Like A Hurricane…(extrait du magasine Uncut fevrier 99)

Neil Young & Crazy Horse are captured in all their raging glory in Year Of The Horse. Its director, Jim Jarmusch, talks to David Fricke….
Jim Jarmusch has been a Neil Young fan since….well, since Young started making records. " The songs that Neil wrote with the Bspringfield really struck me when i was a kid, " says the Akron, Ohio-born director of Stranger Than Paradis (84), Down By Law (86) and Mystery Train (89). 3but then i got the first Crazy Horse album, EveryB KTIN, & that had a big effect on me. Ever since the, i've been a fan, particularly of Neil with the Horse. Im' not a lite-rock type guy. I like Neil when he has an edge, when he has this band with him. "
The fan is now a friend, collaborateur and the directeur of the brilliant concert documentary, Year Of The Horse, shot, mostly in super 8, on Young's 1996 tour of Europe with the deathless Crazy Horse -guitarist " poncho "Sampedro, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina. A riveting combination of ferocious live show footage and astonishingly honest interviiews, YOTH was actually the climax of an intense, artistic exchange programme between Neil Young and Jarmusch. Young contributed the harrowing score for Jarmusch's existential 1995 western, Dead Man ; Jarmusch then directed a music video for Young's Dead Man soundtrack lp and a Young /Crazy Horse clip, " Big Time " , form the 96 record, Broken Arrow.
At that point, Young&the Horse hit the road to promote Broken Arrow -and Jarmusch went along, with camera rolling.
Together with RustNeverSleeps and the unreleased 1986 film, Muddy Tracks, this is the third road movie Neil Young has made with Crazy Horse. As someone who tells stories in film, are you surprised by the extent to which Young goes to document this own life and work ?

" He likes to document a part of everything he does. They usually film a few shows from every tour. Sio he called me up and said " Why don't you come with us ont the road and shoot something ? I said : "Do you want to make a film out of it ? He said "Yeah, if you think it's interesting " I said : How long a film ?
Which is the wrong thing to say to Neil. He goes, " I don't know ! I don't sit down and write a song and think " how long should it be ? "
" Mudddy Tracks is a really interesting film because Neil shot most of it himself. It's all with an 8mn video camera that he would carry around -put on stage, in the dressing room. We stole a little stuff from that. We got intimate things that nobody else would get. "

Like the scene of Neil and the band arguing backstage -Neil basically telling Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot that they'd fucked up on stage.
" They've had the same arguments on every tour. They keep having the same ones over and over again. Il love that scene too. It's funny to see them screaming at each other, and Billy denying that it's his fault. But what i like about it is that it shows how seriously they take it. They're arguing about their work and their music. Neil likes to document things because he likes to learn from what he does -from mistakes and things that weren't quite right.

How did you manage to infiltrate that mindset, the tightly knit intimacy, of Neil and the Horse ? In the film , Poncho says to you, " You come in here with your artsy-fartsy questions and New-York attitude and you think you're going to get our story ".

It's important that he says that, because you can't imagine everything that's gone into that band. It's true what they say in the movie : they bring all of their emotions and past history on to the stage. And it's a pretty dark and twisting history. They bring that to the music. I look at this as some kind of loose rock'n'roll movie that shows where the music comes from -from inside these people and their connections -and illustrates it with the music itself.
" I don't know how you could get much deeper than that. I was lucky because Neil let us -me and cameraman LA Johnson -go anywhere on stage as long as we were'nt in their eye line. When we shot in England at the Phoenix Festival, with 55.000 people there and all these other video crews, Neil told his road crew -they look like bikers -" Look, nobody goes on stage with a camera except Jim and Larry. We see anybody else on there, there's going to be big trouble ". And when Neil says, " No, that's the answer NO ".

One amazing musical moment in the movie is the end of " Barstool Blues " where they keep repeating that final power chord over and over, and over again, as if they can't bear to let it go.

" it's 19 or 20 times, hitting that chord before resolving it. Another director might have chopped it off, let them do it trhee times and then get out of if. I said , No way, it's emblematic of what they do on stage. In " Tonight's The Night " , Neil tried to edit it a few different ways. I kept saying, " Neil, we shouldn't touch this. " He finally said " You're right. Let's leave it alone ".

The way they stretch the arrangement of " Tonight's The Night " -vocal lines accented by long, instrumental passages before going back into the verse or chorus -is very arythmic. But it underscores the deep, dark energy in the song.

" When they hit instrumental sections, it's just so elevating. It's like a big pterodactyl comes out of the sky, sweeps you up and flies you into the clouds. That's why in " Slip Away " i use a lot of super8 cloud footage that i shot from cars and the tour bus. When i think of these songs, they transport me -upwards ".

How did you choose scenes frome the 1976 tour footage ?

