Waging Heavy Peace (14 page)

Original Crazy Horse guitarist/vocalist Danny Whitten backstage at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, where I performed with Crazy Horse, February 1970.

Chapter Twenty-Three

D
anny and the Memories was the band at the root of Crazy Horse. They were a vocal group with Danny Whitten, Ralphie, Billy, and a guy named Ben Rocco. When I recently saw their old video of “Land of a Thousand Dances” on YouTube, I realized that is truly the shit. You know, I looked at it maybe twenty times in a row. Even though Danny was amazing and he held the Horse together in the early days, I did not know how great Danny was until I saw this! The moves! What an amazing dancer he was. His presence on that performance is elevating! He is gone, and no one can change that. We will never see and hear where he was going. I am telling you, the world missed one of the greatest when Danny and the Memories did not have a NUMBER ONE smash record back in the day. They were so musical, with great harmonies, and Danny was a total knockout! I am so moved by this that it could make me cry at any time. This is one of those many times when words can’t describe music.

Danny and the Memories eventually transformed into the Rockets; they were playing in this old house in Laurel Canyon, and I somehow connected with them while Buffalo Springfield was at the Whisky. We had a lot of pot jams in that house. Later on I saw Danny and the guys at somebody’s house in Topanga. After that I asked if Danny, Billy, and Ralphie would play on a record with me. We did one day, practicing in my Topanga house, and it sounded great. I named the band Crazy Horse and away we went. The Rockets were still together, but this was a different deal.

At that time, I thought Danny was a great guitarist and singer. I had no idea
how
great, though. I just was too full of myself to see it.
Now
I see it clearly. I wish I could do that again, because more of Danny would be there.

I have made an
Early Daze
record of the Horse, and you can hear a different vocal of “Cinnamon Girl” featuring more of Danny. He was singing the high part, and it came through big-time. I changed it so I sang the high part and put that out. That was a big mistake. I fucked up. I did not know who Danny was. He was better than me. I didn’t see it. I was strong, and maybe I helped destroy something sacred by not seeing it. He was never pissed off about it. It wasn’t like that. I was young, and maybe I didn’t know what I was doing. Some things you wish never happened. But we got what we got.

I never really saw him sing and move until I saw that “Land of a Thousand Dances” video. I could watch it over and over. I can’t believe it. It’s just one of those things. My heart aches for what happened to him. These memories are what make Crazy Horse great today. And now we don’t have Briggs, either, for the next record, but we have the spirit and the heart to go on. And we have John Hanlon, taught by Briggs, to engineer this sucker. It will rock and cry. Please let’s get to this before life comes knocking again.

So we are getting into this now. There may have to be more than one book. I read up on this sort of thing, and the worst thing you can have is a book that is too long. That doesn’t help the publisher. There is a lot here to cover, and I have never done this before. Also, I am not interested in form for form’s sake. So if you are having trouble reading this, give it to someone else. End of chapter.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Pains

A
long the way, I have encountered many doctors. One of my favorites is Dr. Petter Lindstrom, who was well-known for performing laminectomies. He came to me highly recommended and coincidentally was a former husband of Ingrid Bergman.

I had a double laminectomy by him in 1971.

But let me back up.

I had just signed with Reprise as a solo artist and got a big enough advance to buy my first house in Topanga Canyon. 611 Skyline Trail was all mine, a really wonderful redwood house built with a view of the whole canyon.

I used to go to the Canyon Kitchen every morning for breakfast. Susan Acevedo, the beautiful Sicilian hostess/owner, would bring me a one-eye and bacon. I got to look at Susan Acevedo every day at breakfast! Morning on the deck began with coffee overlooking the canyon, watching everything start to move below as the day unfolded. The scene in there was always stimulating, full of the color of the canyon, with the artists and other local characters, drug dealers and beautiful hippie girls, and I really enjoyed my breakfasts.

Eventually I met Tia, Susan’s daughter. She was a cute little girl about five or six years old with a pretty little round face. Although Susan was a little older than I was, I found myself becoming more and more attracted to her. Eventually we fell in love. Susan introduced me to a lot of great artists in the canyon: Wallace Berman, Roland Diehl (who painted my first album cover), George Herms, Dean Stockwell, Russell Tamblyn, Kiel Martin, to name just a few. Susan was active in the Topanga Players, a local theater group, and I remember going to see George Herms’s play
Egg of Night
and many other theater presentations there with her. She made all of my patchwork clothes, creating a style that spoke to the times, really the only time I was anywhere near fashionable. That was all Susan’s doing, and it was so beautiful.

