The life and times of Fred Neil: “He was an extremely sensitive soul”

This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of Uncut

It’s the spring of 1965 and Fred Neil is recording his first solo album, Bleecker & MacDougal, at Elektra in midtown Manhattan. He and the studio’s in-house engineer Paul Rothchild are at loggerheads. The singer-songwriter can’t settle into the recording process, much to Rothchild’s exasperation. Neil’s solution is to suddenly take flight.

“Fred stormed out of the sessions,” recalls guitarist Peter Childs. “There was a lot of friction. He had the greatest natural talent, but he was an extremely sensitive soul. So in order to work with Fred, you had to learn to love him.”

This isn’t the first time it’s happened either. “Fred’s relationship with the studio was very much a push-me, pull-you kind of thing,” adds John Sebastian, later of The Lovin’ Spoonful, who played harmonica on the album. “I could see him tighten up whenever we got into position. Paul Rothchild was aware of Fred’s difficulties in recording, but he also knew of his enormous talent. Let’s be candid here. There were fabulous songwriters and insightful protest singers in Greenwich Village. But there was no-one like Fred.”

Before the Bleecker & MacDougal sessions were through, Neil had quit another two or three times, only to be coaxed back by his supporting cast. These capricious tendencies, magnified in a studio setting, were responsible for a disappointingly slim body of recorded work. Yet it was outweighed by the sheer quality of Neil’s songs and their effect on those who heard them. Ostensibly a folk singer, Neil reached deep into gospel, soul, blues and jazz, blessed with a fathomless baritone and a unique sense of syncopated rhythm on 12-string guitar. He laid his emotions bare through song – introspective, damaged, often intensely personal.

“Fred Neil was very, very important. Dylan became a big fan”

Judy Collins

“Fred was a very sophisticated musician,” says Judy Collins, another New York City peer. “A lot of people loved him. When Bob Dylan got to the Village, he was told that he had to get to know him, because Fred Neil was very, very important. Dylan became a big fan and I think he sought him out a lot.” 

Writing in Chronicles Volume 1, Dylan described how he came under his wing at the Café Wha?, where Neil co-hosted hootenannies in early 1961. “He was the emperor of the place,” wrote Dylan. “You couldn’t touch him. Everything revolved around him… He played a big dreadnought guitar, lot of percussion in his playing… a one-man band, a kick-in-the-head singing voice.”

Others who fell under Neil’s influence, either in the Village or beyond, included Tim Buckley, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Linda Ronstadt, Richie Havens, Karen Dalton and Paul Kantner. Crosby, Stills & Nash even recorded Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” during sessions for their debut LP, although it didn’t make the final cut. “Everybody’s Talkin’” became ubiquitous in the summer of 1969, when Harry Nilsson’s version was used as the theme song of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy.

A huge global hit that’s since spawned around a hundred other covers, royalties from “Everybody’s Talkin’” afforded Neil the chance to slip further from the spotlight.  Within two years, he withdrew from the music world almost completely. He spent the remainder of his life in relative seclusion, devoting the greater portion of it to the welfare and conservation of dolphins in Southern Florida. As Neil himself put it to Hit Parader in 1966, in the sole interview he gave during his lifetime: “A guy can only take it for so long, then he has to get away.”

“I think he was shy of anything that smacked of real involvement with the music business,” says Collins. “He wasn’t at all ambitious to go places; he was a soul who needed something that was different. His fascination and devotion to the dolphin cause was his guiding light. He was a hidden treasure in a lot of ways, a really mysterious guy.”  

There wasn’t a whole lot of straightforward in Fred Neil’s life. Born in 1936 in Cleveland, but raised in St Petersburg, Florida, his was a peripatetic childhood. His parents separated when Neil was just nine, his father returning home to Ohio. Neil consoled himself with music, devouring jukebox favourites by Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers while learning the rudiments of guitar. By his teens he was singing and playing at Unitarian church. He enlisted in the navy at 17. Returning home two years later in 1955, he married Leilani Michaels; they were together less than a year.

Against this backdrop, his musical endeavours really began. Now also in thrall to rock’n’roll, Neil played regularly at local dances and beach bars, along with the occasional radio spot. A rousing performance at St Petersburg’s Million Dollar Pier drew the attention of manager Fred Strauss, who brought Neil to New York in the autumn of 1957.

His debut 45, “You Ain’t Treatin’ Me Right”, landed in October. This was the first of six rockabilly-ish singles that Neil released on various labels over the next four years. All of them flopped, though the interim threw up a different kind of opportunity. In 1958, Neil secured a $40-a-week deal with Southern Music, as a songwriter, housed on the top floor of the Brill Building.

