Neil Young: Brisbane and Sydney March 2013

Thursday, 14 March 2013

For a while, fool that I was (and, arguably, still am) I was thinking two Neil Young and Crazy Horse concerts would be enough.

Predictably, they're not, though any attempt to increase the NY/CH quotient would result in an automatic reduction in the Springsteen allocation over the next week or so. Sure, I could have headed on to Melbourne for another two shows during the week and weaken in my resolve to avoid winery shows on the weekend, but that'd rule out the two Bruce shows in Brisbane. Oh well...

Looking at these matters in the cold hard light of rational reality, you might think two Horse-driven shows are at least one more than necessary, and on a strictly rational application of logic you might have a point.

I landed in Brisbane pretty sure of what I was going to be getting.

Over the years, watching these matters from a distance, there's an invariable wow, he played that! factor on the first show or two of a tour, but after the second, or maybe the third assuming you're looking at something lengthier than a ten-show swing across Australia and New Zealand, things are more or less set in stone and there's not much room for variation.

In other settings, with other musicians, you might find a bit of variation in the set list, but when we're talking Neil and The Horse you might as well forget it. "They all sound the same," some Frenchman in the crowd called out in 1996, producing a Neil riposte suggesting that it's all one song.

Which it is. Neil dons the harmonica brace for Heart of Gold and Twisted Road, and heads over to sit behind the piano (the upright piano, which explains the girl carrying the guitar case) for Singer Without a Song but for the rest of the just under two and a quarter hours it's fairly obvious what you're going to get.

Anyone walking out of one of these shows and lamenting the absence of the hits either failed to notice the & Crazy Horse on the ticket, or hasn't realized the significance of the two words after the ampersand. This is the behaviour Rusties (members of the on-line aggregation of Neil fans a.k.a. The Rust list) and Winterlongers (the Australian subset thereof) characterize as HoGTT territory.

And if you are, in fact, a Heart of Gold Toe Tapper who wants a set list heavy on Harvest, Comes a Time, Harvest Moon and Silver & Gold you either don't shell out the bucks for a Crazy Horse show  or, having realized your mistake, cop it sweet and exercise due diligence next time around, because, somehow, I don't think Neil's going to be changing his modus operandi Horse-wise any time soon.

But if you're there for loud and electric you're almost guaranteed a good time.

That almost comes with a nod in the direction of well, you do realize he'll be playing a selection of his most recent stuff, don't you?

Assuming you've got all those bases covered (loud, electric, will contain recent material so there's not much room for older material) you're almost certainly in for a good time, from the opening chords of Love and Only Love to the last squalls of feedback at the end of My My Hey Hey and on through whatever Neil decides is going to constitute the encore this time around.

Love and Only Love, from where I'm sitting is close to the ideal opener in these circumstances, driven by a solid riff that allows the quartet to stretch a bit and blow whatever cobwebs might be in the vicinity away. That, I think, is an important consideration. Crazy Horse, in all it's ragged garage band glory, doesn't sit in the virtuoso I practice two to three hours every day, man sphere, and they need a chance to loosen up and find the groove. Love and Only Love certainly allows them to do that.

With the preliminaries out of the way, the groove located and the beast warmed up it's sort of into Greatest Hits mode for Powderfinger, which mightn't have been an actual hit, but occupies a significant place in Neil's epic repertoire. A nod to Rust Never Sleeps, and a classic song that's an almost perfectly self-contained saga.

From there Born in Ontario occupies the same sort of role as its cousin brother Homegrown, delivering a chunk of stomp along groove that equates to a bit of light and shade after Powderfinger in the lead up to what you'd have to describe as the first real set piece on the show.

Walk Like a Giant comes across pretty strongly as one of the centre pieces on Psychedelic Pill, but on stage it reveals a sense of rage that doesn't quite come across in the studio version. That's most obvious towards the end when plastic bags and sheets of newspaper start drifting across the stage as Neil and Old Black deliver squalls of sonic assault that equate to the end of the world as we know it.

That's my take on it, anyway. Walk Like a Giant takes the inner rage Neil mentions in Ontario and turns it into an apocalyptic vision that's diametrically opposed to the old T.S. Eliot not with a bang, with a whimper. It seems, as far as Neil is concerned, we're not going quietly into the night....

