Waging Heavy Peace (38 page)

A number of years later, the midnight call came again with a different name. Jack Nitzsche had OD’d in his little home studio in Hollywood. I sent twelve dozen red roses to the service and quite a few floral displays. It was completely over-the-top, but I heard it looked great at the ceremony and made the family feel good. I couldn’t go. I was on the road. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just sent flowers.

So yes, there has been a lot of loss. It is important to remember the times when life is in full bloom. Those are the moments that give us the faith to move through the darkness when it falls.

Videotaping Ben and Amber on a trip to New Zealand, 1987.

Chapter Sixty-Six

A
lot has happened over the years. I am now a very successful musician with a lot of stuff and things of value. Music is a business. I have traveled a long way along life’s pathway and have become somewhat of a hard person to work for, or with, because I set high standards and have lost some patience. The years have left a mark. Success has made it possible for me to form some bad habits, to lose respect for those I work with, to skirt certain responsibilities, and to make my own way in the world.

That said, now I am trying to find myself again and reconnect with the values I had in the beginning, find the love in the music with others again, return to the camaraderie that we all enjoyed back in the day, respect others, have empathy for them, be considerate, love myself again, and through that, be more true to myself and others, and above all, be deserving of Pegi. So yes, a lot has happened. I have a full plate, but I am up to the task, I think.

Changing the person one has evolved into is not a simple process, to be sure, but I know that with Pegi’s love and support and my family close, I will be able to learn to reach out and live life in a more caring and conscious way. Maybe I have never been good at that, and that’s why it’s so hard to find it in myself. It may never have really been there. I may be starting from scratch. I’ve always been told that what I am doing is right. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe just some of it is. I need to dig deep and discover some things along the way.

How do I avoid being short with those I love and respect? How do I try to make people feel good about what they are doing for and with me? How can I respect others’ tastes while retaining my own? This is the knowledge I am searching for. I can remember so many times in my life when I have hurt others and hurt myself. I really need to find a way to change those patterns for good.

—

T
he Times They Are a-Changin’ in the book world. I got an offer from my potential publisher today. Borders closed their local store yesterday and announced plans to close them all in the next couple of months. The bookstore culture is evaporating, though the online sales of books was not as great as anticipated.

A group of writers in our living room smoking their pipes and talking into the night was not uncommon to me growing up. Books have always been close to my life, with my father being an author and our family knowing so many writers as family friends. Now huge bookstore chains have closed their doors and liquidated their stock.

These changes would have blown my daddy’s mind.

Just as the online social media revolution has brought on mammoth upheaval in the Arab world, it is bringing big change to the publishing world as well. In the new world order there will be an altered landscape, and it is exciting to be around to see it, even as it causes a sea change for the things I do for a living. I believe music and writing will always be around. They are not going anywhere. Actually, I think the full effects of this revolution are just beginning to be seen, and many more areas of world culture will be changed in unknown ways. I am glad I am a musician, and I am looking forward to making my next record with Crazy Horse. I’m not sure how many more albums I will make in the future, since they’re not even called albums anymore, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

—

A
long time ago, I started having little birthday parties at the ranch. These parties have become famous in our small community. Pegi and I love traditions, so I thought every year I would invite the children of our friends to a marshmallow roast on the shore of our pond. The pond is a beautiful place, with reeds all around it and an opening near our house that expands onto a huge lawn. It is the perfect place to watch the sunset and listen to the birds. I love the sounds of the red-winged blackbirds! Once while paddleboarding around the pond I was chased and led by a flock of these singing birds flitting about from the reeds behind me to the reeds ahead of me. It was a circular dance, me on my board and about fifty of these beautiful little red-winged blackbirds that I love so much going in a big arc around the edge of the pond.

Anyway, every year I would invite the kids and tell them they could bring their parents. Presents were always requested in a certain category. One year, presents were all requested to be “something from the ground.” I got rocks and dirt and little pieces of wood, many of which still reside on my train layout, representing something in a different scale. Each year the presents were a little different, but always something the kids could find around for no money. Also, as part of the tradition, I would set a fire with fallen wood from around the ranch, and when I had it all ready, Pegi would come down and light it. That was always a great moment for us, as we watched the fire catch and begin another year together.

The years went by, and the little kids grew up. Soon they were in college and could not make it for one reason or another, so a new crop of kids came along, then the older kids started coming back. This went on for quite a long time and was a really beautiful feeling and memory. I would go out and gather sticks for the marshmallows and prepare them to be used around the fire by the kids, big and small, and we all would roast them together with the sun going down until we were there in the dark with the bonfire roaring away. It was really great. So one year I went out into the bush to get some sticks for the roast and found a great source. Every stick in the bush was the perfect size. Amazing! What a find! I was so lucky to locate these babies, and I gathered them all up, cut them carefully to length, and stored them by the unlit fire in preparation for the evening’s activities. That night we had a wonderful time, planning and remembering the future and past. All was well in the world.

The next day, one of the guests came down with a rash. The day after that, everyone had it.

I went down to the doctor’s office and all my friends were there! Some of them were so disfigured as to be unrecognizable. All of them had poison oak! Oh my God! What a feeling that was! I felt like a Canadian terrorist who had infiltrated this little community and poisoned all of the unsuspecting residents in a crime that was years in the making. No wonder those sticks were so different! I had to share that here because it is the single most embarrassing thing I have ever done. All those innocent kids got poison oak because of me! Every year it comes back to haunt me as everyone jokes about it mercilessly. I am not allowed to gather the sticks anymore. What a tradition.