“One day Fred and I took a taxi over there,” recalls friend and sometime road manager Joe Stevens, later a photographer for NME. “He had his guitar in its case. Fred’s mission was to present his latest songs, scribbled on bits of paper he pulled from the case. He played and sang some of the new stuff. The songs he partly sold were ‘That’s The Bag I’m In’ and ‘Blues On The Ceiling’. They gave Freddie a cheque, we left, and in the elevator he introduced me to Carole King and Leiber and Stoller.”

“Everybody will tell you that Fred was their mentor or their idol”

Peter Childs

His Brill Building tenure included co-writes for Buddy Holly (“Come Back Baby”) and Roy Orbison (“Candy Man”), while extracurricular work involved sessions for producer Nick Venet and guitar duties on Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover”. Neil’s reputation grew. He became a figurehead for the swarms of aspiring folkies who gravitated to Greenwich Village in the early ’60s. “Everybody will tell you that Fred was their mentor or their idol,” says Peter Childs, who met him around the same time. “Yet he didn’t try to be any of that. That’s just what happened when you were Fred Neil.”

By disposition, Neil felt uncomfortable with all the attention. The formal Brill Building experience had also left a bitter taste. “Fred didn’t want to even admit that he’d ever done that,” says Childs. “He was extreme in his rejection of the business, and I think the Brill Building was as good a symbol of that as anything.” When he wasn’t MC’ing and performing at the Café Wha? – site of a famous photo, from July ’61, of Fred, Karen Dalton and a harmonica-blowing Dylan – Neil could be found gigging around the Village with good friend Dino Valenti. Their raucous shows would sometimes involve leading the audience out of the rear door and back around through the front, without dropping a beat. “His stage shows in Greenwich Village were fabulous,” says Stevens. “He’d mastered the art beautifully.”

“Around 1961 or ’62, the four main groupie attractors in the Village were Fred Neil, Dino Valenti, Hugh Romney – who later became Wavy Gravy – and Lenny Bruce,” says Peter Stampfel of The Holy Modal Rounders. “I wasn’t really aware much of Fred from a musical standpoint, but I knew he was considered hot shit by the women. And that he was one of the go-to performers at the time. Then by ’63 I finally heard him. That killer voice, he was terrific. I heard ‘Badi-Da’ and thought it was a fucking masterpiece.”

Neil had attempted to record a debut album for Columbia in 1962, only for his mistrust of the studio environment – with its attendant pressures – to kick in. He kept either disappearing or not showing up at all. The sessions were aborted soon enough. The consensus was that Neil needed someone alongside him. Enter folk singer Vince Martin, with whom he first jammed at the Third Side coffeehouse that winter. The pair hit it off, performing around town as Martin & Neil. A residency at the Gaslight Café, in October ’63, resulted in an offer to record for Elektra. The sessions began a few weeks later, but by then Neil had already found something else: a means of escape. 

“Coconut Grove was just a wonderful place to live,” says Peter Childs. “Especially in the early ’60s, before everybody discovered it. For Fred, one of the great things about it was that his fellow souls would congregate there. The Grove drew itself to Fred as much as the other way around.”

About 1,200 miles south of Greenwich Village, near the southern tip of Florida, Coconut Grove proved an ideal getaway for Neil. He’d been introduced to it by Vince Martin, who’d relocated there from New York in 1960. “There was already a scene there,” says musician Peter Lee Neff, whose authoritative That’s The Bag I’m In remains the only biography of Fred Neil. “It was Greenwich Village South, but with a different vibe. It was laidback, which suited Fred. Plus he loved the beach, he loved the bay, he loved sailing. It was the complete opposite of New York.”

“His voice filled up every corner of the room and actually made your chest vibrate”

Peter Lee Neff

A folk disciple, the teenage Neff regularly saw Neil play the Grove’s Gaslight South in the early ’60s. “The first time you heard Fred Neil, your jaw just dropped,” he continues. “His voice filled up every corner of the room and actually made your chest vibrate. He wasn’t like your typical folk singer. He was doing his own songs, not traditional ballads. No bullshit.”

Neil’s presence drew other musicians to the Grove, including the young David Crosby, still a couple of years away from The Byrds. He’d followed Neil’s trail from New York by Greyhound bus, armed only with a guitar and a box of clothes. “He taught me a sizeable chunk of what music was about,” Crosby later recalled. “He was a hero to me.”

