Pushkin. Hey, y'all, it's justin Richmond. We have a really special episode for you today. When Rick Rubin and I first talked about making Broken Record, we had a short list of absolute dream guests for the podcast. Neil Young was at the top of that list. We tried by various means over the years to make it happen. Neil had even been around the studio while we were taping episodes with other guests, but we just couldn't make it work. So when Neil's new record was announced and we were told he wanted to speak with Rick about it, we were beyond ecstatic. Neil's won a very few popular artists who seems to be singularly focused on creating. Wherever the muse goes, he goes. As a teenager, it led him to the folk clubs of Canada. We first met Joni Mitchell in the late sixties. It led him to Los Angeles. We started Buffalo Springfield with Stephen Stills. Later, it led him to a long solo career with intermittent stints with Crosby, Stills and Nash in other groups he's put together over the years. It's also led him, at various points to spurn fans, journalists, executives, labels, collaborators, or anyone who gets in the way of his vision. Neil's an iconoclast, a renegade, someone who makes music vibrant and exciting, and we're lucky to still have him around four gene, relentlessly ahead, as vital as ever, depending on how you count. Neil's newest release is his fiftieth solo album, not counting the dozens of other archival and miscellaneous releases from decades past, or the dozen or so archive releases to come in the new year. The newest one was recorded in a barn up in the mountains of Colorado with his on and off again band since nineteen sixty eight, Crazy Horse Thubam's called Barn. Let's listen to a bit of a song from it, called Human Race. Today, no one cares Tomorrow, No one shares, because they all will be gone. But the children's children of the bars and floods. Who's gonna say the human Race? The children gonna run it hid the fire, the fires and floods to these people have left behind the people. Today's episode, Rick and Neil talk about his new album, all of the archival projects he plans I'm releasing in the coming year, The time they spent working together on some abandoned songs in nineteen ninety seven that may soon see the latter day, Neil's time at a Rick James fronted band that was signed to Motown, Driving to la from Canada, and a hearse. They talked for so long we decided to make this the first of two episodes with Neil Young. This is broken record liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's part one of Rick Rubin's conversation with Neil Young. Hey, what is that in Maine? How's it going? Pretty good? How you feeling? You're good? Good to see you, great to see you. Oh my god. So how are you being I've been great. I haven't seen you in a minute. Yeah, it's been maybe a minute and a half. Jeez, all good everything. Well, if you're feeling good, I feel healthy. Yeah, I feel good. Great, You're looking great, man, Thank you sir. Trying my best. Yeah, so tell me where. First of all, where's the barn? What part of the world is the barn in? It's in Colorado? Beautiful. Yeah. The filming of the sessions is beautiful and shed a lot of light on the music. The album's beautiful, but seeing the images and seeing the tranquility of the nature while listening to the music really is a moving experience. Yeah, Daryl did a great job. It is quite interesting to watch it stop at you every seven seconds, it takes a picture, and so the music has this timeless aura to it because things are happening out of time. So when you're looking at it, it doesn't distract you from the music. The music stays with you while it's happening, which is really, you know, very rare. Most videos are a distraction, and you know, they don't help you get way into the music. Yeah, they support the music, but they don't help the music. It's interesting when when you listen to music, do you close your eyes or do you keep your eyes open when you're listening. You know, I'm really not sure when I'm listening to music, I'm gone, i don't know where i am, i don't know what I'm doing. If I'm really into the music, Yeah, it just takes me away, transports me. That's that's actually one of the things I wanted to talk about is I've seen you play a lot of times. I've seen a lot a lot of times, and I can't think of a case where it didn't feel like you were being transported by the music. Always it was always you were gone in it. Are there ever bad shows? Can you ever not get into that place? Sometimes, but rarely, I'll take any kind of abuse of circumstance to the music and try to use it. You know, whatever it is, I try to turn around and throw it back at the music. Yeah, it's like I try to make the best set it and I use it. A lot of times. Things go wrong in life, as we all know, and you don't know what the hell is going on? Why did that happen? I try to take that anger or sadness and put it into music, and the same thing happens in real time. If I'm playing and there's a lot of distractions or something, if they're severe distractions, I'll freak out. But if they're not, I will use it in the music. Might the distractions actually make it better? Based on what you're saying? In some cases they might ye for me. I don't know about other musicians. Only asking for you, I know, I thank god. Yeah, it's only everything we're going to talk about. It's very personal. It's just like, how does it hit you? What was it like being back in the room with the horse. It was wonderful. It's always great to be in the room with the horse. And