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Silver and Gold, Looking Forward, 9/11, Are You Passionate?, and Greendale
With the dawn of the new millennium, Neil Young went on something of a creative tear with a flurry of new projects, many of which involved a revolving cast of familiar players—including CSN, various members of the Stray Gators, and the ever-reliable Crazy Horse—who had served him so well in the past.
First up was the latest CSN&Y reunion, resulting in yet another disappointing album (1999’s Looking Forward) that once again failed to recapture the original magic of 1970’s classic Déjà Vu.
However, for their first extended run of concerts together since 1974’s Doom Tour—aside from occasional one-offs like their appearance at the 1985 Live Aid mega benefit—things went much better. If anything, the CSNY2K tour proved once and for all that the public appetite for live CSN&Y had not abated one bit. Indeed, the hunger for these shows amongst fans—including a new generation of concertgoers who were unable to experience them the first time around—remained as strong as it had ever been.
For all of its success from a musical and commercial standpoint, though, the CSNY2K tour also raised just as many questions.
Although the shows brought the expected sellout crowds—and the band also delivered the goods musically—the tour also helped set in motion a disturbing trend among touring legacy acts for charging exorbitantly high ticket prices. With the best seats for CSNY2K topping out at a then-unheard-of $200 a pop, the CSNY2K tour set a new pricing standard that was subsequently adopted by a number of other classic acts from the sixties, seventies, and eighties rock era. This included everyone from the Eagles and the Stones to U2 and the Police.
The high prices remain largely in place today, although there are a few notable exceptions to the rule. Bruce Springsteen is certainly one artist who could easily get away with charging more for his concerts, but has instead chosen to keep his reunion tours with the E Street Band priced under $100. Bob Dylan’s shows have also maintained a more reasonably modest ticket price. Young, on the other hand, has continued the practice of charging the high ticket prices that he helped pioneer. This has remained true whether he is playing with a full band in an arena or doing small theatres on his solo concert tours.
But we’ll get to more on that soon enough.
Neil Young performing at Willie Nelson’s 2003 4th of July picnic.
Photo by Mary Andrews
So I Dove into the Darkness, and I Let My Missiles Fly
Young’s work during the new millennium also found him reembracing various social and political concerns. These ran the gamut from the pro-environmentalist stance of albums like Greendale to the brasher “folk-metal-protest” of Living with War.
Not surprisingly, and as has always been the case with Young, many of these songs also carried mixed messages. There are few other artists in all of rock ’n’ roll—and even fewer coming from his same sixties hippie era—who in just four short years could go from the patriotic rah-rah of 2002’s post-9/11 “Let’s Roll” to 2006’s impassioned cry of “Let’s Impeach the President.”
It can certainly be said Neil Young was a man of many contradictions then and also that he remains one to this day.
Yet as frequently as his post-nineties work shifted lyrical gears, the changes were just as often musical ones. His status as one of the only rock-’n’-roll artists of his generation able to maintain continuing musical and social relevance for younger generations of listeners probably has as much to do with own artistic restlessness as it does with anything else. The decade about to unfold found Young about as musically all over the place as he had ever been.
But first, he would give Crosby, Stills, and Nash another try.
I Feel Like Making Up for Lost Time
In many ways, 1999’s CSN&Y reunion album and subsequent tour happened as the result of a happy accident. As part of the journey of musical rediscovery that came about as the result of his own ongoing work on the Archives project, Young had taken an unexpected, though quite necessary side road through his sixties work with Buffalo Springfield. This ultimately resulted in a Buffalo Springfield boxed set of its own (2001’s Box Set).
As the story goes, what began as a meeting with former Springfield bandmate Stephen Stills in order to get him to sign off on the Springfield box ended with Neil Young himself signing on for the latest Crosby, Stills, and Nash album.
At the time, he was putting the final touches on his own album—an acoustic record he had been making on and off in between Crazy Horse tours dating back to 1997. Upon hearing a new Stills song for the CSN album that his former bandmate was working on, Young was impressed enough with what he had heard to offer his own services on guitar. From there, he then offered up the pick of the litter of songs for his own then projected album Silver and Gold.
Picture sleeve for the “Sun Green” single from Greendale.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
Four Neil Young songs (the most from any of CSN&Y’s four members)—”Slowpoke,” “Out of Control,” “Queen of Them All,” and “Looking Forward”—were selected for what by now was shaping up to be a full-blown Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reunion album. One of them, “Looking Forward,” was also picked as the title track.
While the resulting Looking Forward album didn’t exactly set the world on fire either critically or commercially, the tour did huge business, raking in $42 million and earning CSN&Y the #8 spot on that year’s list of the most profitable concert attractions.
In 2000, Young also released what is arguably the quietest, most low-key record of his career. Silver and Gold was a record he had been attempting to complete off and on for nearly three years. At one point in the process, Acoustica was briefly considered as a working title.
