NEIL YOUNG

Neil Young:
Dark Side of the Moon
By Jaan Uhelszki
Neil Young has long-plotted his life around the phases of the moon. Ancient and antediluvian, prehistoric and prescentient but strangely effective, Young uses the moon as a psychic touchstone--from when to plan a tour, book a studio or make a television appearance, but oddly not to plot the day he got married.

"Yup, you got me there," admits Young. "I am a strong believer in the full moon as a good time to sow creative seeds, and I try to plan everything around it." He leans a little too far back in an artful metal chair within a well-appointed conference suite at Nashville's Hermitage hotel before continuing. "Before there was organized religion, there was the moon. The Indians knew about the moon. Pagans followed the moon. I've followed it for as long as I can remember, and that's just my religion. I'm not a practicing anything, I don't have a book that I have to read. It can be dangerous working in a full moon atmosphere, because if there are things that are going to go wrong, they can really go wrong. But that's great, especially for rock 'n' roll."

Serious, intense, with hooded blue-gray eyes that always seem capable of pinning you to the opposite wall, Neil Young is as close as he ever gets to loquacious. The man who sits before me exudes an almost Zen-like composure, seemingly at peace with himself and the choices that he's made. Gone is much of that early ire, the kind of discontent that found him pitching televisions out of third-story windows into Southern California canyons, or walking off the stage at Oakland Coliseum in the middle of a song--only to be sued by one of the 14,000 concert-goers, or deciding not to show up when Buffalo Springfield was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997--firing off an angry fax after he found out that he would only be able to bring a single guest free of charge, and would have to pay the going price of $1500 for any additional family members.

Today, Neil Young wants to talk about life--in a way he rarely has. "It's so much more simple than having to follow a bunch of rules and go to a building with everybody every week. I respect people who are dedicated to organized religion, and I respect their way of life, but it's not mine. And so I feel grossly underrepresented in the current administration," he says, waiting for the full effect of his admission to be felt.

And it's felt, if not by his words then by a song like "No Wonder" from his latest and 31st album, Prairie Wind, with its pointed but subtle bashing of U.S. politics, from Young's stance on preservation of the environment to dealing with the 9/11 aftermath. Less bombastic than 2002's "Let's Roll" but perhaps more effective because of that, it's the latest in a long line of politically conscious Young songs beginning with "Ohio" in 1970 and extending through "Rockin' in the Free World," "Powderfinger," "Welfare Mothers" and so many more over the past 35 years.

"I feel I'm doing the right thing for me. And the Great Spirit has been good to me. My faith has always been there. It's just not organized. There's no story that I follow. To me the forest is my church. It's a cathedral to me. If I need to think, I'll go for a walk in the trees or I'll go for a walk on the beach. Wherever the environment is the most extreme is where I will go."

The full moon, especially, has been an enduring presence and silent witness to his life (showing up in 28 songs in his canon). It's a widely known industry secret that Young is more apt to accept a project if it coincides with a full moon--and reject one if it's not. In fact, it's no accident that this year alone, the day he began recording Prairie Wind, the filming of the companion DVD and Farm Aid all coincided with the heavenly body looming full, fat and golden in the night sky.

We're two days past full today, AND the energy is winding down a little. After all, Young has put in a good two weeks' work on the DVD to accompany Prairie Wind. His friend and filmmaker Jonathan Demme, best known for films like Stop Making Sense, Silence of the Lambs and The Manchurian Candidate, called him up and offered his services earlier this year, explaining that he was taking a year off, and wondered if there was anything that Young wanted to do. It turns out there was lots he wanted to do, but the first thing Neil wanted was to get a Florida-shaped aneurysm removed from his brain.

After inducting Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 14, 2005, the musician suffered what he thought was a migraine when his eyes went blurry. He realized it was something more when he noticed an irregularity in his eye the next day.

"I was shaving and I saw this thing in my eye. It was like a piece of broken glass, and it looked like it was getting bigger. I'd never had anything like it before. So I went to my doctor and he noticed a couple of other irregularities in my body, a couple of things that were danger signs to him. I said, 'Hey, you know, this thing happened to me. What's going on?' So he took me to five specialists. I was just going from one office to another, and he went with me, and took me around to all these places. And I met the heads of several departments and was looked at and they did ultrasounds and an MRI and MRA on me that night. By the next morning they had the results and I went to my neurologist and they showed me this thing in my head. And he said, "You've probably had this for 100 years, so don't worry about it. But it's very dangerous, and we have to get it out right away. When I first heard the word 'aneurysm' it was like I was watching a movie instead of having it happen to me, because I felt fine."

