Neil Young and how
Neil Young is 60, a few months older than George W. Bush, and we can only imagine what the two of them might talk about if they went out to dinner together to celebrate being around for six decades. "You the feller that wrote that Ohier song?" And so forth.
I didn't have the opportunity to see Jonathan Demme's film about Young, "Heart of Gold," on the big screen, and am not certain if it ever played at the Midtown Theater in Harrisburg, where I usually see my movies. But I watched it on DVD on Saturday afternoon and again on Sunday afternoon and plan to buy it for my collection, it's that good. Filmed over two nights in Nashville at the theater that used to host the Grand Ole Opry, it is as good as a concert film gets. The DTS soundtrack is wonderful.
Young is the rare rock musician who continues to turn out great new music as he gets older. Unlike the Beach Boys, who played in Harrisburg on July 4th and can't even come close to reproducing in concert the great studio sound of their early hits, Young is as good as he was in his late 20s. That's when he was in Buffalo Springfield ("I Am a Child"), then Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young ("Ohio"), then a solo artist ("Sugar Mountain," "Heart of Gold," "Like a Hurricane," etc., etc.) He has always taken a schizoid approach to his solo work, sometimes the hard-edged rocker with Crazy Horse, sometimes the plaintive folkie and country guy. His two hearts capture both sides of the mid-to-late 20th century American music scene in one, very creative man. Yes, I know he is Canadian--it comes through in many of his songs. But he recorded them in America and has lived in Marin County, California, for decades.
It is the folk-country persona we see in "Heart of Gold." Recorded over two nights in the same theater in Nashville that originally hosted the Grand Ole Opry, Young sings most of the songs on his "Prairie Wind" album and then finishes off the show with old songs, mainly from his 1972 "Heart of Gold" album and his 1978 "Comes a Time" album. He recorded "Prairie Wind" in a few days of work after he was told he had a brain aneurysm, but before returning to New York for the surgery. The concert was after the surgery, which he came through just fine.
Director Jonathan Demme, who made the "Stop Making Sense" movie about the Talking Heads, knew Young from the song he wrote for Demme's movie "Philadelphia." The camera work and editing and lighting is first-rate, something that can't be taken for granted in indoor concert films. For me, the emotional high point of the concert comes near the end, when nearly everyone in the band picks up a guitar and joins Young in a "wall of guitars" for Ian Tyson's song, "Four Strong Winds." For us aging hippies, it is a magical moment.
You'll have an opportunity to hear Neil Young on tour this summer with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. They'll be at Hershey Statdium on Aug. 25. Catch him while you can. You won't regret it. I imagine George W. Bush has heard a couple of Neil Young's songs on the radio. But I doubt he listened very closely. Not like you.