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I always like Neil Young

James (07/07/08 15:23:43) Tag: Billboard Interview

The Billboard Q&A: Neil Young
June 24, 2008
Wes Orshoski
In the spring of 2006, Neil Young was just a year removed from a near-fatal aneurysm when he became so enraged with the war in Iraq that he quickly wrote, recorded and released the protest album "Living With War." Not two months after its release, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young launched their Freedom of Speech tour, during which unwitting fans expecting the band's sweeter side were greeted instead with its serrated edge.

During a three-hour-plus concert, the band played nearly all of "Living With War" and many of the political anthems on which its legend was built, like "Ohio," "Military Madness" and "Find the Cost of Freedom." Despite CSN&Y's anti-establishment roots, the move angered some fans, while inspiring others.

The forthcoming documentary "CSNY: Deja Vu" charts that friction, portraying fans who saluted the group's efforts and those who felt betrayed by them, while also introducing viewers to Iraqi War vets who are now protesting the war as musicians, politicians and social workers. Directed by longtime film buff Young (who uses the alias/nickname Bernard Shakey) and due in theaters July 25, the doc blends concert and behind-the-scenes footage with short news features created by ABC correspondent Mike Cerre.

Billboard caught up with the 62-year-old Young recently at a small, rustic restaurant south of San Francisco, in an area surrounded by redwood trees. Just a few minute's drive from the ranch he's lived on for more than 30 years, the restaurant would be familiar to hardcore fans, as it was featured in the "Unknown Legend" video and on the "Greendale" DVD.

With his alternative-fuel equipped 1982 Mercedes parked in front, on this day Young was particularly excited, as Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced impeachment articles seeking the removal of President George Bush. Young spoke from behind a pair of dark sunglasses, the conversation often drifting toward his passion for finding alternatives to fossil fuels for automobiles, which, he notes, "is bigger than a song."

It's pretty shocking midway through the movie when an irate Atlanta fan tells you to stick it up your ****, and another remarks that he wants to "knock your teeth out" for singing anti-war, anti-Bush songs. How did you react the first time you saw this footage?

Well, we knew that it was happening. That wasn't the first time it happened. Before we even got to Atlanta, we'd experienced that. There were other places. The bull-ometer was pretty high in a couple of places, and I think Orange County was pretty good, Irvine. It was pretty strong there. We had some fights; everything was crazy there. They just went nuts. But they weren't real close to us. We could see them, and they were just going berserk. But Atlanta was very forceful. I mean, they are so passionate about what they felt, and how they feel about, you know, how we crossed over the line and intruded on something that they believed in so strongly. So you gotta respect people, even if they're losing their minds at that very moment, and not talking really eloquently. They have their deep beliefs. So we had to use it, because we're telling the story, and we're trying to tell the whole story. There was a journalistic responsibility involved.

It definitely adds weight to the film.

It does.

Were there times while you were editing the film when you were worried that you weren't portraying things in a balanced fashion? Did you second-guess yourself at times?

You know, I don't even know if it balanced. I just tried to use everything I could that showed both sides. And we gathered everything we had, and we used more negative stuff in comparison to positive stuff, in relation to the total amount of negative stuff and the total amount of positive stuff that we had. Like, in our articles [Young strings pieces of positive and negative reviews of the concerts throughout the film], the pros and cons of the press, the pros outweighed the cons by like two-and-a-half to one. But in the movie, it's pretty even. We tried to keep it even. I assume that's the right way to do it. But tilting the film toward the bleeding-heart liberal is the content of the songs, and that aspect, I can't help that -- that's me. That's how I feel. So I couldn't change that. That was the catalyst, the trigger for the reactions. So the reactions were fairly even, but the source of the trigger is a little bit slanted.

When you watch this film and when you think back on the negative reactions in the audience, is there a face or a middle finger that vividly sticks out to you?

I remember some faces. There's one guy I remember for sure, and he's not in the movie. But there are things that I remember from all tours. [This tour] was a harrowing experience at times, and it's not an experience that I would like to repeat. I think it was a one-off.

