Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Once I actually got to the Neil Young and Crazy Horse concert, it was great. Last week when I saw Santana at the Tweeter Center in Camden, New Jersey, I was with some friends who knew how to get there. But this time I was reliant on the directions from the Tweeter Center itself, and they sucked!

But I finally got there, after several wrong turns and even managed to catch a few songs by the opening act, Lucinda Williams.

She rocked out, and I think I'll look into getting one of her albums. She was kind of country rock, and even wore a white 10-gallon hat.

I had an aisle seat. The two guys sitting next to me were both about 40. We chatted about all the concerts we've ever been to.

They were telling me how they once saw a free Santana show that blew them away, and about how they once saw Neil Young in a really small venue, which made for a great, intimate show.

Not until the first song started was a tarp pulled down, revealing the front porch of a house. An old man and a younger man sat on the porch, acting out the song or lip syncing to certain lines of dialogue within the song. On a screen sometimes images were shown to match other lines from the song.

I had heard that Neil Young would be performing his unreleased album, "Greendale," from start to finish, but I hadn't realized it was essentially a mini-rock musical, with actors acting out songs as they were sung. They used a really interesting technique where an image would scroll up on the screen and as it did, actors and props would rise up on a moving platform behind a small raised stage, which was on the stage. So they would come into view as the background came into view, act out their part of the song and then, as the image scroll back down, they were lowered, as well.

A lot of the background and the props had a real folk art, cartoony feel to them. Sometimes, the backgrounds were photographs.

Overall, it was a really interesting experiment. The rough story follows a family named the Greens who live in Greendale. The family consists of Grandma and Grandpa, the parents, one of whom is a Vietnam vet, the granddaughter, Sun, and Sun's cousin Jed. It tells the story of what happens when Jed is pulled over by the police one day and makes a split second decision that changes all of their lives.

I was fascinated by "Greendale" and was listening intently to all the lyrics, even while the restless people around me were getting in and out of their seats, going to get more overpriced beer. Once in awhile, when Neil Young was talking to set up a song, someone would shout, "Play the song!" I was embarrassed for the audience, but I guess a lot of people didn't expect the concert to be this way. There wasn't much promotion, and I haven't heard anything in the media about it. You would expect it to be talked about, since it's such an unusual approach to a concert.

One thing that struck me was how different the crowd was from the Santana concert. For one thing, it was less diverse. It was primarily white, in the range of age 20-60. I didn't see any little children. And it struck me how impatient they were being with the new stuff, when you consider that during the Santana concert they seemed as into the new stuff as the older stuff. Plus, I smelled a lot of pot being smoked, which surprisingly was something I didn't notice during Santana.

At one point in the show, a sign scrolled up on the screen that said, "Support our War." At first, it got some weak cheers but later, when it scrolled up a second time, it got a lot of boos. As Neil Young was talking about the sign and how it used to say "Leaving Greendale" but then they covered it over with this sign, some more people started booing and hissing. And he said, "You can talk to the sign. We have time." So people booed a bit louder.

I think one of the most interesting things about this show was that there were moments like that with messages which could be read more than one way. There were activists, there was a message of environmentalism, and an ambiguous message about the meaning of patriotism. I didn't quite know what to make of all that until later that evening, heading home when I heard an interview that had been done with him in 1991. Back then we were in the midst of Gulf War I. A call-in listener asked him about the fact that he had a peace sign as a backdrop for his tour and yet also had yellow ribbons. The listener asked him whether the peace sign was supposed to just evoke the Sixties or whether it was a statement about the war.

His answer was, first of all, that yes, of course, the peace sign evokes the Sixties because it was so associated with that time. Then he said that peace is always a solution that should be explored. But he said the yellow ribbons were there not to say, "Yay for the war" but because there are people in the audience whose brothers and fathers or sisters and mothers are over there in harm's way, and may not even be coming back.

He said he felt his job was not to take sides but to reflect what's going on in the audience. And so that's why the message seems a bit ambiguous at times. He was including perspectives from a variety of sides and allowed the audience to make up their own decision.

When they were in the middle of a very rousing number, where all of the actors had joined him on-stage, a curly haired blonde who had been pushing drunkenly in and out of her seat the entire show leaned in to me and said, "This is his last song, and then he jams out. We saw this show before." I guess she'd seen the "Talk to Me" sign on my forehead.

After that song, they kept the lights down while they redid the stage a little bit for the next set. I took a break, and in the lobby a young guy came up to me and said, "Ma'am, do you have a dollar so that I can get a pretzel?"

I just stared at him in confusion. Two things were running through my mind: first of all, he's inside a concert where the lowest ticket is about $45 a pop. Secondly, he reeks of alcohol. He clearly had enough money earlier to buy some overpriced beer. And I'm just thinking, "How could he not have a dollar to spare to get a soft pretzel?"

To make it worse, next to him was a guy who looked completely sober, had a big grin on his face and was about 6 feet tall. All I was thinking was, "There's no way I'm pulling out my wallet right now." So I returned to my seat, feeling guilty the rest of the show, telling myself it was a big enough place that if he really needed that dollar, he'd no doubt find somebody to give it to him.

When I returned to my seat, Neil Young had launched into a set of older favorites, such as "Cinnamon Girl" and "Prisoners of Rock 'N' Roll." They rocked the house. Some people came out of the woodwork and were standing in the aisle dancing and for once, the Tweeter Center employees didn't seem to care it was a fire hazard.

They must have played about six or seven more songs before leaving the stage and then everyone cheered and applauded and they came back for a four-song encore. All in all, it was a great show.

As we exited afterwards, one of the concertgoers turned to a friend and said, "What did you think of 'Greendale, the Musical'?"

"It should have been in the Mann Music Center," he said, with a big smile.

Whether that was high praise or not wasn't clear. But I, for one, was glad I'd seen it.

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

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