The environmental apocalypse gets another airing in Hole in the Sky, one of two so far unrecorded numbers in a fairly small setlist, and it may stay unrecorded because it may only exist as a wind down from what went before leading into an acoustic mini set in the middle of proceedings. Lyrically, it's a case of There's a hole in the sky and not much more, but the Horse harmonies help it work in ways a more verbose statement mightn't.

Both nights the appearance of the acoustic guitar and the neck brace produced a fairly hearty roar, suggesting the presence of a healthy contingent of HoGTTs and a strong hint of finally, here's something we know. Predictably, something we know turned out to be Heart of Gold, which might have been something but probably didn’t equate to much if you’re coming out of HoGTT Territory.

From there we got Twisted Road, another one I could have done without but can appreciate the reasons for its existence and inclusion in that particular slot.

And it's obvious there is a certain amount of thought that has gone into the presentation for these shows. Neil obviously wants a piano song in there, otherwise the piano wouldn't be there, and Singer Without a Song is going to be it. Seat him behind the old-fashioned upright on stage right, however, and he's out of sight of a fair section of audience. Billy Talbot's on stage to deliver some harmonies, and Poncho Sampedro has an acoustic guitar around his neck, but there's not much visual interest there. In that setting an attractive girl carrying a guitar case adds something. At least that's the way it looked from where I was sitting.

With the quiet bit out of the way the volume went back up for the second set piece, the quite magnificent Ramada Inn, like Walk Like a Giant one of the centre pieces of Psychedelic Pill, twenty minutes of thunder leavened with the harmonies on the And every morning comes the sun bit. HoGTTs can moan all they like about unfamiliar material and the lack of the likes of Down by the River, Cortez the Killer and Like a Hurricane, and, admittedly it would be nice to hear them, but when Neil can still produce something that's this good I, for one, won't be complaining.

Your mileage may vary on this, but the thirst piece highlight comes in the form of the mildly notorious Fuckin’ Up, which has been a regular part of the setlist since Ragged Glory and has evolved into an interesting piece of staged presentation that really takes off if the right people with the right gestures are in Neil and Poncho's line of sight. There was a fairly substantial Winterlong contingent along the rail, and they were right into goading and gesticulation mode, which made for some interesting visuals on the big screens on either side of the stage.

Not that they were looking at the big picture, of course.

After Sydney I ran a remark about his moment of prominence past the inimitable Stub King and got a Was I? In return, which of course explains why he ended up on the screen in the first place. It's fairly obvious Neil and Poncho are having fun with the current version, and that, I suspect helped shape what followed.

I've heard my share of concert recordings over the years, and most of them have been fairly light on for the on stage repartee, but something has changed over recent years.  Where once you might be lucky to get anything beyond a couple of How ya doin?s, the time machine sequence that leads into Cinnamon Girl is positively verbose, with wry remarks about those in the audience who wouldn't have been there yet as far as Zuma and Tonight's the Night are concerned.

Cinnamon Girl rocked, My My Hey Hey did likewise and you really got a sense of the mount of fun Neil and the Horse are having on stage when it gets to the obligatory encore. Perth had Roll Another Number, Adelaide got Like a Hurricane and I would have been happy to see LaH reprised in Brisbane or Sydney.

Instead, in Brisbane they led off with Opera Star (not played since the European tour in 2001) before heading off to Roll Another Number, while in Sydney two chords were all I needed to recognize Prisoners of Rock & Roll, which segued nicely into Opera Star.

Looking back, you might be inclined to think, despite Hughesy's enthusiasm, that one show is about enough, but with the interval between Sydney and the time this review makes its way onto the blog and into the Reviews section of the website there's one additional factor that suggests it's a case of too much Neil isn't nearly enough.

I refer, of course, to Wednesday's show at The Plenary, with Cortez the Killer, Dangerbird, Barstool Blues and Sedan Delivery turning up in the set list in a show that ran close to three hours.

Neil's inclined to the predictable once things have started moving but that doesn't necessarily mean he's going to stay that way. After two quite stellar shows you might be disappointed to have missed one that sailed right off into the stratosphere, but that's the way things are.

Should Neil be headed back this way with The Horse in tow, Hughesy's going, come hell or high water. Now for a triple serving of Bruce...

Neil Young with Crazy Horse "Psychedelic Pill" (4.5*)

There's a pair of chicken and the egg statements that spring to mind when you're looking at something like the Neil Young with Crazy Horse album they've decided to label Psychedelic Pill.

Which came first?

Did consumers stop listening to albums all the way through in sequence because artists have stopped making grand artistic statements that hang together seamlessly?