Why's that?

I think if I did this kind of thing for the rest of my life, I'd become like CNN and I don't really respect that very much. It's like the same thing on a loop. I don't see the need for that. I like to be a full-length program, not a repeating segment.

Were there times on tour where you would confide in your wife, and say, "I can't believe what happened tonight?"

There was never any sense of giving up or anything. We went from July 4th to September 10th in the tour, and I kind of remember feeling that I was really glad that we weren't playing on September 11th. I do remember that. I said, "Let's not do that." There were moments throughout it where you just shook your head and said, "God, what are we doing?" But the songs were there, the feeling was there, the audience was there, and we were doing it. We planned it. We executed it. I mean, we planned it -- the whole thing aimed at one thing. It was all focused on war and politics and that type of thing.

Speaking of 9/11, you've said that Bush mishandled the empathy that many countries felt for America after the terrorist attacks. In your mind, how could have Bush capitalized on that empathy? What could he have done that would have taken things in a much more positive direction?

Well, I think misleading the country into a war with Iraq by misrepresenting the facts, as the Senate committee has verified that he did, that was the wrong way to go about it. I think that he took a tremendous amount of good faith and good will from around the world and used it very poorly. It's not, "What could he have done," so much as it is, "Why did he do what he did?" I mean, it's just unfortunate that his feelings and convictions took him there, and we're the ones who suffer for it -- to a lesser degree us, and to a greater degree the Iraqis. And we're all suffering for it. And it's just very unfortunate. I just feel badly about it because [pauses] it's not because I hate Bush. I just think he's a strong leader that was going in the wrong direction. It's a bad combination.

A liberal friend of mine in New York saw the Twin Towers fall while stuck in traffic on the Verrazano Bridge. She was so shook up, and remained so scared that in 2004 she voted for Bush, simply out of fright.

Well, he used that. He played on people's fear, instead of people's faith and their real faith, real belief, their real human feelings. They used fear to get where they wanted to go, which is too bad. It's just unfortunate. You know, I empathize with her for voting for Bush and being so terrified that she had to do that. I feel sorry for her. But I think a lot of people probably did that, and it's too bad.

And he needs to be impeached for what he did. I mean, the Senate has verified it. It needs to happen for history. It's like a dirty business. It needs to be taken care of. Nobody wants to be bothered, but it should happen, because do we want to let this go down in history? It's a cancer. It's a blight. It has to be eradicated. You have to look at this and go, "The president mislead the people into going to war, lost 5,000 troops, there's hundreds of thousands of people killed in Iraq, billions and billions of dollars were taken out of the economy for the war, and now we've discovered for sure -- the Senate committee has said, 'Yeah, he did. He lied.'" So what do you have to do to get impeached? What do you need to do? And who are we if we don't do it ... if we don't actually say, "Hey -- the law! You can't do that!"

We place our trust in this guy, and this is what happens. I don't see how it plays out. We've been vindicated by the Senate, who spent a long time investigating it. Yet it's on the second page of the paper. Brian Williams talks about it and goes right on to the next story, and it's like it's 25 seconds. Give me a break! Why fall asleep? America's fallen asleep. America's sleeping through a moment in history that's going to affect us forever. It's gonna be, we're the country who had our Senate investigate and found out we went to war under false pretenses and we didn't do anything. We said, "That's okay. We'll just let that go because we're distracted by oil prices and a new presidential election." So we don't have time to take care of our dirty business. But, man, you got to take care of your house. You can't let that go. What if we have another guy like that, who turns out to be an idiot in 15 years, and he goes, "Well, George Bush did it." What's the precedent?

Dennis Kucinich introduced impeachment articles today, and people think, "Ah, he's a kook," you know. It's like, when are people going to wake up? We shouldn't have big vehicles that use so much gas, but we keep making 'em. It's not, "Big is bad," it's "Gas is bad." Why don't we change that? There are a lot of things to do that we're not doing that kind of bothers me.