now that we have nos in Pancho's retire you know, Pancho got some arthritis and the hand injury at the same time, so that he did do another tour after that, but he wasn't enjoying it as much because it really hurt, so he decided to give it a rest. Mills was in early two though, wasn't he. Yeah, he was with He was with us for after the gold Rush. Tonight's tonight trans So during my first ten years, he was around a lot. Do you remember the very first time you jammed with Crazy Horse? Yeah, it was in my living room. You know. I hung out with the Rockets a lot at their house in Laurel Canyon, which was right on Loyal Canyon Boulevard. Someday we're in Loyal Canyon together, I will show you the house still there. Great, one of those funky wooden houses. Yeah, three years, four stories tall with the garage under it that opens right onto Laurel Canyon Corner. It's dangerous, very dangerous. But we used to get high there and party and have a great I'm playing music and listening to music and talking. There was you know, Annie Whitten and Robin Lane and Billion Ralph and George Witzel and Bobby knock Coff from the Rockets. You know, I just liked it. They were they. I think I met them through Buffalo Springfield somehow at some gig, maybe the Whiskey of Go Go, and I think that's where I met them. And then they asked me to over and hang out. They started talking, and so we talked and we hung out and listening to music, had a great time just hanging out. It was a good place to go. I went there more than anywhere else because I had a good time and we were jab and play. It was always always felt good to me because they weren't really you know, that accomplished, although Knotcuff on the violin was amazing and George Witzel was a great musician still is I believe. Then there was Billion Ralph, and Robin was Danny's girlfriend, and Dan was great. They're just nice people, just a good group of people. I enjoyed being with them. And from the first time you played, did it feel good. It always felt good playing with the Rockets then, but there were a lot of Rockets, but it wasn't really good for making a record for me. So that's when I decided maybe I could just borrow a few people from the Rockets and make a record. And when that happened, I asked them to come up to my house. My house was into Panga Canyon and OHI way up on one of those roads and overlooking the shopping center and the corners and everything. And we were up there playing in my living room and that was great. We sounded great right away, instantaneous by playing with different people. How does it affect you the way you play or what happens, Well, there's nothing like crazy Horse, and I always loved playing with Skills the same way. Still is just like a real musician. He's very open and shares everything and loves to play. But the Horse is like a group that's like that. So you know, the more I played with the Horse and then we start jamming and just playing, and it's just always was easy. As long as the chords were right, it was good. Nothing complex, because that wasn't that's not what the horse does. The horse does it groove, and if it's simple enough, we can all get into and get lost and not worry about remembering anything or an arrangement. The window into the instrumental has got to be the window into the verse, so we can play for as long as we want, and then we're in the verse whenever we want to go. And that's how we do it. There's really no there's no rules about it. When you write the songs, do you think of a structure or does it happen more you're looking at the on the page and you're feeling the jam, and the shape of it evolves naturally. The best ones just naturally evolved. The best ones happened kind of by mistake, if you can say that they happened so naturally. You don't even know how that happened. It's a real deal, and we have it and we respect it, and we love it. You honor it. I'm glad to be together all the time. When we together, you appreciate the whole thing. It's like a gift. Beautiful. There's one. There's one on the new album. I don't know. I don't know titles. I don't know titles on anything. I don't know titles on any songs I work on either, But you sing about stars in the sky. Oh yeah, let's welcome back, welcome back, welcome back. It's not the same, don't you love all those commercials Welcome back, Applebee's, welcome back. Are you kidding? I'm not going in there. I mean, I got nothing against Applebee's. Good luck to Applebe's, and I'm sorry see EO, whoever you are. But so many people started saying welcome back. I was thinking myself, I don't think we're any farther away from this pandemic than we were the first day we discovered it. Yeah, I think we've made much progress, so I feel that we're still there. So I don't go out and play. I hardly go anywhere. I just stay at home because, lucky for me, I've got a lot to do. Yeah. Same here, we don't leave the house because there's a lot to do right here. Look at all the stuff you've gotten your vault. I mean, you've got so much stuff that you wish that you'd finished, or you wish that somebody else had come along and help you finish it, or whatever happened. What happened to that? That was great? How come we stop? I understand all of that time is weird, because see, you keep going, and that's the way. That's the way I've lived my musical life. I just go from one thing to another. And coincidentally, I just was visiting one of our sessions, one of our few sessions. We were actually in a studio. We were playing yeah and some of that stuff, and there's some radical