Or did artists stop making grand artistic statements that hang together seamlessly because listeners stopped listening to albums all the way through?

Anyone who's read Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace will have no doubt about where Neil stands on the matter. We're supposed to listen all the way through, which is fine up to a point, and that point comes when you decide there are things hereabouts that justify employing the old shuffle button.

Actually, when it comes to recent Neil activities you probably need to link Waging Heavy Peace, Americana and Psychedelic Pill because they're all part of the same process. Different aspects of that process, but they're definitely interlinked. The book, of course, came first, and we've already had a look at Americana here, but now it's time to look at Psychedelic Pill and we need to think about the links a bit.

Looking at Americana, I remarked: Regardless of how prolific you are, sitting down to write a book (Waging Heavy Peace, apparently semi-autobiographical, due out later this year) the effort’s possibly going to steer you away from writing songs and while you’re thinking about the past you’re going to remember things you were doing back when you were starting out in the early sixties.

There's an additional factor revealed in the pages of Waging Heavy Peace which appears to have some bearing on Psychedelic Pill. The book, Americana and the new album are all the work of a clean and sober Young who's eschewed the use of marijuana and alcohol, apparently on medical advice.

You might be inclined to question whether this matters at all, and for most of us it probably doesn't. As far as Neil's concerned it probably doesn't either, but where these things are mentioned in the book he's not sure about song writing without the altered consciousness or chemical enhancement because it's been a while since he's written a song.

So we seem to have a book in the process, and the process had reached a point where he could switch his focus towards different projects, which seems to have been the point where he started thinking in terms of Crazy Horse again. With the Horse back in the stable they need something new to play, and the WHP manuscript has had Neil thinking back to his days on the road across the prairies with his early band (The Squires). You're thinking about that stuff, you need something to work on with the Horse, so you head back to that material. Fine. There's a certain amount of logic there.

With Americana in the can the songs apparently start to flow, and that delivered most of the material here. Given the fact that Neil had a number of matters that were occupying his attention you're hardly going to be surprised to see them turn up again.

We're talking about a man who'll wander away from his tour bus, as described at the beginning of Nick Kent's article Neil Young and the Haphazard Highway, leaving instructions to the driver to pick him up a few miles down the road, visualise something that fits the vibe of the landscape he's walking through and turn it into something anthemic in the genre that has currently caught his attention.


The problem, of course, lies in Neil's tendency to channel whatever vibe he's into, and proceed without the intervention of an editing force. That means if you’re into concise statements you’ll be steering clear of the opening Driftin' Back here.

Actually, if you’re into concise statements you’ll be steering clear of Waging Heavy Peace as well.

Driftin' Back is, to a large extent, symptomatic of the whole of the sprawling double CD statement, and your reaction to the track will probably define your attitude to what follows the twenty-seven and a half minutes. For a start the Hey now now, hey now now chorus makes for a substantial, and quite effective ear-worm.

I’ve been trying to get the thing out of my head for days, but, on the other hand, the grumpy old man trying to find inner tranquility while everything around him needles his consciousness gets your goat after two or three hearings. Having read WHP you know where he stands on his new format for high quality digital music and the rest of his critique of spirituality, MTV, contemporary listening habits, the degradation of sound quality in recorded music (when you hear my song you only get 5 percent, you used to get it all) and the reduction of Picasso’s art to digital wallpaper hardly comes as a surprise.

The band speeds up and slows down, ebbs and flows, locks together and drifts apart as Young scatters verses across the landscape, filling the rest of the terrain with swathes of guitar like you haven’t heard since, well, the previous NY/CH recoding.

There are two takes on Psychedelic Pill, which comes across as daughter of Cinnamon Girl, the first phased to within an inch of its life, and the second, more straightforward reading closes the double album. Apart from the CG Revisited bit, there’s a healthy serve of Dirty Old Man in there as well. Strangely, given the time differential between its 3:28 and 3:13, it doesn’t work nearly as well as the preceding half hour of Drifting Back, though the phasing definitely brings back memories...

But the marathons resume with close to seventeen minutes of roughhewn guitar on Ramada Inn, a clear-eyed and coherent not quite eulogy for a long-term relationship now that the kids have grown up and flown the nest. It’s Greendale-style storytelling, uncharacteristically focussed as Young looks at the sacrifices it takes to keep things afloat, more than a quarter of an hour of shimmering sentiment and melancholy analysis conducted in the temporary shelter of a motel room against an alcoholic background. Gut wrenching, epic, and arguably as good as anything he’s done in forty-plus years.

