If you're one of those people who think
superannuated rockers from the late 1960s have no business going on
tour, you'll get a kick out of Neil Young's new film CSNY: Déjà
Vu . It's nearly 40 years since the heyday of the folk-rock
super-group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and this documentary
charts the reunion of the old gang in 2006 for one more road trip.
Musically, as Young admits in a voiceover,
the early part of the tour was "a bit rough". Then, at the
climax of Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" at a show in
Toronto, Stephen Stills stumbles and falls over mid-song. Lying among
the speakers at the front of the stage and still trying to play, he
can't get back to his feet and has to wave off a youthful helping
hand. The indignity of it all.
All this is just fine with Young. At 62 he's
angry and out to make a noise; the uglier it all gets, the better he
seems to like it. The cause of this anger is the war in Iraq. Young
was only in his mid-20s when he wrote "Ohio", a protest song
prompted by the killing of four students at an anti-Vietnam war
protest at Kent State University. The times and the war may have
changed, but in early 2006 Young's simmering discontent over Iraq
finally boiled over and he rushed off a new album of protest songs, Living
with War . That was followed by a US tour supported by Crosby,
Stills & Nash - a group of musicians famous for their feuds,
break-ups and reformations. The movie of the tour is Young's attempt
to keep fanning the flames, a journey of protest through the American
heartland, an act of angry defiance.
Of course, that word "angry" should
come with a large asterisk next to it. A Canadian and a product of the
1960s counterculture, Young doesn't really do anger that well. It is
more an urgent reasonableness that sets the tone for Déjà Vu
, a film that chronicles Young's tour and also features scenes from
Iraq and interviews with war veterans and their families. There are
also flashbacks to Vietnam-era protests and a younger, hairier CSNY.
It may lack the passion of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 ,
but with the pathos of some of its war stories it rises to an elegiac
wistfulness. The rasping whine of Young's singing voice and the
plaintive urgency of the songs (thankfully, the music gets much better
as the tour goes on) are a fitting accompaniment.
I meet Young in an old roadhouse above the
Pacific Ocean, where the golden late afternoon light is filtered
through tall redwood trees. His battered 1950s Plymouth saloon is
pulled up outside the entrance. The log building is empty apart from
Young and two ageing LA music industry minders. It seems the perfect
setting; a place left marooned when - to borrow Joan Didion's phrase -
the tide of the 1960s went out.
When I ask him whether all this anti-war work
isn't better left to a younger generation, Young agrees. "I was
hoping some young person would come along and say this and sing some
songs about it," he says, "but I didn't see anybody - so I'm
doing it myself. I waited as long as I could."
Young's involvement provokes inevitable
comparisons with the Vietnam protests, but the innocence and anger of
that earlier period have been succeeded by the sophisticated cynicism
that is the standard reaction to Iraq. Now, asked whether protest
music still has a way to touch the emotions of a mass audience, Young
doesn't duck the question: "Not really. If it does, it seems to
be doing it in a context of history. It's not a real
communication."
The average age of the band members (62 and a
half) probably has something to do with it, he allows. But it also
reflects changes in the times. "The world is so different and the
audience is not unified by a threat," he says. "That's the
big difference between the 1960s and now. There's no threat."
The threat Young has in mind is the threat of
the draft. According to this view, President Bush's avoidance of using
the draft has been a naked tactic designed to save his own political
skin. "That's why people criticise this generation for not being
with it, not being alive, not being cognizant of what's going on in
the world; it's because they're not affected directly by it,"
Young says. "This generation is just as sensitive as the 1960s
generation, but they just haven't been tickled yet."
Despite his measured tone, Young's criticism
of the Bushies comes across as pure pop-paranoia: "These guys
seem to have so many agendas going on - there's so much business, all
the connections. You know the story: the oil, Halliburton, the
connection with Cheney, the whole thing." The media also takes
its hits, blamed for the overkill and trivialisation that have
combined to stultify the American public. "It's repeating itself
endlessly," he says, "like a giant machine that just spews
out the same stuff over and over and over again. 24-hour news really
screwed things up."
But Young's isn't the only anger portrayed in
Déjà Vu . The other side gets a chance to vent, too. It comes
in Atlanta, Georgia, when CSNY break into the jaunty chorus from
"Let's impeach the President", a protest song that doesn't
pull its punches ("Let's impeach the president for lying/ And
leading our country into war/ Abusing all the power that we gave him/
And shipping all our money out the door.") The sentiment doesn't
go down well with many members of the crowd, who probably thought they
were coming out for a nostalgic evening reliving Four Way Street
. The booing grows louder, and people start to leave. "Neil Young
can stick it up his [expletive]" shouts one concert-goer, caught
at the exit. Another says: "He can suck my [expletive]. I'd like
to knock his [expletive] teeth out."
Young suppresses a chuckle at the memory,
then embarks on a rather unpersuasive attempt to argue that his movie
was really trying to present both sides of the issue. "It doesn't
exclude these people; it tries to respect them," he says. In
fact, it was filmed as a series of 10 segments or storylines by
broadcast news journalist Mike Cerre, who then handed his work over to
Neil Young to be edited. Balance is not the aim.
At least the music finally touches a nerve.
When Crosby gets back to his feet and hits a stirring guitar solo, the
tour starts to make sense. "It took a while to get going, but the
music on the record is really good," says Young. As a last
hurrah, there's a sort of shabby nobility to it all. CSNY Déjà Vu
is released in UK cinemas on July 18
Richard Waters is the FT's San Francisco
bureau chief
