Neil Young

DavidW · 14 Jul 2006

I found this link on Expecting Rain. Maybe I should also post this upstairs if someone hasn't already. There are already a few Neil Young threads in the Playroom area.

From comicbookbin.com:

http://www.comicbookbin.com/news1160.html

Neil Young Comics
By The Editor
Jul 28, 2007 - 11:44:58 PM
Neil Young’s epic GREENDALE has made headlines as a powerful concept album, a performance piece and a movie. Now Vertigo, the publisher of Sandman, Preacher and Y The Last Man, will publish a graphic novel based on Young’s ambitious concept piece. The project was announced today by Karen Berger, the Senior Vice President and Executive Editor of Vertigo, during the San Diego Comic Convention.

GREENDALE will continue to find new audiences as an original graphic novel, written by Joshua Dysart (SWAMP THING, VIOLENT MESSIAHS) from characters and concepts by Young, and featuring full color artwork by Sean Murphy (OUTER ORBIT, OFF ROAD).

It’s the fall of 2003 and the nation is marching blindly into a war that the rest of the world doesn’t seem to want. The media pipes in stories of global unrest and criminal politics. GREENDALE tells the story of Sun Green, a teenager and burgeoning activist whose life is changed when a mysterious stranger pays a visit to her small town. In a matter of days the only symbols of uncorrupted authority, unconditional love and youthful rebellion are swept clean form the streets, sending the town into a disillusioned spiral and Sun on a surrealist, transformative journey through familial tragedy, failed romance and self-discovery.

Politically and environmentally aware, GREENDALE is a meditation on the magic of activism and the nurturing strength of humanity in all of us.

© Copyright 2002-2007, Coolstreak Cartoons Inc.

Federico · 12 Jul 2006

From the New York Times - Sunday, October 28, 2007

October 28, 2007
Vintage Neil Young, Still Working for the Muse
By JON PARELES
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.

NEIL Young was thrilled about an old car. Over chile verde at a Mexican restaurant near the landmark Fox Theater here, where he was rehearsing for his tour, Mr. Young’s grizzled face lit up as he described his Linc-Volt.

The car is a 1959 Lincoln Continental Mark IV, a 19-foot, two-ton behemoth. It was a commercial flop in the year of the massive tail fin, and in its original configuration the car is an ecological disaster, guzzling gas and leaving giant black exhaust spots on the ground as it starts up. That’s the Linc part. Volt is because Mr. Young is converting the car to battery power, with a biodiesel engine for backup, and he plans to drive it to its birthplace in Detroit to demonstrate the viability of electric cars. He’s making a movie about the trip. The film, “is so different from everything that I’ve ever done,” he said. “It’s totally positive.”

The converted Linc-Volt will still barrel along a highway, but silently. It should get up to 100 miles per gallon of fuel, since it runs most of the time on electricity. “The car is really heavy,” Mr. Young said. “It’s got a lot of inertia. So that gives it more power.”

The Linc-Volt makes an irresistible metaphor for Mr. Young’s career: a memorable profile, the inertia of four decades and the latest new start, an old-fashioned exterior that’s been rejiggered within. His new album, “Chrome Dreams II” (Reprise), takes a slice through Mr. Young’s present and past, time-warping through his career. He is also reconfiguring his past with the small-theater tour that will bring him to the United Palace in New York for six shows, Dec. 12 to 19.

Mr. Young, 61, is no fashion plate. The Fox Theater, which he has often used for rehearsals in recent years, was built in 1929 as a vaudeville house and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. But Mr. Young could almost be mistaken for a stagehand. Over two days of rehearsal he wore T-shirts, jeans and an old sport jacket, as well as a paint-spattered railroad cap that may turn up onstage during the tour. He speaks the way he writes lyrics: in terse, unadorned cadences full of plain one-syllable words. As far as career goes, he says, “I work for the Muse.”

He operates by whim and intuition, veering every which way: from the homegrown rock opera “Greendale” in 2003, which was staged as Mr. Young’s most elaborate arena production; to the pensive, made-in-Nashville “Prairie Wind” (and a Jonathan Demme film of it, called “Neil Young: Heart of Gold”) in 2005; to the quickly recorded protest-song broadside “Living With War” in 2006. When making albums, “it’s not like you have a real idea what’s going on,” he said. “You just start, and sometimes it happens easier than other times.” For the new album, “the songs came pretty fast, and they weren’t there in the first place, and they were there when I was done.”

But Mr. Young has also regularly combed through his archives. Lately — after years of nearly releasing old recordings, only to decide that they needed to be remastered once more for newer, higher-fidelity technology — he has put out albums of galvanizing live shows from 1970 and 1971. He plans to release a 1976 concert from the Fox Theater in Atlanta, where, for some reason, he imagined himself talking to the ghost of Judy Garland.

“Chrome Dreams II” also glances back to the 1970s. It is named after “Chrome Dreams,” a 1977 album Mr. Young never released. That album, widely bootlegged, would have introduced some of his best songs, among them “Like a Hurricane,” “Too Far Gone” and “Powderfinger.” The cover had been designed, and the album had been mastered, but it never appeared.

