Neil Young: Heart of Gold
“Neil Young: Heart of Gold” was playing at the Uptown theatre last week so Gabe and I decided to go and see it. It’s a concert film, made by Jonathan Demme and I’d liked both “Swimming to Cambodia”, and “Stop Making Sense”, his live performance films of Spalding Gray and The Talking Heads respectively. I’ve seen Neil live four times over the years, and enjoyed all four concerts. This film was a live performance he gave last year, just after he’d been operated on (twice) for a brain aneurysm and after his father, Scott Young, had died.

Most of the film, about the first two thirds, is a Neil performing his current album, “Prairie Wind”. More than any musician I can think of, (even Dylan, even Springsteen) he covers a wide range of styles: rock, punk, folk, and country. This concert is Neil in country mode, with his old friend Emmy-Lou Harris singing backup. And like much country music there’s a nostalgic twang that runs through the music; unlike Mick and Keith, Neil is a man in his sixties singing about being a man in his sixties. He jokes, before singing a song about his daughter’s leaving home, that this is a whole new genre, “empty-nester songs”. A lot of the songs are about mortality and death.

And he looks older than he used to. Part of that is seeing him in extreme close-up, as opposed to five years ago, when I saw him from the thirtieth row at Wonderland. But I remembered the first time I saw him, 37 years ago, at the Riverboat, a small folk club in Yorkville about two blocks north of where the film was playing. It was 1969, and I was home from MIT between semesters, and was reading Scott Young’s column in the Globe and Mail, about a folk singer he’d seen the night before. He talked about the power of the songs, the vulnerability of the singer, and concluded that what he was most proud of was that it was his son Neil. I was twenty then, and it sounded like a good show, so I went down to the Riverboat that night.

I knew some of Neil’s music. I was a rock announcer on college radio, and I was familiar with the music of Buffalo Springfield, the band he’d been in before it broke up and he went on by himself. I had bought his first solo album, “The Loner” with which I had been disappointed ...muddy and overproduced, I thought. But that night at the Riverboat was one of the great concerts of my life. There were fewer than twenty people in the room, which filled it half way. The songs were bare and stripped down, raw and painful. Neil was figuring out where he was going; later that year he’d tour both with Crosby, Stills, and Nash and with Crazy Horse, his rock backup band. He’d play with both of those over the years, as well as solo folk, and country bands, and I’d see some of the concerts live and hear lots of other recordings. But while I love his proto-punk work on “Weld”, and probably have two dozen albums of his, I’ve never heard anything that moved me as intimately as that first concert had. Not until I saw this film.

Part of that is me, and part of that is Neil, and the rest of it is that we’re both about the same amount older from that first concert. Like a lot of baby boomers, I’d imagined that rock music was really important in the world, or at least in my world. And I’ve moved to a place where I enjoy it, but I don’t expect to find a lot of deep meanings in lyrics any more. But I remember what it used to mean, and I remember the Scott Young column that first got me to see Neil. Scott Young had senile dementia, and when in “Prairie Wind” Neil sings “Trying to remember what my daddy said/ Before too much time took away his head” I think of my father’s death two years ago, and there’s a wrenching empathy that just tears me up. Gabe, whose daughter’s married now and living in Vancouver, had the same reaction to “Here for You”, Neil’s song about loving his daughter and letting her go.

The film ends with Neil alone on the stage, the auditorium empty, the backup singers and band all gone. He sings “The Old Laughing Lady”, a song he sang at the Riverboat that night in 1969 (“They say the old laughing lady dropped by to call/ And when she leaves, she leaves nothing at all.”) Then he fumbles with his guitar case a bit before he gets it open and puts the guitar into it, and walks, pretty stiffly, off the stage. It’s a lot emptier when he’s gone. The text comes up on the screen, “For Daddy”, and I guess the credits came up next, but by then I was too teary eyed to read them.