" The 76 stuff is all logged in a book. I just looked at the book, a description of scenes, and said, " could you send me this stuff ? " It was shot by a Dutch or English crew for some English-tv film. But Neil
had all the rights to it and in the end it wasn't made, so he kept all the footage. I only looked at a fraction of what was there. I avoided all of the live perfor-mances except for 'Like a Hurricane', because I wanted the music to be from '96."
Ddi you conduct the interview ?
"Yeah, with LA Johnson. We were only with them for two weeks, but we kept threatening them with an interrogation chamber: 'We're going to stick you under the lights, ask you all kinds of stuff.' And they kept saying, 'Oh, when's the interrogation cham-ber?' Then we found that room backstage in Dublin, on the last night of the European tour."
Now hard was It to get my band to talk about the drug-related deaths of Danny Whitten (founding Crazy Horse guitarist) and (roadie) Bruce Berry ? The Whitten segment is very potent. But you also have Neil kidding about the " trail of destruction i left behind me ".
When he first saw that in a rough cut, he laughed out loud. But it was a laugh of finding it funny, but also finding it incredibly revealing, a laugh of releas-ing something. He's being very honest - in a way. It's a very telling moment."
And Poncho talk about doing hard drugs himself when he joined the band in 1974 : "The lost one guy and saved another "
"Yesh, Poncho's pretty hardcore. They've all had their drug periods, and come out of them. They're all intact. But they've been through a lot. And Pancho's right - we only see the tip of the iceberg. We heard a lot of stories that we didn't get on film, a lot of wild, twisted stuff about what they'd been through together.
"My favourite rock'n'roll movies of all time are Don't Look Back and Cocksucker Blues. Those films caught those people at really important points: Dylan changing very dramatically at a key moment in his career, and the Stones in '72. You can almost feel a chemical reaction at work in front of you."
In Yéar 0f The Morse, you can see that reaction. But there is also a sturdiness, as if the band is an indestructible force of nature.
"We had a very funny interview that Neil and I did with a German guy, very antagonistic. [Affects stiff German accent] 'Neil, I have seen your movie,
.
Human Highway. It is really bad.' And he said to me, 'Your film is neither a concert film or a documentary. Why is it neither?' Neil loved this guy. Because Neil's a contrarian.
"Then he said to Neil, 'You're the godfather of grunge. Now that grunge is dead, are you dead?' And Neil said, 'No, man. l'm alive. Totally alive.' The guy said, 'In your career, you will go up and down. Are you going down now?' Neil said, 'I don't know. Maybe. I just keep riding. It's not my problem to chart the waters. It's just to keep going.'
"Neil loved the guy. Afterwards, he said, 'Hey, you do a great interview. I should have you talk to me every time I do press.'"
One surprising thing about the film - maybe because we're so used to mtv, style jump cut - is the lengthy, lingering shots of the band. You ofte·n have the tree of them - NeiI, Poncho and Billy - clustered together in the frame
"We were very conscious of that. When we had a French crew of 16 guys shooting in Vienna, I had to tell them over and over again, 'This is not a Neil
Young concert. It's Crary Horse. Make sure you shoot the band.'"
Why dld you shoot so much footage in super 8 ?
"I love Super 8 because there is some: thing tactile about it. There is a raw texture to it, but also a beauty. And the band is like that. The sound of Crary Horse is raw and loose, and it's sensual and beautiful. The way they end a song Is not slick it's not choreographed. It's very emotional. Super 8 equates the feeling of the music very well. I certainly didn't want it to look Iike Don Kirshner's Rock Concert.
"And it was funny being on stage. l'm a big fan. But, on stage, you also feel what they feel, all that energy pouring back at them from the audience. So we were sort of riding both waves, in that place where both waves collide, and we got sort of stoned on it somehow. Personally. I like the footage where we're on stage wifh them the best, even though some of it id technically out of focus. It has the most feeling."

The· real money shot in the film is the way zyou segue in and out of the 1976 and the 1996 performance footage of " Like A Hurricane ". One minute, he's railling against the winds in " 96 , the next you see this innocent-looking guy 20 years earlier.
"Neil flew to New York when we were cutting the song and Jay Rabinowitz, the editor, and I were won-dering, how is Neil going to react to seeing how he looked back then?
"When that scene came up, when he was suddeny looking at himself in 1976, Neil literallyjumped out of his chair and went, 'Wow, look at Old Black,' meaning his guitar. 'She looks so different. She looks so shiny and new.' He didn't look at himself at
all. He was looking at his guitar. 'Look at her. Maybe I should get her polished up. I haven't taken very good care of her.'"
Having made a movie about him and worked with him on other projects, do you understand Neil any better ?
"One thing that 1 understood is that he's very shamanistic about his art. I learned this when he did the Dead Man soundtrack. The pagans used to draw a circle around the priest to protect him from other spirits while he was performing a ritual. And Neil has to have a circle drawn around him, and all the other stuff has to stay outside that circle. Because what's coming out of him has to come from inside. It can't be affected by other superficial things.
"It's a crucial thing that l've seen about the guy. And he's pretty adamant about it. That circle can't be fucked with.
"When he has that circle around him, this incredible stuff comes from deep inside him."
Year Of The Horse is released on video by Artif:cial Eye on January 25 at ~f14.99