Why Neil Young Will Never Give Up on the Road
This week Neil Young did two amazing club shows at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, with his new band the Chrome Hearts. He began both nights with “I’m the Ocean,” one of his fiercest songs, from the 1995 Pearl Jam collaboration Mirror Ball. “People my age, they don’t do the things I do” — that was a great line when he was on the edge of turning 50, but it’s a whole other experience hearing him snarl it now at 78. On Monday night he sang that verse twice, then ripped the wires out of his malfunctioning teleprompter with his bare hands, threw it to the side of the stage, without pausing the music. His rage just faded into the electric turbulence of the guitars.
At 78, Neil Young is at home on the road, and he’s not alone. You think about The Last Waltz — it’s that time of year — a Seventies movie full of grizzled rock & roll veterans trying to quit the highway before it kills them. But there’s Neil, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, still out there, none of them rolling out their greatest hits or doing it the easy way. Hell, even Joni Mitchell started playing live again after her near-fatal aneurysm. It feels like these veterans are caught up in these long stories they started telling decades ago and they can’t let go of them. So they hit the road, because that’s where the stories are.
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This week, he hit the road again, after his triumphant spring tour with Crazy Horse got canceled when someone in the band got sick. The shows were massively powerful — a self-consciously ritualistic return to the road, after an unexpected detour and an affirmation of how bizarrely vital he remains. He revisited songs from all over his history — including “Journey Through the Past” itself, on piano.
Both nights, one of the highlights was “Big Time,” a deep cut he’s never played without the Horse. It’s from Broken Arrow, a mostly forgotten album he banged out in 1996, full of songs about mourning his friends, after his longtime producer David Briggs died. As guitarist Poncho Sampedro once said, “We were playing David on his way.” As with Tonight’s the Night or Rust Never Sleeps, Young made timeless music out of grief, with his trustiest mates. But he played it both nights as a raggedly elegiac guitar jam. “I’m still living’ in the dream we had,” he sang. “For me it’s not over.”
He plays monstrous guitar in “Big Time” — his fingers and wrists haven’t lost anything, and they can tell any story he wants them to tell. It’s poignant to hear him bust out that song now, after trying this tour with his old friends in Crazy Horse. They couldn’t finish up because of age and health, but he moves on and takes the song forward, with them in it. The shows were full of moments like that.
If Young had his druthers, he would have spent this week with the Horse, playing Louisville’s Bourbon and Beyond festival, then heading west for the Hollywood Bowl and Eddie Vedder’s Ohana Festival. The Chrome Hearts — same initials — came together out of desperate need, so Young could play Farm Aid and next week’s Painted Turtle Camp/Bridge School benefit next week on October 5, with John Mayer and Young’s old Buffalo Springfield foil Stephen Stills.
The Chrome Hearts just debuted at Farm Aid last weekend, with guitarist Micah Nelson, who’s been a fan since seeing Neil play his dad’s Fourth of July picnic. (His dad’s name is “Willie.”) These impromptu Capitol Theatre gigs might have been a test to try out the new band, but if there were any doubts they were gone by the second song on Monday night. He posted a photo on Neil Young Archives saying, “A New Era Begins.”
His Crazy Horse shows this spring were a triumphant blowout, with drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot; the three have been playing together since the 1969 feedback-orgy classic Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Since Talbot and Molina are 80, Young was one of the youngest guys in his band. Micah Nelson fit right in at 34, born a few months before Ragged Glory, several dozen Neil Young comebacks ago. “It’s like if you had asked me at 15, ‘What band in your wildest vision would you love to play with and be in?,’” he told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene this spring. “It would probably have been Crazy Horse. It’s just very, very surreal to end up here.”
The Horse were in top form all spring, doing the gloriously incompetent bronto-thud nobody’s ever figured out how to replicate. At their Forest Hills shows in New York, the spirit was festive — with a minute left before the curfew, they slopped out a 60-second reprise of “Roll Another Number.” When the power went dead during “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” the Horse didn’t lose a step—they just kept playing until the electricity kicked back in, which is basically what the song’s about. But sadly, this Horse only made it halfway through the tour. When the band got sick in June, the tour got canceled, with a summer and fall’s worth of gigs left to play.
