Getting At The Shape Of Loneliness
Neil Young: 'Hey Hey, My My' + Going nowhere + Becoming something
‘What I think the young man was really doing was seeing what it would be like to “bottom out.” The phrase flicked through his mind like a mantra.’ Sam Kahn on pushing through, with some help from a rocker doing the same.
I was 25 and subletting a room in Ladera Ranch, an Iranian neighborhood south of LA. I didn’t have a job. I was working on an article that was going nowhere. It had to do with suicide, infidelity, narcissistic personality disorder, land deals worth millions — a real Chinatown kind of story, but I was in over my head and already knew the piece would never be published, even if I dug up anything worthwhile. I was staying with a very beautiful Persian woman but never made a move, both because I was trying to be faithful to my girlfriend in New York and because the opportunity didn’t come up.
What was I really doing? I was listening to music, the same three songs over and over again on my laptop: Amy Winehouse’s “Back To Black,” Radiohead’s “Codex,” and Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My.”
Why those three? Well, “Back To Black” because Amy Winehouse had just died and that felt like a requiem for my stillborn generation. (I was assuming, maybe a bit hopefully, that everybody else was as stuck as I was.) “Codex” because, as a moody young man, I was overdue for my Radiohead phase. And “Hey Hey”— well, I didn’t really know.
For a long time, I listened to the song by skipping around. This is the story of a Johnny Rotten didn’t work for me as a starting point — I didn’t know who Johnny Rotten was. I have an image of myself flipping forward to lines that worked. Out of the blue and into the black. Then back to Hey hey my my / Rock and roll can never die. I see the audio controls on my long-vanished Kazaa account. This seems to be how memory works — these photographs or fragments of photographs.
In the background, off-screen: the feckless young man. What in the world was he doing? I don’t think he was writing — later, there would be nothing to show for this whole phase. Probably he was putting his notes in order (yet again) for his article that would never materialize, keying himself up with the same song over and over.
What I think he was really doing was trying to see what it would be like to “bottom out.” The phrase flicked through his mind like a mantra. Bottoming out, in this nascent theology, meant sinking below the level of all acquaintances, all institutional ties — forgetting all about college, forgetting about the six-figure i-banking and consulting jobs that his friends all seemed to have landed straight out of college. It meant one day quieting down his racing mind, meant getting at the real shape of himself, which is to say the shape of loneliness.
Young wrote “Hey Hey, My My” in 1978. He was past his peak, the tide of the Sixties having cleared out, giving way to the wasteland of the Seventies. Over and over again he says, defiantly: I am still here, what I was really existed and is still here as well. No matter what, no matter what, rock and roll can never die.
There’s little else to show for the young man at that time. He drove around, he accumulated parking tickets (he was new to driving). Eventually he went back to New York, eventually he started listening obsessively to different music. The very beautiful Persian woman he was staying with sold jewelry and, trying to be nice, he bought a necklace from her that she shipped to his dad’s address. His dad’s girlfriend got upset when she saw it— jewelry from this mysterious woman in L.A. The young man couldn’t bring himself to say anything to clear up the situation, just as he couldn’t bring himself to reply to the beautiful woman’s follow-up email asking why she hadn’t received payment for the necklace. He felt himself sinking, he felt himself close to something like bottom.
Strangely, it’s not all a dark memory. I listen to the songs from this time, remember what I can, and it comes through as nostalgia. The solution to the young man’s angst turned out to be very simple: get a real job, lighten up a little, and so on. But I think that, in the heart of his dark period, the young man was working on some project that was more profound than that. He certainly couldn’t have named it to himself. The only people who could get at it were a handful of musicians — and then only in a few lyrics, a few notes, of a few songs. What he was trying to do was to strip everything away, all the preposterous, megalomaniacal illusions of who he thought he would become as an adult. He was trying to see himself instead as something smaller, more humble, more emotional. He was trying and — I think — succeeding, far more than he could have imagined at the time, at getting at the real shape of himself. ✹