Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Greendale

I don't care what anyone says — and it's easy to poke fun at a concept album based around hippy politics and homespun philosophy — but I was just in awe at Neil Young taking the kind of risk that the Greendale 2003 shows in Europe represented. He knows his audience wants to hear the old songs. So what does he do? For 90 minutes, he plays a solo suite of completely new songs, joined by a rambling narrative. From my seat in the Hammersmith Odeon (or whatever it's called now), he looked, and sounded in the monologues, a bit like Spalding Gray (you can read and hear the monologues). I'd read about the new Greendale on the web, and my anticipation was high (because I always find Neil Young most interesting when he's playing new songs), but I was still impressed on the night.

The truth is the songs work much better in solo acoustic form than with Crazy Horse. The album isn't as good as it could have been, and not as good as the shows (either the solo ones in Europe — apparently Neil brought the solo shows to Europe because he knew there would be too much restless whooping in America — or as good as the 'full cast' dramatic production in the US). Anyway, I got the release with the DVD of the Dublin show at Vicar Street, and that's the version of Greendale I prefer.

I've also got the DVD of the Greendale feature film, of course. It's good enough. More consistent than Human Highway, and still featuring a few Brechtian and Godardian flourishes, mixed in with a dose of sentimentality.

Inevitably Neil can't avoid taking a swipe at himself, as when Grandpa says, with his last breath,

That guy just keeps on singing!
Can somebody shut him up?
I don't know for the life of me
Where he comes up with that stuff.

I'm not saying this would be in the top five albums in the Neil Young collection, but it makes the collection as a whole much more valuable and interesting than if he'd just done another album like Broken Arrow or Silver and Gold.

Today I'm starting my subscription to eMusic (having completed a two-week free trial). I'm getting drawn into this digital stuff earlier than I expected. They're crappy MP3s, so I don't expect them to last, but they are cheap (£8.99 for 40 tracks each month — comparable with Fopp prices for deep catalogue CDs, plus greater track-by-track selection), and the scope for discovering weird independent stuff seems good.

MusicBrainz entry for this album