Burlington (VT) Free Press
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/
December 3, 2008
MONTREAL -- Neil Young is ferocious.
It's no surprise to anyone who's seen him in concert that, while mild-mannered if a tad eccentric as a personality, the rock legend is musically fierce on stage. My wife and I, however, had never seen him in concert, even though we go to a ton of shows and he's been on our must-see list for eons. That finally changed Monday night when, as a belated birthday present, I took my wife to hear his show at the Bell Centre in Montreal.
That's what struck me from the moment he started, how ferocious he is. This was electric Neil, not the acoustic Neil from the sedate Jonathan Demme film "Heart of Gold" a couple of years ago.
When he plays, with his body swaying and writhing violently, it looks like his electric guitar is trying to escape from the otherworldly sounds this possessed man and his trusty tremolo bar are working so hard to extract from it. It's man vs. machine, and in this case, man always wins.
Hearing the slicing guitar chords of "Hey Hey, My My" in person for the first time after hearing the recorded versions again and again over the past 30 years felt like having some legendary yet strangely distant land all of a sudden in your lap. Imagine Halley's Comet crashing through your roof into your living room, famously familiar and white-hot.
The raucous songs dominated the night. Young and his veteran (non-Crazy Horse) band practically shot sparks into the nearly capacity arena crowd on "Cinnamon Girl," "Powderfinger" and even the slow-burner "Cortez the Killer." He closed his two-hour pre-encore set with "Rockin' in the Free World" -- which in classic serious-artist Neil Young fashion is a rock 'n' roll anthem carrying the heavy burden of stark reality -- that sent thousands of fists flying into the air in exultation.
On his quieter songs--"Heart of Gold," "Unknown Legend," "The Needle and the Damage Done" and even the newer, slightly less-effective "Sea Change" -- Young proved that he's still sensitive and emotionally pitch-perfect. You could certainly argue that as a technically unskilled singer he hasn't had far to fall in the past 40 years, but it's also hard to argue that he's lost any of that gut-wrenching vocal quality, and he certainly hasn't lost any intensity.
The sweetest moment came when he sang "Happy Birthday" to his backup singer, band mate and wife, Pegi. That was sweet not just for them but for me and my wife, celebrating her birthday almost two months late with one of the most amazing arena shows I've ever seen by one of my wife's favorite performers.
His only encore song was a flammable cover of The Beatles' "A Day In the Life." At the end, where The Beatles' version ends with that never-ending note, Young ripped the strings from his guitar and headed off, leaving his instrument musically battered and bleeding on stage.
He proved once more that when it comes to Neil Young and the guitar, man always wins. Always.
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenb@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
Neil Young going strong
Bernard Perusse, The Gazette,
http://www.financialpost.com/
Published: Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Apollo Hammersmith, London, England, 3/14/08
Photo by Chris a.k.a Crris b
Talk about peaking early – and sustaining.
Neil Young, only two songs into his two-hour-plus set at the Bell Centre last night, roared out a blistering version of "Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black)" and reminded a fully-packed house that it's better to burn out than to fade away. Everyone sang along, as if the sentiment were self-evident, but the joke is that Young has lived to eat those words --- much as Pete Townshend has had to shrug off "Hope I die before I get old."
Young did not burn out. He is, at 63, fading away. But there's no sadness in that, let alone defeat. In fact, great beauty lies in his refusal to fade away gracefully. That meant everything last night, when Young's emphatic yes to rock n' roll at its most primal seemed a yes to life itself. By the time he throttled his guitar in a spectacular "Rockin' in the Free World" and pulled out every string on his instrument at the end of his (literally) show-stopping cover of the Beatles' "A Day In the Life", the line between entertaining and inspiring had been crossed long ago.
The stage had been set and the bar raised by the two opening acts. Los Angeles rockers Everest, hand-picked by Young for this tour, played a 35-minute set showing them to be one of the year's promising acts, while Wilco --- headliners in their own right --- followed up with 50 minutes of brilliantly-executed fan favourites (the astounding madness of the triple-guitar attack on "Handshake Drugs" must still be ringing in many ears).
