PETER LEWIS

Moby Grape songwriter, guitarist and founder; bonded with Young during gigs in San Francisco in 1966 – a “trade” was briefly mooted: Lewis to join Buffalo Springfield in exchange for Young joining Moby Grape.

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Neil once played me an early acetate of ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’. I’d met up with this chick who knew both of us. She was a super-groupie who was like one of those chicks in Almost Famous. She used to hunt me down all the time and one day she found me in LA, so I went out to se her that night at her place in Topanga Canyon. She told me she’d been hanging around with the Buffalo Springfield, or the remnants of it, and that Neil was living just up the street. So we went up there to visit. He had an A-frame and I remember a long flight of stairs leading up to it, with an intercom. She pressed it and I heard Neil go [affects high-pitched voice] “Who’s there?” When I said it was me, he said “Oh, come on up”. But when he opened the door and saw who I was walking up the steps with, he freaked out because he had just got married to Susan. Neil was even whiter than he usually was. I was trying to play it cool, but I presumed that whoever knew her had already slept with her.

Anyway, we went in there to this room where he had this big throne and he said: “I want you to hear this.” He put on the acetate of Everybody Knows this Is Nowhere and we just sat there, smoking dope and listening to it. At the end I said: “Neil, you’re going to be a big star, man”. It was that obvious. I knew what he’d always been trying to do, but he’d had a hard time getting the rest of Buffalo Springfield to let him do it. They had a similar thing to us in Moby Grape where everybody was kind of stumbling over each other to get to the limelight or something. Stephen [Stills] and Neil had a real rivalry over who was going to play lead. Neil wanted to do that but hadn’t found a voice yet. I had dinner with Jimmy Messina the other night and he was telling me about the rivalry in Buffalo Springfield. And I don’t think Neil really wanted to get into that.

Whenever it all became too much, suddenly he was just not around. And with his first solo record, he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to be Bob Dylan. Then he made Everybody Knows… in his basement. He’s just like that, he gets an idea in his head and executes it instead of thinking about it. He knew it would work if he could just do it. Nobody else could write those kind of songs. The other part of it was the fact he’d been able to get in with these guys [Crazy Horse] who did whatever he told them to do. The other people he’d played with, like Nils Lofgren, were always giving him advice and stuff.

When Neil was in Buffalo Springfield and I was in Moby Grape, there’s this weird thing that kind of happened that I still don’t understand. We were driving back to the city [San Francisco] after practicing at [Sausalito houseboat-turned-live venue] The Ark and Neil wanted me to drop him off at Marty Balin’s house. Somehow my wife ended up picking us up. She had this thing where she’d be a real flirt and she just zoned in on Neil. So when we got to Marty’s place, Neil was a little embarrassed, but then she was real pretty and was just staring at him. Neil went back to LA and then about a week later, my wife wanted to go to LA. And since we had this weird thing going on where everybody was cheating on everybody else, I’d had enough of it and told her to just go. So she left but then came back. I always thought she went down there to go screw Neil, but then somehow he didn’t want to get involved where I’d left off. He may have fucked her, but that was it. Not long after she came back, she was pregnant. I didn’t think of it until much later, but I always wondered about my first son.

So I knew Neil on some level. There was something about him I could dig, in a way I understood him before he became a star. There was even some weird thing where he nearly joined Moby Grape and I nearly joined the Buffalo Springfield. Neil and Stephen and the Buffalo Springfield hung out with Moby Grape for a while when we had these houses on Malibu Beach. They’d be coming up there all the time. It eventually got to a point where we had to go and make our second record [1968’s Wow] in New York because we just couldn’t work. It was all this screwing around.

What made him special? He didn’t let whatever liabilities he had become overwhelming, he turned everything around. Neil could just shock you with something. It was like making a liability into an asset. I don’t know how else to describe it. Other people were scared of Neil because they sensed that about him. If anybody was going to get out of that scene alive, it was him. He never seemed to have any doubts about himself.

Neil’s an interesting guy, because he’s not easy to understand. You could drive a hundred miles in the car with him and he wouldn’t say a word. I think he sometimes suffers in that, like other famous people, there’s a sense of loneliness about not being able to get any help from his fellow stars. They can commiserate but not really help. There’s no real bottom to it, you’ve just got to make a choice whenever you want it to stop. With Neil, he’s kind of had to deal with that all his life. And maybe it made him a better candidate for stardom than somebody who didn’t understand any of that at all. It seemed like he was able to keep everything in some kind of perspective. I mean, the ‘Sixties was a confusing time. A lot of people thought that taking more drugs would make them feel better, but Neil couldn’t do that because he had epilepsy. The whole thing was about getting high with people, but it didn’t seem to hurt Neil’s music in any way. His music was psychedelic.

INTERVIEW: ROB HUGHES

PART 11: ROBIN LANE

LA singer and musician. Lived with Young for a few weeks in 1966 and sang on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

UNCUT: When did you first meet Neil?

LANE: I was friends with these guys that had a house in Laurel Canyon, who had a band called the Rockets. Danny Whitten was a really good friend of mine. One night Neil just showed up.

What were your first impressions of Neil?