Why not? “Sometimes there isn’t a good reason,” he said. “It just passed me by. I did it, I got to a certain place, and then something would happen and distract me, and I would get into something else and forget what I was doing before. That’s happened a lot.”

The anchor of “Chrome Dreams II” is “Ordinary People,” an 18-minute song he recorded in 1988. Those people include drug dealers, factory workers, boxers, gun runners, vigilantes and models. “The people were real to me,” he said. “They’re all in there. I don’t know where they came from. I can’t make them go away. I didn’t invite them.”

Mr. Young recorded “Ordinary People” with his R&B-flavored Bluenotes band, in one take. “There is no Take 2,” he said. He considered the song too hefty to include on an album until now. (Ever the contrarian, Mr. Young is also releasing the full 18-minute song as a single. On vinyl.) Yet the main giveaway of the song’s age is a lyric mentioning Lee Iacocca, the Chrysler executive. “Ordinary People” sits easily alongside the rest of “Chrome Dreams II”; it uses three of the album’s core musicians and the same engineer in the same truck. When Mr. Young finds collaborators, he keeps them on call.

The band on the album, which is also his touring band, brings together musicians he has worked with in separate projects. Ralph Molina, from Crazy Horse, is on drums. Ben Keith, who has been in Mr. Young’s country-flavored bands since “Harvest,” is on guitar and pedal steel guitar. And Rick Rosas, who has backed Mr. Young in projects from the Bluenotes to “Living With War,” is on bass. Mr. Young’s wife, Pegi, is the opening act; she and her keyboardist, Anthony Crawford, sometimes join Mr. Young’s band during the set.

“Chrome Dreams II” is a miscellany, as “Chrome Dreams” was. It has distorted-guitar Crazy Horse-style stompers like the 14-minute “No Hidden Path”; it has wistful country-folk songs like “Beautiful Bluebird” (an old song finally getting a studio recording) and “Ever After”; it even has a 1950s-tinged ballad, “Shining Light.”

Many of the album’s songs revolve around a “spiritual quest,” Mr. Young said. “There’s a lot of thinking going on in the record, pondering and kind of searching for the experience that enlightens you in some way.” In “Ever After” he sings, with characteristic simplicity, “The world is full of questions/Some are answered, some are not/The only faith you’re keepin’/Is the faith that you still got.”

The album ends with “The Way,” a waltz featuring a children’s choir. “So many lost highways that used to lead home/But now they seem used up and gone,” he sings by himself; then the children promise, “We know the way.” He said that he told them: “You have to pretend that you’re singing to your parents and you know how to have world peace. They don’t. You have to tell them while they’re sleeping, so they know when they wake up, but you can’t tell them too loud or they’ll wake up.”

For Mr. Young, faith doesn’t involve organized religion. It’s about walking among the trees on his Northern California ranch, “trying to figure things out,” he said. “How did I get to where I am? I mean, what happened? Where’s the guy who wrote the other songs? Where’s the guy who wrote a lot of the early songs? There are some songs I can’t even sing. I don’t even know who wrote them. But I know I did. When I listen to myself, I go, ’O.K., but I can’t do that now.’“

On tour Mr. Young will be playing a solo set followed by a set with the band. “I want every song to be coming from me, not coming from who I was or who I’m trying to be or who people think I am or who they want me to be,” he said. “All those things are out. It’s just got to be: ‘Is this going to flow like water through me? Can I swim in this sound?’”

The solo set is something like the solo tour he did in 1992 for “Harvest Moon.” He brought back that tour’s lighting designers and has his old Univox electric organ, with angel wings, that can be lowered to the stage from overhead. The set lists are built from “Chrome Dreams II,” a few of Mr. Young’s best-known songs and many rarities. Among them are “Bad Fog of Loneliness,” a song cut from “Harvest,” and a mid-1970s song, “No One Seems to Know,” that says “time is better spent searching than in finding.”

“Some of them went right under the radar,” he said. “Some of them never came out. I’ll be doing a lot of songs that are only on collectors’ albums that are not my albums, that are bootlegs.” He continued, “It’s like if you were in a gallery and all the paintings were upside down or piled in a corner, and the ones that you knew, that you’d seen in the magazines, were all really. ...” He paused. “I want to know what’s in the corner. Put them on the wall for a while.”

For a man whose hair usually looks windblown and whose shirt is perpetually untucked, Mr. Young is surprisingly persnickety. He chose every theater on this tour. “I want to control the environment,” he said. “They have to be auditoriums. The audio part is very important. I prefer that they be old. I prefer that they be in cities. I prefer that the outside elements are totally blocked out. There’s no sunshine coming in through a window; I don’t want any of that. I don’t want to have anything to do with the real world while you’re in there. It’s not where we’re going.”

He had further stipulations. The stage lighting will be incandescent — no arc lights or halogens — and not automated or computerized. A spotlight will be operated by hand; changing the color of a light will involve replacing a gel. The equipment is vintage, like Mr. Young’s guitars — he has one he calls Hank, which once belonged to Hank Williams — or it has been made in the same way for decades.

