In 1978, the last thing that anyone would have expected from Neil Young was an abstract, stream-of-conscious comic film that
touched on issues of nuclear waste and the dating habits of diner waitresses, starred Devo, and would make David Lynch look like
Harold Ramis in comparison. “He was hippie Grandpa Granola to us,” says Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh of the music icon.
“That was what we thought of Neil before we met him.”
Yet, starting in ’78 and continuing off and on throughout the next three years, Young, under the alias of “Bernard Shakey,” made
his narrative cinematic debut as director and writer of Human Highway, a film co-directed by one-time child actor Dean Stockwell
and co-written by another former famed teen thespian, Russ Tamblyn. These longtime friends and denizens of Topanga Canyon,
along with other pals and habitués of the West LA playground (including actors Charlotte Stewart, Sally Kirkland, and Dennis
Hopper, as well as the folkie David Blue), improvised their way through a wonky dreamscape and a sketchy script with Young as the
goofball star. The story—roughly, the owner of a diner near a nuclear power plant wants to set the restaurant aflame to collect the
insurance money—played third fiddle to the film’s rampant energy and wild ideas. The newly christened Shakey cast himself as the
protagonist Lionel Switch, a bumbling, nerdy car mechanic who secretly longs to be a rock star.
“I know he was making fun of himself, but I think that role exposed who Neil really was: a dweeby guy who loved cars and wanted
to be a rocker,” says Stewart, whose clothing store on La Cienega Boulevard, Liquid Butterfly, sat across from the offices of Young’s
longtime manager (and future co-star), Elliot Roberts.
Human Highway, into which Young reportedly stuffed three million dollars of his own money, had a brief release in 1982 and an
equally short run on VHS in 1996. Today, however, with Young having spent decades obsessively recutting it for improved narrative
coherence, the film is being rereleased by Warner Bros. Pictures. It now survives as a brisk mini-epic with the director’s colorful
vision comparable to that of an early Tim Burton.
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