United Palace Theatre, New York
For the past two months Neil Young has been touring apparently randomly selected towns of America with a mix-and-match version of his old bandmates with a half electric, half acoustic set. He started in Boise, Idaho to no great fanfare but arrived this week in New York with a jaw-dropping concert that signals an invigorating renewed energy and passion for his own revered back catalogue. Young brings that energy to the UK from 3 March for a stint that includes five nights at London's Hammersmith Apollo.
The thing that people reading reviews hate about people writing them is a sense that they decided what they were going to write before they got there. And the accusation is not entirely unfair. Now that set lists and digital audience recordings are available for almost every show on a tour, it's very possible to have reached a conclusion about a concert from what you think you know about all the ones that came before it.
So let's assume you're a reviewer and want to save time and make your mind up before you get off the 'A' Train at 177th Street for one of Neil's tour-ending six nights in New York. On paper, before you ever walk into the United Palace Theatre in Harlem, you are going to write about what a strange, typically enigmatic set Young is playing. He has a CD out, Chrome Dreams II, a sequel to an album that never appeared, but is only playing four songs from it. He is currently embarked on a project to release his archives of live and unreleased material, but there are only a few truly rare gems ('Sad Movies', 'Try', 'Mexico', 'Kansas') being played on the tour. And despite having more than an hour of solo time to fill as he pleases, he has stuck more or less to the same songs from Boise to the Big Apple. These particular numbers must really mean something to him. But what?
Then you actually hear him play and it makes a lot more sense. You can almost see the ghosts. The current work on the archives, a project to put out his live and unreleased material that has been anticipated by fans for nearly 20 years, has obviously set Neil thinking about and journeying back to the early Seventies, a time in his life that brought much of his best work but where his life was filled with a doomed, destructive relationship, a lot of dope, and big dark clouds.
The key song might be 'Winterlong', from 1974, which on Thursday he dedicated to his own biggest ghost, Danny Whitten, the guitarist he lost to a heroin overdose in 1972. That song's refrain hints at what the tour is about. 'Half the time has passed away/ Things we thought of yesterday/ Come back now, come back now.' But Young isn't on the trip to wallow or just to trot out old tunes for old times' sake. He's here to celebrate, to forgive himself maybe, to remember fondly.
The exorcism brings vitality to some old songs that over the years had lost some of their power through repetition. It was starkest in the acoustic segment of the show. I have heard Young play 'From Hank to Hendrix' many many times but never heard it sound so heartfelt and beautiful, slowed down a little bit, given some space and a dash of passion. The bitter misogyny of 'A Man Needs a Maid' sounded almost naked and apologetic. The dirgy 'Journey Through the Past' was made to sound upbeat. 'Ambulance Blues', in which Young sounds doped out on disc, is injected with some grimacing passion and changes of pace that turn a good song into a great one. And 'After the Gold Rush' previously noteworthy for always getting a naughty cheer at the mention of getting high, sounded as though Young really meant it, enough to introduce a new twinkling piano part that sounds like rain and somehow transforms a preachy hymn into a much more personal and hopeful song.
Maybe the real key song is the self-mocking 'Love/ Art Blues' in which Young laments the need to choose between love and art. The set suggests that Young, happily married to his 'soulmate' Pegi, has decided that if he can embrace the bitterness and loneliness of his worst times, it might actually be possible to have both.