Young's 'Greendale' show creative as it is audacious

By Greg Kot
Tribune rock critic
July 11, 2003

God bless the crackpot genius and misfit idealist. Without them, the world would be a boring place.

Neil Young illuminated our world by creating one of his own Tuesday at the almost-full United Center, premiering one of the most ambitious works of his career in its entirety. "Greendale"—a 10-song, nearly two-hour "musical novel" that uses a small-town tragedy as a symbol of global crisis—was performed by Young and his longtime band Crazy Horse, while a cast of dozens that included his wife, Pegi, enacted some of the scenes. At times, the production resembled a high school play, a low-budget self-indulgence, with its homemade scenery and amateur thespians lip-synching some of Young's lyrics.

But it was also stuffed with ideas, in many ways a summation of everything Young has stood for in his fractured, frazzled and fascinating career: the nurturing strength of family, respect for elders, the sacredness of nature and youth, the corrupt invasiveness of political and economic institutions, and the power of a really loud guitar to cut through all the distractions.

If the narrative was a complex portrait of a family (a grandfather who clings to forgotten virtues, a disaffected uncle who lives in a houseboat, an idealistic teen daughter and her cop-killer brother) hounded by the media and the FBI against the backdrop of an impending ecological catastrophe, the music was built on three-chord structures and lilting choruses.

With Crazy Horse reconfigured slightly—Young on guitar, Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums, while guitarist Frank Sampedro was consigned to playing barely audible chords on a keyboard—the singer stretched the arrangements with solos that were unhurried and melodic, or caustic and over-driven. Young bobbed and bounced, huddling closer to his bandmates as if to feel the music's physical presence. He merged nasty blues riffs derived from John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed with folk melodies, which mixed affirming messages with bulletins from the front line of a dying planet. "A little love and affection will make the world a better place," he sang, even as "the human race kept rolling through the religious wars."

The sole acoustic performance was also "Greendale's" most striking musical moment, a stream-of-consciousness dialogue that echoed "Will to Love," his epic 1970s tone poem to resilience. "Some day you'll find everything you're lookin' for," Young sang over a reverberating bass string.

If a couple of the "Greendale' songs slowed to a slog for the sake of advancing the plot, the high points resonated: a funeral dirge for the heroic grandpa performed at the pipe organ, a tale of a routine traffic stop that spirals into murder and acid-dream paranoia ("we'll be watching you in everything you do, and you can do your part by watching others, too"), a blast of harmonica-laced blues punctuated with bullhorn taunts of "Hey, Mister Clean, you're dirty now, too," and an anthemic finale that set a fist-pumping chorus of young people dressed as eco-guerrillas over a classic Crazy Horse roadhouse stomp, and rode off in a burst of surreal hippie imagery ("be the ocean when it meets the sky"). In the latter song, one of the youthful protesters waved an American flag, reinforcing one final layer of meaning lurking within this grandiose statement on family, nature and politics. Here, Young equated dissent with patriotic duty, a message more necessary than ever in this era of Dixie Chicks CD burnings.

At 57, Young has lapped most of his Baby Boomer rock 'n' roll peers in the audacity and creativity departments. He's a high-stakes gambler, but he's no con man: He charges his audience 85 bucks, slams them with 10 previously unheard songs, and somehow turns it into a triumph—a couple of the new songs were greeted with standing ovations. He does it by creating an entire fictional world for his fans to lose themselves in, one that will repay return visits. Then he rewarded their patience with an encore of three classics spread over 40 minutes of rollercoaster fury: "Powderfinger," "Down by the River" and a strikingly relevant "Rockin' in the Free World." Young huddled with the Horsemen in front of Molina's Jolly Roger drum riser and took even his vintage songs down new tributaries, a great artist once again at the peak of his game.