There's a scene in the movie where Graham Nash talks about going to hear "Living With War" for the first time and deciding whether he wanted to suit up for this tour. I wonder if there were times when you felt like you were bringing David, Stephen and Graham into something that was ultimately harmful to their bottom line as Crosby, Stills and Nash? Obviously, you play to two different audiences, and touring with them is a lot less of a preaching-to-the-choir scenario.

I guess so, 'cause they've been pretty mellow for a long time, and they haven't done anything. But if you look at the roots, if you look at the original music -- "For What It's Worth," "Ohio," "Military Madness," "Long Time Gone," "Deja Vu" and all these songs that were written back then -- "Immigration Man," "Teach Your Children" -- all that stuff is all rooted in the same message. This is just a different time. So they had a history of doing that, and I thought that was a good thing, because it reached way back for the roots.

Of course, between then and now, they've been singing about things they've believed in, and also just singing a lot of love songs, and a lot of songs that people enjoy, so it could become kind of like date night going to see them. But I put out my record, I was in the band, my last record was called "Living With War," [and] it had "Let's Impeach the President" [on it]. It was on all the networks. [The audience members] had to know something about it. We called the tour the Freedom of Speech Tour. And we went out and did these songs. They had to know something was happening. But there was still an element of surprise, and you saw that in Atlanta, but a lot of people knew what was going on, too. You could see it -- they're talking about it before the show [in the movie]. It was just very complex.

But those guys were into it 100 percent. I mean, Stephen does not like people to not like him, and I respect him for that. And he's a very sensitive guy, so I could understand that, but even with that he wanted to do it. He said, "Yeah, I'll do it," and he sang "For What It's Worth" every day and every night. He played his heart out. But he kept saying, "Well, it's like a political cartoon, you have to see it as that," and he was always trying to soften the blow a little, and that's the way he is, and that's cool. But I think he was with us, and he believed in what we were doing, or he wouldn't have been there. And Crosby and Nash were right there from the beginning, because they don't care so much how the reaction's gonna be. They're not as concerned with that as they are just with singing about stuff that matters to them. And they agreed with the songs, and they wanted to sing 'em.

Continued, Page 2) The Billboard Q&A: Neil Young
June 21, 2008
Wes Orshoski
Over the past 10 years, we've seen a kindler, gentler Neil Young emerge. At Farm Aid a couple years ago, I was struck by how often you sincerely thanked the crowd, and, obviously, you look happier than ever onstage with your wife, Peggi. It just seems like you've lowered a wall of defense.

Well, there's no pretense. I am who I am. They know who I am. I think the older you get, there is some mellowing that happens. But at Farm Aid, I feel like thanking people for being there and for giving their money for the cause.

Seeing you performing with Peggi, it just seems like you're genuinely happier onstage than you've ever been.

Well, we were having fun. We had a good time. We had a great Farm Aid in Chicago a couple years ago. It was unbelievable. It was just after I shot "Prairie Wind." It was in September of the year Katrina hit, and we played Farm Aid, and I had the choir with me from the "Heart of Gold" movie, and Wayne Jackson and the Memphis Horns. That was a great Farm Aid. Anyway, I digress.

There's a moment in the film where Stephen tumbles over a light onstage. It was surely hugely embarrassing for him. Did you hesitate to include the footage?

Well, I showed it to him. I wondered, "What's he going to do. Is he gonna like it or is he not going to like it?" But we were all who we were, and it's a movie. The more uncool we are, the more real it is. These things happen. We certainly didn't plan on that happening [laughs].

In terms of planning out the film, did you sit down and draw out an outline? Did you say, "I want to get X, Y and Z in this film, I want these people in the film?"