No stranger to health concerns, Young has had bouts with epilepsy since the age of 20, suffered from polio as a child and was forced to relearn how to walk at the age of six, undergone numerous spinal surgeries and a hearing disorder called hyperacusis continues to nag him, but he never allowed his frailties to slow him down. He just works around them.

"I set up an appointment with the head of the surgery team that was going to perform this intervention. It's not really a surgery; it's a radiological intervention," he clarifies. "I got an appointment to see him but I had four days before the appointment. It was a Thursday and the appointment was on a Monday. So I went to Nashville that night and we started recording the next morning. Then I started writing that night and in the morning I did the next song. So the words all started coming and the songs came real fast."

The studio was already booked--on March 25, a full moon, natch--so the musician flew down to Tennessee with only one song written, with plans to hook up with old cronies like Spooner Oldham, guitarist Grant Boatwright, bassist Rick Rosas, and steel guitarist Ben Keith--many of whom played on earlier albums that he recorded there, including Harvest and Comes a Time. He immortalizes those early relationships in "The Painter," the first song written for the album: "I have my friends, eternally/We left our tracks in the sound/Some of them are with me now/Some of them can't be found."

"I think my greatest strength is the ability to let myself be washed along on the top of the water, just to be able to roll along--with absolutely no control over my destination," Young tells me with complete sincerity, belying the public's long-held perception of him being more than a bit of a control freak. Although after assuring me of his pacific tendencies, less than a month later he's devoted an entire pre-Farm Aid press conference to rage about an article that appeared in the Chicago Tribune that questioned the charity's distribution of funds, chastising the publication for hurting the annual concert's reputation, not letting anyone or anything deter him from his public witch hunt, finally thundering: "The people at the Chicago Tribune should be held responsible for this piece of crap," before ripping the newspaper in half and tossing it aside, an act that was accompanied by a roomful of cheers--including cheers from some Tribune employees.

"Okay, I'm kind of a walking contradiction," he laughs in his characteristic short, two-syllable laugh that's somewhere between a chuckle and a cough. "I just do what I feel like doing, so I don't close any door. I'm just open to things. I don't close things off, I don't have a lot of beliefs that stop me from doing things. I try to be open and follow the muse wherever it goes. And if it's not around, I don't push it. There's no sense in trying to fan a flame if there's no flame. Sometimes you've got to rest --and you don't have to go against the grain."

And because of that, he felt absolutely no fear that he didn't write anything for a year and a half after 2003's Greendale, or even felt the slightest urge to pick up a guitar. "It just comes when it comes. Greendale was such a huge thing that it just drained me. I couldn't figure out whether I was going to write another story like Greendale, or whether my next album was going to be like a novel or what I was going to do, and whether it was going to have more characters, or a continuation of the same story, or--I couldn't figure out what it was so I just waited. And then, finally, after 18 months, I started picking up the guitar. I never do it if I don't feel like it. I mean I don't sit around and practice. If I don't feel like it, I don't do it. And if I do feel like it, I won't do anything else."

"But you can forget how to do it," he continues. "You can write it down at night, and get up in the morning and start playing it and not remember it, and then get it back, and then go to the studio and still not remember it. You can't box it in, you can't fence it in. If you trust yourself and you don't try to box it in, you'll get it. It's like catching a wild animal: you can't corner it, you can't scare it. But you just consistently stay there with it, and wait for it to come out."

Which is exactly what Neil Young did with Prairie Wind. But he had the added impetus of his brush with mortality. "That does give you a certain fragility. But I think I always approach my records this same way. An urgency to get the stuff out, like it might be my last one." Although with this one he was plagued by the fear that he might never play again. "I knew I was at risk, a lot of people get these things and they don't make it. I think I was more afraid that I might be incapacitated."

While he claims that fear wasn't a motivating factor in getting everything down quickly, once he got to Nashville the songs just spilled out of him--some of them coming in less than 15 minutes. He wrote at the studio and at a small desk in his hotel suite after he finished recording at the studio during the day. By the time he had to return to New York for his surgical procedure Young had penned and recorded eight numbers.

