When the announcement was made that NEIL YOUNG was touring theaters and was scheduled to play the cozy ~2800 capacity Orpheum Theater, I scoured the internet to make sure I could get tickets, and found a pre-sale site. Regardless of the hefty ticket price, I figured that with his increasing age and last year’s brain aneurysm scare, this might be the last tour I’d get to see from Shakey, especially an electric set with a full band. I think the sold-out crowd (the second of three nights in Boston) may have shared my uncertainty on how it would turn out, but our convictions were affirmed early. At the conclusion of the second acoustic song (“Ambulance Blues”) an audience member shouted out “Neil, you get better with age.” His reply? “Well, I should be pretty good then…I got the years part covered.” And so the tone was set in a wildly varied and overall splendid night of music.
Unlike so many bands or musicians of his era which roll out the pat set list of audience favorites when they hit the road, Neil’s been digging deep and bringing out some old, seldom-heard songs. Despite the selection of “Journey Through The Past,” and this couplet from “Ambulance Blues” (” It’s easy to get buried in the past/When you try to make a good thing last”), they were not portentous; both the acoustic and electric sets were filled with vitality and an overwhelming sense of now, as opposed to a classic rock legend mailing it in. I’ve seen Neil nine times now (starting in ‘86 or so), and this was certainly as good or better than any of the previous times; although RALPH MOLINA was the only CRAZY HORSE member in tow, the others (RICK ROSAS and BEN KEITH) both share a history with Neil and fit in just fine.
For the initial solo set, Neil sat in the middle of a ring of acoustic guitars, and sang the songs in his high-pitched, quavering trademark vocals, which sounded just like they did in the 70s. The highlights of this precursor were a banjo-led “Mellow My Mind” and the closer “Cowgirl in the Sand.” Stupendous, and the fact that the audience sat in rapt attention during the playing, refraining from shouting out song requests and singing along like the last time I saw him play solo, really made a big difference.
After a short break, Neil was back with the band, trading in volume and his well-worn style of attacking the black Les Paul in a manner which has spawned hundreds of sonic imitators, but no equals. “The Loner” and “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” are the sort of simple, straight ahead rockers with that trademark guitar barrage, with Neil giving the Bigsby whammy bar plenty of attention. A laid back “On Lonesome Me” from After The Gold Rush let the collective audience and band catch their breath, but damned if Neil didn’t set the tasers on kill for the new-ish “No Hidden Road”, a song which was written years ago but just released on Chrome Dreams 2. This was the culmination of all the lessons Neil’s been teaching us over four decades, packed into 25 minutes of guitar fury. The 1990 tour he did with Sonic Youth still shows that the give and take between himself and Lee and Thurston still burns brightly. Word is that JONATHAN DEMME was filming all the dates on this tour, so even if you didn’t catch any of the shows, you might be able to live vicariously through a DVD viewing in a year or so.