Susan and I were married in my new Topanga house, perched on the top of Skyline Trail, overlooking the canyon, and George Herms performed the ceremony. Our house was on a steep hill with the garage at the lowest point on a steep drive. One time Susan loaded my Mini Cooper with pies in the garage, preparing for a catering job she was doing with her company, Scuzzy Catering. Somehow after the pies were fully loaded, the emergency brake came loose and the Mini and its pies rolled down the hill and straight into the neighbor’s garage, knocking out the support posts for his house. Pies were splattered all over the inside of the Mini. The neighbor, a gay man, was yelling at Susan, and she was going right back at him. It was quite a moment, full of expletives. Susan was quite a spirited lady, and I don’t think the poor guy knew what he was in for!

Sadly, I was not mature enough to be a very good father to Tia, and I regret that I missed the boat there, but she sure was a sweet girl. Eventually Susan and I broke up. I don’t think I was mature enough for her, either. The instant fame that came with
After the Gold Rush
and CSNY were too much for us. I have a lot of respect for Susan. She never asked for anything from me that was unreasonable, and she gave all she had to our short marriage. I was too young, and the pressures were too great for who I was at that time. The marriage lasted about a year. Sometimes I hear little tidbits about her, and I am always hoping she is doing well with her life. She was seen in Mexico recently and looking very good, was my last report. Love you, Susan. Thanks. You, too, Tia. Maybe we will meet again someday.

One day in early ’70, still living in Topanga with Susan, I was working with a hoe in the brush on the hillside outside the house. I don’t know what I was doing. I had thrown a portable TV off the deck and I could see it down there. I may have been preparing for a garden. Anyway, the next day I was in my car and I went to put my left foot on the clutch and my foot wouldn’t come up. It just wouldn’t move. So I went to a chiropractor Susan knew, and he did an adjustment on my back. After that my movement came back pretty much like it was before, but there was a little pain in my leg. That was the end of that.

In September of that year, Susan and I had split up and I was living on Broken Arrow Ranch, tearing my new house apart. At Crosby’s advice, I went to Berkeley to a hardwood dealer and saw some amazing huge slabs of California walnut. There were six big ones. I mean nine-footers, three feet wide and two to three inches thick. I bought them all and wanted to do the walls of my dining room with them. I was so excited that I tried to put them up myself. Doing that, I injured my back again. But the symptoms were worse: My leg didn’t work, and it hurt all up and down the front. So I went to LA to see the doctor there that Elliot had, a Dr. Lipshutz. Walking through the airport to catch a plane to fly to LA was very painful, and I was sweating profusely when the sexy go-go stewardess brought me a Coke on PSA.

Things get blurry now in the memory department. I was told by the doctor to take Soma Compound (a muscle relaxant) and rest in bed so that the swelling would go down. There was no mention of surgery at that time, and I was thinking that if I just mellowed out while taking this Soma and stayed in the hospital bed they had moved into my room at the Chateau Marmont that everything would work itself out.

So there I was in the hospital bed at the Chateau, and it was there and then I first met Carrie Snodgress. After reading a story about her in
Newsweek
or
Time
, I had found her number and called her up, introducing myself and inviting her down to the Chateau. She was very attractive to me. What a way to meet. I was taking so much of the Soma Compound that I could hardly move. I liked her right away.

A few days after that, I returned to the ranch on doctor’s orders to rest in a hospital bed that had been moved into my house there. Lying in bed, taking Soma at Broken Arrow, I found out that Michelob and Soma Compound are a great combination—and eventually I landed in traction at Cedars-Sinai on Melrose Avenue back in LA. The doctors were hoping that traction would solve the problem and there would be no need for surgery.

Anyway, Cedars back then was an old hospital. I was in traction, with wires and weights pulling on my feet to relieve the pressure on discs in my back. (While I was there, I listened a lot to a cassette tape I had from the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. It was a live tape I had recently recorded with Henry Lewy. It was real good, and I made some notes for an album, and I will eventually release a very cool record of those times. (Now, these years later, I am still finishing some things and looking for closure.) A lot of folks visited me in the hospital. I had friends from Hollywood, and some of them were beautiful ladies. I had a pretty good stay in that hospital!

When I finally got out and went home, I was wearing a back brace. It was still painful, but not too bad. Back at the ranch, I tried to walk up the hill behind my house toward the site of my new pool, but I couldn’t make it. That really depressed me. Two weeks later, I went on the road across Canada with the brace. That was in early January.

I was corresponding with Carrie and writing songs. A lot of songs, like “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold,” “Needle and the Damage Done,” and “Bad Fog of Loneliness.” During that tour, I recorded at Massey Hall, and that came out as a record years later. Briggs was living in Toronto then and produced that. He had gone up there to live and had started a studio called Thunder Sound. The live Massey Hall record is David’s live mix to 7.5 ips analog. You can see the brace and my hunkered-over posture in the Massey Hall video—which is actually a Stratford, Connecticut, picture from a few days earlier with Massey Hall’s sound synched up. I used the sound from one place and the picture from another. “A cheap Hollywood trick,” as Larry Johnson used to say.

