Young At Heart: Neil Young At Madison Square Garden

By: David Schultz

Rock stars from the Sixties continue to provide a consistent fount of nostalgia and often are the source material for lucrative arena tours. Very few though retain their vitality and remain an important and influential presence. For all the reverence Bob Dylan and the Jagger/Richards combo have earned, it’s been years since they’ve been anything other than musicians. Despite the cycles that bests any artist’s career, Neil Young has always managed to remain an essential cog in the rock and roll machinery, a “Rockin’ In The Free World” or “Let’s Impeach The President” always simmering below the surface and ready to burst from his blue-collar soul. A true veteran, the venerable Young concluded his North American tour with a pair of shows at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

Time has taken nothing from the feisty Canadian. Numerous times during Monday night's show, Young bounded away from the microphone and careened across the stage, his guitar going through wild tremors as if trying to escape his grasp. No one would ever mistake Young’s voice for another but his incisive and defiant guitar style can be heard constantly in the artists that followed him. On “Cinnamon Girl,” “Cortez The Killer” and “Powderfinger,” Young reestablished himself as the Godfather of Grunge and the ancestor that sits atop the family trees of bands like My Morning Jacket and Dead Confederate.

In many ways, Young has finally grown into the cranky old man that, in many ways he’s always been. By the shear task of remaining relevant, Young dodges any irony inherent in the chorus “Hey Hey My My” by proving that burning out or fading away aren’t the only choices. Some of his songs have evolved with him; “Old Man” could seem anachronistic coming out of the sextogenarian’s mouth but Young’s shifted roles, grudgingly becoming the old man from his Harvest era classic, living the song’s adage with his wife Pegi singing by his side. Others have come full circle; when Young wrote “Rockin’ In The Free World” in the early 90s, he was railing against the hypocrisy of the Bush Presidency. Years later, the song still resonates with meaning, only it’s about finding hopes in the aftermath of a different Bush’s legacy.

Young has kept his setlist relatively stable over the course of his tour and it’s expertly geared towards 70s style arena rock like “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” and “Cowgirl In The Sand.” Over the course of the tour, Young has insinuated pre-recording workouts of newer material into the show and the middle and latter parts of the evening consisted of previews of the relatively unfamiliar fare. But for the singer, many of the new songs didn’t feel like they had earned the right to be played at Madison Square Garden. Perhaps the impending end of the Bush regime has left Young without a proper catalyst to inspire the proper amount of outrage. After all, once Batman vanquishes The Joker, he moves on to The Penguin, Riddler or Catwoman. Thematically tied to the environment, Young’s newer songs which lacked the texture and heart of his older material: “Cough Up The Bucks” had a harsh, choppy chorus creepily reminiscent of his Trans-era experimentations and “Fuel Line” ran on fumes.

During the barrage of the recently written, the nostalgia-inspired excitement expectedly waned. Young’s salvaged this part of his two and a half hour set with a primarily acoustic section centered on “The Needle And The Damage Done” “Heart Of Gold,” “Old Man” and a wonderful take on Harvest Moon’s “Unknown Legend.” Young can still muster the same indignant wails or mournful country purrs from his distinctive voice and it adds a weary dimension to his softer work. For someone that can generate an overpowering onslaught, it’s Young’s reflective heartfelt moments that resonate the deepest.

Young has always been find beauty in the noise and he’s never flinched at the prospect of commercial or critical failure. That reckless spirit still lives within Young. To close the night, Young and his band tackled The Beatles’ nearly uncoverable “A Day In The Life,” finishing the song with a wall of feedback that became a backdrop for a revival of the song’s dreamy harmonies as a psychedelic peyote chant. Even when venturing into sacred and familiar ground, Young continues to find a way to transform it into his own inimitable style.