Weekly Neil: Hey Now

A little change of program here

Every night when I clean up the kitchen after dinner some stray thoughts pop into my head. Idle work will do that. As I’m scraping my toddler daughter’s uneaten meal into the garbage for the fourth night in a row a distant memory will emerge like a ship in the mist and I’ll once again be face to face with actor Andrew Rannells, whom I spotted ordering tuna salad (I think) at Starlite Deli on 44th Street in Manhattan during his run in The Boys In The Band on Broadway. This was June 2018. It was a crazy day. I worked across the street and we were already a skeleton crew at that point because of unnecessary but financially dictated staff cuts, so me and another guy held it down while the other half of our team was out in Los Angeles for a broadcast television event. We’d already worked most of our day before the West Coast folks signed on and they were setting up shop for the show anyway when we saw some news that required our full attention. The young emo rapper XXXTentacion had been shot and killed in Florida. This was shocking and kicked off a slew of deaths (some murders, some overdoses) in the following 18 months that included high-profile names like Mac Miller, Juice WRLD, Lil Peep and Nipsey Hussle and that prompted the critic Craig Jenkins to posit, “We’re losing another rap generation right before our eyes.”

Working in news is psychologically draining because you’re constantly exposed to both the horrible events and the reactions to them in real time. It puts you in crisis mode and your body stays in it even after you leave for the night to try to sleep but find yourself checking your phone again and again, like you’ll somehow glean more understanding by absorbing more blue light. It also makes you hungry. I needed “lunch,” even though it was roughly 5 p.m. when I stepped outside, and I decided to grab a bag of chips at the Starlite. There’s this thing that happens when you live in New York City long enough where you see famous people around and it becomes somewhat normalized, though for me it never stopped being novel and exciting. The stakes do get slightly lowered. If you spot a well-known musician at a bar in your town where they’ve just played a show, by contrast, there might be an impulse to approach them. After all, this may never happen again. But in New York, it could happen again, and likely will, though perhaps not with the same person (although maybe). So these NYC run-ins, while enthralling, aren’t imbued with the same once-in-a-lifetime stakes. All of this is what compelled me to speak to Andrew Rannells but keep it brief and just say, “I love your work,” which is true. He’s excellent on Girls. That’s pretty much all I’ve seen except A Simple Favor but I really don’t remember him specifically in that though I’m sure he’s great as ever and compelling and quite funny. He smiled warmly and said thank you and carried on with his tuna order. I got my chips and walked back into my office, took the elevator to the 26th floor and resumed editing an obituary for a slain hip-hop artist.

Hey now!

I’m going full stream-of-consciousness here because quite frankly writing about anything related to Neil at this particular juncture doesn’t seem appealing to me. I haven’t listened to the dude much as of late. I’ve sought out wilder, rawer sounds. I’ve been buried in the wild skronk of Pharoah Sanders and the quizzical improvisations of Chick Corea with Roy Haynes and Miroslav Vitouš. Have you listened to this shit, man? “Red, Black & Green” from Sanders’ 1971 album Thembi? I’ve never heard so much texture on a piece of recorded music in my entire life. Makes me think of Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionist works where seeing the brush strokes offers as much insight into the meaning as does viewing the piece from multiple angles around the room. I’ve been wrestling with how to convey this particular relationship between different art forms because it makes sense in my head but I may have come up short here, which is perhaps why people tend just to say things like “song whips ass” because it gets the enthusiasm across without getting lost in the trees. Driving to pick up my daughter from school I listened to that song and followed it up with “Black Balloon” by the Goo Goo Dolls because everything is a vibe and realized 20 years too late that Johnny Rzeznik sings, “And I go on as you get colder,” and not, as I had long thought, “Dagger waters, you get colder” although it does make me want to use “dagger waters” in some kind of creative capacity. An experimental music act called “Dagger Waters” could sound like so many things, including but not limited to: a drum/guitar freakout that lasts way longer than it ought to; a brassy exploration of exotic scales; a chilly, synthesizer-led tribute to pirates. You get the idea.

Hey now!

My father-in-law is in his seventies, a few years younger than Neil. He’s originally from Michigan. A few years ago we were talking about the endless slate of gray skies that seems to materialize over this part of the country (Western New York, the Midwest, et al) from about October to April, if we’re lucky. He called it going into the tunnel. We’re in the tunnel now. I write this from inside the tunnel.

Neil Young turned 79 earlier this week, on November 12. For context, Neil’s Crazy Horse mates Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina are both 81. Everyone in The Stray Gators, who backed Neil up on Harvest, died between 2000 and 2015. Neil’s onetime bandmate Graham Nash is 82 (and quite lucid, even with the exact dates of formative events that happened to him in the 1960s). Stephen Stills is likewise 79 but turning 80 in less than two months. David Crosby died in 2023. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan are both 83 and Dylan is still very much touring, like Neil. Joni Mitchell, recently 81, just staged some incredible shows at the Hollywood Bowl. Phil Lesh died last month at 84. And earlier this month, Quincy Jones passed on at 91. I really didn’t mean to make this such a downer but I guess I’ve been thinking about death and really how could I not, how could we all not, as we’re always among it even as we are in life and all that. But I come back to the fact that Neil is nearly an octogenarian and yet still does whatever he wants as he is compelled to do it. Luckily for us most of those things seem to align with what is commonly understood to be Good (though not always).

One of these days I’m going to dedicate one of these entries entirely to Neil songs that I can’t stand and one of them is absolutely going to be “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” — and I suppose its twin, “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” although at least that one has some cool crunching guitar dissonance in it. The whole “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” discourse is exhausting even now but I did like learning recently that John Lennon thought the whole sentiment was bullshit. (“Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison — it’s garbage to me,” he said in a 1980 interview, via Wikipedia. “I worship the people who survive.” He was murdered later that year.) Neil’s response to Lennon, given two years after the latter’s death, stuck with me:

Rock'n'roll doesn't look that far ahead. Rock'n'roll is right now. What's happening right this second. Is it bright? Or is it dim because it's waiting for tomorrow—that's what people want to know. And that's why I say that.

A foolish, likely selfish perspective that I nevertheless have to support. When you’re making art, there is only the moment. Any deviation is a threat to its very existence. “Is it bright? Or is it dim because it’s waiting for tomorrow?” Good thing to keep in mind as we make our way through the tunnel.

Hey now!

“Hey Now,” written by Neil Young, Jeff Blackburn, Bob Mosley, and Johnny Craviotto, from High Flyin’ (The Ducks, recorded 1977 and released 2023)

Neil Young: guitar, vocals
Jeff Blackburn: guitar, vocals
Bob Mosley: bass, vocals
Johnny Craviotto, drums, vocals