Under the Art Deco Revival ceiling of the Fox, under those incandescent lights, the band sounded vintage. Mr. Young was still auditioning songs for the tour. There were keepers like “Cortez the Killer” and “The Loner”; there were possibilities like “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.” After a run-through of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” Mr. Young decided it had no life left. “Something else in that neighborhood would be good,” he said.

Through the years Mr. Young’s music has usually sounded rough-hewn, but it has never been haphazard. Backstage Mr. Molina — the drummer in Crazy Horse since 1969 — said that he still gets nervous every time he plays, trying to live up to Mr. Young’s standards. The band socked out the new “Spirit Road,” a chunky two-chord rocker, and it had the old Crazy Horse thrust: the slow, steady trudge of someone walking directly into a perpetual high wind. From the seats it sounded good.

When it was over, Mr. Young looked disgusted. “We’re going to do this again,” he said. “We’re going to fix this now.” He demanded better backup vocals, a different monitor mix, more attentiveness from the whole band and crew. And on the next run-through the song was twice as strong. “We’ll get it,” Mr. Young said. But he still didn’t look satisfied.

72stones · **Joined:** 12 Jul 2006 **Posts:** 2109

Federico,
Thanks a ton for posting this. The news on the '76 show was very interesting.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

Wow, I love his music, but he is SO weird!

This is the man who championed Ronald Reagan, & then was anti-Bush senior........

Pip · **Joined:** 16 Aug 2004 **Posts:** 2921

Young appreciated Reagan's small government rhetoric, especially in light of his small community organizing around The Bridge project. He seemed genuinely surprised that Reagan's budgets soared larger than any previous administration.

Linda · **Posted:** Thu Dec 13, 2007 9:46 pm

Neil Young pays tribute to Reverend Ike in New York

http://www.nme.com/news/neil-young/33177

Linda · **Posted:** Tue Mar 04, 2008 1:50 pm

http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/index.php?blog=12&p=640

Neil Young - Edinburgh Playhouse, March 3 2008

2008-03-04 11:29:09
John Mulvey

To paraphrase Dolly Parton, it must take a lot of care to look as chaotic as this. I’m referring not to Neil Young himself, not exactly, but to the astonishingly cluttered stage around him, dressed to look like – well, backstage, really, behind the scenes at some lost old-time opry.

There are klieg lights and spots strewn around, cables and stands everywhere, a huge, antique wind-machine with wooden blades, variously battered musical instruments apparently abandoned at random, and a single, ominous, baffling red house telephone of roughly 1974 vintage. Everything looking worn and used and tested and true, and in no need of replacement. Oh, and, obviously, there is a man standing way at the back, turned away from the audience, silently painting amid a stack of large canvas backdrops.

It’s a stage-set, of course, and the first clue that, whatever he’s engaged upon amid the red-velvet splendour of Edinburgh’s venerable Playhouse theatre for his first UK gig in five years, Young, who makes his bizarre entrance trying to hide behind the painter as he carries a large canvas bearing a single “N” to an easel at the front of the stage, sees it as a performance in every sense of the word. The drama’s precise meaning will remain unclear to all but him, but it’s as compellingly weird, as hauntingly beautiful, as stormy and electrifying as anything he’s ever done.

Even by his own considerable standards, Young, wearing the kind of loose, off-white suit a US Defence Secretary might favour for a field visit to Iraq, appears to be in a strange mood. The audience bays but he ignores them, utters not a word. Sometimes, when the shouting gets too loud, he throws his arms over his face, warding it off in a manner that suggests Marcel Marceau being spooked by a horse; at one point, he actually falls cowering to his knees.

He sits alone inside a circle of acoustic guitars – seven of them, plus a banjo – absently, fondly, touching one and then the other, as though waiting for them to tell him which one wants to go first. He dips his harmonica in a china teacup of water like a man dunking biscuits in a rest home. He looks shambling, distracted; and then he starts to play, and his focus and intensity sucks the breath from you.

The facts are that we get a solo acoustic set followed by an electric set, and anyone who has glanced at setlists from earlier in this tour will know that he has been throwing in songs from some of the most obscure corners of his catalogue. Knowing that in advance, though, does nothing to dilute the impact when, after a gorgeously warm “From Hank to Hendrix,” Young begins “Ambulance Blues.”

The abandoned closer to 1974’s desolate "On The Beach" is song he has barely, if ever, played live before this tour, but one that certain fans have tattooed on their minds. All the same, tonight, as he hunches over the ever-dying thing, it feels almost as though he is creating it on the spot, sucking each stray chorus out of the air, forever fading away, forever coming back in with one more last thought.

