SURVIVOR Pegi Young
Dec 26, 2011
With her new album Bracing For Impact, the artist-also-known-as-Mrs.-Neil-Young flexes her creative wings and looks forward with optimism.
BY ANDY TENNILLE
It's close to 4 a.m., and all's quiet on the Mother-Baby ward.
Infants are shuttled to the nursery, allowing new moms a brief respite for a few quick winks as dads sleep uneasily on nearby pleather couches. Nurses come and go, checking in on their patients and preparing for the shift change in a few hours. Outside, the wind whips the flags on the flagpole at the center of the traffic circle, a strange Indian summer-like Thanksgiving Day weekend. Inside, it's silent, save for the beeps of the monitors and the occasional scoot of some furniture on the floor above - Labor and Delivery.
Across the room, my newborn daughter sleeps soundly in her crib, a peaceful end to her exhausting first day of life.
***
It's funny how certain albums come to define specific periods of time, like personal soundtracks.
Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever album was the soundtrack of the summer of 1989 for me. I was 12 years old and remember riding to my summer league baseball games every weekend with my Dad listening to "Free Fallin'" and "I Won't Back Down." Dad laughed at Petty's little joke about flipping the record before Gene Clark's "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" and explained why vinyl was superior to the compact disc.
Tomorrow The Green Grass came out on Valentine's Day of my junior year in high school. I'd recently broken up with a girlfriend, one of my first lessons in love and the perils of long-distance relationships. I was a big fan of The Jayhawks' previous release, Hollywood Town Hall, and wondered how Gary Louris and Mark Olson could top it. They did, and Tomorrow The Green Grass didn't leave my CD player for months. Listening back to it now, the songs take me back to that winter 16 years ago, full of teen angst and intense navel-gazing.
Dad passed away in July 2007 as I was on deadline writing stories on both Band of Horses' Cease to Begin and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings' 100 Days, 100 Nights. I'd spent time with both bands during recording sessions earlier that year, and my editors wanted them for that fall's issue. Those albums remind me of the days I spent at the hospital with my father, and the late nights writing those stories sitting at his dining room table.
When Bracing for Impact, Pegi Young's new album on Vapor Records, hit my desk a few weeks ago, the title spoke to me. My wife had just entered the ninth month of pregnancy with our first child, and I was anxious - nervous about the prospect of being a parent and wondering how this new addition was going to affect my life. Bracing for impact seemed like a pretty good analogy, and I wondered what watershed event in Pegi's life led to the title.
"It came from the album artwork," Young explained recently from the California ranch overlooking the Pacific Ocean that she shares with husband and rock legend, Neil Young. "It's this beautiful piece of art that was done by a young South African woman whose father was killed in a plane crash when she was 12 years old. Everyone on board was killed, and it happened under suspicious circumstances. She did this series of paintings as a cathartic way to deal with her grief. I was drawn to this one piece that from a distance looks like a flower. When you look closely at it, it's actually pictures of people in the bracing for impact position like you see on an airplane. It seemed like an apt title for the album given some of the things that happened over the last year."
2010 was a rollercoaster year for the Youngs. In January, the couple lost Larry "L.A." Johnson, a close friend and an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker who headed up Neil Young's film production company, Shakey Pictures. Tragedy struck again in July when Ben Keith, Neil's long-time pedal steel guitarist and Pegi's producer and musical director, died suddenly at his home on Broken Arrow, the Young's Northern California ranch.
"Ben was really a champion for me from the very beginning," Pegi says. "He helped me feel comfortable playing my songs. He's such an old...he was such an old, dear friend. I just trust, trust...it's hard for me to speak in the past tense about him. I trusted him so completely. He was always there for me. Losing him was a big shock to all of us."
When Young's band - bassist Rick Rosas, guitarist Anthony Crawford and drummer Phil Jones - convened to rehearse for the first time after Keith's death, Crawford announced he was leaving the group.
"I looked at Rick and Phil and was like, ‘Well, I guess we're the only ones left now,'" Young recalls. "That band had done over a hundred shows together opening for Neil, so we'd gotten to be a pretty tight little unit. Losing Ben really shook us up, and then Anthony left, so everyone left after was a survivor. That's how we got Pegi Young & the Survivors."
To record Bracing for Impact, Young gathered the Survivors at Sunset Sound, the legendary studio where The Doors, Zeppelin and the Stones cut records on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. In keeping with her husband's now infamous belief in recording during the full moon, Pegi started the sessions the day before the full moon in May 2011.
"It was a total coincidence, a happy accident, but if it works for him, I don't discount it," she says with a laugh. "I think it is a time of great productivity, and his experience has born that out. Mine did, too. We tracked seven songs that first two days, just humming along. It came together really quickly."
