Waging Heavy Peace (12 page)

Buffalo Springfield near my Laurel Canyon cabin, 1967. Left to right, Dewey Martin, me, Richie Furay, Jim Fielder (replacing Bruce Palmer), Stephen Stills.

Chapter Twenty

T
here was a thing in Hollywood in the sixties called Teen Fair. It took place near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street across from what was then Wallich’s Music City, an amazing store. Let me describe Wallich’s for you: They sold all kinds of music there—45s, LPs, sheet music, books about music—and in a little shop upstairs guitars and other instruments were displayed. There were also listening booths where you could hear singles on headphones and see if you wanted to buy them. I spent a lot of time there. Of course, the place was crawling with flower children and beautiful hippie girls.

Anyway, like I said, upstairs at Wallich’s there was a great guitar department. Martins, Gibsons, all manner of electric and very nice old acoustic guitars were there. This was around the time the Springfield was happening; we were playing at the Whisky a Go Go, about a mile down Sunset toward Beverly Hills. Stills and I went to Wallich’s a lot and tried out Martins together. Stephen was fast becoming an excellent player and had surpassed me in his knowledge of voicings, and he was always playing rhythms naturally that blew my mind.

One day, I was there at Teen Fair with a few friends, looking around, taking in the sights, the sounds, the girls, the crowds, an overwhelming chaos of inputs, when the sky started to spin a little and I felt a bit sick to my stomach. I started to fall. The sky was getting dark and the sounds were all echoing, a hollow reverberation inside my head. Lying on my back on the pavement, I saw the faces looking down on me. It was like I had just been born, and I recognized no one. I didn’t really even know my own name. I was hot and sweating.

“Neil, Neil! Are you okay? Are you all right?”

I didn’t know the answer to that question, but I was becoming aware that my name was Neil and that I was in a crowd of people lying down somewhere. I did feel strangely reborn. On the other hand, I was being helped up and people were all dispersing and walking away. Someone must have taken me home, back to Barry’s, and later I fell asleep, I guess.

From that moment on, for years, I lived in constant fear that it was going to happen again. I could feel it in my stomach, and then I would get really scared and withdrawn until it went away. I felt it onstage, I felt it in crowds, I felt it in grocery stores, this unreasonable anxiety all the time waiting in the wings to come out and envelop me. It had an effect. Eventually I could not even go to the Laurel Canyon Country Store, which was near my place, to buy food. There were too many aisles and too much produce, too many choices for me.

The Canyon Country Store was just two blocks from where I had been living in the hearse less than a year before. I now had a house/cabin at the top of Ridpath Avenue near Utica Drive, way up at the end of the road at the top of Laurel Canyon. It was a crazy place up there, with a main house, a garage, and a little cabin. The shingles were all curved and mystical like a witch’s castle. Wonderful. I was renting a cabin at the top of a flight of stairs, maybe one to two hundred–plus steps. Below it, the garage was down on Utica, and a drummer, John Densmore of the Doors, lived there. The garage was constructed with the same mystical shingle work. An astrologer, Kiyo Hodel, was my landlord. She lived in the main house of the whole compound and was very cosmic. The little cabin was made of knotty pine, very rustic, and I loved it. I had a llama rug on the floor. A lot happened to me up there. I brought a lot of girls up there to my little shack and we had good times, although I was not very confident in myself and probably not an impressive lover to be sure. We could call it performance anxiety.

I was kind of lost in that area and worked on that for a long, long time. Learning how to open up and give myself to another person, learning the depths of intimacy as more than sex. It has become the journey of a lifetime, one of the great revelations. I never did get much advice from my father and growing up missed his presence to quite a degree. I’m uncomfortable talking about that, but I feel a lot better about myself now than I did in my earlier days.

One day Dennis Hopper, who Stephen had met through Peter Fonda, came and took some pictures of the Springfield behind my little cabin. It was very simple, with only two rooms, a bedroom and a bathroom, and a little add-on porch where I kept my fridge. Who knows what I put in that fridge? It was certainly not much. I think I had a hot plate, too. I used it for pork and beans . . . probably.

Once, when I had been on the road for a week or so, I stopped on Sunset at the Whisky before going home to the cabin. I met the daughter of one of the Rat Pack there that night and brought her up to show her my place. She was very nice. We went back to the cabin late that night without me having a chance to get there first. Somehow I had closed my cat in there for a week. The cabin was full of cat shit! Wow! I’ve never seen a girl get out of anyplace faster than she did. I did not make a very good impression on her.