He follows it with three more songs you thought you would never hear him play: the unreleased “Sad Movies,” then, shambling to one of the pianos, a truly astonishing “A Man Needs A Maid” (substituting the recorded version’s orchestral fills with chilling, Dr Phibes-meets-"Trans" blasts on an aged electric keyboard), and “Try,” another unreleased song from the legendary aborted "Homegrown" album. Lurching from these into some of his most iconic “Neil Young” songs – “Harvest”, “After The Gold Rush”, “Don't Let It Bring You Down”, “Heart Of Gold” – the impression is of an iPod on shuffle, and on fire.

That frayed falsetto sounds as strong, as pure, as distressed as it ever has; close your eyes, you could be listening to an Archive recording from three, four decades ago. Listening, watching, I’m struck by a thought: will Bob Dylan ever take the chance to go so naked before an audience again?

Between songs, he keeps up his silent, shambling routine, wandering the stage like a man who doesn’t know where he is or why, sometimes standing and staring vacantly off at what the painter is painting, still working away at the rear of the stage. At one point, Young stands and holds his hands up to one of the little purple standing spotlights, warming them on the light – at first I think it’s a comment on the bitingly cold night leaking into the theatre from outside. An hour later, I’m not so sure.

We’re coming toward the end of a colossal electric set. Backed by veteran associates Ralph Molina, Rick Rosas and Ben Keith, Young, changed into a paint-splattered black suit, has been wailing and whaling away at the guitar he calls Old Black as if he might never get the chance to play her again. Dropping the stumbling gait he affected for the acoustic half, he’s leaning, grooving, stepping ass-shaking and almost pogoing as he tears out damn-near definitive workings of mangled warhorses including “Down By the River”, “Hey Hey, My My” and a towering “Powderfinger.”

He’s climaxing, though, with a voyage through one of his newest songs, “Hidden Path.” Largely written off as a meandering lowpoint on the "Chrome Dreams II" album, the song is transformed into a long, classic, violent stone jam to stand alongside any of the above. 15 burning minutes in, it’s seemingly endless, and you don’t want it to end. And, at its most intense, as he pulls at the howling riff, Young wanders to a massive klieg light that drenches the theatre in a blinding golden glow and stares into it, bathes in it, as though trying to climb inside the light. Thinking back to this little pantomime with the smaller light, I wonder, is there a connection here? What is he trying to say?

Who could ever say? Rummaging through the backstage of his mind, Neil Young, at 62, is, quite thrillingly, as vitally unknowable, as far out there and as far inside himself as he ever has been. I doubt even God knows what he has in mind for his six-night stand in London.

DAMIEN LOVE

ACOUSTIC SET

From Hank To Hendrix
Ambulance Blues
Sad Movies
A Man Needs a Maid
Try
Harvest
After the Gold Rush
Mellow My Mind
Love Art Blues
Don't Let it Bring You Down
Heart Of Gold
Old Man

ELECTRIC SET

Mr. Soul
Dirty Old Man
Spirit Road
Down By the River
Hey Hey, My My
Too Far Gone
Oh, Lonesome Me
The Believer
Powderfinger
No Hidden Path
Fuckin' Up
Cinnamon Girl

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

Jeez, he looks old.

Renny · 26 Jun 2006

Geff R. wrote:

Jeez, he looks old.

because he is old.

as are many of our rock and roll icons, which is why what they do today makes them even more amazing.

renny

p.s. and don't forget how their lifestyles were back in the day, making what they do now even more amazing.

Holt! · **Joined:** 02 Jan 2007 **Posts:** 9051

Renny wrote:

Geff R. wrote:

Jeez, he looks old.

because he is old.

as are many of our rock and roll icons, which is why what they do today makes them even more amazing.

renny

p.s. and don't forget how their lifestyles were back in the day! which makes it even more amazing.

IAWTP

Linda · **Posted:** Fri Mar 07, 2008 11:35 am

http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/index.php?blog=6&p=643

Neil Young live in London

2008-03-06 10:42:13
John Mulvey

So, the start of Neil Young’s six-night stand in London, and a lot of the schtick will be familiar to anyone who’s read Damien’s review of the Edinburgh show. Neil bumbles around the stage in what we might optimistically call a Proustian reverie, warms his hands on a stage light, plays “Ambulance Blues” and stops time dead in its tracks.

I’m sure plenty of us know he’s been playing “Ambulance Blues” on this bunch of dates, but still, the shock of actually hearing the song live, the way it keeps unravelling, at once elegant and wracked, the way Young lets notes hang in the air, never rushes the next line, is extraordinary. I was playing “On The Beach” this morning at breakfast, and it struck me how much the song suits his older voice; the curious sweetness of its tone, that affecting mix of experience and, perhaps, increased uncertainty which he brings to the song now.

This is my first time seeing Neil Young play under a roof, my previous four or five epiphanies involving giant fields, giant solos and, usually, Crazy Horse. Consequently, it’s also the first time I’ve seen one of his conceptual performance art pieces, which the first acoustic half seems to be. Two mild criticisms: Neil’s dumbshow is endearing, but pure ham; and the paintings which are ferried about the stage by the artists aren’t terribly good.