No. I met Mike Cerre, who was a correspondent who had been to Iraq and Afghanistan five times. I said, "Embed in this tour and do what you do -- travel in one of the buses, come with us everywhere, and do whatever you want to do, and cut together 10 episodes, like you were cutting together episodes for CNN or MSNBC, and give 'em to me, and that's it. I'm gonna do whatever I want with them. They're mine from that point on. You do what you do, give 'em to me, and I'll do what I do." And that was my direction. I just went for the people, the humanity of the people.

Your publicist told me that you called the film's soundtrack the greatest CSNY record ever yet.

It is.

Why?

Because it's CSNY. Because it really is CSNY. It's not overdubbed. There's no fixes. It's straight from the board. Every once in a while, we make something a little louder, maybe a little bit of bass here and there. But the basic mixes are the mixes that people heard when we were playing it. So it's got rough spots all the way through it, which I think it refreshing, especially considering the subject matter. Why should we polish? Why polish this? Who gives a **** whether it's polished or not? It is what it is, and that's the message of the music. It's what we're doing. If you don't like, you don't like it. If you like it, you like it. But it is what it is. Chroming it is not going to help it.

The more raw, the better, the more exciting.

I think so, and nobody's heard that from CSN.

In the late 1990s, you began singing the song "Buffalo Springfield Again," which seemed like an open letter to your former bandmates in the Springfield. When it was released on then "Silver and Gold" album, it seemed like something of a message to those guys that you were interested in reforming. But, instead, CSNY reformed, and has been an on-again, off-again entity for nearly a decade? Will we ever see a Buffalo Springfield reunion?

I just wrote the song one afternoon sitting in the garden, I guess, somewhere up by my house. No, I don't know, I don't think there ever will be a Buffalo Springfield reunion. There may be for us, but I don't think there will be for anybody else. But, you know, never is a huge word.

You're nearing the long-anticipated release of the first volume in your "Archives" project. What took so long? Has it just been exhausting finishing this first edition?

It has taken a long time. But we had to build a platform for it, because it's a new way of listening and looking at things. We had to build the whole program that it sits on, and that took a long time. We conceived that in the '90s, and we worked on it right until the technology was available to do it. And we couldn't have done it without Blu-ray. I've already started work on the second volume.

Do you have any sense of when that second volume will be released?

No, but it won't take nearly as long, because we have the platform, so now we just tag things and drop them in and they show up in the right place, and the whole thing's organized. We had to build this thing. It took a long time to build it.

In the liner notes to "Living With War," you thank Bob Dylan for inspiration. Did you give him the album? Has he heard it?

I don't think so. I know I didn't give it to him. I imagine he may have heard part of it. He may have heard all of it. I really don't know. I talked to him a couple years ago, maybe a year-and-a-half ago. He really liked a performance that I did of "Walking to New Orleans" on TV. He saw it and he called me to tell me that he liked it. I call him to tell him when he's great, when I see him being great. I like to call him and tell him: "You're fuckin' great. You're still rockin'. You fuckin' really got it." Ya know, somebody's got to tell him. And he is great. You may think that everybody is telling him all the time how great he is, but I don't know about that. Coming from me, I just wanted him to know how I felt, because I love the guy. I think he's a great artist. So I want to be supportive, whenever I see him really step up. So he returned a favor to me. We have a friendship.

I still listen to the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary tribute live record, on which you appear. It's one of my favorite discs.

Is "Tom Thumb's Blues" on that one?

Yeah, and your version of "All Along the Watchtower" as well.

I'm doing those two songs on this tour in Europe. I'm opening with "Watchtower" and I'm doing "Tom Thumb" in there somewhere.

So many musicians say that what they are doing now is a reaction to their previous project. Obviously, you released "Chrome Dreams II" since the Freedom of Speech tour, and you've been working on "Archives." I'm guessing you want to leave politics alone right now.

Well, I'm not really focused on the music right now, as far as new music. I have a couple songs in the back of my head, and if they come to the front of my head, I'll write 'em. When they arrive, I'll deal with them and drop everything else. But I'm not focused on [it]. I'm not looking for anything. I'm just kind of here, musically speaking. But as far as my life goes, I'm totally focused on my car, building a car that ... Our goal is to eliminate roadside refueling, with a big car, not some little rinky-dinky thing. Something that a big guy like you could get and drive a couple hundred miles. An American car that doesn't need oil, that doesn't need gasoline. Doesn't pollute, doesn't need gas stations. That's what I would like to make.

