The day was April 2, 1976. Neil Young was fly­ing into Glas­gow, and a local cam­era crew was wait­ing at the air­port to meet him. Direc­tor Mur­ray Grig­or and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er David Peat had been hired by Young through his record com­pa­ny. As they wait­ed there, at the air­port, they had no idea what to expect.

“The irony,” Peat told Open Cul­ture, “is that nei­ther Mur­ray or myself were par­tic­u­lar­ly knowl­edge­able about the rock world, and we knew lit­tle of this guy Neil Young. So we turned up at the air­port in sports jack­ets and ties to meet him!”

Young’s sched­uled flight from Lon­don arrived, but he was­n’t on it. When a sec­ond flight came in, Peat and Grig­or watched anx­ious­ly as all the pas­sen­gers cleared the ter­mi­nal. Still no Young. Final­ly, said Peat, “this tall bloke in a long coat came ambling down the cor­ri­dor.” The film­mak­ers intro­duced them­selves to Young and asked what he want­ed.

“Just give me some funky shit footage,” said Young.

“Nae both­er, as we say in Scot­land,” Peat said. So the film­mak­ers tagged along as the musi­cian and his band, Crazy Horse, head­ed into the city. At this point Mur­ray Grig­or picks up the sto­ry: “Our film­ing got off to a tricky start. When Neil and the band final­ly made it to their lunch in the Albany Hotel’s pent­house, one of them set fire to the paper table dec­o­ra­tions, which we filmed. ‘Just like Nam,’ anoth­er one said as he warmed his hands over the small infer­no lap­ping up towards the inflam­ma­ble ceil­ing.”

At that moment, Peat added, “this very Scot­tish floor man­ag­er leapt in and com­plete­ly cowed them with her rage.” The woman turned to the near­est per­son and demand­ed to know what was going on. “That hap­pened to be our sound recordist, Louis Kramer,” said Grig­or. “She then shout­ed at them to get every­thing burn­ing into the bathroom–and gen­er­al­ly gave them all a dress­ing down.”

As Grig­or explained, “Neil and the band were all stoned out of their skulls.”

When the smoke had cleared at the Albany Hotel, the crew fol­lowed Young out onto the streets, where he began accost­ing passers­by. “Excuse me,” he said. “Could you tell me where the Bank of Scot­land is?” He soon set­tled on a dif­fer­ent des­ti­na­tion. “It was entire­ly Neil’s idea,” Grig­or told us, “to flop down at the entrance to Glas­gow’s Cen­tral Sta­tion and then wait and see who would rec­og­nize him.”

With a scarf wrapped around his neck and a deer­stalk­er hat pulled down over his face, Young took out his ban­jo and har­mon­i­ca and sat on the pave­ment. Peat, whose forté is obser­va­tion­al film­mak­ing, panned his cam­era back and forth between the famous street musi­cian and the peo­ple pass­ing by. Kramer’s sound record­ing pro­vid­ed the con­ti­nu­ity that made it pos­si­ble for Peat to move around and cov­er the scene from dif­fer­ent angles. He noticed that Young was singing about an “Old Laugh­ing Lady,” so when he saw one, he filmed her. The whole thing last­ed only a few min­utes.

Lat­er that evening, Young and Crazy Horse opened their show at the Glas­gow Apol­lo with “The Old Laugh­ing Lady.” It was the last con­cert of their Euro­pean tour. The film crew doc­u­ment­ed the crowd going into the Apol­lo and the show itself. When it was over, Young asked Grig­or to syn­chro­nize the sound and film for lat­er edit­ing. Local edi­tor Bert Eeles did the synch work, Grig­or sent in the film, and that was about the last they ever heard of it. “I always under­stood Neil com­mis­sioned it for his own use as a kind of ‘home movie,’ ” said Peat.

The fire scene from the Albany Hotel resur­faced in Jim Jar­musch’s 1997 film, Year of the Horse: Neil Young and Crazy Horse Live. When the busk­ing scene at Cen­tral Sta­tion recent­ly appeared on the Inter­net, Peat was hap­py to see it, but dis­ap­point­ed with the state it was in (see above). “The qual­i­ty is poor and the sound appears to be slight­ly out of sync,” he said. “It looks as though the mate­r­i­al is in black and white, but I’m sure I shot it in col­or.”

Peat and Grig­or col­lab­o­rat­ed on a num­ber of oth­er projects, includ­ing the 1976 Bil­ly Con­nol­ly doc­u­men­tary Big Banana Feet, which was screened at the Glas­gow Film Fes­ti­val last Sun­day for the first time in decades, and the 1983 film, The Archi­tec­ture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Archi­tec­ture has been a major focus of Grig­or’s work. Last month he received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his ser­vices to archi­tec­ture and film. Peat is the sub­ject of an upcom­ing spe­cial on BBC Two, A Life in Film: David Peat.

The strange assign­ment to shoot “funky shit footage” for a strung-out rock star was a minor foot­note in Peat’s long career, but he looks back on it with fond­ness. “The footage of Neil has achieved a sort of icon­ic sta­tus in Glas­gow,” he said. “I was in a music/video store recent­ly try­ing to find out if it exist­ed on any pub­lished DVD, and the guy behind the counter near­ly fell over when I revealed I had shot it. He prob­a­bly just saw an old bloke with a beard instead of the lithe young man who used to dance around with a cam­era!” H/T Dan­ger­ous Minds

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