The Capitol shows went heavy on electric twin-guitar scorchers like “Powderfinger” and “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” with country-style harmony reveries like “Comes a Time” and “Harvest Moon.” Monday night had a freewheeling 13-minute “Down by the River” jam. On Tuesday, he played the 1977 tune “Hey Babe” for the first time ever. Young kept roaring away on Old Black, his 1953 Les Paul. On Tuesday night’s “Big Time,” he walked over to turn up his amp mid-solo, as the band exchanged mischievous did-you-see-that glances. One of the roadies came out to bang away on the piano, the notes more felt than heard, part of the noise.
A highlight both nights was “One of These Days,” where he remembers old friends, lovers, and bandmates, admitting, “I’ve let some good things go.” He did the call-and-response at the end, chanting “It won’t be long” with the band. (It’s a sly echo of a moment from deep in his personal history, when he sang the Beatles’ “It Won’t Be Long” the first time he got up the nerve to perform in the school cafeteria.)
He played all these great songs from Harvest Moon, but it’s weird to realize now that Harvest Moon was in the FIRST half of his career. In the Nineties, he seemed like the wisest and craggiest of rock sages when he made Ragged Glory and Harvest Moon — no rock star his age had been so relevant or influential, with Nirvana and Pearl Jam flying the flannel. Yet he was just in his mid-40s. His reviews were already kicking around the term “grizzled veteran” for Rust Never Sleeps, the ultimate doing-it-forever album, just a dozen years into his recording career at the then-shocking age of 33. But he had barely begun to grizzle.
Nelson learned the late Ben Keith’s pedal-steel guitar parts from Tonight’s the Night last year, playing them on his Telecaster, so he can echo Keith without trying to copy him. The band has Promise of the Real’s rhythm section, bassist Corey McCormick and drummer Anthony LoGerfo. They’ve all spent years playing Young with Promise of the Real (along with Micah’s brother Lukas), backing him up on the albums The Monsanto Years and The Visitor. Six years ago, right around this same time in late September, they played two gigs at the Capitol, as Neil kept surprising them with songs they’d never played before. After a beautifully ramshackle “Speakin’ Out,” Micah cracked, “Not bad for the first time.”
On organ it’s Spooner Oldham, an old-school Memphis legend who played on soul classics by Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin, along with many Young projects. (Friday night Oldham went into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame; Neil was on hand to induct him, talking about hearing Spooner on Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.”) The setlist included additional unplayed songs the musicians had on deck for these shows, including deep cuts like “Song X,” “Prime of Life,” “The Old Country Waltz,” and “Long May You Run.”
“There’s just something so primal and primitive about Neil, especially when he is with Crazy Horse,” Nelson told Andy Greene when he joined the band. “I saw them at Golden Gate Park at the Outside Lands Festival in 2012, it was a full circle moment and just sort of a slap in the face. It reminded me what I felt like I’d gotten too far from.” I saw that night too — Neil telling the crowd “time for some meditation” before dropping the 20-minute feedback lament “Walk Like a Giant.” Crazy Horse always represented Young at his most freewheeling and chaotic. We don’t know if they’ll play together again, but he’s determined to keep that spirit going.
Until this week, he’d never played any of the Broken Arrow songs without Crazy Horse. That always seemed like a mourning album, as in “Slip Away” (“when the music started, she just slipped away”) and “Scattered (Let’s Think About Livin’).” “Scattered” was a highlight of his spring shows, the song he dedicated to Briggs — he even disarmingly slipped his friend’s name (“Daaave”) into the verses. It’s a lot for Young to carry all that history around with him, but that’s always been his way, even in his sugar-mountain youth.
As Young sang “Hey Babe” this week for the first time ever, it was impossible to miss the resonance of the hook: “I know that all things pass, let’s try to make this last.” (As Young scholar Andy Greene points out, that leaves “Will to Love” as the only song from his Seventies studio albums that he’s never played live.) The flip side of that is in “Ambulance Blues”: it’s easy to get buried in the past when you try to make a good thing last. But that’s the story Neil Young has kept telling onstage his whole career.
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