Neil Young is back on tour with Crazy Horse, and also back using those oversized props of amps, and amp covers, and a giant microphone on stage, a commentary perhaps on the oversized task of an arena rock show. What were once Ewoks-sized characters serving as roadies before are now mad scientists in white lab coats, and workers in hard hats who do a lot of exaggerated removal of the cases from the large amps as the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” played.
Then Neil and his band, all looking like disheveled day workers one day from retirement, ambled on stage in their T-shirts and flannels, and stood with no apparent irony to a recorded National Anthem (to which the crowd, even more surprisingly, stood to acknowledge). This was, on the other hand, the Patriot Center on the campus of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
Neil didn’t also have “O Canada” played but he had the new song about his upbringing in the Great North two songs in with “Born in Ontario.”
His bandmates – Frank “Poncho” Sampedro on guitar, wearing Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums — are just as old and familiar as those “Rust Never Sleeps” props on stage. They were a band built to burn, so it probably shouldn’t matter that they were not easy to see on the Patriot Center stage (from where I was sitting on the side anyway).
Molina was tucked behind between two of the big bake amps, hard to see outside of the video screens; the other three often stood in a tight circle and bowed to one another as they churned up the noise — not the most extroverted entertainers on the circuit to be sure. Add to that they could be blotted entirely by one of the hanging speakers (again from my vantage point particularly) and it would be annoying, except that those speakers, expertly tinkered on by Young himself probably, delivered remarkable sound throughout.
By contrast the usually ferocious set by Patti Smith, the artist of considerable stature who opened, sounded relatively sedate (though she was very good and in exceptional voice, and perhaps knowing the noisier side forthcoming from the headliner, chose to cover one of his quieter ballads for the fans, “It’s a Dream”).
Songs from the new “Psychedelic Pill” were plentiful in the generous set, and though they were new to most of the audience, they were familiar in their similar drive, guitar inventiveness and melodic flourishes as the rest of his catalog, going back some 45 years now.
It reached a peak early, with the epic “Walk Like a Giant” ending in an elephantine crashing, punctuated by balled up paper being blown across the stage.
Any show that includes both “Powderfinger” and “Cortez the Killer” can’t be called a failure by fans of the Crazy Horse era; likewise full-bodied performances of both “Cinnamon Girl” and “Mr. Soul” fulfill the cravings of fans who go even further back — or classic rock fans in general.
Though the show was largely guitar-driven stomping that paused at times for feedback workouts, it was a surprise that it paused midshow for a couple of acoustic numbers, “The Needle and the Damage Done” and “Twisted Road” among them, that were rendered with the same pristine sonic delivery as the rest of the show. His “Singer without a Song” from the piano was accompanied by a woman who acted out the number, mostly by wandering the stage wistfully with a guitar case.
“Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” closing the main set on the tour, is as much an anthem as the Star Spangled Banner that began it. And though I would have preferred the previous night’s “Like a Hurricane” in the encore slot rather than the good timey “Roll Another Number,” the latter was probably more fitting to ease the bottleneck pain of parking snarls that followed.