I went on to Nashville at the end of the tour to do the Johnny Cash television show, which was new and really hot at the time. Bob Dylan had just done the first one, and everyone wanted to do it. James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt were doing the second show, and so was I. Everyone loved Johnny Cash; he was the real thing. The show was all about music, and it was cool, very real.

While I was there I met Elliot Mazer, the record producer, and we went into the studio to try some studio versions of all my new songs. Tim Drummond was there, and he put together a great band, with Kenny Buttrey, John Harris, Ben Keith, and another guitarist who played some tasty things like the harmonics on “Heart of Gold.” This was a great-sounding band. James and Linda came in and added some vocals; James even played banjo on “Old Man.” That session was a solid beginning for
Harvest
. Then, a few weeks later, I was in London and recorded “A Man Needs a Maid” and “There’s a World” with the London Symphony Orchestra, produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche. After hearing the playback in Glyn Johns’s truck, where the pieces were recorded outside the Barking Town Hall, Jack said, “I think it’s a bit overblown.” We knew it was over-the-top, but we had done it and we loved it.

Later, when Carrie and I were seriously getting together and she was moving to the ranch, I wrote the rest of
Harvest
, and we went back to Nashville for another session. We did “Out on the Weekend,” “Journey Through the Past,” and a few other ones, including “Harvest” itself. Then I asked the band to fly out to the ranch with Elliot Mazer to record a little in my barn. That was where we got “Alabama,” “Are You Ready for the Country?” and “Words.”

“Words” is the first song that reveals a little of my early doubts of being in a long-term relationship with Carrie. It was a new relationship. There were so many people around all the time, talking and talking, sitting in a circle smoking cigarettes in my living room. It had never been like that before. I am a very quiet and private person. The peace was going away. It was changing too fast. I remember actually jumping out the living room window onto the lawn to get out of there—I couldn’t wait long enough to use the door! Words—too many of them, it seemed to me. I was young and not ready for what I had gotten myself into. I became paranoid and aware of mind games others were trying to play on me. I had never even thought of that before. That was how we did
Harvest
, in love in the beginning and with some doubts at the end.

The album was received well, and I suppose that was my commercial peak, at least my first and biggest one, although I didn’t do the math. Some people liked it a lot and it was a big thing for them in their lives. It was for me. But my Crazy Horse fans were not knocked out. There is a line there. I suppose it matters to them, but it doesn’t matter to me. I just like to make all kinds of music and do what is coming naturally to me. Nobody told me to make
Harvest
. No record company told me what to do until a lot later—and that didn’t work.

But this was not the end of my back problem.

Eventually surgery was required. My left side was chronically weak from my childhood polio, and I was too active for the sort of long careful recovery that limited my movement for the rest of time without surgery.

I met with Dr. Lindstrom, who advised me that surgery was the only option and I should get ready to leave my pain behind. He came to see me in the hospital in San Francisco. He asked me how I was feeling, and I told him, “Not too good.” Then he looked at me and said that after the surgery, he would come back and get me out of bed to walk around the room without the brace and the pain.

I said, “Really?”

He said, “Yes, but first we have to do the operation, and that will be tomorrow morning at six
.
”

The next day I went to surgery. All I remember is lying on the gurney, the ceiling rolling by on my way to the operating room. And the next thing I knew, there he was, asking me to get up and walk around my room. I did it. He thanked me and said he would check in on me regularly for a few days and then I could go home. He was an amazing doctor. He told me to swim and exercise and do everything gently for a while. No football or hockey, he laughed. Then he made some graceful moves imitating a tennis player in slow motion. Nothing too fast, he said. Forty-two years later, I am still fine. Thank you, Dr. Lindstrom; what a gift.

Maybe the combination of Michelob and Soma was such that my thoughts were completely jumbled—and perhaps my love affair with Carrie was part of that process. I was never really happy during it, with the excessive amount of analysis and psychodrama that was spawned. And I have never been in that type of relationship before or after, so there is just something about my time with Carrie that I am unsettled about.

It is important for me to say that I initiated our relationship based on an article about her I read in
Newsweek
or
Time
and a beautiful picture the magazine ran. Falling in love from a picture in a magazine, however, is not a very calculated thing; nor are the effects of loneliness on one’s decision making. It is a great thing to write a song about, though. I am just trying to make sense of the thought process and emotional landscape that resulted, and I suppose that would be a fruitless endeavor at this point, an emotional Band-Aid.