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Living with War, “Let’s Impeach the President,” and the Freedom of Speech Tour
Throughout his career, Neil Young has consistently defied convention. Where many other artists of his generation might have been content to follow the path of least commercial resistance, he has always boldly followed his artistic instincts, for better or for worse. This stubborn dedication to his muse has led him to create a body of work that is notable as much for abrupt turns of style as it is for producing so many great, timeless songs—from “Heart of Gold” to “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
In the seventies, this meant following up his commercial breakthrough album Harvest with the darkness and desolation that permeates such personal work as On the Beach, and the only much later to be fully appreciated Tonight’s the Night. In the eighties, this meant releasing a series of albums so stylistically schizophrenic—from Kraftwerk-influenced syntho-pop to fifties-style rockabilly—that Geffen Records actually sued him over his failure to make a “Neil Young” album.
So it should have surprised no one when Young announced the latest of his trademark artistic curveballs in 2006—a fierce, cranked-to-eleven rock assault featuring ten new songs that could best be described as all-out antiwar anthems. The album was called Living with War. Less than a year after the warm-and-fuzzy, quiet reflection of Prairie Wind, Young shocked the world with this self described “folk metal protest” record.
In the process, he probably also made some powerful enemies.
Not Ready to Make Nice
Neil Young has often followed his louder records with quiet ones, and vice versa. Comes a Time was followed by Rust Never Sleeps; Ragged Glory by Harvest Moon. But there had never been anything quite like this. At a time when the country was bitterly divided over President George W. Bush’s foreign adventures in Iraq (not to mention their economic repercussions at home), musicians who dared to speak out against the war and against the president were not immune from doing so at considerable risk to their own careers.
In the most famous example of this, the Dixie Chicks overnight went from country darlings to political pariahs following outspoken singer Natalie Maines’s off-the-cuff, anti-Bush comments during a concert in London. “We don’t want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas,” Maines infamously told her foreign audience, instantly inflaming large segments of the traditionally more conservative country fan base back at home and earning Maines taunts of “traitor” and worse.
You’d have thought Hanoi Jane herself was back from Vietnam.
Fans who had once flocked to the Dixie Chicks shows, now burned their records at events organized by radio stations—with covert backing from Republican sources, according to some accusers. These same country stations were also dropping Dixie Chicks songs from their playlists faster than you could say “Disco Sucks” or “Lennon Claims Beatles Bigger Than Jesus.”
After a tour marked by cancelled shows that saw their once huge audience shrink by up to fifty percent according to some estimates, the Dixie Chicks rebounded with 2007’s Rick Rubin–produced Taking the Long Way album (and its defiant single “Not Ready to Make Nice”). The album also earned the Chicks a Grammy for Album of the Year. But the fallout over Dixie-gate still had lasting repercussions. The Dixie Chicks have remained mostly inactive as a touring and recording musical act ever since.
Neil Young fans were likewise split down the middle over his new songs like the provocatively titled “Lets Impeach the President.” Although Living with War sold decently, peaking at #15 on Billboard’s albums chart, there were still some fears that Young might be headed for the same fate of commercial death as the Dixie Chicks.
On Internet blogs like Thrasher’s Wheat and Blogcritics, heated debates between conservative and liberal fans often turned ugly. Young himself did little to simmer the flames, dialing the rhetoric up a notch further with interviews on cable news outlets like CNN and streaming the album for free on his own website. On the same site, he also launched the Living with War Blog, with continuous updates from the war, along with links to various antiwar organizations and veterans’ rights groups.
Déjà Vu Again
The latest reunion tour with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young—complete with the by-now usual practice of exorbitantly high ticket prices—focusing more on Young’s Bush-bashing album than on the band’s back catalog of hits only further ignited the growing firestorm. It wasn’t uncommon to hear fan complaints like “I didn’t pay two hundred bucks to hear this shit” during CSN&Y’s 2006 Freedom of Speech tour, particularly when it played the southern states.
As captured on the 2008 documentary film CSNY: Déjà Vu, the divisions between these two equally combustible elements making up both CSNY and Young’s fan bases was palpable. It also makes for a very compelling film, directed by Neil Young under his Bernard Shakey alter ego and filmed by Larry “L.A.” Johnson.
From a purely musical standpoint, the film is a decent enough document of the latter-day CSN&Y in concert. You don’t see much in the way of any real musical fireworks (although Stills and Young do occasionally revive their dueling guitar shootouts, proving that the old chemistry is still mostly there all these years later). The band—which is really more like a group of Neil Young all-stars like Ben Keith, Rick Rosas, Chad Cromwell, Spooner Oldham, and trumpet guy Tom Bray—is also reasonably tight. You don’t really see any blown parts here.
Even though of all CSN&Y’s projects, this is clearly the one where Young is the most in charge, the other guys also seem quite content to put their own famous egos aside and play second fiddle to what is essentially the Neil Young Show.
Movie poster for the Déjà Vu film, a Shakey Pictures production capturing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young on the now infamous Freedom of Speech tour. The concerts, which focused on Neil Young’s Living with War album, polarized audiences along political lines during the controversial presidency of George W. Bush.
Courtesy of Robert Rodriguez
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young perform in Denver, Colorado, on the 2006 Freedom of Speech tour.
Photo by Anthony Stack
The set list is dominated by new songs from Young’s Living with War, complemented by similarly political, antiwar songs such as Nash’s “Military Madness,” Crosby’s “Wooden Ships,” and Stills’s “For What It’s Worth,” and if anything, Crosby, Stills, and Nash seem to be quite passionately into it. Perhaps the aging hippies saw Young’s strident new antiwar songs as a golden opportunity to recapture the glory days when they were seen as writing the soundtrack for the sixties and its counterculture revolution.
