When the call came, Nils Lofgren was preparing to go on tour with his own band. But it was his old friend and musical collaborator Neil Young on the line with an offer too good to resist.
“He said he’d been writing a lot, and wondered if there was any chance we could all get up to Telluride for a whirlwind session to start a record,” Lofgren says of the invitation to rejoin Young and his frequent collaborators Crazy Horse for a few weeks in a Colorado recording studio.
But first, a little background before we continue:
Lofgren was 17 in May 1969 when he met Young and hung out with him during the four nights Young played with his band Crazy Horse in a D.C. nightclub. A year later, after Lofgren movrf to L.A. with his band Grin, Young asked him to play piano on his classic album “After The Gold Rush,” and almost as soon as that was finished he joined Crazy Horse for its debut release.
In addition to that and his solo work, Lofgren has been for the last 35 years a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, and he’s been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a result. But his time spent making music with Young over five decades taught him there’s almost no one more inspired and inspiring than Young is by the rough edges of impromptu creativity.
So Lofgren went to Telluride in mid-April and on Friday, Oct. 25 the Neil Young with Crazy Horse album “Colorado” comes out. (“Mountaintop,” a documentary film about its making, opened on Tuesday, Oct. 22)
“It’s been a long series of great chapters through the decades,” Lofgren says. “I was elated that Neil started writing, and got really excited about it and wanted to get up there and start recording, which we did.”
Getting the band back together
Last year, Young asked Lofgren to rejoin Crazy Horse for a short run to promote the 2018 release of “Roxy: Tonight’s The Night Live,” a recording of the 1973 shows Young did to open the Roxy on the Sunset Strip with a band that included Lofgren.
“I just loved that band,” Lofgren says of the group billed as the Santa Monica Flyers, which played Young’s “Tonight’s the Night” at the club. “And that album is a very special time.”
So last year, Young booked five shows in Bakersfield and Fresno with Crazy Horse before its longtime guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro bowed out, and he told Lofgren he might have to cancel the bookings unless Lofgren was willing to join him and Crazy Horse’s drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot to fill the breach.
“He wondered if with very short notice and basically almost no rehearsal I could kind of jump in and wing it with them so they could do the shows,” Lofgren says. “I said, ‘Yeah, if you need me, I can do it.’”
Young’s plan was to rehearse at soundcheck, though he and Lofgren got together in a hotel room with acoustic guitars to talk through the list of 30 or 40 songs he might want to play. In Winnipeg, where two more shows eventually were booked, the preparation got even looser, Lofgren says.
“We always get together and sing for half an hour before the show, which is really helpful, and just also to get together as a band before you walk out there,” he says. “And Neil looked at us and said, ‘Guys, I just, I’m not into writing a setlist, do you mind? Let’s just go out and wing it, play whatever comes to mind.’
“It was just a classic example of a band with a great history being led by somebody that you know is intimately aware of the value of spontaneous and emotional and not over-rehearsed playing.”
Making magic
That sense of seeking magic as it happens is something Lofgren says he learned from Young and his friend and producer David Briggs from the very first sessions he recorded with them as a teenager.
“They came to me with ‘After The Gold Rush’ and said, ‘Mainly, we’re going to have you play piano, a little acoustic guitar and sing,’” Lofgren says. “I was like, ‘Guys, I’m not a professional piano player.’ It freaked me out because it was such a great opportunity.”
But they insisted — he was a classically trained accordion player, after all.
“At that point, thank God, I shut up and said, ‘Yes, thank you,’” he says. “I never left the piano. I’d sometimes sleep under it with a sleeping bag.”
Looking back, he says he realized that Young and Briggs knew exactly what they were doing, that they wanted someone to play simpler, sparer piano parts, not a virtuoso.
“You get like Dr. John or Nicky Hopkins, and if you want the parts I played you’re going to tell ’em to play less and play less so they fall asleep at the instrument,” he says.
For the 1973 sessions that produced “Tonight’s The Night,” Young and Briggs had a similarly structured plan for an unstructured recording.
“David and Neil warned us and said, ‘We don’t even want you to know the songs too well, we don’t want you working out parts,’” Lofgren says. “They said, ‘Once Neil gets the vocal, you’re done. You can’t change a single note. That’s the theme here, it’s anti-production. Let people see how it is that raw, so stay down in it.’
“And sure enough, Ralphie and I would go and want to re-sing some harmonies because we were singing live to songs we didn’t know that well but Neil and David stuck to their guns,” he says. “They said, ‘No, man, it feels great. It’s a picture of something really raw and emotional and that’s the theme here.”
Colorado rocking
Young sent Lofgren, Molina and Talbot demos of the songs before they got to Telluride in April, but he also asked them not to get too familiar with them before everyone was in the studio and ready to play, a process that resulted in music that mutated in the moment. “She Showed Me Love” feels like classic Young and Crazy, 13 minutes that ebbs and flows between and around its verse-chorus foundations.
“It was getting a little late at night, we were all a bit fried, but we wanted to at least touch base on the song,” Lofgren says. “And so we started playing it, but all of a sudden we got to the body of the song and Neil sang a great vocal. And so we just started riding the A chord and doing the jam.
“Personally, I felt like, Yeah, I’m finally kind of integrating into the band and feeling good, and we hit this real kind of zen-like groove and we just, nobody stopped playing,” he says. “You go back to that teenager in the garage where you keep fishing for something and all of a sudden you find it and you just don’t want to let go.”‘
“Olden Days” started with Young on acoustic guitar and Lofgren playing accordion before Young reversed himself and suggested they try it first with both on heavier electric guitars.
“We started with the two guitars from then on and only when the song really begged for it changed that,” he says. “There’s certain songs, like ‘I Do,’ I was on pump organ and the acoustic guitar gives it the fragility and space it needed.”
Even dinnertime conversations influenced the way songs shifted in the studio at times. Lofgren laughs as he describes how at dinner one night with his wife Amy and Young’s wife Daryl Hannah he mentioned that he’d taken up tap dancing after his years of basketball and on-stage trampoline tricks led to hip replacement surgery.
“Two days later in the studio, Neil goes, ‘OK, we’re going to do ‘Eternity,’ and Nils is going to be on the tap board,’” he says. “I thought that was hilarious. Here’s my first tap-dancing session work with Crazy Horse after 50 years.”
Stay loose
It’s not yet known whether Young and Lofgren in Crazy Horse will ever play these new songs live. Young hasn’t announced any dates and before long it’s believed Springsteen will call the E Street Band together and hit the road again. Lofgren says he’ll always take their calls, Young and Springsteen both kindred spirits in the spontaneous spirit of rock and roll in his eyes.
“The main differences are really just sound,” he says. “The sound of their guitar playing and the sound of their voices. The similarities are enormous because basically they’re all for keeping it very loose on stage and not following the setlist, being open to improv and just letting the night and the energy of the audience take them where ever they’re going.
“Between ‘Tonight’s The Night’ and those two shows in Winnipeg — ‘Let’s not even have a setlist’ — Neil might be a little bit more willing to have things a little looser, but it’s really enormous similarities in the sense that they give you freedom to play what you’re feeling, and as long as you’re down in it, they’re happy to have you kind of find your way through the music.”
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