Conceived as an acoustic album, it was eventually fleshed out with the addition of many of the same familiar names used on his previous “folkie” outings Harvest and Comes a Time, including Stray Gators Ben Keith and keyboardist Spooner Oldham as well as backup vocalists Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. They were joined by bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn and drummer Jim Keltner, both of whom had toured with Young in the nineties during his brief fling with Booker T. and the MGs after the “Bobfest” tribute to Dylan.
Where the songs on both Harvest and Comes a Time contain undeniable elements of pop craftsmanship and, in many cases, appear to be purely designed with commercial radio play in mind, Silver and Gold feels like a much more personal album. It is certainly a quieter, moodier-sounding record than either of its more obviously commercial predecessors. Some of the songs are also quite old, with the title track in particular dating back several years.
Concert shirt for the Greendale tour.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
What really makes Silver and Gold stand out, though, is the fact that Young has never sounded more, dare we say it, “contented” than he does on this album. The easy, back porch vibe of the music certainly reinforces the album’s overall laid-back mood. But the lyrics of the songs also seem to reveal a far more relaxed and less restless side of Young’s typically more relentless nature.
Songs like “Silver and Gold,” “Good to See You Again,” and especially the gorgeous “Razor Love” find him embracing simple values like love and family, even as he yearns wistfully for the opportunity of having another go with his more distant rock-’n’-roll past on “Buffalo Springfield Again.” Album closer “Without Rings” also boasts one of Young’s best vocal performances, with the dreamlike lyrics sung in the same beautiful lower register heard on “Ambulance Blues” from On the Beach (yet with nary a hint of that song’s more depressing tone).
The overall result is some of the simplest and prettiest music of his entire career. Subtle is not usually a word associated with Neil Young, but the relaxed, airy sentiments heard on Silver and Gold are so beautifully understated, at times it’s as though they are barely even there.
An acoustic concert video, also titled Silver and Gold, was released in 2000 on VHS format as a complement to the album. The concert features several songs from the album, along with those that ended up on CSN&Y’s Looking Forward. There are also some interesting rarities, like a performance of “Philadelphia,” the song Young wrote for the Jonathan Demme film of the same name.
For the tour to promote the Silver and Gold album, he hit the road with a band including Oldham, Keith, Dunn, and Keltner, along with wife Pegi and sister Astrid filling the backup singer roles of Ronstadt and Harris on the album. Yet another live album, 2000’s largely forgettable Road Rocks V1: Friends and Relatives, was culled from the tour’s stop at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre. This same show was also released in video form as Red Rocks Live: Friends and Relatives, and is still available on DVD.
Time Is Runnin’ Out
Sometime around the year 2000, in between the barnstorming CSNY2K arena tour and the more sublime pleasures found on Silver and Gold, Young found time to book studio time with Crazy Horse in San Francisco for yet another rumored to be complete, but never released album called Toast.
The projected album title reportedly comes from the location of these sessions, as does the one song that survived and made it onto a Neil Young album. A barn burner in the tradition of “Hurricane” and Ragged Glory’s “Love and Only Love,” “Goin’ Home” is the only song credited to Crazy Horse on the 2002 album Are You Passionate?. The recording locale is likewise simply listed as “Toast, San Francisco, CA, USA” on the CD’s foldout inner sleeve. In 2002, on the second Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reunion tour in two years, “Goin’ Home” became a highpoint of the shows night after night, as it became the vehicle for some particularly fiery guitar duels in the ongoing shootout between Young and Stills.
There are strong rumors that the rest of the Toast album may yet surface, as part of the second volume of Archives.
Another standout from the album that eventually became Are You Passionate? is “Let’s Roll,” a song Young released several months earlier as a single, just weeks following the 9/11 attacks. The title refers to the phrase Todd Beamer uttered to fellow passengers abroad United Airlines Flight 93 just before their heroic decision to fight back against the terrorists on September 11, 2011—a suicide mission that ultimately crashed their plane into a Pennsylvania field below, killing everyone onboard.
Written quickly in much the same way that “Ohio” had been some thirty years prior, the political messages of the two songs couldn’t be further apart. Although “Let’s Roll” wasn’t initially criticized during the generally united mood of the country following 9/11, it was later thought by some to be an endorsement of George W. Bush and a return to the conservative political stance of some of Young’s mid-eighties work.
Any such notions however, were put to rest a few years later with the release of 2006’s Living with War and the strident, anti-Bush tone of songs featuring none-too-subtle titles like “Let’s Impeach the President.”
The remaining songs on Are You Passionate? feature a band comprised of Booker T. and the MGs members Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Booker T. Jones himself, along with Young mainstays like Frank “Poncho” Sampedro (all three of whom are also credited as co-producers). The album also marks the emergence of a new, more soulful, Motown-influenced sound, which drew some jeers at the time that Young had returned to his eighties genre-hopping ways.