stuff in there. There's one thing called hard Luck Stories that you should give a listen to sometime just to refresh your memory. I haven't heard anything since that day, so I know it's ridiculous. It is, yes, and that's not the one. That's the best one real. The other two are better, but hard Luck Stories it's ridiculous. Back and I think somewhere in the previous decade, Yeah, I did a bunch of demos. It's when I got the synclaviar and the Lynn drum and whenever they all that started, the seton drums, the sink system with the synclaviar and all this stuff. I got all that stuff, and I started laying down tracks and doing all kinds of stuff by myself and my ranch. And then I did a bunch of songs like that and recorded them next them, and but there's no real guitar player or anything on them. And they were all on multi tracks, and that's what we had when we went in the studio together. We had we had one of those that I brought in and I said, let's just try to play this song or whatever. And I played it and I was singing. I already sung on it and everything. So I must have said, or somebody must have said, why don't we just play with that? Which was weird because crazy Horse playing with a bunch of computers, it is weird. Wow. I don't remember this at all. I mean I remember, I remember being in the room with Crazy Horse. I remember the session, but I don't remember that. That's wild. Yeah, we only did one like that, Yeah, Hard Luck Stories. The other two are just live tracks of Modern World and Horseshoe Man, the two songs. Yeah, I remember there was a good version of Horseshoe Man as I think back. Yeah, it's a beauty things. It's great. I remember it being really in the moment I remember it. I remember that. See, that was an early master that was probably if I remember, it might have been the original performance in the studio, as was Modern World and Hard luck stories. It was the first time if you if you say, okay, the one I did with the computers and all the synthesizers and the machines. The one I did with the machines was the original one where I was writing it and I laid it all down. But the only other time I played it was when we put that on and we played with it, and it is so ridiculous. I can't I can't wait to hear it. It's the war of crazy horse against the machine versus the machines. That sounds great. Yeah, it's really good. Wins the battle. I think the horse one very they were very thankful the machines. The machines gave it them to some idea what they were doing, and it was easy to do. Never count the horse out, Oh no, no. The horse just sniffed the machines a couple of times. I can do this and turn its back on the machine and kicked them a couple of times. Don't bet against the horse. So that was great and we had a great time. I remember we booked the session and then you called me and you told me that you cut off a piece of your finger. Do you remember this, Yeah, that's where I happened after that session, no, before the session, and you called and told me about it, and I said, so, which we'll cancel. You said, I can't play guitar, So he said, we cancel the session, and you said, no, I have an idea. I'm gonna play harmonica through my guitar, rig right, and it's said okay, And that's so. That's that was what happened. That is so, that's why I'm not playing guitar on some of it. The only thing I played on Hard Luck Stories. I believe the only thing I played is one chord. Yeah, and I kept playing with one chord and just yeah and the rest of it. Poncho played his guitar, Yeah, played. Everything was good. But I remember you were able to play piano because you were playing piano the whole whole. Yeah. Yeah, I played piano on Horseshoe Man, and I didn't play anything on Modern World because I played harmonica. Yeah. We just kept going, We continued and we made good records. Yeah. I remember you had a marimba brought down. If I remember correctly, I think there may be marimba in there somewhere, because because I remember, i'd never seen a marimba in person before, so it was exciting. Well, that was the big thing, like xylophone. It was like a xylophone but made out of wood and really big, beautiful, and it had some machine in it that like spun almost like a Leslie. Yeah, that was used on I believe we used that on Horseshoe. Yeah. Cool stuff. We'll be right back with more from Neil Young after a quick break. We're with Rick Rubin and Neil Young. You mentioned Stills. Do you remember the first time ever playing with Stills. I played with him in Fort William, Ontario, in like nineteen sixty one, before I even went back, before I even went down to La Wow. And I went down to La looking for him, couldn't find him. And I was driving down the street and they were thinking of going to San Francisco. Bruce Palmer and I, you know, just driving down the street in our hearse's with all of our stuff and you go to San Francisco, will find some music there. So all the Sunset Boulevard around uh right, it between the Screen Actors Guild and the Old Green Blacks and exactly where that is really close to Earle Canyon, Yeah, really close to all canyon. I looked out and there and I heard this somebody calling Neil Neil, and I looked out the window and it Stills. He's in a car going the other way, but the graphics kind of going really slow. So I pulled over and they came and Stills with Puree and they had been trying to get it going. So that's how the Springfield started. So the the initial playing with Stills in Ontario must have been good for you to want to come down to California to find him. Oh