It is 1986 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the gig has not gone well. Backstage, Neil Young is laying into his bass player, Billy Talbot, for screwing up a song, but the besieged Talbot gives as good as he gets.
“That’s why we practice!” Young shouts, as the camera rolls. “Everybody knew the (expletive) arrangement!”
“I knew the arrangement as well as anybody did,” Talbot shouts back.
The words become more heated, and it seems as though any minute Talbot and Young will be breaking beer bottles on each other’s foreheads. But before they do, the action shifts to an almost comically austere setting: a room with a washing machine and a chair, in which Young sits. He now has nothing but praise for Talbot.
“Billy’s the center (of the band), plays these big notes,” says the mutton-chopped guitarist, looking balefully at the camera. With Talbot and the rest of Crazy Horse, Young says, he achieves a unique sound, a “feeling” he gets nowhere else.
The scenes are from a new movie, “Year of the Horse,” by Jim Jarmusch (“Stranger Than Paradise,” “Mystery Train”) , which will open in theaters in September. And like many of Jarmusch’s films, it approaches its subject from an unconventional perspective – by giving co-billing at the top to the band that has played in Young’s shadow for most of the last three decades. Crazy Horse is reduced to an afterthought in most rock histories. It is a band that has consistently been referred to as an “overachiever” by musicians who can play more notes in a single solo than Crazy Horse can in an entire concert. Yet Jarmusch shows how deeply the musical and personal fortunes of Young, Talbot, guitarist Frank “Pancho” Sampedro and drummer Ralph Molina are intertwined.
“I am the guitar player in Crazy Horse,” is how Young describes himself at one point in the film, and it’s clear he isn’t being facetious. Instead, as Jarmusch makes clear by interspersing live footage, shot on grainy Super 8 film, with interviews and archival tapes, the relationship between Young and Crazy Horse resembles a long, edgy rollercoaster ride.
“People seem to think it’s a piece of cake, playing with a band this long, that it must be easy,” Young says in an interview from a restaurant near his home south of San Francisco. The incredulousness rises in his voice as he considers the scene in Jarmusch’s movie of him and Talbot arguing, and it’s as though the scene from 10 years ago is still fresh in his mind. “Trying to do something vital — with edge — you can’t let it slide.”
Ever since snatching Talbot and Molina from a northern California bar band called the Rockets in 1969, Young has scaled the heights with Crazy Horse on Olympian albums such as “Rust Never Sleeps” and “Ragged Glory,” and sunk to the hellish depths, with the heroin-overdose death of original guitarist Danny Whitten (whom Sampedro replaced in 1974). He also has taken frequent hiatuses to work with outside musicians while the members of Crazy Horse wondered when, or even if, the next call would come from their leader.
“It’s the only way to keep fresh,” Young insists. “I’ve always taken off and played with other people because I never want to overdo any one thing. The challenge is how to keep it real and vibrant. Who cares what style it’s in if the thing you’re doing is something that matters?”
But the members of Crazy Horse care deeply about whether they will work with Young, for economic as well as artistic reasons.
“We’ve never had a serious falling out,” Talbot insists in an interview from his home in San Francisco. “But there have been times when Neil’s wanted to do other things, and we’ve learned how to persevere. In the early years I took a lot of different jobs to keep my family going, and survival got pretty tricky. But we had faith that it was meant to be, and that somehow we’d always work again even when things weren’t going so great between us.”
For most of the ’90s, the hiatuses have been less frequent, and Young and Crazy Horse are exploiting one of their most fertile collaborative periods since the glory days of the ’70s. Further proof of their one-of-a-kind partnership arrives on June 17 with the release of a live double-CD, “Year of the Horse” (Reprise), which includes a dozen songs from a 1996 tour, none of which overlap with the performances documented in the Jarmusch movie. In addition, Young and Crazy Horse will headline this year’s H.O.R.D.E. tour, which arrives at the World Music Theatre on Aug. 3 (although Young recently was forced to cancel his summer European tour when he injured a finger in a kitchen accident).
Yet Jarmusch says he could understand how Crazy Horse’s role in Young’s music could be underestimated even by longtime listeners.
“I’d been a fan of Neil Young’s for a long time,” Jarmusch says in an interview, “but I didn’t know much about Ralph, Pancho and Billy. I was asked to do a video for them on the last album, and hanging out you realize that these guys are not sidemen, that this is a band and that these guys are integral to what Neil does.”
That relationship extends well beyond musical ability, because as Sampedro readily admits in the movie, “There are plenty of (musicians) that can play circles around all of us.”
Together, it’s magic
But these four middle-age warriors transcend their limitations when they’re cranking together.
“Something happens that I still can’t quite explain,” Talbot says. “But it’s like something begins to push all of us, and pretty soon it’s one big wave and we’re riding it. You don’t question or analyze something like that. You just appreciate that you don’t get this feeling with any other group of musicians.”
