The World Wide Glen: Welcome to My Thoughtmare

Welcome

Welcome

Welcome to the ongoing web journal of Glen Boyd. Glen is a former music professional and journalist who is currently a music editor for Blogcritics Magazine.

Mining Neil Young's
Heart of Gold

I've always loved Neil Young.

For just about as long as I can remember loving music, Neil Young has been right up there in probably my top two or three favorite artists.

But it hasn't always been easy.

You see, when he is at the top of his game, there are basically two Neil Youngs.

One is the organic, reflective folkie responsible for mellow classics like Harvest, Comes A Time, and Harvest Moon.

The other is the wild, thrashing guitarist who gave us Rust Never Sleeps, Cortez the Killer, Like a Hurricane and the rest...as well as some of the loudest concerts in rock history with his band Crazy Horse.

But in between the time he spends making great records like those, Neil Young has this really irritating habit of spending years...sometimes entire decades...doing these goofy experiments.

In the eighties, it was Trans and The Shocking Pinks. More recently, Neil Young has released wildly uneven work like the albums Are You Passionate? and Greendale.

Neil Young's track record with film hasn't been that great either.

From Journey Through The Past to the jumbled 8 milimeter looking mess that is Greendale, the problem with Neil Young's films (concert documentaries and otherwise) has been a consistently amateurish quality.

Even the Rust Never Sleeps film, despite the great music on it, plays as a somewhat dark and grainy looking document viewed nearly twenty years later.

But the thing about Neil Young is you can always count on him to eventually find his way back home. And even though it may sometimes take ten years for him to hit that one homerun...when he does, he usually bats it clean out of the park.

Prairie Wind, the album Neil Young released last fall is just one of those records.

Recorded in Nashville with longtime cronies like Ben Keith and Spooner Oldham, the album is a flawless return to the form of records like Harvest Moon.

It is also quite possibly the most lyrically personal album of Neil Young's career.

Last August, Neil Young premiered Prairie Wind with a pair of concerts at Nashville's historic and accoustically pristine Ryman Auditorium.

The concerts we're filmed by veteran filmmaker Jonathan Demme, known for another great concert documentary, the Talking Heads "Stop Making Sense".

With Neil Young: Heart of Gold, this great artist's fans now finally have the great, definitive film document of Neil Young onstage they've waited so long for.

By carefully avoiding the cliches of most concert films...the quick edits, arty effects, and multiple camera angles...and instead focusing directly on what's happening on the stage, Demme has made a film that captures all of the warmth of the music itself.

The film also manages to communicate the unique and special atmosphere of the event, even while making it seem as intimate as though Neil Young and company we're performing the songs right in your living room.

A big part of the key to this is the staging. For the majority of the film, Neil Young and his band perform in various combinations ranging from Young alone solo at the piano or guitar to a huge ensemble complete with horns, strings, several backing vocalists, and a gospel choir. They do so in front of a gorgeous yellow pastel prairie backdrop (which occasionally changes to a deep blue) that matches the color of much of the music you hear in the film.

For the first set, Neil Young concentrates on the deeply personal songs of Prairie Wind...an album made at virtually the same time Young's father passed away and Young himself had his own brush with mortality in the form of a brain anyeurism.

The songs focus on themes of life, death, family, and mortality...and although there is an intimate, organic quality to many of these songs, the performances...from both Young and the band...have a certain intensity, even if it is a relatively quiet one. The expressions on Neil Young's face as he performs these songs are often every bit as intense as on his most cranked up to eleven shredding with Crazy Horse.

Young's comments between the songs are also very revealing. Introducing Prairie Wind's title track, he begins the story of watching his father struggle with dementia before his death, before letting the song's opening lyrics finish the tale:

"Tryin to remember what my Daddy said, before too much time took away his head..."

On "This Old Guitar", Neil talks about the guitar he is playing once being owned (and played in this same Ryman Auditorium) by Hank Williams Sr, and how he is merely the instrument's present caretaker. On "When God Made Me", another of Prairie Wind's many songs dealing with issues of mortality, Neil seems to be trying to come to terms with his own spirituality.

On another song "Here For You", Neil Young talks about his 21 year old daughter leaving the nest for college and that he wrote this love song for her. In a humorously touching moment, he then catches a glimpse at wife Pegi behind him and quips that he "still has a few of those left."

It is moments like this...and there are several of them in the film, between Neil, Pegi, and several members of the band...that give Heart of Gold much of it's uniquely intimate feel.

For the second set, Neil Young turns to the older material of Harvest, Harvest Moon, and the often overlooked Comes A Time, whose title track is sung as a duet with Emmylou Harris, who is still as beautiful as ever even in snow white hair.

The gorgeous title track of Harvest Moon, one of Young's best songs ever, is sung here as a warm lullaby, punctuated by Ben Keith's chiming pedal steel and an actual broom being swept rhythmically across the floor. Talk about organic...

For Old Man, Neil Young tells the story of how he wrote the song for the caretaker at his ranch as an answer to the question "how does a young fella like you afford all this?". Neil answers that he's just lucky.




Heart of Gold is not just a great concert film, but a rare and surprisingly intimate glimpse into one of our greatest artists, who at 60, appears to just be getting warmed up.

For more on Heart of Gold and all other things Neil Young, I highly recommend checking out Thrashers Wheat, which can be accessed at the web address below.
http://www.thrasherswheat.org/wheatfield.html