Is this something you will patent yourself?

There's a Web site called linkvolt.com and it tells the story of the car and what the mission is, what we're trying to do. There's a lot of interesting scientific stuff in there about ways to do things that are unconventional power sources. We're really into onboard fuel creation -- you make fuel as you go. And we're into the people's fuel, something everybody can get that we can use as fuel. So that eliminates a lot of things, but that does leave air and water, so those are big, good things. I figure using dead stuff is not working anymore. We're paying the price for using dead stuff and we can't use any more dead stuff. It pollutes, it's ruining our environment and we're fighting over it now. It's killing everything. So we have to get by it.

My focus is eliminating roadside refueling. That's the goal of the project. Will I ever get there? I don't know. But I'm aiming at it and that's what we're shooting for, that's our goal. The closer we get to it, the happier we are. If we actually get there, we'll go down in history, but if we don't get there we'll go down trying.

Somebody's got to do it. We've gotta get by this. We can't do this anymore. I mean, we have wars being fought all the time. It's an endless damn war over energy. You take away oil, and what do you have to fight about? People are so addicted and reliant on it. We think we have to have it to maintain our lifestyle. Are we that stupid? I mean, it's the 21st century. What happened to ingenuity? What happened to the first ideas? What we were doing before gasoline came along? We used electricity. We used that, and it was working great. We were using ethanol and electricity. We were growing the fuel and we were using science, and physics, physicists, scientists and farmers, and it was working, and we weren't polluting.

So, you know, we're a lot smarter now. We have computers, we can track people around the world, we can track environmental things, and we can track science projects, physics projects around the world. There are French people doing experiments and putting them on YouTube. There are so many things like that out there by guys working in the garages and physicists working in labs at night, and making their own things on their own dime. We don't have to listen to Ford and GM and Mercedes and go, "Well, these engineers that work for them, that's not the Holy Grail."

So what is the Holy Grail? I mean, there must be a Holy Grail. We've got to have somewhere to go. We've got to have a way out of this. Having a way out of this is not fighting. It's not trying to work out the politics of who's right or wrong, red or blue. That's all bullshit. That's all a waste of time. It's like chemotherapy. You're not focused on the problem. The problem is, where the hell is the cancer coming from, and how do you stop it before it starts? What can you do? What can we replace whatever it is that's causing it? What is it?

So this is the problem with oil. How do we deal with it, how do we get rid of it? How do we eliminate the tentacles of power that come in and touch us at every gas station, where we make our contact with our biggest enemy? Not that they are our enemy on that, on one level, but on another level, they're the biggest threat to our existence. We're feeding it. We go up and down the road, we go from here and there, we stop off, we pay 'em some money, get more of the stuff, and get another jolt, and away we go. It's terrible. We can eliminate roadside refueling and we can change the world. That's bigger than a song. That's what the deal is.

I'm 62 years old, and I've got nothing else to do but something like that. That catches my fascination. And there's so many smart people around, and so many intelligent people in the country. There's laws being ready to be broken everywhere in physics, science, everything -- or bent, maybe not broken, but bent, or reinterpreted, re-understood. There's always something new being found that people thought wasn't there. That's where things come from. So that's my request.

There's a lot going on. I can smell it. It's close. We're close to having a solution, or getting close to a solution. We're moving in the right direction. This is the age of innovation. There's no way that we're not going to figure out a much better way of doing it.

Continued, Page 3) The Billboard Q&A: Neil Young
June 21, 2008
Wes Orshoski
Wow. That should have been on CNN, unedited. But it would have been chopped up into four different segments.