One of them, "Falling Off the Face of the Earth," he even cribbed from a phone message a friend left him after he heard of Young's aneurysm. "I copied all the words down, but I'm not going to tell you who he is, because I don't share royalties with anyone," he tells the audience with a wry smile at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, before performing the song.

Ensconced in nashville's first "million-dollar hostelry," home for eight years to pool legend Minnesota Fats, and both the pro- and anti-suffragette movements, the Hermitage hotel has hosted throngs of celebrities from six U.S. presidents to the likes of screen legend Greta Garbo and gangster Al Capone. But Neil Young likes this place not because of its storied guests, its Italian marble or even because of their flawless egg and watercress sandwiches, but because they allow pets to actually stay in the sumptuous 2000-square-foot suites that overlook the Tennessee State Capitol. To make that fact a little more material, there's a photograph in the lobby of cowboy icon Gene Autry checking in with his horse Champion.

Young and his wife of 27 years, Pegi, travel everywhere with Carl, their apricot-colored behemoth of a Labradoodle. Carl is the latest in a long line of canines who have shared the musician's life, from the slight pooch who posed with him on the cover of 1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, to Old King, a Tennessee bluetick hound whose birth name was really Elvis. But unlike his predecessor, Carl hasn't been immortalized in song. One suspects that's because Carl is markedly better behaved than his predecessor. Every night Neil, Pegi and Carl walk companionably out into the park that is adjacent to the hotel for their nightly constitutional, returning to the stately lobby where Carl gracefully picks his way between the overstuffed couches, high-backed wing chairs and the elaborate oriental rugs in the stratospheric-ceilinged lobby without ever having the slightest inclination to gnaw on a mahogany table leg or mark his territory on one of the ornately potted trees.

On the other hand, the gone-but-not forgotten Elvis not only lives on in the lyrics of "Long May He Run," but Young embellishes the story in a long, rambling, but utterly revealing preamble to the song during both of the performances at the Ryman. After listening to the story, it becomes increasingly apparent that Young has anthropomorphized the dog--into a canine stand-in for himself.

The song was inspired by a rather chilling incident when the dog disappeared, bounding off the tour bus all by himself, because Young was too tired to take him for a walk in the early morning hours. This wasn't an unusual occurrence--many times before Elvis would go romp in the fields while his family slept on the side of the road, but for some reason--perhaps a trip to a dog groomer--Elvis didn't return by the time they were due to leave for the next stop on the tour.

Distressed because rain had begun to fall, Young went on a forced march looking for the errant dog, afraid that he wouldn't be able to find his own way back to the vehicle, explaining to all of the non-dog-owners in the audience that canines always leave concentric circles of scent from their point of departure in order to find their way back. Young eventually got the dog back, due to the kindness of strangers--but that's not what's important about the story. What's telling is this is exactly what Neil Young does in terms of his career.

He leaves trails of scent so he can find his way back--whether it's to help handmaiden the Buffalo Springfield box set four years ago, to resurrect his membership in CSN&Y, to reconnect with the members of his proto-garage band Crazy Horse when he's feeling the need to make deconstructed squalls of rock, or to settle in with his Nashville cronies when he's feeling reflective, like he is now. But despite what many reviewers have surmised, Prairie Wind does not complete a trilogy of acoustic-driven albums that Young has recorded in Nashville in the past three decades

"I'm just not that calculated," insists Young. "I think things just happen because it's easy. You take a route that seems the logical route because of something that happens that day. If I've got a song that I've finished--like I finished "The Painter"--I'm sitting around going, 'I got the song now.' That sets the tone. I called up Ben [Keith] and I said, I've got one song, man. It's the first song I've written in 18 months. I don't know if I'm going to have any more, but I've got one. So maybe we'll go in the studio. And he said, 'Well, why don't you come to Nashville this time?' A couple of weeks later I called him back and said, I still don't have any more songs but let's try to book something for this full moon coming up. This had absolutely nothing to do with those other albums that I recorded there."

While Young doesn't have the geo-positioning of exactly where he's headed next, he does have some rough idea of the direction. "I'd say there is another 'Hurricane' in me, but I'm not really planning for anything like that, but I do know it'll be there. I just feel comfortable with the musicians that I'm playing with now, but I know Crazy Horse is always out there, and that's another ride completely. That's a much rougher ride."

But his former bandmates are never sure what the musician has in mind, and that makes them more than a little nervous. "Neil scares me a lot," Graham Nash, told biographer Jimmy McDonough for his 2002 biography, Shakey. "I don't understand him. I don't understand his ability to change his mind ruthlessly."