Neil was alternating between Coconut Grove and Greenwich Village by the time Tear Down The Walls was issued in 1964. It was a sterling showcase for his remarkable powers. The duo’s 12-string guitars and supple rhythms suggested
a more progressive direction for folk music, while Neil’s low, soulful vocals found contrast in Martin’s higher tones. The traditional songs were handled ably enough, but the keepers were undoubtedly Neil’s own compositions.  “I was just crazy about the song ‘Tear Down The Walls’,” says Judy Collins.
“It had that kind of rebellious and democratic feel that I loved. I ended up recording it for my fourth album, at New York Town Hall [1964’s The Judy Collins Concert]. I remember feeling very excited about it, because it was just the thing we needed at the time.”

A rallying cry for freedom and equality, “Tear Down The Walls” was something of an anomaly for Fred Neil. He was no protest singer, his songs more concerned with expressing his interior life. The doleful “Wild Child In A World Of Trouble” was emblematic. “He sang of being a lost child in a world of pain,” says Childs. “Fred didn’t know how to cope with the shit of the world, but he was just extremely sensitive to it. He was a glowing golden soul. I remember Fred plucking at my sleeve one time and saying, ‘Y’know, what if Gabriel’s horn is the echo of the Word?’”

Neil’s response to his predicament was to self-medicate. Grass and speed were his preferences during his early Village days, before graduating to morphine and heroin later. Pete Stampfel recalls planning to record together at one point. “I was really looking forward to it,” he says. “But Fred had shot up
so much heroin that basically he nodded out in the studio and couldn’t be woken up.”

“Fred was a non-coper, that’s why he took drugs,” says Childs. “Some people talked about him as a junkie, but that wasn’t Fred. He was not a drug addict. But for one thing he couldn’t say no when a friend came in with something. For another, he was always running away from the difficulties of life.”  

The sleeve of Bleecker & MacDougal found Fred Neil at a crossroads. Braced from the nighttime cold in a sheepskin coat, a guitar case under one arm, he has his back to the neon and bustle of Greenwich Village, his body tilted towards the edge of the shot, his face set in a wintry grimace. It’s as if he can’t exit the frame quickly enough.

There were further clues inside. The opening lines come from the title track: “I was standing on the corner/Of the Bleecker and MacDougal/Wondering which way to go/I’ve got a woman down in Coconut Grove/And you know she love me so/I wanna go home”. Elsewhere, Neil sings of being stuck in the big city, unsure of where he’s going next, dreaming of sailing boats and the Gulf of Mexico. In the meantime, he fears he’ll never get out of this crazy blues alive.

For all its fits and starts, Bleecker & MacDougal was a sublime solo debut, studded with folk-blues gems that rank amongst Neil’s finest work: “Blues On The Ceiling”, “Little Bit Of Rain”, “Country Boy”, “Other Side To This Life”. Even the sole traditional tune, the irresolute “The Water Is Wide”, felt like a Fred Neil spiritual.

“He had a background with folk music, but also the full white gospel church setting,” says John Sebastian. “All of these inflections that came with that. It was just how he learned to sing.” For Neil, he was simply running with natural instinct: “I still don’t know exactly where I’m going myself. I’m following the music, trying to write it as I see it, whatever it is.”

Neil was by then primarily based in Coconut Grove, often appearing at the Gaslight South when he wasn’t off sailing in Biscayne Bay. Original producer Nick Venet persuaded him to venture out to Los Angeles in the autumn of 1966, intent on recording him for Capitol. Venet’s approach was in marked contrast to that of predecessor Paul Rothchild. “Nick really loved him, he knew how to handle Fred,” says Childs, who remained part of Neil’s studio set-up. “He’d get him to bring in his friends, turn the lights down low, light a big bundle of incense and stick it in the corner. Then turn on the tape recorder and leave it running.”

Fred Neil, a fuller folk-rock hybrid, was another masterpiece, highlighted by two of his most enduring creations: “The Dolphins” and “Everybody’s Talkin’”. The former, an elliptical beauty later covered by Tim Buckley, who attended the sessions, sought to equate a wider search for peace with Neil’s own disquietude. It was, too, an oblique reference to his frequent visits to the Miami Seaquarium, where he became fascinated by Kathy, the star of TV’s Flipper. Marine biologist and underwater stuntman Ric O’Barry trained the dolphins for NBC’s popular series, befriending Neil in the process. “Fred loved hanging out with the dolphins,” he says. “He had the patience of a saint. He’d stay there by the edge of the tank for hours on end, playing his guitar. He was always trying to communicate with them.”

