Review: Neil Young & Crazy Horse was in classic form in Camden on Sunday night

It didn’t matter if you’d seen Neil Young a dozen times before, or never in your life: Sunday night’s show in Camden at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion was the one you’d been waiting for.

It had been a dozen years since the 78-year-old Young had come through Philadelphia with Crazy Horse, the backing band with whom the Canadian singer and guitarist has made his most-gloriously ragged music for over half a century.

Young’s prior visits with Crazy Horse — which currently is composed of longtime members Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums, plus guitarist Micah Nelson (Willie Nelson’s son, who’s less than half the age of the other members) — were tied to less-than-stellar albums in his expansive, uneven catalog. When Young and Crazy Horse played the Wells Fargo Center in 2012, he was touring behind the roiling but inconsistent Psychedelic Pill. In 2004, when they played the Camden amphitheater — then known as the Tweeter Center — the band performed the environmental concept album Greendale in its entirety.

Sunday night, however, was all about vintage Neil. It wasn’t a greatest-hits show per se; Neil Young doesn’t really traffic in “hits.” But the two-hour, 19-song show, which began with an 11-minute “Cortez the Killer” — complete with two restored “lost” verses that added little to the song’s tragic grandeur — spanned Young’s career with an emphasis on classic late-‘60s, early-‘70s albums Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and Zuma.

In other words, it was the Neil everybody wants to hear: The one who is celebrated for his restless, artistic spirit and cranky, aging hippie contrarian streak.

That has manifested itself in his long history of bucking the system, whether that’s meant not allowing his songs to be used in commercials, pulling his music from Spotify (it’s recently been put back on the streaming service), or famously, at the time of his 1983 electronic album Trans, being sued by label owner David Geffen for making music that was “uncharacteristic” of Neil Young.

Sunday’s show, part of the “Love Earth Tour,” had its share of quirks.

The opening act with Reverend Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir, a New York “radical performance community” led by performance artist William Talen, was a boisterous 14-person ensemble spreading a Young-approved gospel of anti-consumerism. In keeping with a Young theatrical tradition, the roadies who worked the stage were costumed, wearing white lab coats as they brought guitars and harmonicas on and off the stage.

Young, who also played Camden in 2006 on a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion tour, attempted to engage the crowd with some awkward stage patter, including repeating the question: “What’s your favorite planet?” (The right answer: “Earth!”) And in the middle of an acoustic miniset, he admitted to being unnerved by a fan in the crowd filming him while wearing a Santa Claus suit.

But by and large, the show was all about the music, man. So much so that Young chose to not use the video screens inside the pavilion, whose 7,000 seats were filled. Or even on the less-packed lawn, where the sound mix was clearer and a view of the Philadelphia skyline was available to those at the very top of the hill.

Those able to get a good look at the stage saw the three standing figures huddled closely as if they were playing a small club, communicating wordlessly and keeping warm on an unseasonably chilly Mother’s Day evening in layers of denim and flannel.

Songs ruminated on the passage of time and Young’s place in it, as his crunching guitar chords and cutting leads circled each song’s essence, and his distinctive high tenor sounded largely undiminished.

“People my age, they don’t do the things I do,” he sang in “I’m the Ocean,” a true-enough statement when the song was released on Mirror Ball in 1995 that sounded more spot-on now. As did its lyric in which Young succinctly described what he sounds like while riding the Horse: “I’m the giant undertow.”

The three-song acoustic set came toward the end of the show. “Comes a Time” lingered with a simple harmonica solo that hung hauntingly in the air. “Human Highway” wondered “How could people get so unkind?” And in ”Heart of Gold,” a song written when he was 26, he lamented, “I’m getting old.” He tweaked a lyric to indicate that he was still on that search for a heart of gold, more than five decades later.

Along with the truly epic, can’t-miss crowd-pleasers including “Like a Hurricane,” “Cinnamon Girl,” and “Powderfinger,” highlights included the one-two punch of “Love to Burn” and “Love and Only Love,” the latter of which kept returning to the lyric where Young lays out both sides in the battle of good vs. evil: “Love and only love will endure,” he promised, while also serving up a reminder of what it’s up against: “Hate is everything you think it is.”

The end of the show felt like a bonus. After the band joyfully rumbled through “Sedan Delivery,” which had been the closing song on many stops of the tour, many in the audience headed for the exits.

But the Horse wasn’t finished galloping yet. The band returned first for “Roll Another Number (For the Road)” and then one last primal classic in a ripping elegiac “Down by the River.” Neil Young didn’t want to go home just yet.