Waging Heavy Peace (32 page)

With David Briggs, backstage at the Roxy nightclub in West Hollywood, 1973.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

O
nce, when Buffalo Springfield did a show in Albuquerque, I went for a ride in a rented car with Bruce Palmer and cruised the back roads around town. There was a road called the Old Indian Trail that ran along the edge of town and had a wonderful view of the mountains and the old Indian country on one side and the city of Albuquerque on the other.

As we were driving along we found an old roadside antique shop and stopped to check it out. Quite a selection of stuff was inside. There were a lot of old glass bottles and some old statues. The place had a vibe I really liked, and I spent a long time just walking around looking. I finally saw something in a corner I wanted: a bow and two arrows. The arrows were handmade, with iron tips that were jagged-edged and very sharp. They looked like hunting arrows. The arrows were long, very straight, and the tips were different on each one. The bow was very plain and I think it was lemonwood. At least that’s what the old man at the shop said.

Anyway, the arrows had real feathers on the ends, tied with twine that was neatly wound around the quills. They looked like authentic Indian arrows to me, although the iron tips were different. Maybe they were obtained from a white man, a trader. So I took them up to the counter and paid for them, along with an old Indian blanket I found, and when I got back to Laurel Canyon and my little cabin there, I stuck the arrows in the wall by throwing them at it and letting them stick.

I always took them with me whenever I moved to a new place, and I would again throw them at the wall and let them stick wherever they were.

They went to Malibu when Stephen found a house on Malibu Road and the Springfield lived there. I had a little separate place below the garage where we put up some paneling and a sliding glass door. It had an ocean view. A decorative llama rug was on my floor. A kerosene lamp was on my Monterey Spanish dresser. The arrows were stuck in the wall. When Bruce was allowed a second chance and returned to the USA with the help of lawyers, he got busted for the last time near that Malibu house, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway on acid without a license. That was really the beginning of the end for the Buffalo.

Later I moved to Topanga and stuck the arrows in the wall there in that house the same way, by throwing them at a wooden wall and letting them stick. Eventually, I packed the bow and arrows away in the back of my ’51 Willys Jeepster and drove north on the 101 to move to my new ranch. When we were done renovating half of the living room, I leaned the bow up in the corner, threw the arrows at the wall, and left them right where they stuck for the first time. Every once in a while now, when Pegi and I move pictures around, we take the arrows down and I throw them at the wall again in a new place. They are still there for us to enjoy after all these years, whenever we return from our travels to our wonderful ranch home.

Of course, our little cabin has grown, and if you listen really closely on a misty morning, you can still hear little Amber’s bare footsteps running gingerly down the long hall to the living room. At night, when a fire is flickering in the lava rock fireplace, you can see those time-aged and untreated redwood planks glowing in the warm reflection—pierced by two arrows from Albuquerque. I like to take a little bit of the past with me when I go to a new place, and those arrows really ground me. It’s odd, but the way Pegi likes those arrows makes me feel like she knows me.

—

D
avid Briggs’s house in Topanga was known as Old Topanga Ranch and was hidden in the trees just off Old Topanga Canyon Road. I would visit David there, and we would listen to records and talk about the songs and records we were working on. There were a lot of good times.

On the weekends or at least on sunny days, we would all be outside around a fire pit or pitching horseshoes. Kirby, David’s old friend from Wyoming, was there with us a lot, as was Shannon, David’s wife and the mother of Lincoln Wyatt Briggs, David’s son. LW, as he was called, was a great kid. Hannibal and Attila were David’s two dogs, brown shorthaired hounds, who were always around in the living room somewhere. David produced a few records during this time with Spirit, Nils Lofgren, and Murray Roman, among others. Briggs is known to have driven several bands crazy with his temper and his rants about the inadequacies of certain musicians and bands. Subtlety was never David’s thing, although he did work his magic in some pretty curious ways. His reputation grew and became legendary, and some musicians were actually scared of David.

David once said, “If you want to fight someone big, hit them first and run like hell!” He was fearless. But of all the records I made with David, what I most remember is his dedication to getting a great performance on tape at any cost. “Be great or be gone.”

One time we traveled across the country from Key West to San Francisco together in Pocahontas. I was driving and David was navigating. When we got to the Rocky Mountains, we decided to give Independence Pass in Colorado a shot. It was about twelve thousand feet or so at the summit, and then it landed in Aspen on the other side. We were imagining all the starlets we would meet there, so we tried to take that two-lane road over the Rockies in a forty-foot-long bus. It was the wildest ride I have ever been on. When we got to the peak, there was a curve on the side of the mountain with a sheer drop down several thousand feet on the left side and a rock wall straight up on the right. The road was about fifteen feet wide at that point, less than two lanes, and slightly narrower than on a straightaway. I couldn’t see around the curve because the rock wall was cutting down my angle. I swung the front end out over the line a bit to make it around the curve, when suddenly a car appeared coming the other way!

Quickly I turned away from it and simultaneously heard a sickening scraping sound on the right-hand side of the bus where it had kissed the mountainside. We couldn’t stop up there or anywhere, so we just kept going around the curve and down that road. We had peaked the summit and were on our way down into Aspen, and after about twenty minutes of driving we got to a place where we could pull the bus over and take a look. Holy shit! There was a gaping slash in the bus. The generator and the air-conditioning unit were both heavily damaged. We continued into Aspen and went for a series of beers. David was drinking Mexican coffees, a favorite of his, made of coffee and tequila.

