Posts Tagged ‘Neil Young’

Neil Plays Dallas – first night

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.

Read more here:

http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2014/04/neil-young-gave-his-heart-and-soul-thursday-and-some-folks-just-gave-him-a-hard-time.html/

Tags: Dallas, Neil Young, solo acoustic concert
Posted in Concert Reviews, News / Article, Performances | Comments Off on Neil Plays Dallas – first night

Neil hawks Farm Bill. Will it happen?

Neil Young looked  like an album cover during his appearance at a recent Farm Bill press conference – black fedora, sunglasses, muttonchop sideburns, green “Go Family Farms” tee, according to a Washington Post blog.

Musician Neil Young talks with Sen. Debbie Stabenow at the National Farmers Union rally on Capitol Hill Monday. (Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

Congress has tried and failed for more than a year to complete a new five-year farm bill. Now, with Congress embroiled in a fierce debate over whether to intervene in Syria, some are worried the chance to act this year on time may have already passed, U.S. News Weekly reported:

The Post said Neil “Sounded passionate, if a little windy. Spoke without notes for 10 minutes touching on family farmers, the plight of Native Americans near Canadian oilsand developments, and fuel-efficient speeds (“It’s better to drive 55 than 75”). Back story: Young arrived at the rally via a meandering cross-continent trip in his converted bio-electric ’59 Lincoln. “When the electrity runs out, the American farmers and the Canadian farmers and the crops that you grow make this car go. . . Some people are saying cars don’t run right [on ethanol]. . . That’s disinformation.”

Soundbite: “I love what [ethanol] smells like and how it makes my car go. . . It’s a beautiful fuel.”

The current farm bill expires on Sept. 30, giving Congress just nine working days to pass a comprehensive bill.

Politics forced the  House to drag its feet on the farm bill this summer. Internal GOP squabbles over how much money should be spent on the country’s food assistance programs, forced the House to separate the agricultural portion of the bill from the nutrition title. As it stands now, the House has passed an agriculture bill, but has not voted on a bill to reform food stamps.

Read more at:

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/09/09/will-congress-pass-a-farm-bill-this-year?s_cid=rss:will-congress-pass-a-farm-bill-this-year

Also The Washington Post, more Neil slanted:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/wp/2013/09/09/celebvocate-neil-young-for-ethanol-and-the-farm-bill/

Tags: farm aid, farm bill, farmaid, Neil Young
Posted in Activism, Farm Aid, News / Article | 1 Comment »

Audio-stuff: Pono discussion

An article in German about Neil’s new media player, lossless digitalizing, close to what he had in mind with the late Apple-Steve-Jobs:

“Pono”: Neil Young will iTunes & Co. audiophile Konkurrenz machen
on Heise.de

In essence:

Pono = 24 Bit/96 kHz or even 24 Bit/192 kHz lossless coding.

Pono itself:
http://mypono.com/

Neil @ Letterman with the yellow prototype:
https://www.bad-news-beat.org/2012david-letterman-neil-young

Neil on Rolling Stone about Pono:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/neil-young-expands-pono-digital-to-analog-music-service-20120927

Ogg format:
http://xiph.org/

discussion:
http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
“Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.”

Well, maybe technicians hear other stuff than musicians…

Nyquist-Shannon-sampling theoreme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem

Tags: audio, Neil Young, pono, shannon sampling
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Driving around with Neil at the ranch

September 19, 2012, 10:35 am
Well Hello, Mr. Soul
By DAVID CARR
Like a lot of people, I often read something in the magazine that involved a writer going to see this or that music/film/theater icon and think about how lucky that writer was. This week it was my turn.

My pinch-me moment was getting to ride around in a car on Neil Young’s ranch for several hours. Not because I am a Neil Young person per se – I saw the “Rust Never Sleeps” tour, “Trans” and have seen him play with Crazy Horse and solo several other times – but because, well, he’s Neil Young. It’s hard to think of an artist of any genre who has endured so long with as much significance as Young. And over and over, he did it his way, ignoring convention and expectation on general principal.

read more on 6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/well-hello-mr-soul and Don’t miss the photos (on cars, model trains.

Tags: article, model train, Neil Young, photos, ranch, Waging Heavy Peace
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NY Times: Neil Young comes clean

September 19, 2012
Neil Young Comes Clean
By DAVID CARR

Driving down the hill above his ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco, Neil Young took a deep whiff of the redwood forest momentarily serving as the canopy for his 1951 Willys Jeepster convertible.

“I can still remember how it smelled when I first pulled in here — I was driving this car,” he said, recalling the trip in 1970 when he bought the place and named it Broken Arrow, after the Buffalo Springfield song.

The author of some of the spookiest, darkest songs in the American folk canon seemed jolly on this late-August day. Even if he was accompanied by a reporter, generally not his favorite species of human, the motion soothed him. “I’ve always been better moving than I am standing still,” he said.
Young, 66, spotted this land out the window of a plane banking out of San Francisco four decades ago and now owns nearly 1,000 acres of it. His song “Old Man” is a tribute to the caretaker who first showed him the place.

“I ran out of money, so I had to sell some of it,” he said. “That’s O.K., because it was too big. Everything happens for a reason.” He kept his eyes on the narrow road through the giant redwoods.

It was hard to reconcile the affable guy motoring along on a sunny day with his past incarnations: the portentous folkie of “Ohio,” the rabid anti-commercialist who gave MTV the musical middle finger with “This Note’s For You,” the angry rocker who threatened to hit the cameramen at Woodstock with his guitar. He was happy partly because he was here.

“For whatever you’re doing, for your creative juices, your geography’s got a hell of a lot to do with it,” he said. “You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.”

We would spend a few hours creeping along — he drove slowly but joyfully, as if the automobile were a recent invention — on our way there or on our way from there, the ranch where Young lives with his wife, Pegi, and their son, Ben. His longtime producer and friend, David Briggs, who died in 1995, hated making records here, deriding the hermetic refuge as a “velvet cage.”

read all on NY TIMES, Neil Young Comes Clean (has also a nice photo of Neil)

Tags: comes clean, interview, Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace
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