Reading “Shakey”. Neil Young's biography.
August 19, 2003
Reading “Shakey”. Neil Young's biography. Biographies seem so wrong when its someone you respect. With every sentence you’re waiting for the next beautiful myth to be dispelled and the lining to fall out of every cloud. I stopped with bios many years ago because I found they were anti creative. I never got any good ideas from them. They took me in and spat me out minus a few idyllic notions. . .feeling a little like I had to wash and would never quite get clean. Nothing can ever make me think anything other than good thoughts about Neil Young and this is why. . .
I have an autographed picture of Neil hanging in my studio. I never ask musicians (only hockey players) for autographs much anymore but this was when I just did it without thinking. More on the whole idea of autographs later. It was July 30th 1983 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver and (thanks to the magical interweb) this was the set list:
1. Comes A Time
2. Motor City
3. Down By The River
4. Soul Of A Woman
5. Old Ways
6. Old Man
7. Helpless
8. Dance, Dance, Dance
9. Heart Of Gold
10. Don't Be Denied
11. Sail Away
12. Powderfinger
13. Ohio
14. After The Goldrush
15. Transformer Man
16. My My, Hey Hey
17. Mr. Soul
18. Sugar Mountain
19. Jellyroll Man
20. That's All Right (Mama)
21. Wonderin'
22. Kinda Fonda Wanda
23. Bright Lights, Big City
24. Get Gone
25. Everybody's Rockin'
26. Do You Wanna Dance?
It was the tour where he played acoustically, then with a band, then did a couple of songs in his “Trans” set-up with the vocoder & big screen and finished the night with the full “Neil & the Shocking Pinks” band. He had a backstage camera with a reporter relaying the action to the big screen in a reality TV style.
My friend David Macanulty and I bought single seats to the show outside. I ended up on the floor in front of the stage and he ended up somewhere else. After the show we rendezvoused and he said he had been sitting beside Neil’s cousins and they gave him this thing. He held up this shiny cloth sticker and asked earnestly, “what do you think this is”? I said, “its a backstage pass”. Through sheer fluke we found the oldest man ever to work security in any arena catacomb and convinced him that David and I were both Neil’s cousins and I had left my pass at home. This does not work anymore.
When we got to the concrete antechamber in the bowels of the coliseum there was nobody there. The band and Neil were in their dressing rooms and the other guests had taken the conventional way around whilst we had snuck in through the marshmallow security zone in the back. There were two green garbage cans in the middle of the empty concourse with their lids off. We peered inside to find them full of delicious beer on ice. We inhaled as many as we could as quickly as we could. I was 21. This was quite a lot of free beer. We were thirsty and broke. The guests started to trickle in as we looked obviously inconspicuous. Eventually the band came out and we pretended to look like we belonged by standing near the people who belonged but not quite close enough that they would engage us in conversation.
Neil eventually came out. Soon a circle of people formed and I was in it. Neil was standing beside me and talking with the others looking at me...us...in the small circle. Through my dizzying beer filter I realized it was his family ( the cousins I think ). Just as they made plans to go to Fresgos for something to eat Neil turned to me and smiled in a way that said, “I think I’m supposed to know who you are but I don’t so I will smile and be warm and see you later at the restaurant and figure it out then . . . or maybe I won’t”. My legs were feeling like old celery and I was acting on sub molecular impulses. All rational thought left me and I held up the program I had earlier found on the floor and said, “I wonder if you could sign this for me”. He said, “sure” and opened it up to a nice portrait in the middle of the book and signed it in the perfect spot. As he smiled and handed it back I was struck by something that I would later experience every time I met a person I had seen in pictures or on TV hundreds of times. Their two dimensional image would now be freakishly altered to 3-D. Their physical being had actually entered your space and its life size form appeared odd shaped and gangly. My floating brain could no longer stop my swimming tongue and I said quietly, “did you know that your head seems much bigger in person than it does in pictures”. He stopped, turned, looked at me . . . and then ... he laughed really hard in that real Neil Young laugh and patted me on the back. This is how people should be.