Changing his mind is something Steven Stills can no doubt attest to, when in 1976, catching a plane home and abandoning a tour with Stills, Young alerted him with a telegram that read: "Dear Stephen: Funny how something that starts spontaneously ends that way. Eat a peach, Neil."

"That could be construed as being ruthless, because someone doesn't understand that impulse," Young bristles. "They're going to think, 'Well, this guy just does exactly what he wants to do. I can't understand why he's so driven to do what's good for him, he's ruthless.' What is ruth? I don't know what ruth is. I just know that what I have to do is follow the muse, so I do what I have to do to make that happen," says Young, just this side of annoyance, his arms now folded in front of him, in a defensive posture. The first sign of any pique during this entire interview.

"I've had to do all kinds of things that as a human being I felt bad about, because working with different musicians and working with people to get where I want to go, you have to be able to sever the ties and say, 'I'm sorry. I'm not working with you now. I'm working with someone else. I'm going this way and you're not coming with me. These other people--I'm going with them now.'

"But I'm still going down the road," he continues. "They'll be down there somewhere. If they lose interest in what they're doing because they needed me, then they don't have what it takes to go on their own. In that way, I think I could be described as ruthless because I won't bend to normal considerations. It's a responsibility to be on your journey."

Only a few months from his 60th birthday, Neil Young looks like he's equal to both a journey into the present and a look back, and says as much in the first track on the new album: "It's a long road behind me, It's a long road ahead." Like the title of his 1972 soundtrack album, Journey Through the Past, the musician is eager to reflect on his beginnings--but this time he's regressed much further than his musical roots. He's returned to the tangible landscape of memory--to the Cypress River that flows through the Winnipeg farmlands where his father was born--on "Far From Home" to the emotional landscape of the title track, trying to preserve the past by snatching it from his ailing father's memory, something he expresses in Prairie Wind when he laments, "Tryin' to remember what my daddy said, Before too much time took away his head." Prior to his June passing, Young's father, Scott Young--the infamous Canadian sports writer and Hockey Hall of Famer (for sports journalism)--suffered from vascular dementia and it was difficult for the musician to communicate with him anymore. The album is dedicated "To Daddy," and while Young finished the album two months before his father's death, his spirit looms large in many of the tracks.

Dressed in a dove-grey cowboy suit, a blindingly white shirt, cowboy boots and a straw gaucho hat pulled low down on his brow and playing Hank Williams' guitar, Neil Young, along with 35 musicians, transformed his album into a historical document for Jonathan Demme's cameras over the course of two nights. With Pegi Young, Emmylou Harris and Diane Dewitt by his side in period customs nabbed from a Deadwood set, he brought the haunted beauty of the album to life--taking the briefest of intermissions and a costume change--chronologically played songs from the softer side of his extensive canon--the ying to Crazy Horse's yang--from the earliest days beginning with "I Am a Child," from Buffalo Springfield's final album, 1968's Last Time Around, through "One of the Days," from 1992's Harvest Moon.

Young is sanguine about waiting for his muse to show, and he's equally sanguine about the ghosts that parade through his life, and at the Ryman shows. "They're everywhere, there's no escaping them. But there are ghosts of the future around us, not just ghosts of the past. But I'm not really scared of them, but then, I don't think about them too much," admits Young.

One of them is Nicolette Larsen, Young's one-time inamorata and collaborator. During both shows at the Ryman, the musician paid tribute to the singer, who died in 1997 of a cerebral edema. He told a story about how Larson used to torment him with stories about how she and her friends used to mimic his trademark cracked vibrato riding around the bumpy dirt roads in Montana singing his songs. "She used to say, we're having some fun tonight," recalls Young. "This one is for you, Nicolette," he said, looking heavenward and raising a single-hand salute before launching into Ian and Sylvia's "Four Strong Winds," a song he recorded with Larson.

Most of the ghosts were friendly, with Young also mentioning the passing of hillbilly jazz fiddler Vassar Clements during the set, and the recently deceased Cajun violinist, Rufus Thibodeaux, who played with Young on Comes a Time.

