IN PERFORMANCE
A howling Neil Young rocks United Center
Neil Young and Crazy Horse play at the United Center Thursday. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune / October 12, 2012), Greg Kot Music critic, 9:59 a.m. CDT, October 12, 2012
Frank “Pancho” Sampedro, the longtime guitarist in Crazy Horse, is a barrel of a man. He wears the look of a retired linebacker who has put on a few pounds. But he went airborne Thursday at the United Center as he and Neil Young squared off and stomped around the stage.
Instead of hunching over his guitar, bending at the waist as he normally does, Young turned his instrument into a machine gun, his legs splayed, straw hair flailing. “I (messed) up again and again,” he roared, first raging, then pained, as if he were reliving some trainwreck moment from the past.
By the end, the singer was a demon-eyed street oracle howling at the audience. “They give you this, but you pay for that,” he spat, turning “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” into an Occupy manifesto.
* Photos: Neil Young at United Center
Young and Crazy Horse have been an off-and-on proposition for more than 40 years, but Young has indisputably made some of his best – and most violent – music in the company of Sampedro, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina.
Now they’re on the road for the first time in nearly a decade. A few props were resurrected from the late-‘70s “Rust Never Sleeps” tour – the giant amplifiers and parade-float-sized microphone serviced by lab-coated roadies. But that was about it for nostalgia. The quartet has released two new albums this year, and the set list Thursday brimmed with new songs, rejiggered arrangements and feverish intensity.
Make no mistake — the past kept creeping into the songs. The passage of time and how it twists perceptions and tests relationships is a major theme in Young’s new work. Wistfulness oozed from several songs, including the 17-minute “Ramada Inn,” in which a couple finds that even love isn’t enough to keep them from drifting apart. He shuts down, she pulls away, and time rolls on.
But there was nothing particularly genteel or overly familiar and comforting about this music. Like one of Young’s beloved trains, Crazy Horse is a large beast that tends to ease into its work. But once it gains its bearings and picks up speed, it’s awfully difficult to slow down. At least five of the 13 songs performed Thursday surpassed the 10-minute mark. “Love and only Love” began like an extended exhale before finding its pace, with Young, Sampedro and Talbot huddled in front of the drum riser. Whereas most bands spread out to fill a big stage such as the United Center’s, Crazy Horse bunches together, as if defending their home against invasion.
The group works itself into a trance-like frenzy, Young’s guitar piercing through a thicket of bottom-heavy tones and rumbling drums. For the relatively pithy “Cinnamon Girl,” the feedback that shut it down lasted nearly as long as the song itself. The band turned the period psychedelia of Young’s old Buffalo Springfield hit “Mr. Soul” into churning acid-punk. Molina’s drums on “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” pumped like pistons in a factory.
Normally, the encore is a time of a celebration, of release. But Young and Crazy Horse instead shook loose the ghosts of the harrowing “Tonight’s the Night.” Expanded to 10 minutes, the song became a long, lonely howl for fallen friends, a séance. “Tonight’s the night,” Young whispered. “Yes, it is.”
Neil Young Expands Pono Digital-to-Analog Music Service
Audio system could become rival to Apple
by: Patrick Flanary
Neil Young
Paul A. Hebert/FilmMagic
Aretha Franklin had never sounded so shocking, Flea decided last year, as “Respect” roared from the speakers of Neil Young’s Cadillac Eldorado. Stunned by the song’s clarity, theRed Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist listened alongside bandmate Anthony Kiedis and producer Rick Rubin while Young showcased the power of Pono, his high-resolution music service designed to confront the compressed audio inferiority that MP3s offer.
Beginning next year, Pono will release a line of portable players, a music-download service and digital-to-analog conversion technology intended to present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions. In his book out this week, Waging Heavy Peace, Young writes that Pono will help unite record companies with cloud storage “to save the sound of music.” As Flea raves to Rolling Stone, “It’s not like some vague thing that you need dogs’ ears to hear. It’s a drastic difference.”
Pono’s preservation of the fuller, analog sound already has the ear of the Big Three record labels: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music. WMG – home to artists including Muse, the Black Keys, Common and Jill Scott – has converted its library of 8,000 album titles to high-resolution, 192kHz/24-bit sound. It was a process completed prior to the company’s partnership with Young’s Pono project last year, said Craig Kallman, chairman and chief executive of Atlantic Records.
