I saw NY in NY

My Year of Big Concerts reached a milestone last weekend when Shauna, my parents and I saw Neil Young at Bethel Woods Centre for the Arts in Bethel, New York. Well, technically, we saw Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but Neil was our reason for being there. When asked who my favourite musician/group is I tend to provide a long, rambling, historical answer that in the end comes around to Neil Young. For simplicity's sake, if you look at my CD collection I have far more of his albums than any other artist or group. He's well known for his own brand of acoustic country-folkie tunes and all-out-deafening rock anthems, and I love both. On top of the fact that he's the best guitarist in the world (Jimi Hendrix once said so, so don't even try to argue with me) he's written a lot of the best lyrics in rock music. There aren't that many musicians out there that really grab me with what they say and what they play.

I would have preferred to see Neil on his own or with the 'third best garage band in the world', Crazy Horse, and from what I had experienced of their work, it was my opinion that Crosby, Stills and Nash dilute Neil's music. Basically, when they play together they're CSNY, but in truth they should be csnY, as Neil has way more power in the lead than he does as an equal part of a quartet. But, when I found tickets for the show in Bethel I knew that it was not the time to be picky; Neil turned 60 last year, so who knows how many more tours he'll have, and Crazy Horse are as predictable as their title. So I bought four tickets and last Saturday Shauna and I drove across New York (about 8 hours) and met my parents, who had driven down from PEI, at Mongaup Pond Campground in the Catskills State Park, about 40 minutes north of Bethel. NY is a very pretty state if you get off the Interstate highways, but that's a subject for another time.

Bethel Woods Centre for the Arts is a story in and of itself; it's on the site of the original 1969 Woodstock concert, at which CSNY played their second gig together. On Sunday, Stephen Stills made a crack about having stage fright, as it was only "our 4000th gig together and we're scared shitless". Bethel Woods, once a farm, is a sprawling piece of land with tall, rounded grassy hills huddled together like giant shoulders. It's mowed and manicured, with strategically placed boulders and copses of trees here and there, and the buildings where Art is Centred are architectural accomplishments of wood and glass. The stage is at the base of a bowl, with a fixed -seating area fanning out in front of it, and lawn seating at the top and to the sides. We had tickets for the lawn, and were going to sit at the top, a good distance from the stage, when Kevin realized that no one was occupying the areas to the side of the fixed seating. We quickly relocated to the side and were less than half a soccer field from the stage...I could have kicked a ball to Neil...I wonder what he'd do with it...

(On a very tangential note, the layout of the Bethel Woods Centre for the Arts reminded me a lot of the War of the Worlds scene in which the aliens converge with the human military in a huge grassy bowl of fire and explosions...I felt the slight nervousness of impending disaster as we went up and down the hillsides amid a crowd of concert-goers not unlike the displaced citizens in WoftheWs. I digress.)

The concert didn't start till around 7:40p.m. but we landed in one of the giant parking lots around 5p.m. From my parents' Roadtrek we watched the tailgate barbecues and pigskin-tossing going on around us. To fit in with all this Americana we drank some Busch and Miller swill, and Kevin watched Nascar on his new flatscreen mini-tv. I wonder if I can type Nascar as it's pronounced in the States...Nas-cahr...Nahs-cuahar...Nas-quahar...whatever, just say it with as much mumble on the vowels as possible and you'll get it. Then we toted our blankets, mini-chairs and extra clothing through the gates and down to the concert bowl, rearranged our seating as I mentioned, and settled in for the show.

Prior to the show I hadn't actually heard any of Neil's latest album, Living With War, so I didn't know much about the songs, other than that they were very critical of the U.S. government. The four guys took the stage and launched right into "Flags of Freedom," a song that begins with the lines "Today is the day our younger son/Is going off to war/Fighting the age old battle/We've sometimes won before". This song, and the rest of the new album as I've since found out, marks a move back toward loud, electric Neil, showing that he hasn't completely mellowed into acoustic-folkiness in his old age. Obviously a distorted electric guitar adds a little more oomph to angry songs calling for the President's impeachment and railing against the state of the world than an acoustic one does. Neil has also added a new drummer, Chad Cromwell, who has a hard, driving style similar to Pearl Jam or the Stones. The first set consisted of these new rockers, with Crosby, Stills and Nash singing harmony or taking alternate lead breaks, and older CSNY classics, with C, S or N taking the lead and everyone else supporting. While I didn't know the music so well, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would; the CSN songs were better than I predicted and the new Neil stuff was everything I had hoped for. Neil wore a green military shirt with a matching hat and tilted back-and-forth heel to toe as he played, like a big rocking horse. David Crosby sang the lead on a few songs and played acoustic support on others with the neck of his guitar pointed at a 45 degree angle in a more a classical style. His voice is similar to Willie Nelson's, which I liked. When he wasn't playing guitar on a song, he stood at the mic with his arms at his sides, big belly sticking out, his Einstein-like grey hair all over the place and a big smile constantly present under his bushy moustache. He was Shauna's favourite. Stephen Stills wore a somewhat-hideous red, white and blue Hawaiian shirt and was very energetic, deeply bending into a lead break here, jumping up and down there. He has mannerisms and a voice very similar to Joe Cocker, and with his barrel chest and gut on short legs played an interesting contrast to Neil, who remains the tall, reedy one in the group. Graham Nash was very much Mr. Polished Average...he sang some nice songs, did the most talking to the audience, had the most kempt hair and clothing and reminded me a lot of Paul McCartney. For that reason I found him the least interesting.