We can live with this, I think, when the songs have such deathless potency. The clutter of stage gear, the junk accumulated from a lifetime of performance, seems connected with the "Archives" project; maybe when we see the CD-ROM, DVD or whatever format it eventually materialises as, some of this ephemera will be reflected on the disc. The choice of songs also emphasise that sense of arcana, nostalgia, especially “From Hank To Hendrix”, “Old Man” and “Journey Through The Past”, and the unreleased “Sad Movies” and “No One Seems To Know” (according to the internet – and who am I to argue – Young once described this as the sequel to “A Man Needs A Maid”, which is how it’s delivered tonight).

I don’t agree with Damien that this presents Neil as naked, as such: the theatrical elements mean that it’s best to treat all this as a conceptual piece about memory, and reconciling yourself with your own prehistory, rather than an unmediated rooting about in a great man’s psyche. But still, it makes for a remarkable spectacle, especially on that terrific version of “A Man Needs A Maid”, as he flits between surprisingly florid piano and a truly spectral synth line.

There’s a bit more chat, too, much of it expressing a sort of rueful bewilderment at the crowd’s behaviour. Young tells a story about his granny playing piano in Flin Flon, Manitoba, mention of which gets a cheer. “Oh, a lot of folks in from Flin Flon tonight,” he deadpans. Then, a rambling tale about getting busted at the Isle Of Wight festival touches in passing on Joni Mitchell. Much clapping. “That’s cheap,” he observes drolly, “I can get a round of applause just by mentioning people.”

The electric set is pretty similar to Edinburgh, too, and the moment when Young faces down the giant light and solos into it, rapturously, during the gargantuan “No Hidden Path” remains a highlight. A couple of caveats here: why does he have to keep playing “The Believer”, a real weak link on “Chrome Dreams II” (bad enough to have been on “Are You Passionate”, almost); and there are times when I miss the full Crazy Horse experience.

Certainly, Ben Keith and Rick Rosas play beautifully: there’s a great section of “Down By The River” (magnificent, even though they briefly lose their way somewhere in the middle of it) when Young and Keith shut down the effects and bounce clean, cleaving solos off each other. But generally, Keith and Rosas are discreet figures just beyond Young’s hyperactive maelstrom, and I find myself missing those protean huddles which he goes into with Billy Talbot and Poncho Sampredo.

Really, though, picking holes in a gig as great as this seems utterly churlish, when I could be writing about the seething, heavy version of “Mr Soul”, or the gorgeous “Oh, Lonesome Me”, with Keith and Anthony Crawford complementing each other beautifully on piano and organ. Then, finally, there are the encores: “Cinnamon Girl” first, massively expanded by the sort of molten feedback coda that filled “Arc Weld”. A weird painting of a winking dove, with a kind of Hitler fringe, descends from the rafters in the middle of this, and turns out to be concealing another organ. After some confusion as to whether they’re going to keep playing, Keith takes to the organ for a relatively abbreviated, nonetheless ecstatic version of “Like A Hurricane”.

Nothing here suggests to me this is in any way a valedictory tour, an emotional victory lap that some critics are painting it as. Rather, it just seems like Young is drawing new energy from his past, finding new ways to present this most exceptional and volatile of songbooks.

By the end, he looked like he wanted to play all night. Tonight, maybe he will: Allan will be reporting back tomorrow.

ACOUSTIC SET

From Hank To Hendrix
Ambulance Blues
Sad Movies
A Man Needs A Maid
No One Seems To Know
Harvest
Journey Through The Past
Mellow My Mind
Love Art Blues
Don't Let It Bring You Down
Cowgirl In The Sand
Old Man

ELECTRIC SET

Mr. Soul
Dirty Old Man
Spirit Road
Down By The River
Hey Hey, My My
Too Far Gone
Oh, Lonesome Me
The Believer
Powderfinger
No Hidden Path

Cinnamon Girl
Like A Hurricane

Linda · **Posted:** Fri Mar 07, 2008 2:26 pm

http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/index.php?blog=5&p=646

Neil Young live in London, second night

2008-03-07 14:35:47
Allan Jones

Neil Young
Hammersmith Apollo
Thursday, March 6 2008

The last time I saw Neil Young at the Apollo was in 2003, when he was touring to promote his ecological country rock opera, Greendale, still unreleased at the time, which meant no one had heard any of the songs. The unfamiliarity of what he then played provoked among the audience a certain restlessness that quickly gave way to collective dismay when it dawned on them that he wasn’t going to play merely a selection of songs from the record, but the album in what turned out to be its indigestible entirety.

It conspicuously wasn’t what people had come to hear - not that this would have worried Neil too much. He’s always done things his own way, which is one of the reasons we continue to love him, his unpredictability and sheer wilfulness matched only, really, by Dylan, and something when all is said, and also done, to be congratulated.

It was hard not to feel sympathy, though, for some of the people there that night – he was, after all, only playing London on that visit, and many of them had come from hither and yon in the hope, no doubt, of seeing Neil play the stuff for which they liked him most, few of them warming to the often interminable descriptions of the songs that seemed increasingly to take up most of the show, the songs themselves often arriving as not especially distinguished after-thoughts to his windy monologues.

