Music
A storehouse of dreams and memories illuminated the songs and stories that comprised Neil Young's two private performances at the Ryman Auditorium last week. The performances were staged for a movie by director Jonathan Demme, who just four weeks before the tapings asked Young if he could shoot a documentary built around a concert featuring the songs from his forthcoming album, Prairie Wind.
Young wrote the 10 songs from the record in a rush of inspiration after suffering a brain aneurysm, for which he underwent emergency surgery in late March and has received ongoing neuro-radiology treatments. He wrote the rest of the songs following the death of his 87-year-old father Scott, a Canadian writer and journalist who lived with Alzheimer's during his final years.
The material on Prairie Wind draws on Young's memories of his father, his own children and his Canadian homeland. Images of farmlands, trains, birds, wildlife and undeveloped natural areas, each of which has faded from view during Young's lifetime, recur throughout the lyrics. "This song is about growing up," he said of "No Wonder," the second cut on Prairie Wind, which he performed in its entirety, without second takes. "It's about things that are happening today and things that may never happen again."
Working with the same sort of folk-rock arrangements that he did on the album, which was recorded here this summer, Young played acoustic guitar, harmonica and piano all evening. The only exception was his late-concert revival of 1992's "Old King," for which he picked a banjo. Providing continuity with his earlier work in this unvarnished acoustic vein was steel guitarist Ben Keith, who played on the other albums Young has recorded in Nashville, including Harvest (1972), Comes a Time (1978) and Old Ways (1985).
Young's Ryman performances also continue his mixing of music and film, which goes back to the experimental movie he made to accompany his 1972 album Journey Through the Past. Besides the 2003 feature film Greendale, which Young directed, he has released a handful of concert films, most famous among them Rust Never Sleeps. He's worked with Demme several times before: the director filmed his 1994 concert documentary The Complex Sessions, and Young contributed the title song to Demme's 1993 movie Philadelphia
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Demme's Ryman crew was unobtrusive, never stopping Young mid-performance and quickly changing players and sets between numbers. The two main hand-painted backdrops they employed were done in muted golden hues. One depicted a wide-open Canadian prairie, the other a cabin living room with a stone fireplace, easy chair and throw rug. Everyone onstage (some 30 musicians throughout the evening, including the Fisk Jubilee Singers) wore Western-cut clothes, with the women—Emmylou Harris and harmony singers Diana Dewitt and Pegi Young (Neil's wife)—clad in the kind of pioneer-style dresses seen in the movies of John Ford.
Most captivating, though, were Young's openhearted new songs, especially those about his family, friendships and native Winnipeg. Young often talked at length between songs. Before "Far From Home," he remembered his father bringing home a ukulele to play with the family. Even during a rehearsal performance of the bouncy mid-tempo tune, featuring sweet brass by The Memphis Horns, he was overcome with emotion.
"Far From Home" opens with Young singing, "When I was a growing boy / Rocking on my Daddy's knee / Daddy took an old guitar and sang, 'Bury me on the ol' prairie,' "—a reference to a Canadian song that contradicts the old cowboy tune, "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie." Young brings the song into the present and future as the chorus rolls around, joyously crowing, "Bury me out on the prairie / Where the buffalo used to roam / Where the Canada geese once filled the sky / And then I won't be far from home."
Both nights, Young introduced the title song of Prairie Wind by talking about the death of his father. "We're getting to the age where some of us start losing our parents," he said, noting that his father fought dementia toward the end of his life.
A jagged and dark song with an undercurrent of unresolved anger at the cruelty of dying, "Prairie Wind" opens, "Trying to remember what my Daddy said / Before too much time took away his head." Accompanying himself with a haunting guitar figure, Young rails at those who fail to recognize the importance of untouched natural land: "I try to tell people, but they never heard a word I say / They say there's nothing out there but wheat fields anyway." On the chorus, harmony singers repeat the line, "Prairie wind blowing through my head," tying together Young's ecological concerns and the brain-related medical problems he and his father recently confronted in different ways.
The death of friends and colleagues came up throughout the evening, too. Young paid tribute in both shows to his former duet partner (and lover) Nicolette Larson, who died of cerebral edema in 1997. Larson, he said, used to tease him with stories of how she and her high school buddies mimicked his voice while bouncing down the washboard-like dirt roads, the shaking truck beds giving their voices the same shaky vibrato as Young's.
Young also noted the recent passing of hillbilly jazz fiddler Vassar Clements and Cajun fiddler Rufus Thibodeaux (the latter of whom played on Young's Comes a Time), and he talked about working with the Nashville rhythm section consisting of the late drummer Kenny Buttrey and bassist Tim Drummond.
Young addressed other issues close to home. "I'm an empty nester," he said introducing "Here's to You," a musical letter to his 21-year-old daughter. "I never knew what that term meant until I felt it." He went on to say that he's written love songs all of his life, "songs for those young gals, dreaming about them and falling in love with them. But this one here, it's a different type of love song."
Prairie Wind also honors rock 'n' roll and country music, the yin and yang of Young's aesthetic, with a rave-up rockabilly toast to Elvis Presley and a tender tribute to a guitar that once belonged to Hank Williams. Young, who played the guitar at the Ryman, bought the instrument in Nashville 35 years ago from Dobro player Tut Taylor.
Young reckoned that the old guitar last appeared on the Ryman stage in 1951, in Williams' final performance on the Grand Ole Opry. "I'm glad to see it back here," he told the crowd, then looked upward and gave a little wave of his hand. With Emmylou Harris on harmony (and playing her Mother Maybelle model Gibson guitar), he started into the song, which opens, "This old guitar ain't mine to keep / Just taking care of it now." He later performed "The Needle and the Damage Done" on the same instrument—a reminder that the guitar was in Williams' Cadillac when the singer died after an injection of morphine and other drugs.
Young has often created his best work in response to outside events, whether protesting the Vietnam War ("Ohio," "Helpless"), the death and drug abuse of his bandmates and friends (Tonight's the Night), or the challenges faced by aging rockers (Rust Never Sleeps). If his Ryman shows last week are any indication, Prairie Wind, which was written during a time of family trauma, will take its place among the best of Young's many great recordings.
Meanwhile, the second part of the Ryman shows found Young reviving his best-loved folk-tinged material, including "Heart of Gold," "Comes a Time," "I Am a Child" and "Old Man." In the last of these, which Young wrote 33 years ago for the elderly caretaker of his California ranch, he sings, "Old man take a look at your life / I'm a lot like you." Young, who will turn 60 in November, is now becoming an old man himself. With Prairie Wind, he takes his advice, looking long and deep at his life to find that he is indeed a lot like the rest of us.