With friends at the Broken Arrow Ranch, 1981. Left to right, standing: David Briggs, Ralph Molina, Larry Cragg, Steve Antoine, me, Jerry Napier; sitting: Tim Mulligan, Billy Talbot, Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, Sal Trentino. Crazy Horse and I were in the process of recording our album
re∙ac∙tor
around this time.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

T
here is a song that I wrote in the middle of the night in front of my fireplace at the ranch that I think stands alone in its form and consciousness. It is a fairly long song that is pretty ambitious in a few ways. It was 1976. I recorded this song on a little Sony cassette player that had “Life is a shit sandwich. Eat it or starve” on a plastic strip label, applied by Briggs during the
Zuma
sessions right below the Sony brand marking. The door for the cassette opened right below the label so you saw it every time the cassette was inserted or removed.

Sitting on the floor late at night, I recorded in front of the fireplace with the cassette on the hearth, three feet from the fire, and you can hear the crackling and hissing of the fire as I played my old Martin guitar and sang “Will to Love,” the story of a salmon swimming upstream. Laden with my own feelings of love and survival, the recording stands alone in my work for its audio vérité style, a live sketch of a massive production number with only the highlights presented, fragments of parts, the sound of the fire, the underwater sound created by vibrato.

It has often been my dream

To live with one who wasn’t there

Like an ocean fish who swam upstream

Through nets, by hooks, and hungry bears

When the water grew less deep

My fins were aching from the strain

I’m swimming in my sleep

I know I can’t go back again.

I was scheduled to fly to Miami to continue recording the Stills-Young album with Stephen in the morning; the flight was leaving very early and I had decided to just stay up all night and drive to the airport in time for the flight. I had some drugs, had written this song on a piece of paper, and had decided to sing it all the way through for the first time so I would have something to show Stephen and the band in Florida. I didn’t listen back to it that night, I don’t think. It was complex in that there were pieces that would have to be added later that I could not sing myself. It was layered, so I had to just sing little pieces of choruses and then go back to the verses and releases.

The cassette of that song was never played for those sessions. It was too sensitive and complex and wouldn’t fit with the rest of the tracks on the album, so I saved it for later. Later came in a few weeks, when I was back in Malibu at my beach house, a beautiful little house I had purchased on Sea Level Drive, at the end of the road, right on the beach. The house was wonderful, a Cape Cod cottage that was totally overgrown with bougainvillea. The roof and outside walls were covered in vines, with flowers everywhere. It was a magnificent place that I loved dearly, situated right in a bunch of evergreen trees on the ocean. A big rock was in the water right in front of this house, and the beach went on for miles to the right with no other houses on the sand. They were all on the top of the cliff that started right past my little house. That was paradise. One of the most beautiful houses and locations I have ever seen. The actress Katharine Ross was living there when I bought the place, and I’m sure she was sad to have to leave.

Placed in the evergreens around the patio was an Indian chief with full headdress. That wooden Indian was a work of art. A few years later Pegi and I were married there, and Briggs was my best man. The house and patio, on two lots, were my pride and joy, and I wrote a lot of songs there.

So one evening, Briggs and I went up to Indigo Ranch to record. Indigo Ranch Studios was way up in one of the canyons above Malibu, at the end of its own road, with a beautiful canyon right outside the studio. The place was magnificent and had a great sound, with wonderful equipment that Briggs loved. The owner, Richard Kaplan, was really into his studio; he was an engineer himself, and kept it up really well. It was a perfect place, and David recorded me there a lot. We loved it and always enjoyed being there.

I had asked David to get me a lot of instruments, including drums, an electric bass, a vibraphone, some of my old amps including my Magnatone with the stereo vibrato, and a few other things. They were all there when we arrived. We always smoked some weed on the way up there and were feeling fine as we drove by The Band’s Garth Hudson’s place on the little dirt road, the last house before the studio, which was about a half mile farther. I realized there was no way I could sing the song again or perform it, and I never have since. I told David that I simply wanted to play back the cassette through the Magnatone with vibrato so it would sound like I was underwater at times during the song, when I was taking the point of view of the salmon. That was the first thing we did. Then I started layering on instruments, one at a time. The drugs began to flow and soon it was the middle of the night and we were still hard at it. I was sketching, not painting, the track. Instruments came and went, indicating their presence without the cumbersomeness of staying. I played some drums during one section, just following the muse. Then I sang all of the choruses, filling them in so that I was singing on top of myself, and added the releases as well.

Somewhere in the middle of that night, we did a mix. That was the perfect way to work. Get it all at once. Put it on tape and mix it immediately while the image is fresh. As the last chords died away, I felt Mr. Briggs’s strong hands massaging my back as I sat in front of the console with my own head in my hands, my eyes closed and covered, just listening. The sound was cascading over me and all around me, and I was swimming in it. Our work was done. That memory is one of my favorite moments and is the perfect example of a great life with my friend David, who guided me and assisted me in every trip I decided to take through the world of music.

It was time to jump in Nanu for the slow ride home to dawn on Sea Level Drive, carefully avoiding any actions that would catch the sheriff’s eye as he patrolled the Pacific Coast Highway in his cruiser.