Neil Young dazzles again with new crew
What would it take for Neil Young to not be great? For his show Thursday night at the Susquehanna Bank Center, the 69-year-old rock legend stacked the odds against himself. His new album, The Monsanto Years, is an unrelenting salvo against factory farming, genetically modified organisms, and corporate greed, one of those full-length rants the cranky Canadian can get away with without completely alienating his fan base, because - well, because he's Neil Young.
What would it take for Neil Young to not be great?
For his show Thursday night at the Susquehanna Bank Center, the 69-year-old rock legend stacked the odds against himself. His new album, The Monsanto Years, is an unrelenting salvo against factory farming, genetically modified organisms, and corporate greed, one of those full-length rants the cranky Canadian can get away with without completely alienating his fan base, because - well, because he's Neil Young.
Even loyalists in Young's aging fan base are justifiably skeptical: Will he come out and play the mediocre-at-best new album in its entirety, punctuated by angry diatribes? Will he even reward us, in the end, with "Cortez the Killer" or "Cinnamon Girl"?
At the Susq, the mystery was compounded as the lights dimmed and the show began with trademark Young theatrical weirdness. Straw-hatted crew members dressed as farmers moved about, pretending to plant seeds on the stage.
Eventually, Young emerged and sat stage left at the piano, fedora down over his brow as he opened with the timeless 1970 eco-anthem "After the Gold Rush." Maybe everything was going to be OK after all. That was part of a mini-acoustic set that found him in fine, keening voice, reedy harmonica notes hanging in the air on an idyllic summer night. It went "Heart of Gold," "Long May You Run," "Old Man," and "Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)," the latter at the pump organ, as Young pleaded: "Respect Mother Earth and her giving ways/ Don't trade away our children's days."
In the next bit of kooky stagecraft - before the entrance of Young's backing band, Promise of the Real, featuring Willie Nelson's sons Lucas and Micah - a team of hazmat-suited roadies came on, acting as if they were poisoning all those precious seedlings by spraying them with pesticides. It seemed like the hectoring was about to begin. But no. Instead, it was the next stage of a shambling show that would stretch over three hours, eventually finding time for most of the bluntly artless Monsanto songs, but also taking a winning tour through Young's vast catalog.
Starting out with "Hold Back the Tears" (from 1977's American Stars 'n Bars) and "Out on the Weekend" (from 1972's Harvest), the show started out folkie and familial and grew in electric intensity and volume as the evening proceeded.
The night was rant-free.Instead, Young let the music do the talking. POTR is no Crazy Horse when it comes to primal power. But then, what band is? The musicians acquitted themselves well enough with garage-band raggedness and youthful enthusiasm. Young, the Nelson brothers, and bassist Corey McCormick repeatedly faced each other in four-man guitar army huddles, with Lukas Nelson falling to his knees and playing a solo with his teeth during a particularly glorious "Down by the River" that stretched for 20 minutes or so.
There were other reasons for Neil fans who sat this one out to kick themselves: rarities like "Walk On," "Bad Fog of Loneliness," and the Buffalo Springfield song "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong"; a stomping "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere." And how surprisingly well the Monsanto Years populism went over with a rowdy crowd happy to shout along to blue-collar lyrics like "too big too fail, too rich for jail."
The main reason to envy fans who kept the faith is that no matter how iconoclastic and head-scratching his career quirks are, he still remains a commanding and often electrifying performer, one of the great instinctual rock artists and guitarists of all time, who seems incapable of playing music without committing himself entirely to the task. And, oh, yeah, he closed the show with "Cortez the Killer" AND "Cinnamon Girl."
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