In mid-2011, Kallman invested with Young and helped assemble a Pono team that included representatives from audio giants Meridian and Dolby, according to insiders. Once WMG signed on, Kallman said that he and Young approached UMG CEO Lucian Grainge and Sony Music CEO Doug Morris about remastering their catalogs for Pono distribution. Neither UMG nor Sony officially acknowledged those conversations.
“This has to be an industry-wide solution. This is not about competing – this is about us being proactive,” Kallman tells Rolling Stone. “This is all about purely the opportunity to bring the technology to the table.”
The title of Waging Heavy Peace refers to the response that Young gave a friend who questioned whether the singer-songwriter was declaring war on Apple with his new service.
“I have consistently reached out to try to assist Apple with true audio quality, and I have even shared my high-resolution masters with them,” Young writes, adding that he traded emails and phone calls with Steve Jobs about Pono before the tech king’s death last October. Apple declined to comment on whether a collaborative or competitive relationship with Pono exists.
Apple’s Mastered for iTunes program, which launched last year with the release of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ I’m With You, requires mastering engineers to provide audio quality based on a listener’s environment – such as a car, a flight or a club. Those dissatisfied with Apple’s AAC format argue that it still represents a fraction of the high-resolution options that Pono promises to deliver. Engineers have debated the value of sound quality for years.
In early June 2011, after filing a handful of trademarks for his cloud-based service idea, Young traveled to the Bonnaroo Festival to perform with Buffalo Springfield. While he was there, he invited fellow musicians into his Cadillac for a Pono demo, including members of Mumford & Sons and My Morning Jacket, and videotaped their reactions for a potential marketing campaign.
“Neil’s premise is cool, and I think it’s exciting as a traveling musician,” My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James tells Rolling Stone. However, he adds a caveat: “I think that’s somewhere that he has to be careful: I’ve already bought Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ a lot of times. Do I have to buy it again?”
While Young acknowledges in his book that existing digital purchases will play on Pono devices, he points out that his service “will force iTunes to be better and to improve quality at a faster pace.”
“His reasons are so not based in commerce, and based in just the desire for people to really feel the uplifting spirit of music,” Flea said in defense of Young. “MP3s suck. It’s just a shadow of the music.”
[Stereogum:] This motherfucker Neil Young just got his old Crazy Horse band back together to make their second album this year, and that album, Psychedelic Pill, has some really, really long songs on it. One of those songs is “Ramada Inn,” a 17-minute psych-rock odyssey about, more or less, being old and in love. It’s pretty shattering, and now Young has made a video for it, using a ton of old, scratchy archival footage and kaleidoscopic designs. Watch it below.
Neil Young has said he will keep making music until it stops coming naturally.
The 66-year-old Heart Of Gold singer, who has written his first book, the memoir Waging Heavy Peace, said: “When music is finished with me, I’ll be OK.
“Right now I still do it because it seems natural. If it ever comes to the point where I can’t do it justice, when I’m not doing my best, then I’ll stop.”
Neil refused to have a ghostwriter help him with his new book, insisting: “That’s a scary damn idea, having a ghost in the house.”
The Canadian singer added: “My whole M.O. for doing the book was that it was going to be off the top of my head. I wasn’t going to spend any time trying to organise anything. That’s always worked for me with everything else I’ve done.”
Neil has already written part of a sequel to Waging Heavy Peace, which he said started out to be about cars and dogs but now is largely about record players. He also has a tour with the band Crazy Horse this autumn.
Press Association
A RUST TRILOGY October 3, 2012
The third episode of A Rust Trilogy, which began with Rust Never Sleeps in 1978, and continued with Weld in 1990, now concludes with Alchemy in 2012. Things have changed, yet they stay the same. Alchemy, like Rust and Weld, finds the boys at another stage of life’s journey. Time has taken its toll, yet the spirit seems unstoppable.
Tom Hambleton provides BNB with setlists, thankfully. His website is the most comprehensive searchable archives on the Internets about anything Neil Young related setlists. Goto Sugar Mountain.
memphish on 
Albert Stromann on 
liza on 
Baz on 