Unfortunately, not everyone in the audience saw things the same way—which is what makes CSNY: Déjà Vu such a fascinating film. Along with the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing, CSNY: Déjà Vu is a unique snapshot of its time capturing just how tough the going could become for musicians who dared to speak out against the Bush administration in 2006. In fairness to the Chicks, they definitely ended up getting a rawer deal as a result of their activism than CSN&Y did. But it can also be said that CSN&Y had history on their side. Certainly anyone attending one of their shows had to know these were the same guys responsible for Neil Young’s “Ohio”—or at least you’d think.
Unfortunately, not everyone attending these shows got that particular memo, and some of the fans expecting “Our House” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (at least they got “Teach Your Children”) were not happy with either the song selection or the political tone. The chorus of boos during “Let’s Impeach the President” is particularly telling—fans can also be seen giving the middle-finger salute during the song. But what makes this film so fascinating is that the booing redneck types are often shown side by side with fans singing the lyrics and occasionally even breaking down in tears.
As a picture of 2006 red- and blue-state middle America—complete with all of its accompanying contrasts—disguised as a rock concert, CSNY: Déjà Vu is one of the most compelling music documentaries of its kind made during the Bush era. The Shakey Pictures production has also been released as a DVD and Blu-ray, along with an accompanying live album/soundtrack.
Let’s Impeach the President for Lyin’
Living with War is best described as antiwar, anti-Bush, and very, very loud. The album was recorded over a whirlwind three days with a core group of musicians consisting of Young himself on guitar and vocals; Rick Rosas on bass; and Chad Cromwell on drums. They are occasionally joined by Tommy Bray on trumpet (most notably on the title track and “Shock and Awe”), and a one hundred-member choir (on “Let’s Impeach the President” and the beautiful, hymnlike version of “America the Beautiful” that closes the album).
“A power trio with trumpet and 100 voices—A metal version of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan … folk metal protest,” was how Young himself described the album in the weeks just prior to its release. For Living with War, Niko Bolas also returned as co-producer, reuniting the Volume Dealers for the first time since 1989’s Freedom.
Controversy over the lyrical content aside, Living with War is pretty much your standard, cranked-to-eleven, grungy Neil Young album. Although the sound here harkens back to classics like Rust Never Sleeps and Ragged Glory, Crazy Horse—the band usually backing Young on these types of records—are nowhere to be found.
Living with War is not only the loudest Neil Young album since he was backed by Pearl Jam on Mirror Ball, it is also the tightest. The long extended jams with Crazy Horse are replaced here by ten shorter, more straightforward-sounding songs that get directly to the point. But make no mistake, the volume is cranked all the way up—and Neil’s trademark guitar noise with the ever-trusty Old Black is dead front and center in the mix. On Living with War, feedback is definitely back.
With incendiary lyrics like “Let’s impeach the President for lying,” Living with War’s best-known song rattles off a litany of reasons calling for Bush’s ouster from office ranging from “lying … misleading our country into war” to “highjacking our religion … and using it to get elected.” Basically a faster, more uptempo rewrite of “Powderfinger” (you can practically interchange the line “Let’s Impeach the President for Lyin’” with “Shelter Me from the Powder and the Finger”), it ends with Young trading the lyrics off with a series of prerecorded sound bites from Bush.
On “Shock and Awe,” his snarling guitar exchanges licks with the solemn blare of a military funeral procession trumpet as he recalls “back in the days of mission accomplished” and prior times “when we had a chance to change our mind.” On “Flags of Freedom,” the chorus is sung almost as a companion piece to another famous protest song with a patriotic twist—Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.” He even name drops Dylan in the lyrics, right between a chorus that celebrates “these flags of freedom flying” while questioning the wisdom of sending a family’s kids off to war.
Maybe It’s Obama, but He Thinks That He’s Too Young
On “Looking for a Leader,” Young also earns his Nostradamus stripes by predicting the presidential election of a then largely unknown black senator named Barack Obama. “Maybe it’s a woman, or a black man after all,” Young sings. “Maybe it’s Obama, but he thinks that he’s too young.”
The album closes with “Roger and Out,” which returns Young to “that old hippie highway” repeatedly revisited throughout his career, saying “Roger and out” to a fallen comrade. This is followed appropriately enough by the choir’s solemn, reverent, and gorgeous intonation of “America the Beautiful.”
Young revisited the whole Living with War saga again some seven months after its initial May 2006 release by putting out a rawer, repackaged version of the album called Living with War: In the Beginning in December of that same year.
Watching the Flags of Freedom Flyin’
Living with War isn’t Neil Young’s greatest album, not by a long shot. But historically speaking, it may well be looked back upon as among his most courageous, and an artistic statement of purpose uniquely matched with its time.
Protest music is as uniquely rich an American art form as you’ll find anywhere in our history. From the protest songs born in dust bowls and union struggles, to the negro spirituals that arose from the cotton fields of the Civil War era, to the sixties protest-rock of folks like Bob Dylan, and Neil Young himself.
It ‘s a little ironic that quite often the loudest voices at home in support of unpopular wars—from Vietnam in the sixties to Iraq more recently—have also been among the quickest to call for quieting voices of protest and dissent. In the often bitterly divided landscape of 2006 America, Young’s Living with War stood as proof that those voices, which had grown somewhat quieter in recent years, were rising once again.