The two couples, for instance, in the row in front of me have come down from Liverpool, somebody’s birthday involved, money spent on train fares and a couple of hotel rooms, Neil’s concert the highlight of their trip, an evening of familiar favourites what they are expecting. They sit, therefore, in baffled disappointment as one after another the songs from Greendale are played, no sign of “After The Goldrush”, “Heart Of Gold”, “Like a Hurricane” or “Powderfinger”. They leave before the end, thus missing what in truth is a rather desultory short second set of crowd-pleasing classics.

Earlier, I’d been talking to the guy sitting next to me, who’d travelled down to London on a clapped out motorbike from far off Lanarkshire, a journey that with several breakdowns had taken him a ghastly 14 hours. He was exhausted, but excited at seeing Neil for the first time live after years of being a fan. Three or four numbers into the performance of Greendale, however, he’s asleep. I have to step over him on my own eventual way out, imagining him later, waking with the cleaners sweeping up around him, Neil long gone, as well as everyone else.

Five years on, and Neil is again at Hammersmith, and the place is crackling with lively anticipation, something so electric in the air it’s like those moments of meteorological turmoil that preface stormy weather, lightning on the horizon, the wind beginning to whip and buck, cloudbanks rising, a low distant rumble of thunder.
No one, you’d be right in thinking, is going to sleep through what follows.

The stage – as already vividly described by Damien Love in his uncut.co.uk review of the current tour’s opening night in Edinburgh – is an apparently chaotic assemblage, like something from a pop art installation by George Segal, or somebody like him, that could be the basement where Neil keeps the accumulated junk of his many years, through which he seems when he first appears to be looking for something, a key, perhaps, to the past, which turns out to be the songs that he is soon playing.

And so Neil, in a baggy white suit, which apart from the paint smears could be the one he wore on the sleeve of On The Beach, spends a little time wandering around the stage, touching things in a distracted reverie, as if he’s just walked into a room from his past that he has not in living memory visited, affecting now surprise at what’s here, what memories these things around him hold.

It’s not quite as hammy as I was expecting from John’s review yesterday, but not nearly as effective as the act I remember him putting on for the similarly acoustic opening half of his 1975 shows here with Crazy Horse, when for about 45 minutes he played more convincingly the part of a spectacularly spaced out hippie troubadour, swigging tequila, wholly stoned and apparently convinced for the moment that he was in Germany. Tonight, in his suit, his hair already a-fly, he’s like some absent-minded professor in a laboratory of his own design. He reminds me oddly of eccentric TV astronomer Patrick Moore, a model of unkempt bemusement.

And then the first gorgeous chords of “From Hank To Hendrix” introduce a mesmerising hour of music that mixes the familiar (“Harvest”, “After the Goldrush”, “Heart of Gold”, “Old Man”) and the truly arcane (“Kansas”, “Try”) and a couple of songs you thought you’d never hear him play – including, of course, “Ambulance Blues”, hitherto hardly-ever to my knowledge played live, but a staple of this tour, and a jaw-dropping version of “Out On The Weekend”. There’s also the by-now famously startling new take on “A Man Needs A Maid” and a robust “Old King”, written in affectionate memory of a dog he had, played on banjo.

This is all great, of course, but without meaning to moan or wanting to sound like one of those people who spend all night at shows like this shouting out requests for their favourite songs in strangely strangulated voices, I would maybe have liked a few more songs that matched the intense gravity of “Ambulance Blues” and would have given a lot if he’d thrown in, say, a version of “Last Trip To Tulsa”, “Thresher”, “Marlon Brando, Pocahontas And Me” or “Comin’ Apart At Every Nail”.

Anyway, after “Old Man”, there’s a short break and then Neil reappears dressed now in an even baggier black suit, paint-smeared in a manner that makes it look like he’s wearing a 21st century Nudie suit decorated by Jackson Pollock. Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina, ultra-cool bassist Rick Rosas and Ben Keith are with him now, and they rock the house with a two-fisted opening onslaught of “The Loner” and “Dirty Old Man”, the noise they are making akin to the slow roar of an avalanche, an irresistible density of mass, matter and mayhem.

“Spirit Road” follows, gloriously, and there’s a long, suitably malarial “Down By the River”, Young’s guitar feverish, followed by a rampant “Hey Hey, My My”, with a ferocious coda. And then there’s another huge surprise with the inclusion – again for the first time, I think, on this tour – of the great “Roll Another Number For The Road”, from Tonight’s The Night.

“Oh, Lonesome Me” is as utterly marvellous as previous reviews have claimed, with wonderful support from Keith and Anthony Crawford on piano and organ. John’s least favourite moment - “The Believer” – follows. It seems even slighter in the context of tonight than it does on Chrome Dreams II, but effectively sets up a fantastically imposing “Powerdfinger”, which has the weight of legend behind it.

