Rocker Young working with Wichita mechanic on electric car

By ROY WENZL
The Wichita Eagle

This story would sound nuts except that it's happening, in real time, in a Wichita car mechanic's garage last week and for the foreseeable future.

Neil Young -- the rock legend who tried to change the world with songs, who helped create '60s culture, who wrote an anti-war anthem in 1970 that galvanized opposition to the Vietnam war -- came to Wichita this past week, took a test drive, nearly crashed his car and worked two days like a mad scientist with a mechanic who he says will create the world's first affordable mass-produced electric battery automobile.

Thus changing the world. Rearranging it, even.

"Johnathan and this car are going to make history," said the Young quarter of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

"We're going to change the world, we're going to create a car that will allow us to stop giving our wealth to other countries for petroleum.

"And we're going to do it right here in Wichita, a great place that I now love, where people know how to make things, and make things happen."

Not about the music

The Wichita mechanic who will do this, Young says, is his new partner, Johnathan Goodwin, 37, born in St. Louis just months after the Woodstock music festival where Young played but refused to be filmed.

Goodwin started mechanical work at age 6 when he took a lawn mower apart and spent glorious months trying to put it back together. Until a few months ago, he had no idea who Young is. He has never listened to any Young songs, even after Young's people handed him the entire stack a few days ago.

"I figure I can hear it all from the mouth of the man himself when we get the car running and drive the country," Goodwin said. "We'll have to do something during all those miles."

They'll drive to Washington, D.C., to show the capital how two car lovers can change the world.

Goodwin still has only a vague notion of who Crosby, Stills and Nash are, even though rock chroniclers at their height said they were the "American Beatles."

"Funny thing," Goodwin said about that, with a puzzled grin. "When Neil introduced me to them at a party in Malibu last week, they knew all about me. They said what I'm doing with Neil sounds pretty cool."

Goodwin, Young and his employees have become friends, partners -- and guys goofing with tools.

There is little singing in the car shop, Goodwin said, "although one day, Neil opened up two cell phones and held them out and sang and showed us how the feedback thing can make your voice sound louder."

On Thursday, at the Goodwin-Young team's car shop at Chautauqua and Douglas, Young sat on a stool, tapping song titles into an e-mail message on his laptop. He looked over to see Goodwin's skinny, blue-jeaned backside sticking out the driver's-side door of Young's converted electric 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible. Young nodded toward Goodwin's butt.

"This is how we'll think of Johnathan now," Young said. "We'll put that view of him on his own album cover."

Minutes later, when Goodwin's wife and son headed out, the boy called from across the garage.

"Bye, Neil!"

Young hopped off his stool.

"Come here!" he said.

The boy, Brennan, 6, ran to the "rock legend," as Young sarcastically calls himself. Young knelt and hugged him.

A hefty rock bio

He's a stern-looking man with thinning and receding graying hair and bushy eyebrows. He dislikes media attention. "I'll talk to you for a couple minutes, but if you film me, I won't talk. I won't be on YouTube," he said the other day.

He warmed up quickly after that, cracking self-deprecating jokes and speaking with feeling about Wichita, "a great place, a lot of good people."

Young's bio is thick with accomplishment, conflict and good deeds. He is 62, edgy, tough, a survivor of childhood polio, survivor of drugs, the '60s and the brutish business of rock 'n' roll.

With Stephen Stills, he founded Buffalo Springfield, a seminal band in the mid-60s. He wrote solo hits. He fought with Stills over control of that band, and fought him again in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, which played in concert for the first time before 400,000 at the 1969 Woodstock music festival. He refused to be filmed, and a filmmaker named Larry Johnson warily kept his distance.

Young wrote songs with quirky, country-flavored chords, and lyrics as stinging and articulate as any by Bob Dylan.

In 1970, shortly after National Guardsmen opened fire on war-protesting students at Ohio's Kent State University, killing four, Young met in California with shocked friends, including Crosby, who showed up carrying the Time magazine cover showing a girl screaming over the body of student Jeffrey Miller.

Young and Crosby were furious. They wanted to say something on a national stage. Crosby watched Young pick up a guitar and walk into the sunshine, toward redwoods nearby. An hour later, when he walked back to the house, Young already had the jangling chords and bitter lyrics that would become "Ohio," the soundtrack of huge protests that followed the shooting. The band released the song two weeks after Kent State:

Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'

We're finally on our own

This summer I hear the drummin'

Four dead in O-hi-o.

Gotta get down to it

Soldiers are cutting us down

Shoulda been done long ago.

What if you knew her

And found her dead on the ground

How can you run when you know?