As the lights went down for the last time at 9:20, peals of feedback --- is there anyone in rock n' roll who loves it more than Young? --- announced the opening chords of "Love and Only Love". All it took was a trademark choppy opening guitar solo from Young and drummer Chad Cromwell dumbing it all down with a Crazy Horse backbeat, and the rules of the game were instantly changed. It was Neil's world.
In his first Montreal appearance in 12 years, Young placed the emphasis on his uncompromising rockers, like the ever-vital "Powderfinger", the garage-band classic "Cinammon Girl" (still the greatest one-note solo of all time) and the crowd-pleasing jams in "Cowgirl in the Sand", all of which had bassist Rick Rosas working furiously. But fans of Young's mellower, acoustic-based material were also given a treat in a show that deftly combined the sweet and the salty. About an hour into the concert, Young's acoustic guitar came out for the Don Gibson evergreen "Oh, Lonesome Me", which he first covered in 1970. An unplugged segment ensued, featuring guaranteed singalongs like "Heart of Gold" and "Old Man". Longtime Young accompanist Ben Keith on pedal steel guitar, multi-instrumentalist Anthony Crawford and Young's wife, Pegi, on vocals and piano, shone during this thoughtfully-paced sequence.
As the electric axes were retrieved and the amplifiers turned back up, the meaning of the show became clearer. It wasn't really about musicianship: Young has a distinctive vocabulary on his instrument, but he's no guitar virtuoso. Nor was it about presentation, although the guy painting canvases on stage was a nice touch. A clue came with the title of one of three excellent new songs in the set list, the mid-tempo rocker "Just Singing a Song (Won't Change the World)".
It's a provocative song title for rock n' roll evangelists, but we know Young's right. His greatest gift lies in making us hope that he's wrong.
SET LIST:
1. Love and Only Love
2. Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black)
3. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
4. Powderfinger
5. Spirit Road
6. Cortez the Killer
7. Cinammon Girl
8. Oh, Lonesome Me
9. Mother Earth
10. The Needle and the Damage Done
11. Unknown Legend (includes Happy Birthday, sung to Pegi Young, instigated by Neil)
12. Heart of Gold
13. Old Man
14. Get Back to the Country
15. Just Singing a Song (Won't Change the World)
16. Sea Change
17. When Worlds Collide
18. Cowgirl in the Sand
19. Rockin' in the Free World
Encore:
20: A Day in the Life
bperusse@thegazette.canwest.com
Neil Young still rockin' his world
Bernard Perusse, Canwest News Service
http://www.canada.com/
Published: Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Being a fan is generally a straightforward thing: You connect with an artist, you buy his or her albums, you go to the shows.That's pretty much it.
Being a Neil Young fan is a more complicated proposition. The singer-songwriter has slipped in and out of so many personas and musical styles that his followers have perpetually been denied easy identification with a particular image or sound.
In the end, it often comes down to embracing the concept of Neil.
But even the concept of Neil is a slippery thing. It definitely has something to do with not selling out: Young has steadfastly refused to allow his music to be used for commercial purposes. He also lives on a ranch and has built himself a hybrid electric car, so there's something about loving the Earth in there, too.
Simple humanity certainly plays a role. Young's sons, Ben and Zeke, born of different mothers, both have cerebral palsy. Ben is quadriplegic. Apart from their well-documented devotion to the boys, Young and wife Pegi stage annual concerts to raise funds for the Bridge School, which assists children with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs.
A heartwarming scene of Young jamming with Iraq war veteran Josh Hisle in the documentary CSNY / Deja Vu also speaks eloquently of his genuine compassion.
Mostly, though, the concept of Neil has to do with the perception that he just doesn't care what people think: fans, journalists and record company execs have always had to learn to march to Young's drummer.
Even Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Young's Crazy Horse bandmates, pretty much wait for his call.
