What the fuck is wrong with these people attending Neil Young’s solo acoustic shows?
Dallas Morning News music reviewer Robert Wilonsky attending Thursday night’s first of two shows in Dallas as had this to say: (Neil plays again Friday night)
I would love to share with you the story Neil Young told Thursday night about his Martin D-28, which once belonged to Hank Williams and shared the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center stage with him on what was for the most part a very special night. But I can’t, because Young wasn’t allowed the opportunity to share the tale. He tried. He held “Hank” in his hands and began recalling that trip to Nashville, when, from the balcony, to Young’s left, a man began shouting: “Play it! Play it!” At which point the 68-year-old who’s been making music since high school reminded the crowd that no one tells Neil Young what to do.
“I don’t think I’m gonna play it,” he said. Beneath his black wide-brimmed hat, he grinned a little. But you could tell: He was not pleased. The heckling continued, because this is just what some people do: spend hundreds of dollars to see their heroes, only to steal their spotlight.
“What, do I work?” Young said, the good humor now completely gone from his voice. “Is this a job? I’m trying to recall the last time I did something expressly because someone told me to do it.” The rest of the crowd cheered, almost as though it were trying to distract Young or jolt him back into the jovial mood he’d been in moments earlier, following a version of “Mr. Soul” played on a pump organ. Instead he just played the next song: “Harvest Moon,” one of the more beautiful entries in a canon filled with tenderhearted melodies. But Young strummed the guitar a little harder than usual, and didn’t so much sing its simple, sentimental lyrics (“When we were lovers/I loved you with all my heart”) as he did spit them out.
Music Times ranks Neil Young’s “Dead Man” music score number 2 out of 7 top rock music scores of all time.
Guess which one is number 1#.
The publication writes:
“Neil Young’s score for Jim Jarmusch’s western Dead Man wasn’t actually composed. Rather, Young stood in a recording studio with some instruments and simply improvised music while watching a cut of the film. The resulting music is at times atmospheric and chaotic.”
The article states: “Keyboard legend Booker T. Jones has seen it all in his six-decade career, from landing a hit with the instrumental ‘Green Onions’ in 1962 at the tender age of 17 to trying to coax Sinead O’Connor into singing the song she was supposed to sing at a Bob Dylan tribute in 1992 to finally winning a Grammy in 1995, some 30 years after his tunes were all over the radio.
But maybe one of the strangest, and potentially most perilous, of his undertakings came in 1993, when he and the MGs hooked up with Neil Young for a nationwide tour.”
The Booker T show (set list here) was pretty much everything a Young fan would want — a career-spanning effort that began with Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul,” traveled through the likes of “The Loner,” “Heart of Gold” and “Like A Hurricane” and touched upon the best of Young’s more recent work (“Rockin’ in the Free World,” “Harvest Moon.” )
It didn’t hurt to have one of the greatest backing bands of all time, either. Besides Jones, the band included legendary guitarist Steve Cropper and veteran session players Donald “Duck” Dunn (bass) and Jim Keltner (drums). If I remember correctly, Young played well with the rest of the guys rather than going off the guitar-freakout deep end like he had done with Crazy Horse two years earlier.
Here is the setlist for Neil Young’s fourth and final show of the 4-night acoustic solo performances on 2014-04-02 at the Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles, California
“And find out how she felt
In the mornin\' on the fields of green
In the homeland we\'ve never seen. ” by -- Neil Young
Neil Young on Tour
Sugar Mountain setlists
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.