a list of 26 Young songs featuring the moon. Each title came with the relevant lyric pulled out.

'The moon has a huge effect on me,' said Young, adding that its cycles seemed almost to dictate his personality. 'I mean, I go up and down, in and out. When I was just a little kid, I used to get this feeling and I remember my whole body would start to get this funny little chill. And it would happen at a certain time and it would come and go. And it's part of the moon, part of the way things are - the seasons and all of those things.'

He tells me he still feels uncomfortable giving interviews. Even socialising is an agonising process. Carrie Snodgress, the softly-spoken actress who dated Young from 1969 to 1975 and lived with him at Broken Arrow, says: 'I remember most nights I would go out and invite down the folks from the local mountain to supper'. One night, Young came back from a walk. The house guests immediately stood up to attention. 'And I'll never forget what Neil did,' says Snodgress. 'He just walked right past them all in the living room and jumped out of the window. I mean, he did it to be funny. But on another level it horrified him to be thought of as a presidential figure.'

Young laughed fondly as he listened to the tale. 'It might be shyness, I guess,' he said, eventually. 'I guess I'm just uncomfortable. I'm not really very sociable when it comes down to it.' He winked: 'That may come as a huge surprise. But just hangin' out with a bunch of people? I can't do that. All those voices - which one do you listen to first? If I'm on the phone and the other line goes, I have big problems. I can't just switch between conversations like that.'

He watched me light a cigarette, and said: 'I tell you what I think. I think I should be lying down on a couch for this interview.'

It took me a while to realise that for Young, modesty is a natural habitat. Odd, given that both his voice and lyrics have been a cornerstone of movements like punk and grunge. He memorialised the Kent State University killings of four students by National Guardsmen in 1970 in a protest benchmark called 'Ohio'. He took an anti-corporate position against rock sponsorship in the Eighties with songs like 'This Note's For You'. And, in the early Nineties, he reinvented the sonic boom of rock music with Weld, an album of angry and infinite feedback.

The double set befriended him to a new generation of musicians - grunge kids like Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr and Pearl Jam. He is, however, modest about all these associations. Young is, I sense, rarely the man his listeners impute from his songs.

'There is an honesty with Neil that can be scary,' Jim Jarmusch, director of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, told me. In 1995, Jarmusch approached Young to score the soundtrack to his metaphoric road movie, Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp. 'I asked him if he'd be interested,'says Jarmusch, 'and Young said: "I never plan anything. Let's just see what happens"'. Jarmusch later mailed Young the completed script. 'And I got a phone call back saying. "I never read scripts. I never plan anything. Let's just see what happens".'

A few months later, however, after Young received a rough cut of the movie, Jarmusch was invited to Broken Arrow. 'We went driving,' laughs Jarmusch, who remembers trips in Young's '51 Chrysler, '56 Cadillac and '50 Roadmeister hearse. 'Neil loves his cars. I think he just wanted to know if he could figure me out. And when he was happy, he agreed to do the soundtrack.'

In a typically unorthodox move, Young eventually recorded the soundtrack in real time. He watched the film three times to lay down different instruments. 'And that shows,' says Jarmusch. 'The score he did was like a collage. In the context of the movie, it took on a role of its own.'

Jarmusch's experience is testimony to a primary facet of Young's personality. His attention to detail, it seems, knows few limits. He has fired his backing groups on a number of occasions for musically failing him. In the Sixties, he walked out of CSNY sessions when he felt the other three weren't pulling their creative weight. And he was so dismayed with the final mixes of his 1979 record, Comes A Time, that he bought back all 140,000 copies and had them delivered to his ranch. 'It sounded nothing like the original masters. I had 'em on the ranch for a while. I dunno where they got to. I was thinking of using them as roofing tiles.'

