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.
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