Born In Ontario closes the first disk with a trip down memory lane, cousin of Homegrown in much the same way that the title track reflects past glories. It’s a paean to his birthplace and his Canadian heritage while acknowledging the good fortune he’s experienced since leaving the prairies behind. It rocks along nicely, offering much needed light and shade after Ramada Inn, and if there’s a track hereabouts that’s suited to high rotation on the radio this, rather than the title track, is it.

Or maybe it’s Twisted Road‘s recount of Young’s early encounters with the music his heroes—Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison and the Grateful Dead—produced in their heyday, with Dylan’s lyrics rollin' off his tongue/Like Hank Williams chewin' bubble gum. Let’s just leave it at lightweight, shall we?

She's Always Dancing repeats Driftin’ Back’s acapella intro > thudding Horse jam treatment and seems to reprise the title track’s pill-popping bopper for around eight and a half minutes of riffing between vocal choruses. Tight harmonies, trademark Neil guitar, it’s pleasant enough, but on an album that includes something like Ramada Inn most other tracks are going to pale by comparison.

Continuing a long held Neil tradition, For The Love Of Man brings out a song that’s been around for years (as in Silver and Gold, Ordinary People and Hitchhiker) and provides a welcome change of pace with a comforting ballad and a lyric that pays tribute to Young’s severely handicapped son Ben.


Which brings us to the album’s other major set piece, the monstrous (and I use the term deliberately) Walk Like A Giant. According to film maker Johnathan Demme the central used to feel like a giant, and now I feel like a leaf floating in the stream image stems from Neil’s 2005 aneurysm, and the rest of the lyrics fit comfortably into that retrospective feel that pervades the rest of the double album, but there’s an interesting contrast between the jaunty whistled hook and Young’s raging reflection on his (sorry, our) generation’s failure to change the world, which was what we thought we were out to do some forty-five years ago.

Around ten minutes in, Young lets the giant out of the box in savage swathes of white noise lashing the landscape much, you imagine, as a deranged Tyrannosaurus Rex might have done back in the days when there were, literally, giants walking the earth, savage squalls of noise stomping across a landscape that’s 100% Crazy Horse territory.

After that, I guess, anything’s going to be a let down, so perhaps one shouldn’t be too harsh as far as Psychedelic Pill (Alternate Mix) is concerned, but if its sister seemed inconsequential wedged between Driftin’ Back and Ramada Inn, the alternate version definitely comes across as lightweight after Walk Like a Giant.

And if you do the stats, eight tracks (nine if you count the alternate mix as a separate entity) with three definite keepers (two and a half if you’re not totally besotted by the whole of Driftin’ Back) that occupy two-thirds of the ninety-odd minutes is a much better strike rate than you might have anticipated looking back over some of Neil’s recent first thought is best thought efforts.

Very much in the whatever’s occupying Neil’s mind tradition of Fork in the Road, but with added Horse.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse "Americana" (3.5*)

I guess, when you’re looking to head off into Retro territory there are two extreme paths you can choose.

You can, should you want to employ twenty-first century technology and match it up with an attitude or sensibility that comes out of the era you’re looking to recreate, end up with something like a perfectly recorded period piece. That would deliver a seventies punk recreation where you could hear the singers’ spittle hitting the microphone or someone singing the acoustic blues with perfectly recorded fingernails scraping along guitar strings.

Alternatively you can take yourself back to the technology that applied at the time and produce something that sounds like it came directly out of the era you’re looking at without stopping along the way.

Most exercises in retrospectivity fit somewhere in between those extremes, with perfectly recorded reproductions played through vintage amplifiers (or whatever), but when you’re looking at the latest effort from Neil Young & Crazy Horse it’s worth stating those extremes because there’s a fair bit of both here.

It’s around nine years since Greendale, the last time Young let the Horse (in the studio sans guitarist Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro, though he played on the subsequent tour) loose on a fan base that, largely, yearns for the primitive garage band thrash the outfit delivers (basically because anything else is a fair way beyond their actual capabilities), and with the Horse in harness you’re more or less right back in the second approach outlined above, regardless of whether you’re using the latest techno wonders to do the actual recording.

Regardless of what you think about Neil’s recent recording history, there’s no denying the guy’s prolific. Possibly too prolific, in the sense that a little time spent on polishing the product might be better than first thought = best thought, which is where he seems to have been sitting for a while.