yeah, No, that was great. We played a lot of stuff and it always felt good. And he was just really getting into electric guitar for the first time. He had an acoustic guitar and had done a folk but he had gotten an electric guitar and he liked playing it. And he was in a band called The Company and what he played in the Company was his his electric guitar sometimes. And the Company was kind of a folk Christian minstrel's kind of thing, only sixty four or something. It's pretty cool, like a vocal based group. Yeah, but they had instruments and they played, so they the group going yeah, but we were at the time. It was me and the Squires. It was me and a bass player and drummer and we were just rock and roll, crazy rock and roll. I was doing stuff based on Jim Rose. Jim Rose had Hey Joe, Yeah, and he also had great versions of I think it was Oh Susannah, or maybe it was anyway it was. There was some other guys in the group too, and from from his band, and they played both folk songs with rock and roll arrangements, and one of them was their version of Oh Susannah, which I thought was really cool. I actually did a version of it on one of my albums, Psychedelic Bill with Crazy Horse, decades later. So there was a rock version of Hey Joe prior to Hendrix. I didn't know that. Oh yeah, oh Hendrix game right, had no idea. I don't know. Hey Joe was a very cool folk rock thing and Jim Rose is great. Try to find a Tim Rose version I will. So you were in the Squires playing music inspired by that kind of stuff? Was your group with Rick James prior to that? It was after that? So Squires was first, then Mina Birds and what was that group? Like, anybody from the Squires and the Mina Birds or no, no, just me. What was that group like? Well, Bruce Palmer was in that group. Rick James was in that group, amazing, John Yacamac and another guy, a guitar player and a drummer, Rick Rick, the drummer Boost, the bass player John and the rhythm guitar player. The lead guitar player was gone. That's why they bought me and Rick Matthews, Ricky James Matthews, the third was singing lead and he was in Canada and we didn't know, but he was a draft dodger. I see. And what was the music? How would you describe the music? R and B rock and roll, rolling Stones meets motown meets old time southern blues? Great? Did you did you do gigs? Oh? Yeah, how were the gigs? Gigs were great? It was all over the place. I remember pulling my guitar chord out multiple times, was playing, jumping around and suddenly there's no sound. Oh yeah. We played high schools. We played, We played clubs in Yorkville, in Toronto. So then you come down south, you find Stills, the band starts and things go good. For Buffalo Springfield, It's great. It's a great band. Never was recorded. I wanted to ask you about that. What do you remember about the recording sessions for Buffalo Springfield. Our managers were our producers. That's the one thing I remember. They were awful. They didn't know what the hell they were doing. They were on the phone half the time, they were posing. They had nothing. We if we'd had like, oh god, if we'd had Barry Friedman, if we'd had Paul Rothschild, any number of guys from the folk and blues scene, we would have been in pretty good shape. We had two managers from New York. They didn't know how to do it. They had Sonny and Share. Yeah, they didn't do that, though Sonny did that. Yeah, so we we didn't have the benefit of We didn't even have Sonny. You need I would have been something to here. So anyway, we didn't have much. So the recording sessions was mostly up to Skills and I and for a you know, the whole band. But that that was it. On for what it's worth. The guitar sound in the beginning of the harmonics, who plays that? I never knew that. It's it's funny because the song is so it's obviously synonymous with Buffalo Springfield. But we think of it as a Stills song, Yet that guitar part is kind of the musical signature of the song. And um, it's just interesting to know that you played it. Yeah, yeah, it was live. Do you remember how that came about? How that part came about, because it's unusual. I never heard that in a song before, or maybe since. It seemed to me like the song was a news warning or something, and I was thinking of the sound of news, so the d could be part of a news sound, you know. Yeah, and it just it just going, Dad just doing that thing with the tremolo and the tremolo, barn the gretch and it seemed to work. The engineer, Tom May Columbia Studio B, Sunset Boulevard. But yeah, that was great. That was That was a good session. It's the only one we did with Tom. Then. Were you in the band when they opened for the Rolling Stones? Oh? Yeah, I played with the band and when they opened for The Stones at the Hollywood Bowl. How was that, Well, it's just like another gig. It was pretty good. Uh, you know, it was a big crowd and everything was pretty exciting. I remember I drove my eye at a Mini Cooper at the time. Of great. I remember driving it to the gig and you know, trying to get in the backstage with it, and I just said, well, you know, if you don't want to let me in, you don't have to just tell somebody that the guitar player from Buffalo's Prankfield can't get in, you know. So I sat there for a while. You know, when I got in, eventually I wasn't in a hurry. I said, that's okay with me. I mean, somebody's gonna notice I'm not there. They're gonna be looking for them. Yeah. No cell phones in those days. It couldn't call anything. Oh no, everything was really different. It was all reality. People had talked