Home > Work > Shakey: Neil Young's Biography
1 " Young has a personal relationship with electricity. In Europe, where the electrical current is sixty cycles, not fifty, he can pinpoint the fluctuation --- by degrees. It dumbfounded Cragg. "He'll say, 'Larry, there's a hundred volts coming out of the wall, isn't there?' I'll go measure it, and yeah, sure --- he can hear the difference." Shakey's innovations are everywhere. Intent on controlling amp volume from his guitar instead of the amp, Young had a remote device designed called the Whizzer. Guitarists marvel at the stomp box that lies onstage at Young's feet: a byzantine gang of effects that can be utilized without any degradation to the original signal. Just constructing the box's angular red wooden housing to Young's extreme specifications had craftsmen pulling their hair out.Cradled in a stand in front of the amps is the fuse for the dynamite, Young's trademark ax--Old Black, a '53 Gold Top Les Paul some knot-head daubed with black paint eons ago. Old Black's features include a Bigsby wang bar, which pulls strings and bends notes, and Firebird picking so sensitive you can talk through it. It's a demonic instrument. "Old black doesn't sound like any other guitar," said Cragg, shaking his head.For Cragg, Old Black is a nightmare. Young won't permit the ancient frets to be changed, likes his strings old and used, and the Bigsby causes the guitar to go out of tune constantly. "At Sound check, everything will work great. Neil picks up the guitar, and for some reason that's when things go wrong. "
― , Shakey: Neil Young's Biography
2 " -You don't like confrontation?Sometimes I'm really down for confrontation. It's kind of like a changing thing. I don't know why.Must be something that makes me differentiate between things I want to be straight-ahead about, and things that I DON'T want to be straight-ahead about. I think that most people have that mechanism. But some people handle it differently- they just go, "Well, this is something I don't wanna do that I gotta do." Some people think, "This is something I don't wanna do that I'm gonna do- but kinda half-assed." I think I fall into THAT category, heh heh heh. "
3 " A queen of the layered California seventies-rock sound, Ronstadt was amazed by Young’s approach in the studio. “The way Neil makes records, oh my gosh. I have a very, very meticulous way of working. I’m an oil painter—I take a long time to get all the parts real in tune, get ’em right with multiple tracking, doing it over and over. With Neil you don’t get the chance—you’re lucky if you’ve figured the part out, he does things so fast. Neil’s a sketch artist. He just washes the color over it, it’s done and it’s brilliant. He’s really got an uncanny instinct to go for the throat. "
4 " I’m just brutally fuckin’ honest about goin’ ahead and doin’ what I have to do. But it’s not that I can’t sense people’s feelings. People are hurt.Whenever you move forward, you leave a fuckin’ wake.—Yeah, and your wake’s a BIG one.It’s a big wake. A lotta destruction behind me.—Are you very good at saying goodbye to people?No. I don’t like long goodbyes.—HA HA HA. Sometimes you don’t like ANY goodbye at all!Well … some goodbyes are more subtle than others. Sometimes only one of the people involved knows that it’s a goodbye. But that’s because——YEAH?????I guess it’s because I’m chickenshit and I don’t want to hurt people. And that’s a weakness of mine. I could be more honest about certain things. See, these people that say I’m so honest—I’m not that honest. "
5 " What he’d done is he’d wired his house as the left speaker and his entire barn as the right speaker, and they played Harvest. And at the end of it Elliot Mazer comes down to the shore of the lake and goes, ‘Neil, how is it?’ Neil turns around and shouts, ‘More barn! "
6 " How in the heck can I wash my neck if it ain’t gonna rain no more? "
7 " A couple of months after the release of Stars ’n Bars, Young abruptly changed direction again. He surfaced in Santa Cruz, a friendly but somewhat seedy hippie college town not far from his ranch, playing guitar in a local outfit that included Moby Grape’s bass player, Bob Mosley, and Jeff Blackburn, whom Young had encountered during the Springfield days. "
8 " I went and bought a half ounce of cocaine and, in one week, assembled the entire Live Rust album and movie soundtrack. In a week. Y’know, it’s not the drugs, it’s the attitude that goes with ’em. - David Briggs "