And then there’s a show-stopping, simply colossal “No Hidden Path”, nigh on 20 minutes of it, Neil’s solos sounding like ruptures in the earth’s crust, fissures appearing everywhere, tectonic plates shifting and crashing beneath him. The stage now and the people on it are drenched in a burning golden light, that mixed with the red back-spots bathes the band in the burnished glow of an atomic sunrise or a nuclear sunset, I’m not sure which. As the song reaches towards an awesome climax, Neil stands facing the massive klieg light to the left of the stage, soloing into it, head thrown back, then lowered into it, as if he may at any moment be consumed by it, beamed up, the next stop presumably being the Phoenix Asteroid.

I have a feeling of being witness to some sun-cult ritual, a worship of light as the source of eternal renewal. It’s a spooky fucking couple of minutes, this bit of the show, and I am at a loss to even begin to explain how he wrings from his guitar the sound he makes in the song’s final, dying moments, which provokes much awestruck head shaking and how-the-fuck-does-he-do-that looks at anyone who catches my eye.

Great as it is, tonight’s sole encore, an initially smouldering then rowdily exclamatory “Fuckin’ Up”, seems at best noisily irrelevant, nothing he could, I think, do now that can successfully top the gargantuan wonder of “No Hidden Path” and the places it has taken him and us.

If anyone’s got any spare tickets for any of the other four nights Neil is playing, you can lay them off here. This was just incredible.

Let me know what you thought if you were at last night's show.

ACOUSTIC SET
From Hank To Hendrix
Ambulance Blues
Kansas
A Man Needs A Maid
Try
Harvest
After the Goldrush
Old King
Love Art Blues
Heart Of Gold
Out On The Weekend
Old Man

ELECTRIC SET
The Loner
Dirty Old Man
Spirit Road
Down By The River
Hey Hey, My My
Roll Another Number
Oh, Lonesome Me
The Believer
Powderfinger
No Hidden Path

Fuckin' Up

NoPhoneNoPoolNoPets · 17 Jul 2007

Dang, these fantastic reviews really make me wish I were there to witness this. Let's hope that some of these performances were filmed for a possible DVD release!

72stones · **Joined:** 12 Jul 2006 **Posts:** 2109

I'd like to see something from these shows come out as well. Linda, those reports you're posting are really fun to read.

Linda · **Posted:** Wed Mar 12, 2008 6:50 pm

http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/index.php?blog=12&p=653

Neil Young - Manchester Apollo, March 11 2008

2008-03-12 09:39:59
John Mulvey

I have to admit to a certain amount of anxiety tonight. It’s not just the weather, which is, of course, rotten, the wind howling like it’s fit to tear chunks from rooftops from miles around.

Nor is it the small matter of my beloved Liverpool’s tricky Champions League fixture at Inter Milan, made all the more potentially hazardous by Rafa’s selection of Martin Skrtel at centre-back. The last time I saw him, he was hopelessly fluffing his way through an FA Cup tie against Havant & Waterlooville, playing for all the world like someone who’d popped into Anfield to deliver half-time oranges, only to be mistaken for a ‘real’ footballer, handed a shirt and told “Here, put this on and get out there”.

Perhaps it’s more to do with the fact that, last time Neil Young played the Apollo here, it was 2003’s Greendale tour. Allan has already filled you in on the brain-sapping details of punters being forced to endure an entire album of utterly forgettable songs in grim procession, in the vain hope he might play something good later. So I’ll leave it there. But these things live in the memory.

So far, reports of these latest shows have been excellent, seeming to indicate a Neil Young revitalised, refocused and eager to rock out with abandon. As it turns out, I don’t have much to grumble about after all, omens or not. He saunters on for the acoustic set first, baggy-suited and surrounded by a phalanx of guitars. Someone has hoisted up a huge ‘N’ stage left, just in case we’re not sure. Bathed in a curious kind of fireside glow, he settles into “From Hank To Hendrix”, before the captivating “Ambulance Blues”.

As you probably know by now, it’s become the surprise staple of this tour, and it really is wonderful. A great, urgent, labyrinthine thing, it feels like Young is crawling somewhere within it, unsure of where he’s going to take it at any given moment. In an odd way too, it seems to set a certain mood for this acoustic half. He hardly utters a word to the crowd, seems a little tetchy.

He plays “Sad Movies”, another rarity finally dusted down for this tour, then stands up and does that slow bumbling about that I’ve been reading about, like an ageing college lecturer who’s forgotten where his glasses are. Mild performance art maybe, but it does all seem pretty unnecessary and painfully self-conscious. “A Man Needs A Maid”, at piano and synth, is just beautiful, little shivers of notes shooting into the air. Then comes tonight’s first surprise: “Stringman”, originally written in 1976, but unreleased until Unplugged in the early ‘90s. A lovely, almost meditative rendition at piano, it’s followed by “Try”, a sunny piano rag from the "Homegrown" sessions that’s also been stretching its limbs on these dates.

In between “Harvest” and “Love In Mind”, Neil dispenses with a stray heckler, but it’s all starting to feel a little grumpy. Digging out the banjo, he ignores the calls for “Old King” and almost attacks “Mellow In Mind”, plucking hard at the strings, suddenly animated, keening for the high notes. It’s a sinewy, unexpectedly powerful version that gives you a jolt. The timeworn classics are brought out to finish, with “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” getting the biggest roar of the night so far.

