Tour opener stuns hard-core fans!
(photo courtesy of Shawn Raecke - Idaho Statesman)
First off, take a look at the f***ing setlist!
(courtesy of Tom Hambleton, whose
Sugar Mountain setlist site is an invaluable resource)
Neil Young
10-18-2007
Velma V. Morrison Center For The Performing Arts
Boise, Idaho
solo set
1. From Hank To Hendrix (acoustic guitar)
2. Ambulance Blues (acoustic guitar)
3. Sad Movies (acoustic guitar)
4. A Man Needs A Maid (piano/ '76 style synth) w/ Like A Hurricane tease near the start
5. No One Seems To Know (piano)
6. Harvest (acoustic guitar)
7. Campaigner (acoustic guitar)
8. Journey Through The Past (grand piano)
9. Mellow My Mind (guitjo)
10. Love Art Blues (acoustic guitar)
11. Love Is A Rose (acoustic guitar)
12. Heart Of Gold (acoustic guitar)
band set
13. The Loner (gold top Ben pedal)
14. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (old Black)
15. Dirty Old Man (Les Paul Jr ? - not Hagstrom, Ben organ?)
16. Spirit Road (Les Paul Jr ?)
17. Bad Fog Of Loneliness (White Falcon)
18. Winterlong (White Falcon)
19. Oh, Lonesome Me (acoustic guitar, Ben pedal)
20. The Believer (acoustic guitar, Ben pedal)
21. No Hidden Path (old Black, Ben guitar)
encore:
22. Cinnamon Girl (old Black, Ben guitar)
23. Tonight's The Night (grand piano, Ben lap steel)
Neil Young - guitar, guitjo, harmonica, piano, vocals
Rick Rosas - bass
Ben Keith - pedal steel, lap steel, guitar, organ, background vocals
Ralph Molina - drums, background vocals
Pegi Young - background vocals some songs, percussion (?)
Anthony Crawford - background vocals some songs, piano(?)
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Unbelievable!
A few random first impressions...
3 unreleased songs in the first set alone + one more in the second set (if you don't count live dvds).
• "Sad Movies" has only been played 5 times ever (including one aborted attempt) -- and that was 31.5 years ago during a memorable Crazy Horse tour of Europe and the UK.
• "Love Art Blues," an eminently fetching song from the legendary Homegrown lost album," was played a few times in 74 with CSNY and a couple of times solo in 92 (including a show for the ages i was lucky enough to catch in mpls).
• "No One Seems to Know" - a poignant, minor key piano ballad, aka "Once I Was in Love," that finds Neil at his most melancholy -- has been played live over 30 times in 3 of the last 4 decades but has never found its way on to an album.
• "Bad Fog of Loneliness" -- long a fan fave -- dates back to 69 and was recorded for at least two studio albs, including an early version of Tonights the Night, but never made the final cut for anything. It was played several times in 70/71 and then went into deep freeze until it shocked fans at handful of spring 89 shows with The Restless. It didn't show up again until it became a staple on the 2000 "Friends and Relatives" tour (a nice DVD document of that tour, Red Rocks Live, features a version of BFOL, it's only official release).
Other than a one-off on the 99 solo tour, "Harvest" hasn't been played since the 70s.
Don Gibson's "Oh Lonesome Me" hasn't been played since 1970 (there's an unconfirmed report that it was played when Neil made a surprise appearance at a Bushwalla show in Nashville in August 2005, the night after his two night stand at the Ryman to record the Heart of Gold film).
Acoustic "Campaigner" -- don't think that's happened since 76. [edit - there were 3 acoustic performances on the 2003 European Greendale tour]
Not sure off the top of my head, but the last time "Maid" was played might also be 76.
"Winterlong," "Journey Through the Past," "The Loner," "Ambulance Blues" -- any one of these would make a Neil concert special for me.
4 songs from the new album -- all in the electric set. "No Hidden Path" was reportedly 15 minutes of vintage Crazy Horse-ish jam bliss.
