Weekly Neil: A Perfectionist After Surgery
Notes from an appendectomy (and recovery)
“Have you ever had general anesthesia?”
A perfectionist has not had the pleasure. Certain thoughts arrive at the very mention of such an experience. Going to sleep and never waking up, for starters. Some kind of fear of an incomplete operation — one that requires a second round in the hospital and all that accompanies such a stay — can likewise creep in.
Above all else, it’s a fear of failure, like everything else. A fear that there will be complications and it will somehow be his fault, not the result of decisions made by the medical team to whom he is entrusted.
Whether he knows it or not, a perfectionist chases this fear to odd corners of the world.
There’s a band called Coca Leaves & Pearls. They play Neil Young songs specializing in “Ditch-era Crazy Horse and Stray Gator material.” Translation: primarily songs from the albums Time Fades Away, Tonight’s The Night, and On The Beach released between 1973 and 1975. In other words, when Neil was really going through it. This is the bummer period of intoxicated rock, scraggly and loose, commercially unviable but as real as it gets. But funnily enough, the band’s leader, Chris Forsyth, took its name from the album that followed all that trauma. Zuma is brighter and beachier, and even its epic on the plight of Indigenous North Americans from which the band christened itself (“Cortez The Killer”) is meditative, like a benediction from centuries past.
Coca Leaves & Pearls play in my town next week but I don’t think I’ll be there. For the second October in a row, I’ll miss gathering with like-minded Neil heads and paying homage by listening to crunchified guitar music. Last year, I was just too tired. This year, I’m still tired but I’m also wary of being on my feet for so long. On September 21, on the eve of the autumnal equinox, I had my appendix removed. Two days before, I developed a stomachache I can only describe as insane, in terms of the pain level. It felt like I’d swallowed razor blades that were slicing up my insides. I couldn’t sleep. Then, strangely, the pain lessened and centralized to one spot in my lower abdomen. This, I read, was actually bad. It was likely appendicitis, something I used to fear every time I got a side stitch as a kid but hadn’t thought about in years.
First I went to urgent care to rule out other possible causes. When the health care professionals there couldn’t — “You need to be scanned, and we don’t have a scanner here” — they suggested I go to the emergency room. I arrived there by 7:20 p.m. and had an IV in my arm before 8. All things considered, pretty solid timing. Throughout this, I was oddly calm and centered, not my usual anxious self. I felt relieved when, upon getting the scan around 10 and being told later that my appendix was indeed inflamed, it seemed clear that surgery was the best option. My organ isn’t working anymore? Get it out!
A little over 12 hours later, I was in a gown and on a gurney being wheeled to the pre-op room (there’s probably a more technical name for this). My dad hung with me there and in the ER earlier, which was nice and helped keep my mind at ease. At one point, the care team told me to empty my bladder before surgery. I went into the bathroom to do so and threw myself a smile and a point in the mirror. “You got this, big dog.” Turns out talking to myself like a collaborator or even a friend instead of a sworn nemesis is good for both the body and the mind. When I finally went into surgery around 1, I was slightly nervous about giving up control but I had decided that there was simply no other way around it. I couldn’t take out my appendix myself, even if I wanted to. Time to let the professionals handle it.
A perfectionist after surgery is at peace. He floats through the world slowly and deliberately in sweatpants. Little trips are thrilling snatches of adventure; he feels like he’s getting away with something. Seeing a three-hour movie while wearing an elastic waistband. Picking up groceries (but just a few) and lifting the bag into the truck by himself. Does it weigh more than 20 pounds? Of course not.
But the fact that it might means he’s technically bending a rule specifically outlined on his discharge paperwork.
He soars.
Last night I watched a movie
Movie made me sad
‘Cause I saw myself in everyone
How’d they make a movie like that?
Coca Leaves & Pearls were recently enlisted to create some Neil soundalikes for Aquarium Drunkard’s podcast “All One Song,” a wonderful celebration of his music and legacy. The first episode was all about “Will To Love,” one of the wildest tunes in his whole catalog, so I have to respect it very deeply. Anyway Chris and his band — rounded out by John Murray on guitar, Jordan Burgis on bass, and Joey Sullivan on drums — churned out four dead ringers for Ditch-era Neil tunes. The first, “Stoned Stomp,” is their store-brand take on “Time Fades Away” that preserves its rollicking nature without receding into background noise. No small feat! They’re all named for Neil’s state of mind (and inebriation) in the mid-’70s, with titles like “Wrecked Anthem,” “Honey Slide Stroll,” and “Blasted Dirge.” The level of sonic accuracy is what reels me in.
