Real Young & Lazy Horse is the rock and roll book club that will blow out your eardrums

The phrase “Neil Young cover band” doesn’t bring to mind the most awe-inspiring idea of a night out. At best it evokes a kind of professional cosplay situation going through the motions of “Rockin’ In The Free World” with metronomic devotion, at worst a group of suburban dads struggling to jam through “Down By The River.”

So I hesitate to call Real Young & Lazy Horse a cover or even tribute band. The city’s premier Neil Young acolytes are more like expert interpreters of Canada’s finest musical export, which is maybe more fitting for the quartet whose members describe it as more of a book club or a D&D game than a band.

“It's fun to have an outlet,” Billy Talbot, a.k.a the bassist of Neil Young’s legendary support crew Crazy Horse, told me before a sold out Union Pool show on Sunday. “Ralph [Molina] calls it a book club, and that's one of the truest things, that’s what it feels like.”

Okay so fine, I wasn’t standing in a storage alley in the back of Union Pool talking with the “real” Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina. But such is the commitment to the bit by the four friends who make up the band; Adam Reich (Neil Young), Davey Jones (“Poncho” Sampedro), Jeremy Aqualino (Billy) and Yoni David (Ralph), that they refer to each other as Neil, Poncho, Billy and Ralph.

This commitment extends to the way the foursome play, with no Real Young and Lazy Horse show I’ve ever experienced clocking in at something less than at least three-and-a-half hours, and the sets going well past the classics like “Ohio” and “Rust Never Sleeps” to include things like “After The Garden” and “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze.” Driven by a genuine love of the artist, the quartet says they’ve learned 100 Neil Young songs over the years, and that their shows are more or less hanging out in front of an audience.

“When we practice, or ‘rehearse’ or whatever we just do it exactly like that,” Reich told The Groove. “We just go, we start, we don't stop for a few hours. We just play a billion songs. And then when we're out of gas, it's like, all right. It’s just an extension of our hang.”

With that in mind, unlike a tribute band, you don’t know what you’re getting from the Horse when you see them. Instead, in a situation more akin to seeing a band doing their own stuff, every show is new. Each time you catch “Tonight’s The Night” it comes with a different number of repetitions of its eerie chorus; you don’t know how long the apocalyptic breakdowns of “Revolution Blues” will go before you reach the vision of “10 million dune buggies comin’ down the mountains.” You’re going to learn songs you never even knew, which is how, after seeing the band do “Opera Star” enough times I wound up buying the critically-derided but awesomely punk album Re-Ac-Tor the moment I came across it at a record store. 

There’s undeniable skill and energy behind the band, but there’s also an endearing, ramshackle nature to the entire enterprise, which is fitting since Reich, Jones, Aqualino and David became friends hanging out and playing music in bands that came up in the dearly departed Brooklyn DIY venue Shea Stadium, which closed in 2017. The first Real Young performance was actually a Shea Stadium holiday party with a handful of songs thrown together, Jones told me.

“We got together to make it happen and it ended up being a huge hit, everybody went crazy for it. And then we said, guess we'll do it again next year. And then we didn't do it, for like, four years,” he said.

The appearance and disappearance fits the Real Young vibe. At the moment, the band is doing a kind of residency at Union Pool, having played in January, February and March so far this year (catch them again on April 5, the ticket link is not up yet). But for years before this, Real Young and Lazy Horse was more like a hazy legend or a Rockaway Beach cryptid than a band. Since around 2017, you would hear that they were playing Rippers via word of mouth, and hang out all day hoping to catch them.

As the band tells it, no one planned it that way. It was just where someone found them once.

“We played a backyard show in the Rockaways once at Juan Wauters’ house, and that’s where Rippers was like, you guys should start playing shows here. We didn't really think about it, it wasn't some serious something to do yet, and it's still not serious,” said Neil with a shrug.

It was a smart move by Rippers though, with the band’s grungy punk versions of the classic rock canon fitting in well with Rippers’ combination crowd of beach hipsters and sun-weathered Rockaways lifers. Even playing just once or twice a year at Rippers the band developed a reliable crowd that would come out to see them, sometimes on St. Rippers Day, the unofficial holiday marking the last day Rippers is open for business, sometimes in the middle of the summer, always for a mind-searing amount of hours that the boys insist doesn't take a lot out of them.

"I don't know about stamina, I think that's just how we hang out," Molina said.

"We can just play Neil and turn off our brains and have fun," Aqualino added.

Not living in the Rockaways, one is frequently faced with the choice between seeing how parodically long the band will go on for or trying to catch the shuttle to the A train at a reasonable hour like 11:30 p.m. One of those St. Rippers Day shows went for an astounding five hours. It was possibly the 2019 edition, which our friends chalk up to everyone subconsciously holding on to what now feels like the last summer before the end of the world. And if that five-hour show was a different year, well fuck it, all of this is half-myth by now anyway.

The strange community of it all means you begin to recognize the same people at every show: the guy with no shirt on doing Tai Chi and jumping off the tables, the man who somehow holds a beer in his mouth by the tab while recording the show for the entire time, children who were held by their parents by the front of the stage area growing into little kids wilding out to guitar solos. And some of those same peninsula locals have been devoted enough to make the Sunday night treks to Union Pool this year.

The DIY scene background of the band members doesn’t mean that the appeal of the group is that you’re seeing guys you’ve seen in other local punk bands do Neil Young cosplay. Riding with Real Young and Lazy Horse is watching four friends who embrace the way you can drive completely off the map playing a Neil Young song, whether the recorded version is four minutes long or 14 minutes long, and as they fuck around you see them actually become Neil Young and Crazy Horse impossibly going off on the Rockaway Beach boardwalk or at a tiny venue.

“This isn't really a band,” explains David. “When we get together to play and it's not a show, we're just hanging out. We sit around for a while, we watch baseball, we listen to Neil.”

In the end, the four friends aren’t looking for much out of the band. Well okay, they’re looking for one thing. 

“The main goal would probably be to have Neil come to a show and do a song or two with us, and then say, ’That was fun,’ and be out,” Jones said.

“I would nominate us to be the Horse for him,” Reich said.