to each other face to face. What was Laurel Canyon like back then? What was the vibe like? What was the feeling? What was a community like? Pretty hippie, pretty hippified community. A lot of beautiful green stuff, green plants, old houses. The neighborhoods were full of people from bends. Down the hill from me was Danny Danny Hutton from Three Dog Night. It was just like one hundred yards below me on the hill. I lived up on a cabin up on a hill rented by an astrologer named Kio. I had a little pine pine cabin where I wrote a lot of those songs, you know, all those Buffalo Springfields songs on pieces of newspaper I wish I still had. At one point I had all the newspapers in a big pack with felt dick markers on top of newsprints, you know, mister soul burling air, all those kinds of stuff, probably expecting the fly and they're somewhere. Ever, they were in a dumpster in the sky. But down the hill from me, I was up the steps near Kio's house and my little pine ham that was separated by about yeah, under yards or so along the hill. But at the bottom of the steps, which were quite numerous steps, there was a garage and John Densmore lived in the apartment above the garage, and you know, everybody was just playing at the whiskey. You go, though. The Three Dog Night was was, you know, kind of a manufactured group that was put together by a record company, and they were pretty cool, and I don't remember them coming along and playing the whiskey and kind of breaking themselves in. And further down the road was Denny from the Mamas and Papas and Michelle, Michelle Phillips and Denny Doherty. Yeah, they were everywhere. Rockers were everywhere down there. Did it feel good? Coming from Canada moving down and then being in this neighborhood of like minded people? Was that different? I thought that's what it was. What it was like. I just thought that's what happened, you know, I was in Hollywood, that people we were. I wasn't surprised because all the musicians lived there because they all play there, That's where they all come from, that's where all the record companies were in studios, and so they didn't strike me that much. Now retrospective, it does kind of. Yeah. Yeah, at the time, it seemed normal. And then and then when did you move to Penga sixty eight? Probably? I think sixty eight the Springfield broke up and I moved to I can't remember exactly how it happened, but I think I moved to the Chateau Marmont Well. I lived in a room there for a while, an apartment. Well, I'm not really sure that I was there a couple of times. I know I did Tonight's to Night Learning there and somehow I was at some point I moved up north. I saw a ranch. I saw the land out of an airplane window when I was growing up to play with this ringfield sas Alito in this place called the Charles van Dam the ark where we played, and there was Moby Great was playing with us. So usin Moby Great playing on this old paddle wheel. Incredible. Yeah. This guy Matthew Cats who was a promoter, you know, a Filmore or Avalon or something. He managed the arc and he employed us to play there. I don't think we got much money. We did play there. Gave us a place to play. But you found the ranch ranch that way amazing? So you didn't leave live long in Topanga? And did you live in Malibu for a little a minute as well? I lived in Topanga first. Then from Topanga I moved to the Shatau Marmont again. When he got to the shape Marmon, I moved from there. I took off and went up to I might have been staying with Gary Burden, my art director for so many years, in his house, and then I then I thought, I went up north and I found this ranch, so things must have been okay. I'd already recorded after the Gold rushing in to Panga. Everybody knows while I was living in the Panga and my first album with David Briggs. They were all with David Bridge when I when I came to that was my first album. And then so after the third album, I knew We've got North with Bruce Berry and Yermo Ketty and some of the road crew, John and John Barbada, who went playing drums to CSNY. He was a drummer in the Turtles. So we went up north and I bought the place and moved in. I stayed there for a while and I started writing, started touring again. When I wrote the songs and started writing Harvest. I remember there was a there was a BBC live performance from right around that time because Harvest was not out yet, but you played songs from Harvest on it. Yeah, I remember that too. It's one of the It's one of the greatest things I've ever seen. Tell me everything you remember about that. I was interesting. They they did the show and then they wanted me to do something else after that. But the show itself was kind of like No. You see these shows that are in the round where you see all the people sitting and they're all lit and everything's clean. The artists just sitting up there on a little round stage kind of reminded me of one of those there's a lot like that. I had all my songs and I was playing them and it was I don't know what hall. I don't think it was a hall. I think it was a BBC studios, and you know, I just played my show. There's the same show basically that I played at Massive Hall, same show I played basically the same one I play that Carnate Evil. Strangely enough to have a bootleg is that I have a bootleg series now because I recorded everything, I have all the masters of every bootleg thats ever put out, So now I can put those all out and that the sound great. You know, if anybody remembers them, they're going to be there and they're pretty cool. It makes me feel good