In that little cabin, I wrote “Mr. Soul,” “Expecting to Fly,” “Broken Arrow,” and a few other songs. I would listen to acetates of the mixes with my friends often there, too. (Acetates were records that you could make fast and play only a few times before they wore out and lost their sound. They would make them to take home and listen to right after we cut a song at Gold Star Studios in a little room where a lathe was set up. I still remember that acetate smell. The acetate would go in a little record sleeve and a Gold Star label would be typed up and stuck on it. I heard the first Buffalo Springfield album for the first time on my KLH record player and speakers in that little room.) We would hang and play records for hours, sitting on the llama rug in front of the speakers, listening to tracks like “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles over and over. The sound was so good, you could never get enough of it. I really feel sorry for kids with their MP3s today who can’t hear music the way we did then. What a bummer. I can’t imagine that. It really bothers me.

Now, I didn’t get this cabin until the Springfield was happening, months after my first episode at Teen Fair, but somehow we got around to the subject, so here we are. The Canyon Country Store was where I bought food. Not that I bought much food. I would go down there and stand in the parking lot, working up the nerve to go in, hoping I would not get anxious and paranoid and freak out, leaving whatever I had chosen to buy inside and bolting for the door. This anxious feeling was similar to a seizure feeling in my stomach, and I couldn’t tell the difference, so I just panicked.

Somewhere along the line, our managers, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, who we hired in 1966, set up an appointment for me with a doctor at UCLA Medical Center to do some tests. April Full, Greene and Stone’s secretary, took me down there. First they stuck a bunch of things on my head and gave me a little liquid in a cup and told me to go in this dark room and lie down. Then they wired all the things up, and while I was lying there I could feel these little flashes. I still feel those today, kind of like little rushes of something, gusts of cosmic wind in my head. My hearing changes for an instant, and it’s hard to describe. Anyway. I live with that, and it’s nothing. But it is somehow related to the feeling I used to get going up and down steep hills in my car. After that test, which revealed nothing to my knowledge, I went back to April’s house. April chose that moment to explain to me what turned a woman on, demonstrating what would be physically stimulating for me to do as an education for me to apply later in life, say five or ten minutes later at the most.

It was not long afterward that suddenly I realized I had the clap. There were a lot of hippie girls, and we saw them at the Whisky all the time. After the show it was time to go to the International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard. I remember those German pancakes. They were delicious. How much sugar can one person eat? After that we paired off and went back to our shacks for some fun. Anyway, I had the clap and I had to go to the clinic. The doctor said he wanted to draw some blood. I said okay. I was on a metal table. He drew my blood. I crashed and had another full-on seizure on the spot. The same feeling. The room spinning slowly, the echoes, the darkness creeping in, and finally the doctor and nurses trying to get me back on the table, shoving a piece of wood in my mouth so I wouldn’t bite off my own tongue. Then remembering my name, starting over. Getting a grip on my identity, where I lived, etc. It would all come back in a semi-orderly fashion, like a reboot. Eventually, I had to take another test with Dr. Morton K. Rubenstein. I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS TEST. It is barbaric. It was called a pneumoencephalogram.

Pneumoencephalography (sometimes abbreviated PEG) is a medical procedure in which most of the cerebrospinal fluid is drained from around the brain and replaced with air, oxygen, or helium to allow the structure of the brain to show up more clearly on an X-ray image. It is derived from ventriculography, an earlier and more primitive method where the air is injected through holes drilled in the skull.

The procedure was introduced in 1919 by the American neurosurgeon Walter Dandy.

Pneumoencephalography was performed extensively throughout the early twentieth century, but it was extremely painful. The test was generally not well tolerated by patients. Headaches and severe vomiting were common side effects. Replacement of the drained spinal fluid is by slow natural production, and therefore required recovery for as long as two to three months before normal fluid volumes were restored . . . Modern imaging techniques such as MRI and computed tomography have rendered pneumoencephalography obsolete. Today, pneumoencephalography is limited to the research field and is used under rare circumstances.

Thanks, Wiki.

It is the most painful thing I have ever been through. Pure torture, where they tie you into a big device, stick a needle in you, and inject radioactive dye into your spinal column. Then they track its progress through your brain. Of course, being man-made, it is flawed, and bubbles sometimes get in there with the radioactive dye. These fucking bubbles are the worst pain ever in the universe. I took a long time to recover from that shit, and they learned
nothing
. I am still pissed about that. Of course, medical professionals don’t do that test anymore. It’s too barbaric. I am even more pissed now to realize that they
knew
they were injecting gas into my brain, then they had the nerve to tell me some bubbles
might
have gotten in there with the dye. I am pissed. I am over it. None of these tests revealed any new information about my condition. There was no conclusion. The doctor’s recommendations were that I not take any LSD. Prior to that I had never had a doctor recommend that I take LSD. I had never taken acid. I never wanted to, anyway. I hallucinate enough on my own and can’t control that.

In my life I have had various health threats: polio, seizures, a brain aneurysm. None of these things has really changed me much, although it is hard to say for sure. These are events that are part of my life. They make me who I am. I am thankful for them. They are scary.

With Joni Mitchell, doing her song “Raised on Robbery” at Studio Instrument Rentals in Los Angeles, where the album
Tonight’s the Night
was recorded in 1973.