Shakey by James McDonough

Author:James McDonough [McDonough, Jimmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37380-9
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2002-05-14T21:00:00+00:00

“You’re the only friend I have, because you’re the only one that tells me the truth,” Young would say to Jack Nitzsche on their car rides through the ranch. “So I played that role,” said Nitzsche. “I told Neil he was an asshole—not realizing I was being an asshole myself a lotta the time.”

Nitzsche had become the most improbable addition to the ranch bunch, living with his wife, Gracia, and son, Jack, in a house he rented from Elliot Roberts. Jack Jr. recalls that living at the ranch wasn’t the brightest time for the Nitzsche family. His father was obsessed with voodoo, and “he would use this shit to scare me. He once got me in a car when I was a kid—he was pretty drunk—and he started screamin’ at me that he was the Angel of Death.”

The arranger quickly grew weary of playing second banana to Young. “It was stifling, because I was there for Neil, and that started to get to me,” said Nitzsche. “I started drinking heavy, doing a lot of drugs and becoming more abusive to Neil.”

Few understood the relationship. “The ridicule Neil suffered at the hands of Jack’s opinions was ruthless—and that’s what turned Neil on,” said Snodgress, who felt Nitzsche was acting out of envy. “I mean, look at all the music Jack Nitzsche’s written, and who knows who Jack Nitzsche is?” Nitzsche reserved his most potent venom for Carrie herself. “I didn’t get along with her at all. I said to Neil immediately when I met her, ‘This is the biggest phony I’ve ever met in my life. What an asshole this woman is—she’s constantly lying, she’s an actress.’”

Nitzsche’s main running buddy was James McCracken, who was getting more and more out of control. “Neil tried to hang in there, but McCracken wore out his welcome everywhere he went,” said Mazzeo. “He always bit the hand that fed him, really hard.” One night he pulled up to Young’s door at two in the morning, drunk out of his mind, demanding that Neil buy ten of his paintings and give him thousands of dollars immediately to “fix his magic carpet.” Young declined, and, according to Mazzeo, McCracken “pulls out his dick and pisses on Neil’s brand-new oriental rug that cost, like, sixteen thousand dollars.”*

Rogue behavior like this only further endeared him to Nitzsche. And, according to Mazzeo, “It was suicide hanging out with those guys. You’d hop in the car and they’d both be drinking and they’d start arguin’ in the front seat, and Mac would just take the wheel and the car would go off the road into a cow field. Nitzsche would be very indignant ’cause now he didn’t know where the road was.” Nitzsche and McCracken would try to out-macho each other by throwing knives and grinding their hands into broken glass. Needless to say, the peace-and-love types were terrified by these two.

At some point McCracken ventured off to the desert and—painting with the whiskers of a dead mouse he’d accidently

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