On the “Year of the Horse” CD, the quartet plunges into extended versions of Young warhorses such as “Barstool Blues” and “Danger Bird” and recent epics like “Slip Away” and “Big Time” that suggest a journey more than a song. Both the movie and the CD focus on the more adventurous side of the band, the longer, epic pieces such as “Cortez the Killer” (seen in the movie) instead of the more tightly formatted songs.
“Neil is a great songwriter, but together they create this sound that when you hear it, it’s like being carried off by a pterodactyl, and that’s the side of the band I was after,” Jarmusch says.
That he was able to get close enough to the band to do that is in itself an accomplishment. The movie is peppered with Sampedro’s off-color comments directed at the man behind the camera: “You come in here asking a couple of questions that are gonna sum up 30 years of insanity . . . cutesy stuff in some artsy film,” the guitarist says, with a half-smile that indicates he just might be serious. “(You’ll) never get it all.”
Jarmusch says that when he was hired last year to shoot a live video for Young’s “Big Time,” the band never cued him when to expect the song during their long sets at a bar, as though they were testing the director for the bigger assignment that lay ahead. “I’d spend the whole time waiting through three sets for that first chord,” says Jarmusch, still mystified by the experience. “I think Neil did it that way on purpose, but I’m not sure what I was supposed to learn.”
Talbot says he and the band weren’t testing the director, but “we weren’t going to change the way we operate just for him, because it would have been phony.”
Says Jarmusch, “It’s not like you’re dealing with a rock band but a motorcycle gang or a ship of pirates. Everyone has a job to do, and it’s not like they’re looking for input from outsiders. And Neil was very casual about my involvement from the start. He liked the way the video looked, with the Super-8 film that gave it sort of a raw, tactile feel, and he said you can hang out if you like and make a movie, or you can throw it out after it’s all done. It was a not very calculated thing.”
That seems to describe most of Young’s artistic decisions over the last three decades, which have seen him working with and without Crazy Horse, making expansive guitar rock one year and singing simple country ballads the next, turning down an opportunity to tour with Lollapalooza in 1995 and telling the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to take a hike when it invited him to attend his induction along with the other members of his old band, Buffalo Springfield, a few weeks ago.
He says he hooked up with the H.O.R.D.E. tour this year because “It’s not one of those trendy things or a new deal that’s considered really hip,” he says. “The bands that started it years ago were really committed to it, and the commitment paid off for them. That’s the kind of feeling I can relate to.”
“Feeling” is a word that comes up constantly in Young’s vocabulary, and his willingness to act on it can make him seem inscrutable even to those who have worked closely with him.
“I made a movie about him and I can’t claim to have figured him out,” Jarmusch says. “Neil is a contrary — he will do things backward to understand them from a different perspective. He is stubborn in that way, but in a positive sense, because it leads him to new places in his life and his music. With his music, he draws a circle around himself and he’s adamant about how he works. That’s why he’s worked with the same people for so long, because he wants things set up exactly the right way all the time. That way he’s able to pull things from deep inside himself when he performs.”
The images that resonate from Jarmusch’s movie are those from the candle-lit stages of Europe, Young stomping around in his boots and baggy shorts, straw hair flying in the wind, guitar flailing, his band hunched in a tight circle around him as though holding a seance.
“Go ask the fans in some small town in Iowa what that means,” Talbot says. “To me, that’s where we’re at. The stuff that gets written down about us is not necessarily the way it is. It’s the people who come to the shows. They hear the end result, and it gets them in their heart.”
MORE ON THE INTERNET:
Find more about Neil Young and hear audio of Greg Kot commenting on Jim Jarmusch’s documentary at www/chicago/tribune.com/tempo
RATING YOUNG’S ALBUMS WITH–AND WITHOUT–CRAZY HORSE
Is there a difference between Neil Young albums and Neil Young and Crazy Horse albums? You bet. With the Horse, Young indulges his raw, rocking muse, and it is this aspect of his career that has made him one of the few ’60s heroes to remain relevant in the post-grunge ’90s. But his discs without Crazy Horse represent an important side to his art, the experimental detours into country, techno and rockabilly that keep him from going stale even as they frustrate some of his listeners.
– Young’s best with Crazy Horse:
“Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” (1969): The template for all future Young-Crazy Horse jams was set by “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand.”
“Tonight’s the Night” (1975): Harrowing drama in the wake of the heroin deaths of roadie Bruce Berry and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten.
“Zuma” (1975): With “Cortez the Killer,” Young’s unfettered guitar playing at its best.
“Rust Never Sleeps” (1979): The electric half of this disc is arguably the hardest rock of Young’s career.
“Ragged Glory” (1990): A return to form with its dreamlike guitar epics.
– Young’s weirdest without Crazy Horse:
“On the Beach” (1974): Spooky and insular, Young sounds like a rocker jaded before his time.
“Trans” (1982): Young plugs into the techno age.
“Neil and the Shocking Pinks: Everybody’s Rockin’ ” (1983): Straight rockabilly. Possibly a parody.
“Old Ways” (1985): One of Young’s periodic flirtations with straight country music, and one of his most sentimental.
“This Note’s For You” (1988): Big-band blues.
