Nils Lofgren “It was a bunch of old friends… rediscovering what they’ve always had”
HOW is it, being back with Crazy Horse? They’re probably my oldest musical family. Fifty years ago in May, I walked in on them at the Cellar Door. We made friends. I made the first definitive Crazy Horse album with Danny Whitten, with Jack Nitzsche producing. It was an amazing thing and we’ve had some great chapters ever since. And here we are!
“We jumped into it with all the craziness and technical glitches and got used to playing as live as we could”
This February, we did two shows in Winnipeg. We had what we called the Polar Vortex – the whole country wasIt was this mountain-top studio that was scrambling to get ready for us. There was a room with oxygen tanks, because of the altitude. Amy, my wife, and I got there three days early to get acclimatised. We jumped into it with all the craziness and technical glitches and got used to playing as live as we could, without all the baffles and everyone in iso-booths. We chipped away and got 11 or 12 songs recorded. At the last minute, we had a listening party at Neil and Daryl’s, which was beautiful. It was a Sunday night. We drove down the mountain – there was snow, ice, hail and rain, terrible roads – to get to Cortez. When we left, we all felt really good about it. Neil was off to Europe to play festival shows with Promise Of The Real; he thought maybe we’d get back together in August and do some more recording. Then, as the weeks went by, he did some serious listening and figured he had a record he felt great about already. We didn’t need to keep going at it.