In the years that followed, Young broke up with Crosby, Stills and Nash, carried on a solo career, reunited with and then separated from the band, and pioneered music that would inspire grunge rock. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Paul McCartney, it was Young who gave the induction speech.

He did good deeds. With Willie Nelson and John Cougar Mellencamp, he founded Farm Aid to help farmers who had lost land and livelihoods.

He made money from his songs, but "I never got good at being a businessman," he said in the garage. "I hired smart people, surrounded myself with them."

Going green

In this decade, as the U.S. went to war and as scientists warned about global warming, he turned green.

He loves cars, "big roomy, American cars." He has collected classics all his adult life.

"But I decided that it was stupid to own cars that just sit around and then pollute when I drive them."

Eight months ago, he decided to convert his beige 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible to something eco-friendly.

At first, all he wanted was a biodiesel conversion.

Young searched the Internet, looking for some "out-of-the-way revolutionary who did not have anything to do with corporations and pre-conceived notions."

He found interviews and an MTV show, "Pimp My Ride," that featured a skinny, articulate Wichita mechanic: Goodwin, who has a national reputation for re-engineering the power units of big cars to get more horsepower for less fuel. Goodwin was working on a Hummer for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Young called Goodwin.

Then Young looked up Wichita on a map, and gathered his film crew, which included Johnson, the Woodstock filmmaker, now his friend. They convoyed with his Lincoln eastward, across deserts, over the Continental Divide, staying at Motel 6s and Holiday Inns. On the way, as they filmed a planned movie about the car, Johnson shot the gas-guzzling Lincoln's tailpipe blowing exhaust every time Young turned the key. They filled the tank 18 times. Nine miles to the gallon.

On the road, Young was deep in thought.

When he reached Wichita, he asked Goodwin, "Can you do something more than just make it biodiesel?"

"Sure," Goodwin said. "We can do anything you want."

Could they make an electric car, practical, mass produced, right here in Wichita? Ending our addiction to oil, ending wars over oil, ending some behaviors that melt polar ice caps?

Yeah, Goodwin said. They could do that.

They argued for control immediately, the way Young used to argue with Crosby, Stills and Nash. They argued over who got to drive the Lincoln into the garage. "I won that one," Young said.

But then, listening to Goodwin, captivated by his brains, Young decided he wanted to do something big.

"I believe in the American dream," said the Canadian rocker. "With all this talk about gas, people are saying we should go to small cars, but I love big American cars with power. So does everybody else. Why give up on that?"

"I asked Johnathan that first day if we could take a huge American car like this, 2 ½ tons, 19 ½ feet long, and make it so you could drive it without ever refueling. Something practical. Something that would change the world."

"And Johnathan said 'Yeah.' "

"And that's what we're going to do."

A few glitches

The car works.

There are bugs.

Goodwin and Young took a test drive Wednesday on a loop of about 12 miles, from Douglas and Chautauqua out to North Webb.

"She was awesome," Young said of the battery-operated car. "Her acceleration was incredible, she moved with hardly a sound; it was so quiet we could hear the wind through the tags of other cars."

But because there is no gas pedal, Goodwin had to drive with his left hand, with no power steering, while twisting half around and turning an acceleration knob in the back seat with his right hand.

"And we just about crashed it," Goodwin said.

At K-96 and Webb, as they approached the entrance ramp, Goodwin turned the knob the wrong way, and the car leaped toward the back end of another car. In a micro-second, Young, from the passenger seat, stomped the brake, averting disaster.

"Still needs a little work," Goodwin said.

He began explaining the technology. He said the car will regenerate energy as it runs. He used technical terms that went over everyone's head but his. Young grinned.

"Just say that it's just a big hair dryer that you don't have to plug in," he said. "If I had more hair, I'd be blowing it on me right now."

Putting up $120,000

Goodwin said what he and the others are creating is nothing new.

"The technology to make a practical and affordable electric car has been around for a long time," he said. "There are all sorts of ways of doing it and all sorts of ways to work out how to make it work on a national scale. But what Neil has done is provide the backing to do it -- he's put up about $120,000 so far to change his car -- and he's provided a focus. Neil has been incredible, interested and helpful, and if I asked him tomorrow to let me make the car fly and put a flux capacitor in, he'd just shrug and say 'Sure, let's do it.' "

Young nodded.

"He's the brains," he said, nodding at Goodwin. "I'm just the cattle prod."

He walked to his car, put a hand on her hood.

"You know, I thought long ago you could change the world by writing songs.

"But you can't change the world by writing songs.

"Oh, you can inspire a few people, get some of them to change their thinking about something. But you can't change the world by writing songs.

"But we could change it with this car."