FOREVER YOUNG
Johnny Echols on how Neil Young nearly produced Love’s studio masterpiece…
“B
RUCE Botnick [engineer and co-producer] brought Neil Young
in to work on
Forever Changes.
He was very close to Neil, who was, at that point, essentially broke. He needed money badly, so Elektra thought that giving him a producer’s credit would get him some cash. Which it did, because they eventually paid him to go away. He was there for maybe 45 minutes tops, but he never produced anything or was even there when we started recording. Neil was a contemporary, we were friends and got high with him, so there’s no way we were going to listen to him as a producer. So it just caused chaos having him there. Neil was an interesting character. We’d be playing in places like the Hullabaloo or the Kaleidoscope – a large venue that held maybe 5,000 people, a movie theatre with a double balcony – and we’d fill the place up. Neil, being self-promoting, would come up when we were doing ‘Revelation’, just plug in his guitar and start to play. He was that kind of guy. It kind of rubbed us the wrong way because of that, plugging in on stage without being invited.”