Larry "L.A." Johnson: Hard To Forget

Larry "L.A." Johnson: 1947 - 2010

 

Today marks the 2 year anniversary since Neil Young's long time film maker and producer Larry "L.A." Johnson passed away. He was 62.

To say that it was a terrible blow to Shakey Pictures and the Neil Young community is a vast understatement. "L.A."'s contributions to the Neil canon are immeasurable and he is still missed tremendously.

Neil Young said in a statement:

"He never lost the eye and ear of an original artist, one unafraid to listen to himself first. Even more, he also kept his playful spirit and sense of humor, the things that sparked his heart for a lifetime spent doing what he loved best: listening to music and making movies."

Johnson was one of the original East Coast guerrilla documentary filmmakers in the 1960's. He worked on the legendary "Woodstock" film of the 1969 festival and was nominated for an Academy Award in the sound category.

It was at Woodstock where L.A. and Neil Young first met. Johnson went on to film CSNY at the Fillmore East in 1970 and produce Neil Young’s first film Journey Through the Past. 

From Youngtown Museum, a tribute to L.A. by Trevor Hosier:

Some guys are just hard to forget. I don’t know about you, but occasionally Ive found life allows for the rare opportunity of crossing paths with some very interesting people… some may have special skills or talents, some funny perhaps, some just have a personal quality about them that…well,…you just like them right from the start. Larry Johnson was one of those people. I only met him a few times over the course of several days but Ive been thinking about him as days draw closer to the second anniversary of his passing… January 21st., 2010.

More of Youngtown Museum's tribute to L.A. here.  

 

Larry "L.A." Johnson and Neil Young

 

Also, see Larry "L.A." Johnson: 1947 - 2010.

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The Five Sides of Neil Young

Here's a brief "The Five Sides of Neil Young" on YouTube.

A few interesting mini-interviews on Neil's career, including Bob Young, Neil's older brother.

Thanks Keith, Spin the Black Circle!

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Rare 1985 Neil Young in New Zealand

A rare February 1985 with Neil Young in New Zealand while on tour with Crazy Horse. Interviewer by Karyn Hay does a nice job of drawing Neil out on a few of the typical topics like playing with Crazy Horse and changing musical styles. Thanks Denis!

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Getting Wisdom From Neil Young Fans: Confessions of a Data Geek

Neil Young Fans Demographics
Male, Married, Middle Aged

OK. So we admit it.

We're just a data geek.

On occasion, folks will ask us "So Thrasher. What's the deal with you and this whole thing about Neil Young?"

Well, we've attempted to answer this over the years (see here, here, here, here, or here), but really as much as we love Neil and music, we love data almost as much.

And with data comes wisdom.

And here's some wisdom on Neil Young fans. These graphs and analysis are based on data compiled on Wisdom, which is a social intelligence application for Facebook.

So, here's some insights on Neil Young fans followed by some observations on the implications of how this data is compiled and used by corporations and government.

Neil Young Fans Favorite Music
Bob Dylan, Beatles, Johnny Cash


Neil Young Fans Favorite Albums
Grateful Dead, The Band, Dylan


Neil Young Fans Favorite Authors
Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Noam Chomsky


Neil Young Fans Favorite Books
On The Road, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Shakey


Neil Young Fans Favorite Movies
Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction, The Godfather


Neil Young Fans Favorite Comedians
Lewis Black, Lenny Bruce, Kids in the Hall


OK, so what's point of all these random data points. Why does this matter?

Well, from a Neil Young fans perspective knowing that other Neil fans like Bob Dylan isn't exactly earth shattering news. Or that Neil fans tend to be Male, Married, and Middle Aged isn't too surprising.

Or Neil fans like authors Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, and Noam Chomsky?

Obviously from a marketing standpoint, these are highly important insights in order to target your audience in order to raise product awareness, maximize advertising campaigns effectiveness and generate revenue.

From our blog's perspective, these monetization goals are rather meaningless. It's kinda interesting and mainly just confirms a lot of suspicions over the years without hard data. The correlation between Neil Young and Bob Dylan fans has long been a firm belief but it's nice to finally confirm that the facts support our thesis.

Lastly -- and really this is the point here -- many folks are quite oblivious to the amount of information that is gathered about them constantly. Data that is crunched, analyzed, bought, sold and profited upon.

Would anyone have imagined that we would ever know what Neil Young fans religious preferences would ever be quantified?

Neil Young Fans Religion
Church of the SubGenius, Shamanism, Buddhism, Taoism



The concept of privacy know longer exists. Just a quaint little memory.

People's behavior and thinking has been reduced to discrete data points.

Who said numbers add up to nothing?

Finally, if The Powers That Be know everything about you -- what you buy, what you do, what you like -- then they know how you think.

And with these powerful demographic and psychographic insights into the population, future behavior can be predicted...

... and controlled.

And that, our friends, is just so Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Good night Winston.
Good morning Big Brother.
peace

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Love and War: Remembering Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

As we remember Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. today, our thoughts are consumed by many of the challenges facing us all.

But our thoughts are probably not much different than many around the world. Hoping for the best, wishing for good things against all odds.

Maybe we're just a dreamin' man.

So for one man who had a dream, here's to livin' the dream.

LOVE AND WAR

When I sing about love and war
I don't really know what I'm saying

I've been in love and I've seen a lot of war
Seen a lot of people prayin'

They pray to Allah and the pray to the Lord
And mostly they pray about love and war
Pray about love and war
Pray about love and war

Seen a lot of young men go to war
And leave a lot of young brides waiting
I've watched them try to explain it to their kids
Seen a lot of them failing
They try to tell them and they try to explain
Why daddy won't ever come home again

Daddy won't ever come home
Daddy won't ever come home

Said a lot of things I can't take back
But I don't really know if I wanna
I sang songs about love, I sang songs about war
Since the backstreets of Toronto
I sang for justice and I hit a bad chord
But I'll still try to sing about love and war

Saddest thing in the whole wide world
Is to break the heart of your lover
I made a mistake and I did it again
And we struggled to recover
I sang in anger hit another bad chord
But I still try to sing about love and war

Sing about love and war
Sing about love and war

Love and war

Forty four years ago, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Riverside Church in New York City that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” He went on to condemn the Vietnam War and the system which created it and the other injustices clearly apparent.

“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing oriented” society to a “person oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Let's reclaim the dream.
peace

UPDATE: Rev. Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City:

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. . . .

It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through [Lyndon Johnson's] poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such . . . .

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. . . .

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. . . .

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

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