down them. So yeah, I just pretty well now just do whatever I want to do. I put out way too many records. If I was going to put out records and try to sell them, I couldn't do it the way I'm doing. I'm putting them out now because I want to. I just want to make things right. I don't want to get all of the stuff that I wanted to put out. I want to put it out. Yeah, I want to beat you. Yes, I want to enjoy whatever reaction there is, and I want to enjoy the creation of it, and I want to make sure it's done right and that the artwork is correct and everything. So I can still do that. But the big problem with me is that I have so much so I really stuck even that. What that session we did, I think we did three songs in one day and we were out of Yeah, it seemed like went pretty fast, yes, and then I was on into something else and couldn't play because of my finger or whatever it was. Couldn't do the big live performances because my finger was I think I hacked it up with a knife making a tuna sandwich or something. I think I was in my train bar because I like to go to kind of gather my senses and lay track and move move mountains through all kinds of stuff. Funny, I never it's funny to hear you say that, because I never made the connection before of when you're in train land, you can move mountains and you can't you really have complete control of the universe. And then you can turn the whole universe off and leave if you want. Yeah, that's good. But it gave me a place to go. I created the mountains out of stumps from the forest. So I took natural things that existed from burnt out trees and stuff and cut a bottom on them that was flat and put them on these tables and created these mountain ranges out of them. And it was only a matter of perspective. The way they were positioned on the table made you think it was a mountain range. It couldn't be anything else, you know, all over the track winding through it, going through tunnels and stuff. But mostly it was the scenery. I used moss from the trees, moss from the ground, and I bring it into the train barn and laid out all around the mountains and it looked like fields, looked like green fields. Nice to water it and do all kinds of stuff. It was very cool. I'm very good, and I'm building another one in Malibu right now. My son and I and all of the grandchildren great when I took my son there because I left the ranch about eight years ago. I left broke the narrow r ansty line. But I loved that training, so I didn't want people to have my training, so I dismantled it. I took it all apart, and all I left was the stuff that was screwed down. I took all of the wood and took them all to southern southern California and go to another table outside. The story does have a payoff when I took my son Ben there, We went there together just a couple of weeks ago, and I showed it to him and when he saw it, he recognized the wood. And you know, he doesn't speak. He was in a wheelchair. He's at Quadrick Collegiate, so he doesn't speak. But he looked at this stuff and then he looked at me with one eye. This gave me the greasy eyeball the smile on his face, and you could tell you since he was like a year old, he'd been going there and playing trains and hanging out with me while I was working on the layout, and name these pieces of wood. So all the pieces of wood that who saw were there. Amazing, It was amazing. It just then. So we're rebuilding and being ready to do it again and have all the grand children. I'm so happy you get to you get to have a new train barn, and it'll be I bet it's going to be an improvement over the old train barn. I'm guessing it'll be great. We're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with more from Neil Young. We're back with the rest of part one of Rick Rubin's conversation with Neil Young. Back to Buffalo Springfield for a minute. There's a story that the day before Buffalo Springfield broke up, you fired the manager of the band, which was Elliott, our friend Elliott, and broke Elliot's heart because he loved the band, and you coldly fired Elliott. And then, well, this is the story. You'll tell me the truth. I'm telling you the the mythical story, the legend. In the legend, you fire Elliott, you break his heart. The next day you quit the band, the band breaks up, and then you call Elliott and you hire him to be your personal manager. Is any of that? Is it anything like that? It's all true. It didn't happen so fast, but it took a couple of weeks. Yeah, he did something. I didn't like it, but I can't even remember what it was. But I told him that was us. So what change that made you rehire him after firing him? I loved him. I loved him, but you know, he fucked up so bad I could have him, So I think it's just my own immaturity. I had to have him all for myself or not at all. It worked out. It worked out great. The love affair went on up until he passed on, and still continues because we can still send our love to Elliot, share what we're feeling, and if we listen clothes, we'll probably hear what he's got to say. That's right. We will tell me about Briggs. First meeting Briggs. How do you meet him? That Briggs into Panger Canyon. I was walking along Old to Panker Canyon Boulevard on my way to a restaurant to have breakfast, and it was about a mile and a half a lot and I like walk, and Briggs and buy Pete went by, and what it would have been a hummer, but it was earlier before hummers, so it was a military vehicle, troop carrier. A cool vehicle. Yeah, cool vehicle. And he saw me and they stopped and picked me up. So I met