Maybe it's being faced with his own mortality, but Young just seems so much more approachable than in years past. "That's just stuff that people put on me," he insists. "I think that's in everyone else's head, because it's something I really haven't been able to figure out. I don't think that people want to believe that I'm accessible. I don't think they want to believe that they may know what they need to know about me. It's really in the songs. I put as much as I can in there, there's very little that I don't say. I mean what are they going to find out? I've shown just about everything I know, and there are things in the back of my mind all the time but I don't know what they are. Yeah, sometimes I see a lot of people are really nervous, but I never really put that together with something that I did. I just go, well, it's part of fame. It's something the media has done."

No matter what he says about revealing all to his fans, there are things that the musician wants to withhold--like any details about his aneurysm. Young has said on record that he had absolutely no intention of letting anyone know that he had suffered an aneurysm, but two days after the surgery he went on a walk, and the thing burst on the street. There was blood in his shoe, and there were complications in his femoral artery, which surgeons had used to access his brain. He was unconscious and paramedics had to revive him, landing him back in the hospital. Young was scheduled to attend Canada's Juno Awards, but it was obvious he couldn't make it, so he was forced to make an announcement about what had happened.

"I came very close to no one ever knowing," Young told Time magazine's Josh Tyrangiel. "I would have had an aneurysm, got rid of it, and no one would have known the difference. It would have been so cool."

But not as cool as catching Neil Young in the act of being himself. After all the press had gone home, and the gear is on its way back to California, the musician hired a white panel van to take most band members and pals to 12th and Porter, a small, dark Nashville supper club that sits squarely on the wrong side of the tracks. The inner circle have come to see one of their brethren, Spooner Oldham perform with Billy Galewood, a singer who is dating his daughter. Going by the name of Bushwalla, the would-be son-in-law free-styled inane rhymes, while Oldham tried to keep on the organ, looking more bemused than embarrassed by the spectacle. It was clear that Galewood had no idea of Oldham's deep history and the reverence he commands in the music world, from providing the otherworldly organ sound on Percy Smith's "When a Man Loves a Woman" to cowriting the Box Tops' "Cry Like a Baby" and Aretha Franklin's "Do Right Woman."

The whole situation was a source of high amusement for Young, who kept heckling Galewood from the back of the club and chanting "Billy, Billy, Billy" after the rapper would finish a number. He watched from the crowd while his wife Pegi hops onstage to sing "Sweet Inspiration" with Spooner--another song he cowrote. Unrestrained by the period costumes of the two Ryman shows, Mrs. Young is clad in skin tight jeans that belie her 52 years, all perfect blonde hair and provocative stage movements. One look at her, it's clear that life really does begin at 50, especially if you ask her husband, who doesn't take his eyes off of her, holding his Michelob beer against his chest while he claps wildly at the close of her number. She has a clear, torchy voice and a charismatic stage presence--with far more wattage than Mrs. Bruce Springsteen ever commands.

After Pegi's number, her husband joins her onstage. Scooting in behind Oldham's rather smallish organ, Young picks out the first strains of "Oh Lonesome Me" with such little fanfare that it takes a minute to register the enormity of what's happening. "Welcome to the Young family's karaoke," one of his inner circle hisses from the side of the stage. And that's what it feels like. Unlike Elvis renting out an entire bowling alley or movie theater so he can move unnoticed and untouched by his public, Young moves effortlessly among them, although you couldn't really say that he is one of them. No matter how casual he looks or how affable he seems, there is that certain something, a different valance or supernatural weight that makes him different than the rest of us. Like Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and John Lennon, you can see that, despite his unassuming presence, he still dominates the small stage. You can't tear your eyes away, even though his performance is shambolic and a little half-assed, but far better because of it. You almost want to pinch yourself to make sure that it's really the iconic singer on the 24-foot stage. And of course it is. Perhaps his real genius is his ability to effortlessly float between worlds, from a sometimes standoffish artist who won't sign an autograph to the prankish fun hog who's buying beers for everyone within a three-foot radius. He's bigger because of his foibles, more superhuman because of his humanity.

He begins playing "The Sky Is About to Rain" and suddenly stops. "Nope, I don't want to do that one, it's too sad," he says. He sits there for a second, thinking, and puts his hands on the keyboard again, starting the song from the top. You can't really avoid the pain. The only way out of it, is through it, something the musician knows well. In addition to his own illnesses, both his sons suffer from cerebral palsy, and Pegi developed a brain tumor in 1978 and was only given a 50/50 chance of pulling through. And while his father's death was not totally unexpected, Young was at peace with it. "He doesn't loom any larger since he's gone, he's always been a big presence in my life," explained Young earlier. "I'm at peace with my relationship with him."