Although the album is slightly uneven (the oddly placed sore thumb of a Crazy Horse guitar assault like “Goin’ Home” in the middle of this album, great as it is, doesn’t help matters much), there is little denying the tight, soulful groove of the band. Booker T.’s organ flourishes are especially sweet on “You’re My Girl,” “Let’s Roll,” and “When I Hold You in My Arms.” Neil does Motown—who knew?
Generators Were Runnin’, Vans Parked in the Field
Greendale, released in 2003, may be the strangest record of Neil Young’s career. Part rock opera and part stream-of-consciousness political rant, Greendale is also perhaps the most audacious project in a body of work already characterized by such initially misunderstood albums as Tonight’s the Night. It is certainly among his most ambitious.
Initially premiered with a series of solo shows where Neil performed the new songs in a stripped-down acoustic format, Greendale eventually ballooned into a full-band album with Crazy Horse, as well as an accompanying film—shot in the same grainy, surrealistic cinema verité style of previous Neil Young celluloid adventures Journey Through the Past and Human Highway.
There was also a theatrical concert presentation of Greendale with Crazy Horse, featuring a cheesy set composed of cardboard cutouts depicting its fictional town and what one critic described as “fifty people on stage” (they were actually actors playing the roles of Greendale characters like Grandpa, Carmichael, and Sun Green).
The Greendale tour also continued the tradition of higher ticket prices that had begun on the CSNY2K tour, a fact that Young justified in interviews by essentially saying this weeded out the riff-raff, drawing a higher caliber of concertgoer who could better appreciate this latest example of the artist chasing after his muse.
Still, perhaps as a concession to those who could afford the tickets, Young and Crazy Horse closed every show with a quick set of favorites like “Hurricane” and “Rockin’ in the Free World,” following the front-to-back performance of Greendale. He also backed the eco-friendly message of Greendale by transporting its larger-than-usual crew from city to city in buses powered by environmentally safe bio-diesel fuel.
Be the Rain
Where Greendale is concerned, the parallels to Tonight’s the Night drawn by some longtime Neil Young observers are not without merit.
During the initial acoustic performances of the album (which were also included as a bonus disc on early pressings of the full-band CD with Crazy Horse), Young painstakingly laid out the storyline behind his new songs in some of the longest in-between song raps witnessed by audiences since the often hallucinatory breaks experienced on Tonight’s the Night’s tour of likewise previously unheard material.
For all of its lofty ambition as Young’s first-ever bona fide “concept album,” the music likewise most closely resembles the boozy, minimalist blues dirge of Tonight’s the Night. Although half of the album’s songs have run times of seven minutes or more (with “Grandpa’s Interview” clocking in just shy of 13:00), there are no blazing solos or fiery guitar exchanges to be heard. In fact, much of the time the songs just go on in a repetitious drone that grows a little monotonous at times, with occasionally trite lyrical rhymes (see the aforementioned “Grandpa’s Interview”).
Critical reaction to Greendale at the time of its release was also predictably mixed—depending on who you talked to it was either “the most important album of 2003” or “worse than Trans.” The album was still a modest hit, bought primarily by Young’s hardcore fans as well as by the curious who had read about it. Greendale peaked at #22 on the Billboard albums chart.
Reprise Records green vinyl single of “Sun Green” from Neil Young’s Greendale album.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
John Lennon Said That
The loose story told in the lyrics of Greendale’s songs revolves around a cast of characters including the aforementioned Grandpa, his modern-day flower child daughter Sun Green, her cop-killing brother Jed, and Carmichael (the cop he killed). With the small, rural town of Greendale as its backdrop, these characters evolve through a series of economical and ecological hardships amidst a whirlpool of small-town violence, government corruption, and environmental scandal as told through some of Young’s most pointedly topical songs to date.
As has traditionally been the case when he tackles political subjects in his lyrics, there is little doubt of his sincerity, even if the messages themselves are mixed—sometimes within a single passage. On “Devil’s Sidewalk,” for example, he couples the lines “one thing I can tell you, is you got to be free, John Lennon said that, and I believe in love” with “I believe in action, when push comes to shove.” Never let it be said that Young is one to let a simple contradiction get in the way of telling a good story.
At the end of the day, Greendale is exactly that, too—a very good story, told by one of the greatest musical storytellers of the twentieth century. For all of its deceptively simple, stripped-down blues, the album also contains some great songs—mostly notably the whispered, off-chord acoustic guitar standout “Bandit” and “Be the Rain,” a “full cast” rock-opera closer worthy of the Who’s Tommy.
Ambitious? Without a doubt. Overreaching? Perhaps. Uncompromising? Absolutely.
Whether you love it or hate it, 2003’s Greendale serves as a reminder of just exactly why Neil Young still matters.