In its more extreme manifestations, the singer's take-it-or-leave-it individualism has sometimes seemed like a giant raspberry blown at his audience.
Who can forget the robot sounds of Trans in 1982 or the 1991 release of Arc -- 35 minutes of feedback and guitar noise -- as a companion to the live collection Weld? How about the nine-minute-plus "T-Bone" (entire lyrics: "Got mashed potatoes / Ain't got no T-Bone.") in 1981?
"I like it if people enjoy what I'm doing, but if they don't, I also like it," Young once told radio interviewer Mary Turner.
"I sometimes really like aggravating people with what I do. I think it's good for them." He said that in 1979, the year he released Rust Never Sleeps.
With that album, the Woodstock hippie with the fringed buckskin jacket became one of the only 1960s icons to embrace -- and be spared -- by punk's slash-and-burn agenda.
"Underground music before it becomes established -- I like that music, because the people making it are alive," Young said of the punk years in a 1987 interview, cited in Jimmy McDonough's compelling biography, Shakey. "I'm known around the world, so how can I be an underground type of person? I'm not -- I've outgrown that. But my heart is in the underground."
So how did Young deal with his new punk cred in the '80s? By apparently sabotaging it and releasing albums so experimental and uneven that his own label, Geffen Records, actually sued him for not sounding like himself. "Not commercial" and "musically uncharacteristic of Young's previous recordings" were the terms used.
But there's not a Young fan alive who didn't laugh at that one. Young told biographer McDonough that label president David Geffen "was gonna shock me back to reality. He was hurt because it was his record company and he thought I was gonna be a big star and I just wasn't into it. I was more into bein' me, doin what I do," he said.
Geffen should also have known that Young had a history of causing record company executives to tear their hair out. Young had previously followed up his post-Woodstock singer-songwriter smash Harvest (1972) and its No. 1 hit, "Heart of Gold," with Time Fades Away (1973), On the Beach (1974) and Tonight's the Night (1975) -- a trio of albums so dark and uncommercial that they became known as the "Ditch trilogy".
The name came from a famous Young quotation that defined his approach as well as anything he's ever said: "'Heart of Gold" put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch," he wrote in the liner notes of the Decade anthology in 1977. "A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there."
The ditch, it seems, has been a good place for Young. Its unique perspective allowed him to reinvent himself yet again in the 1990s by working with Pearl Jam and becoming revered as the godfather of grunge. Once again, though, a series of substandard releases from that era -- Mirror Ball (1995), Broken Arrow (1996) and the particularly dismal Are You Passionate? (2002) -- made one wonder whether the goodwill from a fan base spanning generations could hold out forever.
Young allayed the fears of many with the comfy-old-shoe songs of Prairie Wind (2005) and the rough-and-ready Bush-bashing rockers of Living with War (2006).
And 40 years after the release of his first solo album, some still don't want to hear anything but plaid-shirt Neil with an acoustic guitar, while others are never happy unless he's thrashing it out with longtime supporting band and eardrum-splitting soulmates Crazy Horse.
On his current tour, more people than usual could end up satisfied. The set lists that have been published online so far show a thoughtful blend of material throughout Young's career.
"I haven't done a tour like this in 15 years," Young recently told Rolling Stone. "With this band, there's no limit to what kind of music I can make. My other bands were always one thing or another. This band can handle anything."
But no set, however varied, will give you a handle on the enigmatic performer. Ask McDonough.
After investing eight years of work in Shakey, only to have Young withdraw his approval at the end and try to stop the book from being published, the author sued. The parties settled out of the court and the book did come out -- with an epilogue that just has to resonate with lifelong believers in the concept of Neil.
"The layers of (Young) were like the layers of an onion -- just when you thought you'd gotten to the bottom of it all, there was another. And another," McDonough wrote.
"Young has invaded every pore of my being, he was in my bloodstream," he wrote. "Somehow he'd made me question everything, just as his music had. He'd given me the adventure of a lifetime."
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