Interval over (during which time I’ve squeezed past a bunch of people from Emmerdale, spotted the bald dome of TV chef Simon Rimmer and overheard Mani talking to someone about working with Bjorn from Peter, Bjorn & John) and it’s a wholly different Neil. With Rick Rosas on bass, Ben Keith on rhythm guitar and Ralph Molina on drums, he tears into “Mr Soul” like it’s an itch he’s been desperate to address all evening.

Springing up and down, bouncing from foot to foot, screwing his face up into the mic, he’s now clearly having fun. Silhouetted against the glaring crimson lights of the now-familiar “junk-shop-memory” stage set, “Dirty Old Man” looks, and sounds, brilliantly hellish, full of the impish glee of old men who know they should really be doing something more sedentary on a weekday night.

Much has been made of “No Hidden Path” this tour, and rightly so. It’s an immense, spectacular thing. But for pure rock’n’roll dementia, head-buckling riffs and roaring solos, “Spirit Road” is its equal tonight. Huddling up to Keith and Rosas, riding the exchange like a tempestuous bull, Young is cutting loose. “Down By The River” is colossal too, Young turning his back, hunkering down and rocking so wildly you fear he’s going to topple into Molina’s lap. It’s a huge ball of knotted noise. At one point during a similarly frenzied “Hey Hey My My”, it sounds like it could easily smash the place to pieces.

Brief respite arrives with Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me”, prefaced with Young’s introduction: “When I was 20, I wrote another melody for this. It wasn’t a good idea, I should have left it alone.” Needless to say, the song, with Keith on organ, Anthony Crawford at the piano and Young wheezing into harmonica, sounds just gorgeous. Then comes “Winterlong”, first aired on 1977 retrospective "Decade", and dedicated to his late friend Danny Whitten.

It stands alone in this electric set as a rolling, graceful country song, albeit with a kick. “Powderfinger” is extraordinary too. After “No Hidden Path” and much audience wailing, the band return for “Roll Another Number”, which, after all that, sounds like a gentle rubdown.

Is this Young, on the other side of 60, giving us all his last hurrah? Reminding us, on the back of "Living With War" and "Chrome Dreams II", that "Are You Passionate?" and "Greendale" didn’t signal the beginning of a long slow fade into mediocrity? Or is Neil just doing what the hell Neil wants and having fun in the process? My guess is the latter. Oh, and by the way, Skrtel did alright tonight. We won 1-0.

ROB HUGHES

ACOUSTIC SET

From Hank To Hendrix
Ambulance Blues
Sad Movies
A Man Needs A Maid
Stringman
Try
Harvest
Love In Mind
Mellow My Mind
Love Art Blues
Don’t Let It Bring You Down
Helpless
The Needle And The Damage Done
Heart Of Gold

ELECTRIC SET

Mr Soul
Dirty Old Man
Spirit Road
Down By The River
Hey Hey, My My
Too Far Gone
Oh, Lonesome Me
Winterlong
Powderfinger
No Hidden Path

Roll Another Number (For The Road)

ROB HUGHES

Smiff · 10 Aug 2006

Because of this thread, I googled "Ambulance Blues," which I had never heard. I ended up buying On The Beach, which is a fantastic album! I can't believe I've never heard this record before. Now, of course, I need more NY (I have Decade, Fillmore, Massey Hall, and Living With War). I know I do this too much, but for you NY experts, what else should I buy? Is there anything else in the On The Beach category?

Thanks.

Jimbo · 19 Jul 2006

You have to buy Rust Never Sleeps. :ohyes:

NoURider · **Joined:** 21 Jul 2006 **Posts:** 3308

Live Rust
Freedom
Ragged Glory
Weld
After The Gold Rush
Zuma
Tonight's The Night
Harvest Moon
Year of The Horse
....
it goes on and on...easier to ask what not to buy...

Smiff · 10 Aug 2006

Thanks guys. Guess it's time to break out the old credit card.

Renny · 26 Jun 2006

Smiff wrote:

Because of this thread, I googled "Ambulance Blues," which I had never heard. I ended up buying On The Beach, which is a fantastic album! I can't believe I've never heard this record before. Now, of course, I need more NY (I have Decade, Fillmore, Massey Hall, and Living With War). I know I do this too much, but for you NY experts, what else should I buy? Is there anything else in the On The Beach category?

Thanks.

get the first four: S/T, everybody knows this is nowhere, after the goldrush, and harvest.you can thank me later

renny

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

To answer your specific question, probably the most similar NY cd to On The Beach would be American Stars & Bars.

My essential N.Y. solo list (in no particular order):
Decade
Live At Massey Hall
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
After The Goldrush
Harvest
Live Rust

just below essential:
Greendale
Rust Never Sleeps
Time Fades Away
Freedom
Tonight's The Night

GoogaMooga · 02 Aug 2006

Rust Never Sleeps

Neil Young

Who is WANline