Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
Jim Jarmusch's Year
of the Horse, a documentary of Neil Young
and Crazy Horse on the road, brings me back to
Robert Christgau gavel-thumping that Elvis
Costello was doomed to "never again convert
the uninitiated."
Certainly the film
proceeds at the flower-blooming pace of an
Alejandro Jodorowsky film with some of the same
drawbacks. We can watch Neil Young, Frank
"Pancho" Sampedro, Billy Talbot, and
Ralph Molina from the outside, but we can't
connect them to the majesty they make onstage
together. Per son to person, Talbot and Molina
seen not so much mystics as two men kept for a
very long time in a very dark hole with very
little light; they cringe, squirm, and fidget in
their chairs. Molina remembers the late producer
David Briggs as "Going through...ah...help
me out here--"
"Chemotherapy?"
Jarmusch fills in.
"Yeah
something like that."
Young, the band's
most mediagenic member, evolves naturally into
the biggest bullshitter. His dry delivery,
chewing the insides of his lips between
sentences, could make Steven Wright break out in
hives--asked about the Rockets, the band he lured
Talbot and Molina out of, he says never cracking
a smile that "That's the hardest part, the
guilt of the trail of destruction that I've
left." Everyone in the preview audience
laughed. But they were mostly the initiated.
Jarmusch's 8 and
16mm footage splays graininess, accentuating
facial wrinkles and in some cases, I think,
creating them; straight lines fork like split
ends while spotlight auras fizzle at the edges,
frying from the outside in. It's appropriate to
the concert footage with the four men hoodooing
either other out of their skins--when the
lighting flickers up and down during
"Fuckin' Up" you feel that the band is
sucking up all the power out of the building, out
of the city, out of the ground--backstage and
offstage, it contributes, along with
discontinuities in time and to a jumpy miasma.
Here's the band in 1976, Neil reaching down to
find "A joint Jethro Tull left behind in
1971." Here's the band in 1986, setting
paper flowers on fire and giggling when the
tablecloth won't put it out; a maid enters,
indignant, and everyone howls like hyenas as she
says, what sounds like, "They're not paper,
they're cereal." Here's 1996, the hotel,
with Pancho Sampedro taunting from behind the
sunglasses he never removes (except onstage,
going iris-to-iris with Neil's
thousand-yard-stare) taunting Jarmusch that the
filmmaker "just wants to come in here and
get the whole story in a few weeks. It's never
gonna happen."
Pancho gets a call
from Neil, who can't figure out how to turn off
the computer; Jarmusch's 8mm lens follows until
the Young slams the hotel door at it. Two seconds
later we're in the room apparently teleported
through the door and Neil, in reasonably extreme
close-up, is giving what I think of as the
quintessentially Neil expression of raised
eyebrows and pursed lips, the look perhaps of an
old woman hearing her grandson say
"penis" for the first time--except for
the coruscating blister in those eyes, an enemy's
last look from an exterminating Magyar. The scene
ends quickly.
So Year of the
Horse is a religious film and like a
Catholic mass or a Quaker meeting, the experience
can bring you to the process and maybe make you
drink, but a single experience cannot give you
the history.
Sampedro is right
about Jarmusch's impossible task, but the
musicians show their true mysticism when they
confront religion themselves. It's 1976, or 1986
(this tour seems to gone on forever and been
filmed for twice that long--though any filmmaker
will tell you it's all in the editing) and a
young man buttonholes Neil, a young man who talks
about having been around for 2000 years, which
isn't so long, he explains, when you're saving
the world--"All right," Neil cuts him
off after a minute of nodding. "Good luck.
Hope you make it this time."
It's 1996, or
1995, and the band's lighting director opens up a
Bible on the tour bus and reads passages of blood
burning sand, smoke, flame, destruction by
crushing. "The Old Testament is where God is
really pissed all the time," he laughs.
"The Old Testament is related to the New
Testament," Neil rasps.
If you haven't
seen Crazy Horse live, let me suggest that you
see this movie on that basis alone; seeing sixty
minutes or so of four men converting electrical
current into protean wails with the emotional
range of opera singers, may well bring you to
conversion point . The band spins a song and then
skates on its momentum--in "Fuckin' Up"
Pancho starts chanting "yer jussa
fuck'p" while Neil testifies in the timbre
of a street lunatic, "Lemme tellya a story
my father told me..." Or they might cripple
and dissect the Ur material, as with
"Tonight's the Night," a song which
"ends" with the death of a friend, but
when broken into pieces--verses interrupted
seemingly at random for guitar windmilling, the
three-word chorus sung over and again ever more
flaggingly ragged--renders the death inevitable,
foretold, and yet to pass. If the four-hooved
fist of electric mysticism leaves you unmoved, at
least you paid half the price of a concert ticket and ran far less
risk of ear damage.
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