Serious music fans are prone to hyperbole when things like this happen -- especially at the very beginning of a tour -- but if you're among the devout, it's pretty hard not to get excited about this. In the aftermath of the news about the Boisie lid-lifter -- which started with on-the-scene smart phone reports minutes after the show started...ahh, technology -- normally reserved "Rusties" on the "
Rust List" were pretty much acting like the kind of crazed nutjobs you'd find on a Ryan Adams fan board. "This tour is for
us," sputtered one fan, clearly on the verge of a trip to the ER. While that seems a bit, uh,
much, you can't ignore the fact that Neil played a bunch of songs that a good chunk of the audience -- including most "serious" fans -- have never even heard of, let alone heard. Previous to this tour, "Sad Movies" had been played at 4 shows. In Europe. In early 1976. I've been a "Neil Nut" since 1970 and it took me almost 2 decades before i tracked down a dodgy cassette copy of a live show with this song (which, btw, is beautiful and haunting, a close cousin of many other "downer" unreleased songs from this era like "No One Seems to Know" and "Give Me Strength"). Over the years, serious Neil Heads have been known to complain about "stagnant" setlists and the lack of "bombshells" (in all fairness, almost every tour Neil's ever done has featured at least a few surprises -- the 2003 European Greendale tour being the most recent example of a tour with many heart-stopping unexpected delights). With only one show in the books so far, i predict that you won't be hearing too many of those kind of complaints in the coming weeks.
It'll be very
interesting to see what else Neil will dredge up as this tour unfolds, especially since Neil is no stranger to left turns and defying expectations. Neil is likely travelling on this tour with the "big book" -- a massive, custom-made songbook with "all" of his songs & lyrics in alphabetical order, reportedly made by his archivist, Joel Bernstein. During a stop in Oakland during the amazing 1999 solo tour of the US, Neil was thumbing through the "book" and came across "Kansas," a song that was supposedly recorded in the mid-70s and was mentioned exactly one time in an old interview. There had been no "leaks" of the studio version and it had never been performed live. In other words, there were only a handful of people in the world even
aware of the song's existence. As Neil was looking for "Kinda Fonda Wanda" (yes, somebody actually yelled that out at a solo Neil show), he mentioned something about "here's one nobody's ever heard," some punter predictably yelled "PLAY IT," and before ya know it, Neil did just that, offering up a haunting, abstract little sketch of a song that seemingly had absolutely nothing to do with the state referenced in the title. He was sufficently interested to play "Kansas"again 3 nights later in LA and then...back into the "vault."
Neil even has a sense of humor about his long-delayed archival releases. A few years ago, there was a 60 second video feature on Neil's official website courtesy of "Bernard Shakey" (Neil's nom de film). This short clip featured a through-the-lens tour of the actual archives -- the camera slowly went up and down the aisles, pausing every now and then to zoom in on shelves full of neatly arranged tapes. Just reading the info on the tape boxes was enough to cause irregular heartbeats for most serious fans. There were professional recordings of seemingly every live show he'd ever done. There were cryptic references aplenty scrawled on tapes and shelf markers (song titles? lost albums?) that Neil-ologists are still trying to decipher. There was about a 6 foot chunk of shelf space devoted to just the
Tonight's the Night sessions (heart be still!). The camera even zoomed in on a book on a work table that turned out to be
Ghosts on the Road, a fan-produced setist compendium/concert history devoted to Neil's long career. And the real zinger? The soundtrack to this short was, you guessed it, an unreleased song -- in this case, "Vacancy," yet another song that has never been heard by anyone outside Neil's inner circle. Neil has been torturing his fans ever since the admittedly superb
Decades comp back in 1976 (
Lucky 13 is barely worth a mention in this discussion) and here he is after 40 years of recording and a flippin'
warehouse full of treasures...needling the faithful some more! Ha ha -- what a fricking comedian.
The time Neil has been spent in recent years trolling through his back pages has undoubtedly had an impact on him; it seems highly unlikely that he dusted off these obscure gems in Boise by accident. The alleged archival releases that are "coming soon" (
really, they are!! - a claim that has been made numerous times over the last few
decades) are the likely culprit, but with Neil, you never know. He's no doubt been wrestling with a lot of big picture stuff lately, not the least being his relationship with his fans, not to mention his own legacy. Maybe he really is throwing the fans a "bone" or maybe he's been assembling tracklistings for the reissues or maybe he just felt like doing something a bit out of the ordinary (not Neil?!). Whatever the reason, this tour is indeed shaping up to be something special -- if not extraordinay -- for Rusties far and wide.
I've got tickets for one show; if this keeps up, i might have to dip into my 401-K.
Boise review