Regardless of how prolific you are, sitting down to write a book (Waging Heavy Peace, apparently semi-autobiographical, due out later this year) the effort’s possibly going to steer you away from writing songs and while you’re thinking about the past you’re going to remember things you were doing back when you were starting out in the early sixties.

Those reminiscences apparently included versions of Oh, Susannah by The Thorns and The Company's version of High Flying Bird as played in Ontario clubs and incorporated into the repertoire of Young’s band, The Squires, joining She’ll Be Comin ’Round The Mountain, Tom Dooley and Clementine in their regular set list.

That’s one part of the equation.

On top of that, it’s hard to avoid suspecting the origins of this particular exercise probably trace back to the preparations for the Young & Crazy Horse appearance at the MusicCares tribute to Paul McCartney in Los Angeles back in February, where their cover of I Saw Her Standing There was apparently one of the highlights of the show. If you’re going to go back to 1963, why not go all the way back?

Of course, when you’re talking Neil Young things aren’t that simple.

Sure, he might wake up one morning with memories of singing God Save the Queen at primary school and decide to have a bash at it here, but he also does a bit of research, digging out the oft-forgotten second verse, goes the full back to childhood kick with a kids choir thrown in for good measure and throws in some of My Country ‘Tis Of Thee (same tune, different lyrics), the unofficial anthem of the United States before The Star Spangled Banner got the official gig in 1931.

And if you thought it was just a matter of digging out a few old chestnuts and redoing them as garage rock thump after the artistic and political stances on Greendale, Living With War, Fork in the Road and Le Noise he goes to some trouble to spell out the fact that many of those old hootenanny staples everybody sang so cheerfully back in the day were concerned with murder, sex, and political turbulence in circumstances where physical danger lurked around the corner for those who were inclined to question the status quo.

So you have the original Old Left lyrics of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, and in interviews Young has talked about She’ll Be Comin ’Round The Mountain (covered here, but renamed Jesus' Chariot), generally held to be a Negro spiritual, referring to the second coming of Jesus, with she being the chariot he’ll arrive on but points out an alternative narrative. She, in this reading, is union organiser Mary Harris "Mother" Jones promoting union activity in Appalachian coal-mining camps.

Not quite your usual good time campfire hootenanny interpretations.

As Young and the Horse stomp through Oh Susannah (Stephen Foster filtered through an early sixties arrangement by The Thorns with a nod to Shocking Blue’s Venus), Clementine and Tom Dula (both a la Fort William, spring 1965), Gallows Pole, and a dose of fifties doo wop withThe Silhouettes‘ 1957 hit Get A Jobit certainly sounds like they’re having a ball reliving bits of the past.

At this point I’m inclined to point out that Crazy Horse started off as a Los Angeles-based doo wop outfit called Danny And The Memories, so it’s not just Young’s past we’re revisiting.


Proceedings are rounded off with Travel On, the Haight-Ashbury folk-rock fave High Flyin’ Bird, Wayfarin’ Stranger and, just to wind things up, God Save The Queen. This one seems to have a few Yanks scratching their heads, but I have a suspicion The Squires and their peers, playing rock’n’roll for the kids on the Canadian prairies, were regularly told to finish the night’s entertainment with a rendition of the anthem, along the same lines as the situation where a Northern Ireland club owner insisted John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers finish with the anthem in November 1967 (as preserved on Diary of a Band)...


As with all things Neil, your mileage is likely to vary considerably, and I must admit initial exposure to the B-A-N-J-O on my knee in Oh Susannah produced a hessian underwear reaction that had me firmly in the anti-Americana camp but repeated exposure has scaled that back to minor irritation and there are moments scattered throughout that are quite sublime in a revisiting our garage rock roots kind of way.

Fortunately, in these days of iTunes playlists and other filtering devices it’s easy to avoid the dross (God Save the Queen has already been relegated to the digital back blocks) and it’ll be interesting to see which other titles will have joined This Land is Your Land in the lofty heights of Hughesy’s Top 1500 Most Played. I’d nominate Get a Job as the most likely candidate.

Some links:

Initial announcement in Rolling Stone

Neil interviewed for Reuters, Morning Becomes Eclectic, Fresh Air and All Songs Considered

On Thrasher’s Wheat, A Neil Young Critic Drifts Into Self-parody and The Unbearable Lightness of Being Neil Young