I had this same thought listening to an absolutely terrific song called “First it was a movie, then it was a book” by the Philadelphia band Florry. The entire thing is built around two chords. That’s the foundation. But the song itself is what happens when the guitars introduce exciting new pathways inside that framework, then take some time to wander around freely for seven minutes. The whole experience is like going on a hike through mountain trails that keep changing colors. Once you think you have a grip on the terrain, something pleasantly knocks you off course and maybe even reveals new information within yourself. It’s psychedelic, yes. But it doesn’t sound like “psych-rock,” the way it might be described on Wikipedia. There’s a generosity of sound and of spirit that can’t be traced in the darker tunnels of stereotypical LSD music.
Florry’s guitar player and drummer are, naturally, John Murray and Joey Sullivan from Coca Leaves & Pearls. Sullivan doesn’t just keep time but paints. Murray isn’t flashy. There’s no striving or posturing in his guitar work. He’s an astronaut. The vocals that dance on top of this whole operation belong to Francie Medosch, who sings the above lyrics with a mixture of exultation and humor (and who is credited with those ripping lead lines). The sadness is baked into the words but not into Medosch’s delivery. In fact, Medosch evokes Neil himself on “Speakin’ Out,” one of my favorites from that Ditch era, when he starts talking about the big screen and calling the plot of a movie “groovy” and “out of sight.” I wrote about it two years ago and tried to unpack why that’s so endearing to me. “It’s simply a good hang,” is what I ended up with. That goes double for Medosch and company.
When Florry’s screeching guitars wind around the verses, it’s like caffeinated Crazy Horse — country rock that seems hellbent on burning down the barn. But really, the closest analog I can think of is listening to “Dream House” by Deafheaven. There are no valleys. Somehow, the entire song is a peak. It just keeps getting higher.
The next track on Florry’s great album Sounds Like… is even more of a Neil-inspired tune. “Waiting Around To Provide” features the kinds of minor-chord drops that characterize Neil’s best work, worked in between harmonica melodies and a rhythm that borders on swinging. It’s no surprise that a bit of searching “Florry + Neil Young” yields some fun results, including an EP of covers studded with a faithfully ramshackle take on “Vampire Blues” and a gingerly “Harvest Moon” presented as a psych-folk soirée.
A few days out from surgery, I was feeling peaceful but mildly slothly. I watched the Rob Reiner film Misery because it’s about a writer (ha) who’s laid up in bed (haha) and tortured but not actually by his own self-doubt but by a crazed fan whom Stephen King perhaps wrote in the novel to be a representation of the boxes that writers get put into either by the book-buying public and their relentless expectations or their own misgivings about creativity in general (hahaha). Anyway Misery was a book and then it was a movie but you can see how the chronology might get screwy if you watch the Oscar-winning movie first, like I did. In the Florry song, Medosch evokes Holly Hunter, who is not in Misery but who is an extraordinary actor. Kathy Bates and James Caan square off in the film largely via their smoldering looks at each other but then at the end (spoiler alert) there’s a violent and fairly gruesome denouement that genuinely took me by surprise. It made the non-gore of my three tiny incisions look puny by comparison.
I also watched the extended edition of The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King. Good movie. Made me happy.
A perfectionist looks back at his own time in the hospital in the lead-up to abdominal surgery, mere weeks out from his wife’s own abdominal surgery, with gratitude. It’s the same hospital. He hadn’t been there since his wife’s complications after the birth of their first child. He dreaded walking in and reliving that incident where he had no control, walking those same halls and riding those red elevators. But he had his own experience instead. The elevators took him to a similar operating room — “I guess these all look the same,” he thought — and he was conscious for about 90 seconds before things drifted away into a white blur of overhead lights.
There were no complications. A perfectionist woke up, groggy and confused and one organ lighter, but completely fine. He had no control. He had plenty of questions. And he had a fine time. He made it.
A perfectionist after surgery is healed physically but not mentally. A perfectionist after surgery is still a perfectionist. But he’s working on it.
“First it was a movie, then it was a book,” written by Francie Medosch, performed by Florry, from Sounds Like… (2025). The excellent album is $10 on Bandcamp.
NEXT WEEK: The time Clay Patrick McBride met Neil.