Neil Young at Magness Arena
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Monday night at Magness Arena, Neil Young sounded like shit. Sloppy playing. Off-key singing. False starts. Muddy feedback. Classics that whizzed by too fast. Jams that dragged on too long. Stagehands wandering around aimlessly. Bandmembers wandering around aimlessly. Neil Young wandering around aimlessly. And, overall, the sense that the veteran rocker dared take the stage in front of several thousand people with a ragtag, under-rehearsed group that was barely able to connect the dots—let alone paint a full portrait of Young's songwriting genius.
In other words: It was damn near perfect.
After solid performances from Wilco wannabe Everest and the deeply funky Neville Brothers, Young kicked off his set—no introduction, not even a hello—with the opening chords of one of his most beautiful, underrated, and heart-on-sleeve anthems, "Love And Only Love." It sounded like a dinosaur farting in a tar pit. It's important to note that both opening bands actually sounded fantastic; concertgoers, naturally, are used to warm-up acts sounding like crap right before the headliner comes on and magically produces an upgrade in fidelity. Monday's show was the reverse: As Young tore into the warm, distorted folk of that first song, every neck in the house craned forward to try to hear Young's corroded guitar and thin voice through the shimmering puddle of murk that had filled the air of the venue.
From there, things just got more rickety and raggedy. Young switched to the piano and lit into "Are You Ready For The Country?"—a rollicking tune from his otherwise depressing-as-hell 1972 album (and biggest seller), Harvest. The crowd stood up, cheered, and started to dance. But a few seconds into the bouncy barrelhouse vamp, Young yanked his hands off the keys and yelled at his band to stop. It wasn't clear why—but it was clear that when they started the song over, the audience had been deflated like a balloon. And this was only song three of Young's set.
It would be easy to blame Young's band for the messiness. But the players—pedal-steel guitarist Ben Keith, drummer Chad Cromwell, bassist Rick Rosas, guitarist Anthony Crawford, and Young's own wife Pegi on backup vocals and some kind of weird neon xylophone or something—have been with the singer on-and-off for years. It's almost the same core group that appears on Jonathan Demme's concert film from 2006, Neil Young: Heart Of Gold—which, by all accounts, is a focused and even virtuosic performance. Here, though, it was as if Young had taken these seasoned musicians backstage before the show, doped them, chopped off half their fingers, and set them loose on their instruments.
Of course, Young has been infamous throughout his career for throwing reason to the wind to wallow in fits of aesthetic perversity that border on self-sabotage. We love him for it. And that's why, by the time Young and his band limped into a mid-set rendition of "Tonight's The Night," it became clear that Young was simply doing what he does best: fucking up, masterfully. As soon as the song's tentacle of a bass line slithered through the arena and took root in every brain from the floor to the nosebleeds, Young had them. The murk turned into midnight. And it never let up: He finished his set with a mix of hushed acoustic hits, welt-raising guitar abuse, and disposable yet spunky tunes from his latest shoot-himself-in-the-foot release, the biodiesel concept album Fork In The Road. The pieces didn't really line up. The seams were jagged. But what a gloriously shitty patchwork he managed to stitch together.
"Here's the part where I'm supposed to say something cool," Young noted during one of his many long, painfully awkward breaks between songs. And, upon making that canny observation, he immediately shuffled away from the microphone to fiddle with something on the side of the stage, leaving everyone in the audience hanging. But that's Neil Young for you: If people can't roll with his erratic, eccentric, and utterly non-rock-star presence, let 'em hang.
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