him. Were you hitchhiking or you just walking, just walking, and he just said you you want to ride? Want to ride? And I said sure, thanks. Do you remember good conversation in the car. Was he involved in music at the time. Oh, yeah, it was producing. He worked with Murray Roman, the comedian, and he worked with Tetra grammaton records. He was working on a record with Randy California from Spirit but a few things going on and everything, and I just liked talking to him. Yeah, I got to know him and find out where he lived. We were hanging out of his house, just hang out and talk and played in some songs. He started talking about it. What was the first album you did with him? My first album from the beginning? Amazing? Yeah, and that was That's That's that record we made after I met him. Then I moved from the house. I was living into another house one in Topango where I recorded after the Gold Rush. But this is long before that, and I was living in Topanga at my new house and going in and reporting with breaks at T T ANDNG Reporters and a little bit of Wally Hiders and stuff, working with Jim Messina and George Grantham. Jim that had been had helped us out in Springfield as we were breaking up, and George Grantham was in Poco, which Jim Messina and Richie Furrey started. So I just you know, I played with Jim and because I knew them in when did you build the big red box with all the pedal box? Okay, that's nineteen seventy six, the first iteration of it. Yeah, this was the simplest version of it. The first version only had two levels. First of all, let me explain what it did. It connected an electric potentiometer or a spring. A spring drive through a cable to an electric box that you could turn on or turn off. I had a spring on it, so if he turned it off and went back to a starting position wherever, you manually screwed it into the post on a button on the amp the volume control. I took the volume control off my Deluxe, stuck this thing over the volume posts, screwed it in. Once I'd gotten the volume where I wanted it, then I put the thing over and screwed it in, and then if I hit the switch, would vote turning this thing until the spring was it was pushed all the way and that would turn it all the way up and then if I pushed the button again, it would turn off and then would go back down. So the advantage of that with a fendered lux or with any old amplifill is that really the master volume is the tone control. Yeah, these ancillary tone controls were based in Trouble, but they don't really do what the volume control does, which is overload the hella. So that was the amount of overload that I had and was decided by the position of that one button. So there was a sober box that was, you know, with a cap that looked like a mechano set holding it on top of my amp. And then I had a Fender reverb unit and those two things. That's what I used up until nineteen including nineteen seventy six, and the last record that I made playing that way was as a record this is called Electric Duty presents Chaos and the course that rode in on. I've never heard that one. Oh it's not out. Oh that's why, it's just I just found it. And it's the last one that I did. But the original rig then Rust Never Sleeps was the next tour, and I developed a system that had four levels for the potentialometer to go to four buttons to select the tones that I wanted by the position of the master volume. So it's only controlling the master volume. That's the only thing that the box does. That's what that does. But the red box also has on the bottom there's four buttons. That's that's low, medium, medium, high, and high and they all sound different, really radically different. Along the top there's a MXR analog delay in it, a neutron octive divider, some old kind of flange thing, and they on off bypass that took them all out of the loop and echoplex, so they were all together, the neutron octive divider and the other things and the echo plex which are the most critical ones. And every once in a while I used the flanger and there was another one that was a ridiculous digital thing that it sounded like I was making popcornings, so i'd throw that in for a couple of notes every once in a while. But they were right on the edge of my foot, all these things, and I had them all there, and then one one button would take them all out. So then instead of going through all these switches the signal only one for one, I bypassed all of the electronics and everything into the other stuff. But if I want to use the other stuff, you know, I could preset it and then hit that one switch and everything could come on at once, or I could play with the switch on and add things one by one. I could do anything I wanted. Plus I had the four levels of volume, so it's pretty complex. Yeah. Do you ever hit the wrong button by mistake? Always? Every show? Sometimes? So yeah. The thing is rick that while it was a great sound, it colored everything that I did from nineteen seventy seven and a half now. Yes, But right before that is this album Chaos. Can't wait to hear it, which is just me playing the guitar with Crazy Horse with one volume change and a reverb unit. No a complex is, no flangers, none of the stuff. But also nothing where the signal went away, nothing where the signal had to go through a new place to get to the effects. Yes, So consequently the actual sound of the guitar was more pure, more direct, and I was playing it and what that sound? That like? This this record? I think this Chaos record is ridiculous. It's the best Crazy Horse record ever made. When