“Fred loved hanging out with the dolphins… He was always trying to communicate with them”

Ric O’Barry

Adds Sebastian: “Fred would take this perfectly good 12-string guitar, strike it and then lay it down on the top of the water, because the dolphins would come right up to it. They were so curious, and that just delighted him.”

By contrast, Neil seemed less enamoured with his music career. Neither Bleecker & MacDougal nor Fred Neil made much impression on a commercial level, partly because of his reluctance to tour or promote his own product. Another album with Venet, 1968’s Sessions, was a languorous set of jazz-folk songs recorded mostly in first takes. But another round of dismal sales figures left Capitol wondering just what to do with their mercurial charge. They resolved to compile 1971’s The Other Side Of This Life. Side one was cut live at The Purple Elephant in Woodstock, where Neil had moved with his fourth wife, Judy, a couple of years earlier. The second side, assembled without Venet’s permission, comprised outtakes from the Capitol vaults. It was an inglorious end to Fred Neil as a recording artist. By then though, he seemed beyond caring.  

In 1970, Neil, Ric O’Barry and Stephen Stills resolved to end dolphin captivity in America by setting up a non-profit organisation, the Dolphin Project. The idea came to the trio while they were out sailing on Biscayne Bay. Benefit shows were organised at the Coconut Grove Playhouse and elsewhere, with Neil as bait. “Fred would call somebody – Jerry Jeff Walker, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Richie Havens, John Sebastian – and they would all make their pilgrimage to Coconut Grove,” says O’Barry. “People really wanted to perform with Fred and it would sell out in one day without even advertising. We would’ve died on the vine if it wasn’t for the music. Fred was the heart and soul of it all.”

Neil all but retired from live performance in the ’70s, save for those shows. “I remember being backstage with him at The Last Waltz, with my guitar in my hand,” says Childs. “The Band and I were begging Fred to come out and perform. He knew The Band well, because they’d both been neighbours in Woodstock, but he just wouldn’t do it. Fred did not particularly enjoy performing.”

There were odd exceptions though. In 1975, Neil pitched up at the Montreux Jazz Festival, backed by Childs, Sebastian and bassist Harvey Brooks. Two years later the same band, augmented by pianist Richard Bell, appeared at a three-day Save The Whales benefit in Tokyo. It was Neil’s last official performance. Sebastian believes the Montreux show, especially, was spectacular: “It was recorded, but has never been released, unfortunately. I believe it to be the best representation of Fred doing a live set. He’d lost none of his power.”

To honour a deal with Columbia, Neil re-entered the studio in late 1977, cutting a bunch of covers with O’Barry as producer. CBS were unimpressed with the results though (provisionally titled ‘Walk On Water’) and bankrolled new sessions backed by jazz-funksters Stuff. They still didn’t like the album, finally giving up on Neil for good. Clean from drugs for some time, Neil kept a low profile around Coconut Grove during the ’80s. He made an impromptu appearance at a local Buzzy Linhart gig, but left for Texas before the decade was out, distraught after witnessing a car accident in which his girlfriend died.

Increasingly withdrawn, Neil lived in Corpus Christi, then headed to the Pacific Northwest in the ’90s, settling in the modest coastal city of Newport, Oregon. He seemed intent on disappearing altogether. “What he was fleeing from I don’t know,” says Childs. “It was like he had mafia after him or something. But it was all tied in with his reluctance to be on stage, out there in the open and exposed. In any other profession, people might say it was pathological.”

He might well have stayed put, had O’Barry not requested his return to Florida to help out at the Sugarloaf Dolphin Sanctuary in 1996. Neil spent his final years in a two-storey house on Summerland Key, keeping up a couple of aliases: ‘Buddy Smith’ or, more simply, ‘Rick’. “We were in the process of rehabilitating some rescued dolphins and releasing them back into the wild,” says O’Barry. “So Fred was very involved in that, gutting fish and mopping floors, doing all the things that everybody else did.”

Neil died of skin cancer in July 2001, aged 65. He remained an enigma
until the last, his songs better known for their interpretations by others rather than the man himself. But the music is still there to be discovered. And that emotive, one-of-a-kind voice. “I’ve had two women tell me they had babies to Fred’s songs,” says Childs. “There was always a spiritual reality being expressed. There’s something about that magnificent voice that makes you feel that, no matter how fucked up the world is, everything’s going to turn out all right. For me, that’s Fred’s legacy.”