In 1991, Young invited discordant art-rockers Sonic Youth to tour with him. Kim Gordon, the group's bass player, remembers one show in Buffalo: 'I looked down at the crowd and all I could see was a sea of people holding up their middle fingers. He took us out deliberately. He wanted to challenge his fans.'

One night, Gordon offered to cook chicken stew for Young on his tour bus, named after his song 'Pocahontas'. As she cooked, Young sat adjusting a toy train set, another of his long-term obsessions. He has 750ft of track laid out at Broken Arrow and in 1995 he bought a toy company, Lionel Trains, to help him communicate his passion to his son, Ben, who has cerebral palsy. Young reconfigures the electronics to provide auditory and visual feedback: sound and movement that stimulates interaction with his son.

'Part of the train set was a model cow that made moo-ing noises,' laughed Gordon. 'And Neil wasn't happy with the cow sound. He didn't think it was realistic enough. So he kept fiddling with the electronics. He'd then get the cow to moo, and he'd ask us what we thought. Was it realistic enough? Did it need some more work? What was wrong? He was at it for an hour or so. It was amazing how a toy cow could maintain his interest for so long.'

'Sometimes, I try to stop that,' Young admitted. 'Other times, I know that if I stick with it, I can get to a certain place I need to get to. I can generally feel good about it. I have a way of knowing when I'm just obsessing and not progressing.' He smiled mischievously: 'My idea of what's far enough, and other people's ideas of far enough might be different, though.'

His answer leads to a comfortable silence. I eventually ask him if he finds his thoughts turning to Kurt Cobain. The pair never met, but publicly credited each other's music in the press. He tells me how he tried to reach the Nirvana singer in the week he died.

'I read something and someone told me a few things that made me think he was in trouble that week,' sighs Young. For the first time, he is not looking directly at me, but staring off across the table. He describes how he tried, over three or four days in the first week of April in 1994, to reach Cobain. 'I even had my office look for him.' By that Friday evening, however, Cobain had taken a life-threatening dose of heroin and shot himself.

In a suicide note, later broadcast by his widow, Courtney Love, Young found himself inextricably linked with the Nirvana singer's death. Cobain had ended his letter with an old Young lyric: 'It's better to burn out than to fade away.'

Destroyed by grief, Young hit the studio and issued his bleakest work, Sleeps With Angels. The record was a sickened reaction and Young sounded inconsolable. It was released with a moratorium on interviews. 'I've never really spoken about why I made that album,' Young told an interviewer in 1995. 'I don't want to start now.' But today, he opens up.

'I like to think that I possibly could have done something,' he says, concentrating on finding the right words. 'I was just trying to reach him. Trying to connect up with him.' He pauses and thinks again. 'It's just too bad I didn't get a shot. I didn't get a shot. I had an impulse to connect. Only when he used my song in that suicide note was the connection made. Then, I felt it was really unfortunate that I didn't get through to him. I might've been able to make things a little lighter for him, that's all. Just lighten it up a little bit.'

Health, or the pursuit of it, has dogged Young all his life. He was afflicted with polio at the age of five. In the early Seventies, two of his best friends, Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, overdosed on heroin - and Young released the stark and confrontational Tonight's The Night in response. In the Eighties Pegi was given a fifty-fifty chance of surviving cancer. Young himself is epileptic and suffers from a spinal deformity.

After the interview, Young went back to sit with his manager, Elliot Roberts, who has been with him since the Sixties. He ordered a mixed leaf salad, and inspected a test record pressing of Are You Passionate? His label will this year start to re-issue his entire body of work, liner notes intact, on vinyl. 'I'm really getting into it,' he said, then, shaking my hand: 'Stay safe on your travels. Always stay safe.' And he left. For Oakland, for Broken Arrow, for those backwoods two-lane roads and yonder. Still racing to flee all those expectations. Trying, as he once put it, to leave the Top 40 behind.

Are You Passionate? is released tomorrow on WEA. Neil Young and Booker T & The MGs play at the Brixton Academy on 21 and 22 May.