"Oh Lonesome Me," followed, heartfelt and as plaintive as it's ever been, with Young's voice cracking in all the right places. Pegi and singer Anthony Crawford came up onstage for "It's a Dream," and after finishing the group filed out into the hot August night as one. It was like it was a dream, leaving not a single trace except for the memory.

"I can play a few songs in a place like last night and screw half of 'em up and not even know what I'm doing," Young confides in me the next day. "I get to make all kinds of mistakes and bumble away like an old drunk up there, and people just tell me it was fantastic. Sometimes I don't get it."

And sometimes he does.


LIVE MUSIC

Live & Kicking:
Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy Picks His Essential Live Albums
By Tom Moon
When Jeff Tweedy sat down to edit the DVD that was to accompany Wilco's new, double-live Kicking Television, he was shocked by what he saw: a sea of logos and brands. "When we started, we wanted to include a lot of shots of the audience, because to us the audience is a big part of it. And everywhere you looked, there were logos. Nothing against our crowd, but everybody had a T-shirt with a slogan on it."

This triggered questions between Tweedy and his cohorts about the unintended messages (Shop Old Navy!) the band might inadvertently be sending out while sharing the fruits of several nights of music making. The band, Tweedy recalls, quickly came to a conclusion. "[We] didn't want to put a bunch of logos in our DVD. And at the same time, we didn't want it to be this hermetically sealed claustrophobic ideal of the band. Eventually we came to the conclusion that it's more fucking exciting just listening to it. Somehow it feels way more intimate and inclusive of an audience than the DVD did."

The initial motivation for Kicking Television was simple: to capture some of the changes in sound and structure that Wilco's music had undergone since the release of its 2004 album, A Ghost Is Born. The band did a multitrack recording of what Tweedy recalls as a "below-average" show in Madison, Wis., early in the tour, and decided to set up more elaborate recording equipment for its three-show homecoming run in Chicago. "The weird thing about Wilco putting out a live album," Tweedy says, "is whether we do it or not, somebody has access to every show we've ever played. All we were trying to do was present a sample of what our shows felt like a year ago."

Tweedy adds that the tapes surprised him when he listened back. "It's really loud, and raw. It might be the first Wilco record you could actually put on at a party and not have it get completely lost."

Since he'd spent so much time thinking about live records recently, we asked Tweedy to reflect on some of the live albums that are most important to him. He says he's always had a very simple test of a great live album: "If I was there, man, I would be shitting my pants. Just that simple. I almost put on the live side of [ZZ Top's] Fandango!, just for that reason. I'm not a big ZZ fan, but I would be shitting to be in the room hearing them do that. It's all about the bowels, really."

Neil Young, Live Rust (Reprise, 1979)

There's not that much Neil Young that I'm not into. But "Powderfinger" on this—he's on fire. The film was pretty miserable, but, man, the music is in its own place. I just saw him at Farm Aid. He did "Southern Man" with the Fisk University gospel choir. It was a fucking perfect performance of a classic song, and maybe my favorite moment ever of seeing live music. There was a lot of shit going on, things that seemed to fuel his anger. And an angry Neil Young, that's pretty unbeatable. That's kind of what that "Powderfinger" sounds like to me. He's invested himself in some of the fury of it.

Allman Brothers Band, Live at the Fillmore East (Polydor, 1971)

A lot of these records are just so formative for me. It's like "the sky is blue" kind of stuff. This one is one of the prime documents of rock music. It shows the chemistry of a band being so finely tuned, a band playing with one mind. And serious chops. I think I probably hated it the first time I heard it. I'd done a lot of brainwashing in the service of belonging to something I was never meant to belong to, like punk rock. The Allmans got pushed to the wrong side of the line in the sand--if you liked them, you couldn't be punk. That's the difference between listening to music and trying to fit into a mass movement. Punk was a mass movement. It required true believers to make it go. And now I see punk as just rock, another incarnation of it. In a way, it's exactly like the Allmans--people believing in themselves, and going out and doing it.