do we get to hear that one? Probably this year? It's coming out. It's the first disc on volume three of my archives. Amazing. Yeah, I can't wait to hear it. Thanks right, I wait to hear it too. We just today, we just had a meeting and locked the running order completely. Thirteen CDs. There's thirteen discs. Each one has a cover, each one as a story, and but they're all those thirteen discs. Have found them ten blue ray discs, and the blue rays each have the high res version of the CDs and films. There's eight films. So of the ten Blu rays, eight of them have films and CD and you know albums in high rese How did you know the archive all this? Like, how did you notice, say, of every thing? How did that happen? That's the question. Yes, yes it is. I'll call you if I can figure that out. I have no idea, but I collect everything, I keep track of everything. I can't help it. I write everything down, or I make some sort of note or cryptic message to myself that says where this was from. So consequently I have at the beginning of this disc, I have chaos, which is chaos and the horse that rode in on presented by Electric Jude. That's a very interesting covered title. But anyway, Then at the other end, CD thirteen is Summer Songs, which is a collection of original versions of songs that came out three or four years later. So it has the original versions of American Dream. Would you call them demos or would you not call them demos? I would call them sketches. I see, I don't think they're a demo. What they are is versions of the song, the pure original version. They all have the original lyrics which are different from the lyrics that that came out on Freedom. And I had four albums that they came out on, all in the late eighties early nineties, and this album was made in the eighties seven, So the album Summer Songs was done years before. Yeah, I did all these songs and then I don't know why, but I put them all together, called them Summer Songs and put them on the shelf. And then later on what I did American Dream with CSNY, I tried a couple of these songs. There's two of the songs from that are on that record. Then I did Freedom, and there's songs on Freedom that are from that record, And there's two other records that I made, but I can't that from that Erio and they are American Dream from that album, The Last of His Kind, which was an unreleased song about farmers, Someday, which was on Freedom for the Love of Man, which was on Psychedelic Pill, which came out in the nineties, One of These Days, which was on Harvest Moon, Wrecking Ball from Freedom, Hanging on a Limb from Freedom, and Name of Love from American Dream. So all of those songs in their original shape are on this and I played them all on acoustic and then very different from any acoustic Overdubblin's overdone. I did them all, perform them and sang and played them, and then right away I did them again, listening to what I've done, playing exactly without moving, staying in the same position, not moving, did the song again and played everything along with it. It's uncanny, You cannot you think that it's an electronic thing where I duplicated the guitar. Really, if you really have to listen to tell it, it's two different versions. Really, they're close, and everything's the saying because nothing changed, everything is doubled, everything's doubled. I sang harmony parts and played the guitar parts at the same time. So when I did the harmony parts, the guitar was added or elade guitar was added, but whatever it was, I played it and sang at the same time, just like I did in the original. So that was amo that I used to create summer songs. And I found it last week, maybe two weeks ago. I kept looking at I kept saying, summer songs. There's summer songs. Yeah, that's a bunch of things that I didn't want to put out or that I didn't use. Then I listened to it. It's got beautiful echoes. It's so beautiful. If it's not like a demo, because it's like the production. The first thing that anybody heard them said it is wow, what a great production. Sounds amazing, And I'm going, well, it's uh. First of all, it's not even high res. It's CD quality as in the dark ages that digital recorded sound, which was the late nineties, late late eighties and early nineties. Yeah, where things went downhill really badly before we started to pull it back because we were all recording low resolution because the technology companies were telling us how great it was. That's why we started doing We trusted again. It's pretty scap. But anyway, so we so I found these. They all sound the same. They are like a record like no other record I've ever made. They all are everything that's unified. It's altogether. It's like I wrote myself a letter and mailed it to myself to get like three forty years later. Unbelievable. Yeah, so there they are. So that's what I'm doing right now as I'm investigating all this stuff. Thanks to Neil for taking the time to talk about the early days of his career and telling us about his vast musical archives. Be sure to check out part two of Rick and Neil's conversation next week. You can hear all of our favorite Neil Young songs at broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast. We can find all of our new episodes. Broken Record is produced with help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chaffey. Our executive producer is mil LaBelle. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record and please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast at Our theme music is by Kenni Beats. I'm justin Richmond.