Why Neil Young will never give up traveling

This week Neil Young and his new band, the Chrome Hearts, performed two fantastic club shows at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. He started both nights with “I’m the Ocean,” one of his wildest songs from his 1995 collaboration with Pearl Jam Mirror ball. “People my age, they don’t do the things I do” – that was a great line when he was about to turn 50, but it’s a completely different experience to hear him growl now, at 78 . On Monday night, he sang this verse twice, then ripped the wires out of his broken teleprompter with his bare hands and threw it to the side of the stage without stopping the music. His anger was simply lost in the electric turbulence of the guitars.

At 78, Neil Young is home and not alone. You think about it The last waltz – it’s that time of year – a ’70s movie full of grizzled rock ‘n’ roll veterans trying to get off the highway before she dies. But there’s still Neil, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan out there, and none of them are putting out their biggest hits or doing it the easy way. Hell, even Joni Mitchell has started playing live again after her near-fatal aneurysm. It feels like these veterans are trapped in these long stories they started telling decades ago and they can’t let them go. So they set off, because that’s where the stories are.

This week he hit the road again after his triumphant spring tour with Crazy Horse was canceled because someone in the band fell ill. The shows were hugely powerful – a confident, ritualistic return to the road after an unexpected detour and an affirmation of how bizarrely vital he still is. He revisited songs from his entire history – including “Journey Through the Past” himself on the piano.

One of the highlights of both nights was “Big Time,” a deep cut that he has never played without the horse. It’s from Broken arrowa largely forgotten album he released in 1996, full of songs about mourning his friends after his longtime producer David Briggs died. As guitarist Poncho Sampedro once said: “We played David on his way.” As in Tonight is the night or rust Never sleepsYoung made timeless music out of grief with his most trusted friends. But he played it both nights as a sloppy, elegiac guitar jam. “I’m still living in the dream we had,” he sang. “It’s not over for me yet.”

Editor’s Tips

In “Big Time” he plays a monstrous guitar – his fingers and wrists have no place and they can tell any story he wants to tell. It’s poignant to hear him release this song now after trying out this tour with his old friends from Crazy Horse. They couldn’t finish due to age and health, but he goes on and takes the song forward with them. The shows were full of moments like that.

If Young had his Druthers, he would have spent that week with the Horse, playing the Bourbon and Beyond Festival in Louisville and then heading west to 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 the Painted Turtle Camp/Bridge School fundraiser next week on Oct. 5, with John Mayer and Young’s old Buffalo Springfield fan Stephen Stills.

The Chrome Hearts debuted at Farm Aid last weekend with guitarist Micah Nelson, who has been a fan since he saw Neil play at his dad’s Fourth of July picnic. (His father’s name is “Willie.”) These impromptu performances at the Capitol Theater may have been a test to try out the new band, but if there were any doubts, they were gone by the second song Monday night. He posted a photo in the Neil Young Archives with the caption, “A new era begins.”

His Crazy Horse shows this spring were a triumphant success, featuring drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot; The three have been playing together since the Feedback Orgy classic from 1969 Everyone knows this is nowhere. Since Talbot and Molina are 80, Young was one of the youngest guys in his band. At 34, Micah Nelson fit in perfectly, having been born a few months earlier Ragged Gloryseveral dozen Neil Young comebacks ago. “It’s like when I was 15 I was asked, ‘What band, in your wildest vision, would you most like to play with and be in?'” he told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene this spring. “It probably would have been Crazy Horse. It’s just very, very surreal to end up here.”

Related

The horse was in top form all spring, doing the deliciously incompetent Bronto stroke that no one has ever been able to replicate. There was a festive mood at their Forest Hills shows in New York – they played a 60-second reprise of “Roll Another Number” a minute before curfew began. When the power went out on “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” the Horse didn’t lose a step – they just kept playing until the power came back on, which is basically what the song is about. But unfortunately this horse only made it halfway through the tour. When the band became ill in June, the tour was canceled and gigs still had to be played in the summer and fall.

The Capitol shows were characterized by electric twin guitar blasts like “Powderfinger” and “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” and country-style harmonious reverie like “Comes a Time” and “Harvest Moon.” On Monday night there was a relaxed 13 minute “Down by the River” jam. On Tuesday, he played the 1977 song “Hey Babe” for the first time ever. Young continued to roar on Old Black, his 1953 Les Paul. On Tuesday night’s “Big Time,” he turned up his amp mid-solo while the Band exchanged mischievous glances. One of the roadies came out to pound on the piano, the notes felt more than heard, part of the noise

A highlight of both nights was “One of These Days,” where he reminisces about old friends, lovers and bandmates and admits, “I let go of some good things.” At the end, he did the call-and-response and chanted “It won’t be long” with the band. (It’s a sly echo of a moment deep in his personal history, when he sang The Beatles’ “It Won’t Be Long” when he first plucked up the courage to perform in the school cafeteria.)

He played all these great songs from Harvest Moonbut it’s strange to realize that now Harvest Moon was in the FIRST half of his career. In the ’90s he seemed to be the wisest and harshest of rock sages when he made something Ragged Glory And Harvest Moon – No rock star of his age had been as relevant or influential, with Nirvana and Pearl Jam as flagships. He was only in his mid-40s. The term “grizzled veteran” was already in circulation in his reviews Rust never sleepsthe ultimate forever album, released just a dozen years into his recording career at the then shocking age of 33. But he had just begun to turn gray.

Nelson learned the late Ben Keith’s pedal steel guitar parts Tonight is the night Last year he played them on his Telecaster so he could imitate Keith without trying to copy him. The band consists of the Promise of the Real rhythm section, bassist Corey McCormick and drummer Anthony LoGerfo. They all spent years playing with Young with Promise of the Real (along with Micah’s brother Lukas) and supporting him on albums The Monsanto years And The visitor. Eight years ago, around the same time in late September, they played two shows at the Capitol, with Neil continually surprising them with songs they’d never played before. After a wonderfully downbeat “Speakin’ Out,” Micah said, “Not bad for the first time.”

On organ it’s Spooner Oldham, an old-school Memphis legend who played soul classics from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin as well as many Young projects. (Friday night, Oldham went to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame; Neil was there to introduce him and talked about hearing Spooner on Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.”) The set list included other unplayed songs, for which the musicians were ready for these shows, including profound pieces such as “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’s in Crazy Horse,” Nelson told Andy Greene when he joined the band. “I saw them at the Outside Lands Festival in Golden Gate Park in 2012, it was a full circle moment and it was just kind of a slap in the face. It reminded me of what I had strayed too far from.” I also saw that night – Neil told 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 revealing and chaotic. We don’t know if they’ll play together again, but he’s determined to keep that spirit going.

On trend

Until this week, he had never played any of it Broken arrow Songs without Crazy Horse. This always seemed like a mournful album, as in “Slip Away” (“When the music started, it 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 included his friend’s name (“Daaave”) in the verses. It’s a lot for Young to carry all that history with him, but that’s always been his way, even in his youth in the Sugar Mountains.

When Young sang “Hey Babe” for the first time this week, the resonance of the hook was unmistakable: “I know all things pass, let’s try to make this permanent.” (As young scholar Andy Greene points out , “Will to Love” remains the only song from his ’70s studio albums that he never played live.) The flip side of that is in “Ambulance Blues”: It’s easy to get caught up in the past when you’re trying to make a good one to make the thing permanent. But that’s the story Neil Young has told time and time again on stage throughout his career.