The second set opened with a more acoustic feel, and they each took a turn leading a song on the piano. Neil's tune was "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" which was the first song that I fully recognized and could sing along to---before then it was all Living With War material, or CSNY songs that I might have heard before but didn't know well. The true diehard Neil Young fans out there might chastise me for ignoring all the material he's produced with CSN, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Maybe after seeing them and having them rise in my estimation, I'll pick up an album or two. I was hoping the second set would continue this way, with more of Neil's own material, but it switched back to CSNY stuff for awhile until returning to politics with "Find the Cost of Freedom". After this song a strange ceremony took place. Jimi Hendrix's version of "Star-Spangled Banner" played loudly over the speakers, the band abandoned stage and a ten-foot microphone rose up from the fog. A man, woman and boy walked on stage and pinned a giant yellow ribbon to the mic. Then they stood there contemplating it sadly for the rest of Hendrix's song. I couldn't tell if they were actors or a real family that had lost a son or daughter in Iraq. When this song ended, the band returned to the stage and struck up "Let's Impeach the President," the new album's most overtly critical song. The big screens displayed the words for people to sing along, and then footage of George W. Bush saying various things about Iraq, Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction, etc. and promptly contradicting himself, while Neil and the crowd shouted "Flip! Flop!" The crowd clearly shared Neil's opinion, but there was some booing during this song, notably from an old guy behind me, who, despite being decked out in tie-dye, had earlier asked his wife "Which one is Neil Young?" He got a lot of disapproving stares for his boos.

This song then led into "For What It's Worth," the most famous Buffalo Springfield song that is now synonymous with war and the world turning ugly. After that "Ohio," the song about the Kent State University protest shootings in 1971, was bookended by two CSNY songs I didn't recognize...and then everyone went wild with the unmistakeable percussive aggression of the opening chords of "Rockin' in the Free World." I don't think I know of any other songs quite like this one. It possesses such a hard-hitting rhythm, such scorn and anger in its lyrics, and Neil is famous for going into throes of guitar wildness while playing it (if you don't know what I mean, go to youtube.com and do a search for "Neil Young Rockin' in the Free World"...the top result is his rendition on Saturday Night Live in 1989, one of the greatest rock performances ever). As much as this song is bombastic, as much as it's testosterone-induced, it can't be denied. It's hard to be articulate about it---it's a song meant to blow speakers, to piss-off your neighbours, to knock over shit, to middle finger modern life---yet it's so lyrically cutting ("We got a thousand points of light/For the homeless man/We got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand"...peerless). An amazing display of muscle, emotion and thought. At Bethel the song went on forever, with both Stills and Neil playing lead breaks, and culminated in waves of deafening noise during which Neil broke half the strings on his guitar but kept playing. The band came back to play "Woodstock" as an encore, but in comparing intensity it was like a walk to the corner store after a marathon. I felt battered and bruised and out of breath and could only half pay attention.

Clearly this concert was very political, and very anti-war. At different times on the stage backdrop they projected the peace symbol normally, then skewed sideways and dripping paint, a silhouette of a helmeted soldier, and the yellow ribbon. During "Living With War" they played footage of Iraq and Afghanistan on the big screens in a mock-CNN style, with LWW in place of the station acronym, and anti-war statistics on a news ticker at the bottom. I think it was during "Find the Cost of Freedom" that the big screens displayed thumnail photos of all the Americans killed in Iraq, while at the bottom a casualty counter rose into the thousands. I've read a few tour reviews on the web and some are critical of it, calling it more of a political rally than a concert. Well, so what? The album is very political and harsh because it's responding to a very harsh time. I think some of the criticism hints at how bombastic and one-sided Neil's stance is, as though he doesn't understand the bigger picture. I counter that he's railing against a President and a government that have no clue about the bigger picture of the world, or if they have a clue, are burying their heads in the sand and taking a numb-skulled Us vs. Them approach. Neil's response is raw, but it's not unintelligent or uninformed. The album cover of Living With War is plain beige packaging, with the words painted in military stencil; I think the message is that it's an urgent time and there's very little that is subtle about it anymore.

All in all, it was a fantastic concert. I might have liked more of Neil's own material, but the CSNY songs were very good and I'm less opposed to adding some of their music to my collection now (and I'm going to own all of Neil's own albums sooner or later, anyway). The open air venue was fantastic, though they didn't have the asshole detector turned on at the gate: the old booing idiot; a teenage girl who insisted on standing up and "grooving" out of sync with the music, tossing her hair around narcissistically and all the while blocking the view of we seated folk; and a bizarre trio of an old guy who was either falling down drunk or had lost all equilibrium through illness but either way was extremely rude, his female caregiver and her husband who went on an expletive-laced tirade against her near the end of the show for bringing the old guy along to be babysat---all these people managed to get in and dim the glow on the show a bit. Was it the best concert I've seen? I think I'll hold off on a pronouncing the answer to that. You see, there's a long and detailed explanation as to why Nine Inch Nails, The Rolling Stones and Pearl Jam are also deserving of that title, yet no single show can quite claim it, I'll start with Nine In---....[I'm tuning myself out here]...

Next up: The Chili Peppers, Sept. 26 at the ACC...