Yeah [laughs], and they would play it over and over again. And somebody would come on and say, "What bullshit! That's ridiculous. You can't tell me we don't need oil. That's just not realistic." No, you need oil, I don't need it. That's why you feel that way [laughs].

What are you hoping to gain from the release of the film, and the DVD that will follow it?

Discussion. Debate. Open forums. And it does do that to people. You'll see what happens when this film comes out on the Internet. You'll see people talking. It'll be interesting. It'll open up a thing, and that's what it does. That's what the music did. That's what happens. It happens in the audiences. I saw families fighting within the families, the kids wanting to stay and the parents going, "No, we've got to get out of here. This is no good." The parents dragging the kid out, and the kid looking back. And we're not talking a 10-year-old, here. We're talking college kids being driven out by just straight-laced fathers, the classic father image of strength. Not much compassion, but a lot of strength.

Is there a certain amount of disappointment you have in your own generation? Was that one of the reasons for doing the Freedom of Speech tour?

Actually, I'm encouraged by my own generation, because they still remember enough. They're the ones that are trying to move forward. The youngsters today, the ones in school, the college kids, they're not threatened like my generation was when they were in college. They're not threatened with going to war, the imminent draft, that they're going, that they're going to be in the lottery, that they're gonna go, and maybe die. Kids today are thinking, "Will I work for Google? Am I going to be lucky enough to work for Google? Or whom I'm going to be working for? Am I gonna get a dotcom job? Maybe I'll be working in an environmental company. Maybe I'll get some cool job. Maybe I want to be a designer, maybe fashion. What am I gonna be doing with my life?"

They're not going, "I don't want to go to Vietnam. I don't want to go to Afghanistan. I don't want to go Pakistan." There's no threat so there's protest. So our generation, my generation, still remembers what we went through, and they still have the fire. They're making a lot of noise about Bush. When I see them out in the crowd, I'm not disappointed. I'm proud of them, because they're still there. Because they remember what it's like.

The only difference is that this president and this vice president were smart enough to realize that Nixon's **** up was the draft. What undid that whole thing was the draft. So they didn't have a draft, and they disguised it as a lean and mean army, and they reinforced it with mercenaries and Blackwater, but they didn't talk about that. So they kept 100,000 guys going back and forth, some five and six times, ruining their lives. Many of them are never going to live a good life again because of this, if they live. And their families are broken. Everything's broken. But they let that happen, so that they would not lose their jobs, and their influence, and their power. That's the difference. That's why this generation is not challenging this administration, because this administration has not challenged this generation, like in the old days, like they did. They didn't tell this generation it had to go to war. They told this generation to go to college, go to school and do whatever you want to do. Only 140,000 people that we enlisted at shopping centers are gonna go.

In the movie, you talk about not singing the song "Ohio" for years, because you didn't want to capitalize...

I thought that right at the beginning. That's what bothered me about the song in the first place, and that's why I rarely sang it. But in this tour, it took on a context of being part of history, so we played it again. But I did many tours with CSNY where I would hardly ever do that song. If you saw us do it, you saw us on a rare occasion. Crosby loves to do the song. He just wants to do it every night. And I just can't do it. It's too personal, it's too real. It's about people who actually died that we feel were our audience. They could have been in the first row at our shows. These were students. That's who we played for. That's why I didn't want the cameras at Woodstock, because they were in between us and our crowd. This is the way it started. It started with a total connection. There was no fa�ade, there was no style, there was no posing. It was a real deal happening. And it had so much energy that people are still living off of it today. They're still building off of it.

A family member sent me an email recently entitled "How Long Does the American Empire Have?," which noted that each of the world's great dynasties have crumbled eventually. Are we nearing an end to the American dynasty?

No, I don't think so. I think potentially we're going to lead the world through innovation. We're going to solve the problem of consumption that we created. That's what the whole thing is about. That's the goal. Not everybody knows it. But that's what's happening, in the back rooms, in the labs and the garages, in the physics clubs, and the science labs around the country and around the world. That's the real thing. That's what's really happening. All this other **** is just window dressing.

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