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Also this issue: Random House Melt Banana Alexi Murdoch Tom Tom Club DJ Buck Mary Lee's Corvette Yerba Buena The Gossip |
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July 10-16, 2003
music
According to critic Christopher O’Connor, Neil Young’s 2002 Are You Passionate? wasn’t "bad," so much as it was "Neil Young bad." There’s something to the idea that Young should be judged on his own scale, less because he’s beyond criticism than because even his colossal missteps (and there have been a few) form part of the ragged patchwork that makes Neil Neil. So think of Greendale, the unreleased concept album/stage show he brought to the Tweeter last week, as "Neil Young crazy." His cavernous guitar sound is enough to enliven the most pedestrian composition, but Greendale’s songs are an ambling, shaggy lot, bereft of choruses and so awkwardly structured that the rhymes (when there are any) come off like doggerel. The awkwardness was only compounded by Greendale’s stage show, which featured actors (including Twin Peaks’ Russ Tamblyn) mouthing the words as Young sang them -- though "mouthing" doesn’t begin to suggest the degree of arm-flailing involved. The Tweeter’s audience responded lustily to Young’s potshots at mile-wide targets like the media, Clear Channel and duplicitous politicians (boo!) and a handful of syrupy nostrums ("Some day, you’ll find/ everything you’re looking for.") But then, if they were hung up on lyrics, they wouldn’t be Neil Young fans, would they?
Not surprisingly, the Greendale set peaked with the lengthy instrumental passages of "Carmichael," followed by the lulling "Bandit," which Young performed on a rattling acoustic guitar, nary a convulsing actor in site. As Greendale drew to a close, Grandpa Green had been killed by the media (a heart attack brought on by an overzealous TV reporter), and his granddaughter, Sun, had become a sort of Avril-esque ecoterrorist. The stage then flooded with youngsters dancing to the swinging sounds of Crazy Horse, pumping their fists and shouting, "Save the planet for another day." The audience, their plastic guitar-shaped cups hoisted high, seemed to agree.
The clip from Rust Never Sleeps that preceded the encores, featuring that tour's Jawa-esque road crew, seemed designed to remind the audience that this is hardly the first time Young's done something odd, although it has been a year or 15. Those who made it that far got to hear Crazy Horse pound through a passel of hits -- and to actually hear guitarist Frank Sampedro for the first time, as he'd been banished to inaudible keyboards for the main set -- which just served to make you think how few of Greendale's songs are likely to survive this one peculiar incarnation.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse
July 2, Tweeter Center
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