When we exited the bar, we checked into a hotel to regroup. The next day we continued on toward California with no generator and no air-conditioning. A couple of days later we finally arrived at Alex’s Bar on the mountain on Skyline Boulevard above the ranch, one of our old haunts. We went in, had dinner and a lot of alcohol. That was a trip to remember, but it was only one of the many experiences I shared with my good friend Mr. Briggs. I think I have time to tell you a few more, although I could never tell you all of them.

About twenty years later, in the mid-nineties, Briggs and I were making an album. I still call it an album because that is what I make. I don’t make CDs or iTunes tracks. I make albums. That is just what I do. Call it what you like. I remember how I hated the shuffle feature on iTunes because it fucked up the running order I spent hours laboring over. Having tracks available independently and having the shuffle feature available sucks as far as I am concerned. Call me old-fashioned. I make albums and I want the songs to go together to create a feeling. I do those things on purpose. I don’t want people cherry-picking the albums. I like to choose the singles. After all, it’s my shit.

We were making an album at the Complex in LA that Briggs was producing with John Hanlon engineering. It was Crazy Horse, and it was cool. We were right into it. Briggs said at one point that this record was going to be Crazy Horse’s Grammy. He was really into it then, and that surprised me. He never gave a shit about that in the past. Kurt Cobain had just committed suicide and left a note with my song quoted in it. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” He had been taking a lot of heat for canceling some shows. I, coincidentally, had been trying to reach him through our offices to tell him that I thought he was great and he should do exactly what he thought he should do and fuck everybody else. He was not just an entertainer; he was an artist and songwriter. There is a big difference. I knew him and recognized him for who he was. I wanted to talk to him. Tell him only to play when he felt like it. And that would be good enough. Be true.

So when he died and left that note, it struck a deep chord inside of me. It fucked with me. I wrote some music for that feeling: “Sleeps with Angels.” David was right there with me because he knew. He knew the truth. At the end of that session, David did something highly unusual: He made a sort of declaration about the record and what we were doing. He did it on camera with Larry Johnson, who was there filming the sessions. I went back and revisited all that footage to see what the hell we were doing. I couldn’t find that. I found a lot of other stuff. That is just one more loose end to finish up.

That was David’s last album. He got sick after that. There was more recorded there than what we used. We missed something. I know it. He sleeps with angels.

—

T
here was a Crazy Horse tour, Ragged Glory, that Briggs and I did, with John Hanlon engineering, around 1990. I wrote a lot of songs in my car barn that were on that album. The car barn was a huge metal building with a gravel floor, and I set up my amps in there with a bunch of old cars. All my best shit. My Fender Deluxe with a Fender Reverb, my whizzer attached to it, my Magnatone feeding from that, and my Baldwin Exterminator feeding off of it, too. The fifties tweed Fender Deluxe I refer to is my original amp purchased from Sol Betnun Music on Larchmont Boulevard in LA in the sixties. That place was always full of old Fenders galore. I think it’s gone now. I had that amp in my little Laurel Canyon cabin when I was in the Springfield. It had a fine sound. It sucked in a really good way when you turned it up to twelve! Yes! It goes to twelve! (Eat shit, Spi¨nal Tap!) At ten it is distorted and chunky but doesn’t suck, at six it is nasty and edgy. At three it is just plain awful in a good way. The whizzer is something we built that turns the knobs manually so the signal doesn’t get compromised. Any volume pot (controller) that’s in the line fucks with the signal. The whizzer doesn’t go in the line. It manually controls by rotating the master volume pot with a motor instead.

My Fender Reverb unit is from the fifties, too, maybe the early sixties. It has tubes and a spring reverb. It’s very analog. If you rattle it, it makes a loud sound all by itself. It is a real effect. Not digital. Digital effects are trying to sound like this stuff. My Magnatone amp has a stereo vibrato. It takes a feed from inside the Deluxe at a point where the signal is least compromised and there is a boost to keep the level up. The Magnatone has a lot more balls than the Deluxe, but they are both run from my pedal board built by Johnny Foster, Tim’s brother, attached with platinum switches built by Sal Trentino, the original tube amp guru. Thanks to Sal, I can bypass all that shit with one button if I don’t want it, because it splits the signal, too. Thanks, Sal—rest in peace, my friend. (Of course, there’s still that one platinum contact that the signal has to go through. If that was too techy for you, then you can just forget I said it, but it’s staying right here in this book where it belongs.)

Anyway, back in 1990, I would go into my car barn with all this stuff and Old Black. I’d just started reviewing my archives, and I had recently heard some of my best shit, so I knew who I was and who I could be. I would come in every morning, smoke some weed, and start playing. Then the songs just came.
Ragged Glory
. The songs got written. We started recording and playing all the songs in a row two or three times a day for a week or two. No repeating. We’d just do a few sets a day. That was a cool way to make a record. No analyzing. Then at the end, we read our notes and went back and found the masters.

One day we were listening to tracks and we heard “Mansion on the Hill.” It was a funky track, but it had the vibe. I asked David to play it one more time. David said to Hanlon, “All right then, let’s hear it in all its ragged glory.” That became the title. David had a way with words, an amazing vocabulary that he used poetically and to great effect always. So I finished the record, and we went out on tour with Sonic Youth and Social Distortion. Briggs went along, recording in an analog truck. We were a great bill; people got a real show. It rocked. I met Thurston Moore, and he told me about Nirvana, this great band, and how I should be taking them out, too, or at least hear them. Every night I would warm up backstage with Mike, my trainer, when Sonic Youth would come on, and they were fucking great. How original are they? Very. They would echo through the arena and sound like God. First, Social Distortion would come out cold and level the place. Then Sonic Youth! Then Crazy Horse! Because it was the Gulf War, we did an electric version of Bob’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “How many times must the cannonballs fly?” It was just another great tour for the Horse . . .