Greendale -- Neil Young and Crazy Horse

Last Tuesday evening M., a freind from Marquette who has moved to Detroit, and I went down to the Fox Theater in downtown Detroit to hear Neil Young and Crazy Horse. We took a wrong turn or two getting down there, but despite (or perhaps because of?) M.'s nervous insistence on locking all the doors before entering downtown, we failed to get mugged or carjacked. (Actually, it's probably because no self-respecting thug would want my vehicle, or imagine that it contained anything worth stealing.)

First impressions of the theater itself were impressive, despite its seedy surroundings. The Fox must be one of the most extravagantly excessive movie palaces ever built. (It was later modified into a live venue.) The lobby is at least two stories tall, with red marble, elaborate painting, and lavish gilded ornamentation dripping from almost every square inch. It was a bit strange to see aging, leather-clad biker types with "Neil Young" tattoos on their arms casually wandering about such a venue, but so be it. The interior of the theater is equally lush, with pseudo-Oriental (Indian?) statuettes lining the walls and a golden elephant's head incongruously looming over the stage. Since I'm on a librarian's salary and M. is similarly underpaid, this approximates the view from the seats we could afford. Not that hearing Young and his famously raucous band was likely to be a problem at any distance....

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Greendale. Young has never been afraid of trying new genres and new ideas. Sometimes I think that, like Mervyn Peake, Young strives to do things that are difficult for him simply because they are difficult. (Young is frequently quoted as saying that his bestselling 1972 song Heart of Gold "... put me in the middle of the road. It got boring there, so I headed for the ditch.") Sometimes this has resulted in work of rare independence and originality; other times, it has resulted in awkward pastiches. I admire his versatility and nerve... but what was Greendale going to be?

When I saw the drum kit and the usual musical paraphenalia on stage surrounded by what looked like sets for a play, and then looked at the playbill and saw that it began with a family tree and a "Who's Who" including several credits to "Bernard Shakey", Young's pseudonymous cinematic alter-ego, plus credits for additional vocals by "The Mountainettes", followed by a "History of the Green Family" extending for several pages, my perplexity deepened.

I needn't have worried so much. It seems that in Greendale, Young has decided to incorporate storytelling, drama, and projected movie images, into his work. Clad in worn clothes with a grimy gimme-cap shadowing his face, he introduced each song with a short vignette telling a story about the inhabitants of the mythical small town of Greendale, a place which seems to exist in Young's mind the same way that Lake Wobegon exists in Garrison Keillor's. What resulted was a sort of Neil Young-style musical play, with Young and the band at center stage as actors played out the roles of various characters in his imagination on three stages around the perimeter of the stage, occasionally running across the stage or interacting with the musicians. It's eccentric and occasionally self-referential -- at one point, Young, singing the role of a character, gripes:

Seems like that guy singing this song has been doing it for a long time/
Is there anything you know that he ain't said?"

While voicing the same character, in the midst of a diatribe against obnoxious media coverage later in show, he takes another self-referential jab:

That guy who just keeps singing ? can't somebody shut him up?
I don't know for the life of me where he comes up with this stuff!

The set designs, and occasionally the acting, are gleefully amateurish. To nobody's surprise, Young's story and songs take unsubtle aim at several of his favorite political targets: corporatism, Clear Channel, environmental pollution, and the warmongering and citizen-surveilling aspirations of the Bush Administration. At one point, after a traffic stop in mythical Greendale has gone catastrophically wrong, resulting in a death, the discovery of a cache of weapons and "subversive" literature, and an Ashcroftian law-enforcement crackdown, a cartoon of a large billboard emblazoned "Clear Channel : Support Our War!" looms over the stage while Young sings:

There's no need to worry
There's no reason to fuss
Just go on about your work now
And leave the driving to us
And we'll be watching you no matter what you do
And you can do your part by watching others too.

(The Evil Empire is apparently not particularly concerned about this implied criticism, since they will happily sell tickets to his upcoming shows. From a server named "Orwell", no less.)

At one point in the show, after the sound system had apparently failed to adequately handle the droning bass note underlying the beautiful acoustic ballad Bandit, resulting in some unwanted unpleasant sound effects, Young seemed visibly irritated. A couple of obnoxious concertgoers who kept loudly whistling and shrieking during his next storytelling vignette, dealing with a meal delivered to a jailed character, became the targets for his well-known mercurial temper, as he briefly interrupted the story to snarl at them: "Why don't ya whistle at that? Don'cha like biscuits, ya f*ckin' *ssholes?" Before starting the next song, he asked one of the roadies for a C harmonica, and ostentaciously placed it on a stand in front of him. "This is for the guy that was whistling. All ya gotta do is come up after the show and get it...."

The Whistler shut up, at least for the remainder of Greendale.

Typically, Young sees the possibility for salvation in the young (no pun intended) and idealistic. The final song in the show, Be the Rain, is an energetic hymn to environmentalism: "We gotta job to do / we gotta save the Earth for another day...." Sun Green, a hippie-like idealistic young woman, takes on the crusade against corporatism, pollution, etc., despite harassment from police and FBI-type investigators. Many of her lines (as sung by Young) are delivered through a megaphone as she takes on PowerCo ("Hey Mister Clean, you're dirty now too....") and various unspecified environmental evildoers. I'll admit that the love affair between Sun and her lover "Earth Brown" was rather confusing and even embarrassing, but on the whole Greendale was enjoyable. It probably won't go down as Young's greatest work, but it's not an embarrassing oddity on the scale of Trans.

And then. And then.

After several minutes of silence, Young and Crazy Horse came back out for an "encore" of classic Crazy Horse songs that lasted nearly an hour and a half. An hour and a half of raucous roadhouse rock and roll from the King of Howling Feedback, with the walls of the theater literally shaking and thousands of Detroiters screaming themselves hoarse, singing along with familiar refrains, and (judging from the occasional odors) toking up with abandon. I won't bother trying to describe this part of the concert, because if you've ever heard Neil Young and Crazy Horse, you either love their unabashedly aggressive playing or you hate it. The final song, Down by the River, was awesomely, magnificently, powerful in its dirgelike pace and doom-laden grief. Listening to it on CD the next day proved only that listening to Neil Young and Crazy Horse on CD is nothing like hearing them in person.