Crazy Horse to Test the Waters Minus Neil Young

Crazy Horse is the Sancho Panza of rock bands, the faithful, earthy sidekick always willing to ride when its quixotic boss calls.

The knight-errant, in this case, is Neil Young, who has spent the ‘80s tilting at an ever-changing array of stylistic windmills. Since 1969, when Young first hooked up with Crazy Horse to record the landmark “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” album, he has called on the band when he wants to leave folk-rock or country or rockabilly (or whatever) behind and blast away as a hard rocker.

The intermittent Neil Young & Crazy Horse partnership has resulted in some of the rawest, most powerful rock ever played: songs such as “Down by the River,” “Cinnamon Girl,” “Powderfinger” and “Like a Hurricane” and the albums “Rust Never Sleeps,” “Zuma” and “Tonight’s the Night.”

Now, for the first time in more than a decade, Sancho is sallying out on his own. When Crazy Horse plays Wednesday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, it will, according to founders Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, be the band’s first live show without Young since 1974.

Young is busy, off in his latest new direction--big band blues and R&B--with; a 10-piece, horn-driven group called the Bluenotes. In the past, Crazy Horse waited patiently--sometimes for years--while Young employed shifting sets of accompanists better suited to whatever direction he was following at the moment. Eventually, when Young decided he wanted to flail away at his guitar and make a big, crunching sound, he would call again for Crazy Horse.

Interviewed in the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Young questions whether he will be rocking with Crazy Horse again.

” . . . I may come back to Crazy Horse again some day, but it seems more and more doubtful to me. The kind of music I played with Crazy Horse was a younger kind of music. And I’m not younger--I’m older.” Young, 42, went on to say that the Bluenotes play with a versatility and passion that “makes me wonder what’s gonna happen with Crazy Horse.”

Speaking by phone recently from a rehearsal studio in Reseda, bassist Talbot and drummer Molina, both 44, said they doubt that Young has taken his last ride with Crazy Horse.

“I take that with a grain of salt,” Molina said of the Rolling Stone quotes. “In a year or a year and a half from now, he could call us. That’s the way it has always been.”

Talbot added: “He’s going to call. I’ll always want to play with Neil, and I’m sure he’ll want to play with us.”

But what if Neil Young & Crazy Horse is “a younger kind of music” than the graying boss has in mind?

“I guess we’ll have to wait till he gets young again,” a punning Molina said. “He’ll always want to do his rock ‘n’ roll thing. That’s what the people want to hear.”

This time, instead of waiting for Young to call, Crazy Horse is trying to establish itself as an independent entity. Joining Talbot and Molina are two newcomers to Crazy Horse: singer-guitarist Sonny Mone and lead guitarist Matt Piucci, formerly of Rain Parade. Frank Sampedro, the guitarist-keyboard player who had been a mainstay in Crazy Horse since the “Zuma” album in 1975, is still with Young, playing keyboards in the Bluenotes.

Talbot said that he and Molina last played with Young in December during a two-week series of dates with the Blue-notes. After that, Talbot said, “we split the Bluenotes. It just didn’t work out right. It wasn’t our kind of music. When we got the six horns, it took a turn to the more sophisticated style. It lost the feel that we have.”

For about three years, Talbot said, he had been working on songs with Sonny Mone, a transplanted Bostonian. With no other commitment, the time seemed right to bring Crazy Horse back on its own. As an independent entity, the band had released four albums--the last in 1978.

Talbot said the last live show by Crazy Horse featured brothers Mike and Rick Curtis, who had a short-lived tenure with the band after the heroin-induced death of its original singer and guitarist, Danny Whitten, in 1972. The circumstances of that gig have faded. “It could have been Lincoln, Neb.,” Talbot said.

The idea now is to test the band’s new independence with a series of live dates that starts Wednesday at the Coach House and also includes shows Friday at the Bacchanal in San Diego, Saturday at Bogart’s in Long Beach and May 27-28 at Trancas in Malibu. Molina said the shows will include a mix of songs from the Crazy Horse albums, new material written by the band, and selections from the Neil Young & Crazy Horse catalogue.

As for courting a record deal, Talbot said, “We haven’t even thought about it yet. We’ve got a whole bunch of new material and we’re going to feel it out. As soon as we play them (live), we’ll think about the recording end of it.”

After years of depending on Neil Young to call, Crazy Horse’s core members say, the goal now is to create a public demand that will keep the band busy with its own music.

Molina said: “I’d like to get to the point where Neil calls one day and we can say, ‘Maybe in a month.’ ”