He was very tall, kind of gangly, and after he heard me sing a song and play my guitar, he said: “D’you wanna go for a ride in my hearse?” I liked his songs, but he was just another musician. There were a lot hanging round there at the Rockets’ house. They sold weed, and so Gram Parsons, Three Dog Night, Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, a million people would be there.

Did Neil’s reputation precede him?

No. But I’d heard the Buffalo Springfield. He wasn’t too forthcoming with anything.

What kind of guy did he turn out to be, when you knew him a bit better?

Well I stayed in his cabin up on Laurel Canyon for a while. He was, at that time, closed off, emotionally. But so were we all. People were doing a lot of drugs, and hiding behind drugs. I don’t think he was doing drugs then. He was obsessed with his music, and writing songs. He wanted to be a success in the music business.

Was he obsessed with that to the extent that everything else was secondary?

We were all really young, and you can’t really get into someone’s psyche at that age. Then I was just a waif of a girl, maybe still in high school. What I observed was that he wrote songs, which I’d learn and go round playing them when I auditioned at record company offices. I didn’t think about business or success. But the men did. Neil said to me, “You’re like all the other women I know who play music. They don’t see it as a career. They just do it.”

Can you describe Neil’s cabin?

It was up a hill, at the end of a cul de sac. You had to walk up a major flight of stairs outside, and then there was a nice little patio around the garden. And all I can remember is one room, with a bed, and you sat on the bed when people came over to play music. It was brown, might have been made out of logs. This was around ’66, ’67.

If you think back and picture being at Neil’s cabin, who might be there, and what would be happening?

Well, one time he got in a big fight with Stephen Stills, because Neil was ducking out on rehearsals. And Stephen Stills came up yelling that Neil was ruining his [Stephen’s] career. Musicians would come by and play.

Would there be eating, drinking, smoking?

I remember eating a lot of cream and wheat with him. It wasn’t like now, when people go to restaurants. Food wasn’t a priority for anyone I knew. Neil never cooked anything. I don’t know if there was a kitchen in his cabin. I don’t remember Neil smoking pot. In fact one time I was sitting in his hearse, and he got mad at me for smoking pot in it.

Who else might have been passing by, at Neil’s cabin?

Stephen Stills, Bruce Palmer, really sweet person. Bob Lind, who sang “The Elusive Butterfly of Love”, which was really, really corny, but it was a big hit then. And Buffalo Springfield’s managers were around.

When socialising was going on, how did Neil fit into that? Did he sit in the corner – not really doing too much?

No, he had a personality. He just had that laugh, like he knows something that you don’t. Our relationship was like the Dead Sea Scrolls – like there’d be something profound happening, but you don’t know what it is.

Referring directly to Archives, what do you remember of the seesions for “Round and Round (It Won’t Be Long)”

When I sang “Round And Round” with him and Danny [Whitten], Danny brought me into the studio. Neil listened to some of my songs, and was really sweet. And then we went into the studio and cut the song in one or two takes. There was a platform that you could sit on, and the three of us sat around, maybe with just the one mic. We all played guitar. I was just making it up as I went along – not the lyrics, but the “ooh oohs”. We did it once or twice, then Neil said, “Okay, that’s it!” and I was really amazed. We’d done the song before together. When I first met him, he taught me the song, and then we’d play it together up at the Rocket house, with other musicians that came up there. The Rocket house was full of pot-smoke. My impression of singing that song with him then was of darkness. I didn’t notice the sun. There was a lot that went on there that helped define me. I don’t know that it defined Neil. He came already knowing what he was doing.

Did he seem above what was going on around him – the socialising?

He was in his own world. Oh, yeah. And it was an unusual world for me. I admired all those musicians so much, so I was pretty shy and awkward around them, and just watched. But a lot of people were a lot friendlier than Neil. Neil was friendly, but he was just weird. Meaning he was different than other people. I think his personality’s the same even now – he’s droll. And kind of trollish, then. A gentle troll. Someone who was dancing to his own music. There were other people who you could just be normal with. I never felt like you could be normal with Neil. He always seemed to have something going on in his head. I couldn’t tell you what. There weren’t many conversations. I would listen to him, and he’d tell me stuff about his songs. One time, his grandmother had died, and I felt really bad for him. He was crying, and I was feeling sad. And he got mad at me for feeling sad with him: “She’s not your grandmother!” That’s kind of a funny thing…He probably thought I was a phoney. But he was really young.

Did he come across as superior?

Yeah. But he didn’t mean to be. He was kind of a colourful guy. Like someone who was in the CIA. He just had something going, and you didn’t know what it was. He seemed very self-sufficient. And he was wry and droll, and quick and snappy. After I moved out of his cabin, I still saw Buffalo Springfield, but only saw Neil casually. When I played my songs for him, that time I went in to sing on “Round and Round”, he was really encouraging. He told me I was talented.

When you sang with Neil, did he take real pleasure in singing?

He liked singing his songs. Barbra Streisand or someone would take pleasure in their singing. I think he liked the whole deal that he had – he wrote these songs, and he sang them in that voice that was Neil Young.

INTERVIEW: NICK HASTED