Bracing for Impact is a different kind of album from its predecessors - Young's folksy 2007 self-titled debut and the darker Foul Deeds three years later. For her first album, Young "dug out a lot of stuff from back in the day, but the second and third records have been a lot more current." Bracing for Impact is a fuller sounding album than Young's ever made, apparent from the first notes of "Flat Line Mama," the funky album opener with horn fills from Joe Sublett, Darrell Leonard and Jock Ellis. "We heard horns on a couple of songs when we tracked, so Phil called a few friends in to help us out," Young says. "Joe and the guys came in and put some wonderful parts on three songs. I really liked how it turned out, and that's a credit to Phil."
Songs like "Med Line," "Trouble In A Bottle," and "Lie" all have a slow-burning soulful feel, Young's smoky voice sounding like a sultry lounge singer. "Number 9 Train" and "Daddy Married Satan" show off Young's country-rock songbook. The plaintive "No Heartbeart Sounds," inspired in large part by the loss of LA Johnson, features some beautiful keyboard work from legendary Muscle Shoals sideman Spooner Oldham. Just as he's done for all of Young's records since her 2007 self-titled debut, Oldham lent his keyboard playing and songwriting talents to Bracing for Impact, but the Muscle Shoals legend was also responsible for finding Crawford's replacement: Kelvin Holley, a guitarist from north Alabama who has recorded with Gregg Allman, Donnie Fritts and Bettye LaVette, to name just a few.
"Anytime Spooner speaks up for someone, you go with it," Young says. "Kelvin's a terrific player, and his playing really worked well on this record. He's been a great addition to the band."
As on her previous albums, Young kept up her tradition of covering other artists on Bracing for Impact, delivering a brilliant version of the Danny Whitten-penned ballad "I Don't Want to Talk About It."
"I didn't know Danny, he was before my time with Neil," Young says of the late guitarist and member of the Crazy Horse who died of a drug overdose in November 1972. "Songs that I'm drawn to are songs that I feel like I can get inside of. I generally don't do a straight cover of a song with the same arrangement or in the same key. Typically, I hear a song that I love, and I turn it into my own. Sometimes, my versions bear little resemblance to the original, but I used Danny's original song with the Horse as inspiration."
"Song for a Baby Girl" is the only track on the album where Keith appears, his gorgeous, dreamy pedal steel fills floating over the album-closer. "The guys were rehearsing for the last CSNY tour, the Living with War tour," Young remembers. "Spooner, Ben, Rick and Chad Cromwell, who plays drums on that track, were all in L.A. rehearsing, so I called Anthony Crawford out, and Elliot Mazer came in and produced. We cut it one day at the Sound Factory, the sister studio to Sunset Sound. I love that Ben's on it."
The last song to make the record was "Gonna Walk Away," a Bonnie Raitt-style rocker with background vocals from The Watson Twins. "We finished tracking, and I thought we were pretty much finished with the album," Young says. "I went to lay down that afternoon to take a nap and the song just hit me. I was just like, ‘Good grief, do you have to come now?' Got up, and it just flowed right through me in one or two takes."
With her third album in the can and getting strong reviews, a revamped band to work with and a tour scheduled opening for Stephen Stills, Young appears ready to emerge from her husband's imposing shadow and show the world that Broken Arrow is home to two talented songwriters and artists. But don't let her catch you calling it a career.
"I'm 58 years old, so I don't have any delusions," she says with a laugh. "But being able to bring music back into my life over the last few years, I feel like the timing was perfect. I don't regret not doing it sooner. I wasn't ready. I was raising my children, and frankly my confidence wasn't there. I was really shy about bringing out my songs. But Neil and the guys were always so supportive of me from the very first day."
Talk eventually leads to the Bridge School Benefit, the annual charity concert the Youngs have honchoed every fall for the last 25 years that benefits a Bay Area school for children with severe physical impairments. The cause is close to the Youngs' hearts - Pegi co-founded the school in 1986 in part to have a place for Ben, the couple's son who was born with cerebral palsy, to attend school. 2011 marks the school and benefit concerts' 25th anniversary, which is being celebrated with the release of both DVD and CD compilations of performances from the concerts over the last quarter century. I ask Young if she's ever wondered what her "career" would look like now had she been able to focus on her music earlier in her life, and she replies without missing a beat.
"Taking care of our son was my absolute focus," Young says. "There was no question that's what I needed to do, and it led to the Bridge School. I feel incredibly fortunate to be a part of Bridge School, an entity that truly changes lives. Ben gave us entrée into the Bridge School and the world of disabilities that we wouldn't have otherwise had. We owe that all to him, and I'm incredibly grateful to him for it."
***
Dawn is breaking. Outside, splashes of orange, red and yellow streak the cloudless sky, announcing the impending arrival of the sun and the beginning of a new day.
Inside, my daughter sleeps peacefully in her crib. I watch, counting and double-checking the number of fingers and toes and noting the birthmarks and freckles that dot her small face.
[Photo Credit: Autumn de Wilde]
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