MC5, Kick Out the Jams (Elektra, 1969)

That's a document of people trying to start a mass movement and failing miserably, and being shit out of luck. There's a thing I do with some of my favorite records. I listen to them and imagine myself in the role of the person [making] that record, what they were thinking about. With this, these fantasies usually revolve around some sense of revenge. You know, kick out the jams, motherfucker. Punishing people who were mean to me. Part of what amazes me about it is that the audience is there, having their brains taken out of their skulls, totally receiving that. Another fantasy I have sometimes is imagining that I'm playing a record for some other being, not an extraterrestrial, just something from another dimension. Would I be able to play this for them and be proud of it? I'd be really proud of the MC5 at this moment, for all its flaws.

Albert Ayler, The Complete Live in Greenwich Village (Impulse, recorded 1965-1967)

This has all the best qualities of everything I find virtuous in free music. Here's somebody who can play anything he wants, and he's freed up his mind to the point where he can play like a little kid finger-paints. That's an achievement beyond learning "Flight of the Bumble Bee." I think it must have been a nice time to be able to sit in a small club and hear somebody going in that direction, to be in the company of people who are allowing him to, people who were mature enough in their listening to go with it and follow it. And hearing Ayler standing up, saying, "This is what I think sounds good." There was a lot of academic stuff [going on in free jazz] at the time, people becoming enamored with conceptualizing things. Albert Ayler never lost touch with the feeling and the soul of it.

Richard Pryor, Wanted: Richard Pryor Live in Concert (Warner Bros., 1979)

What can I say? He's funny. Still funny. What else do you want to know?

Miles Davis Quintet, The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel (Columbia, 1965)

This is a relatively new area for me. With the Legacy reissues I've been able to focus my attention more on a lot of jazz music. I guess I was more familiar with Albert Ayler sooner than Miles Davis because Ayler, in my pretentious world, was more a fringe figure, so I gravitated toward him. There's one thing people forget about all those guys, Ayler, Miles Davis: They played all the time. That's one reason there's such a sophistication to jazz music that seems so unattainable: They just did it a lot more. They practiced in front of people. You could say that's one of the reasons [the Allman Brothers'] Live at the Fillmore East is on such a higher plane--they were, like Miles, just a workaholic band.

Johnny Cash, At Folsom Prison (Columbia, 1968)

It's probably one of the first of all these I heard. My dad was a big Johnny Cash fan. Folsom Prison appeals to me in the same way it did when I was a little kid. There's something sort of sinister about it. Plus it has the essence of Cash. "I Still Miss Someone," is pretty much one of the best songs ever written. "25 Minutes To Go"--just amazing. And on and on. This is another record I picked because the audience is such a large part of the enormity. He's empathetic, they're propping him up. They're carrying him around in there. These kind of documents are really rare, and they're really necessary. I have the pronounced feeling, every time I hear it, that this is what live music is for, what it does.

James Brown, Live at the Apollo Vol. II (King/Polydor, 1968)

I just like the funkier stuff. It'd be kind of a tossup to pick one of those records [referring to the first Live at the Apollo, from 1963]. I love 'em both. But this one is a lot more nasty to me. You hear a little bit more of how the funk had developed, over the years, by another band that worked a lot. You can't just tell people to play like that. Those kinds of vamps, you have to have that feel already inside you.

Pink Floyd, Ummagumma (Capitol, 1969)

There's a lot of jam bands that to me sound like everybody's talking at once. This isn't like that. It's orchestral, very well thought out and beautifully arranged. David Gilmore is a really understated guitar player; that's one of the things I've always loved about Floyd. [Gilmore's] really patient, he's got that ability to pull you along just by the way he plays a melody. [The reunited Pink Floyd's set at the Live 8 concert] was better than all the other shit that was on that day. Their tones were better. I couldn't believe that they sounded like they have always sounded. It was so fucking glorious to hear musicians that sound like themselves. It's weird how we're inundated with music every day, just tons of it, and then when we get a little dose like that, it's like finding gold.

Bob Dylan, Bootleg Series Vol. IV: The Royal Albert Hall Concert (Columbia, recorded 1966, released 1998)

I could talk forever about Dylan. I didn't think I could love Dylan any more until [Martin Scorsese's PBS] documentary. I just love him so much. I love how the enigma is still there with him. Think about why. It's because you want it to be there. He's somehow maintained this guileless thing, and somehow understood himself better than anybody would think he could. Why do I still wanna know Dylan better? Because somehow he's come to represent how we don't know ourselves. This is another recording like Folsom Prison, where you can tell everybody is swept up in the moment. You can hear it in the document. Everybody there, whether they're having a negative or positive reaction to what he's doing, is really all the way there. It's a charged moment. They're all together in coming apart.