BLOWN AWAY - Neil Young

Scotland on Sunday July 18th 1993
SECC
Glasgow
12th july 1993.
By Alastair Mackay

WHAT makes a legend? For Neil Young it is the story of a fine-looking waitress who takes to the desert roads on her Harley-Davidson in search of freedom. That song, from his Harvest Moon LP, is called Unknown Legend, and it's one of the saddest, most lonesome songs about freedom you'll ever hear. Even the notion.of freedom it describes is the stuff of myths and dreams, of hitting the road, Jack; though that makes it no less attractive. Legend is in the eye of the beholder. of course.

A life sentence of rock might grant`only a handful of transcendent moments,flashes of Rollermania. To put it personally -- and personally is how an evening with Neil Young makes you want to put it -- it was watching the splinters of light on Noddy Holder's mirrored top hat in 1974, or decades later standing next to Johnny Cash as he prepared to go on stage at Wembley Arena. All Cash had to do was clear his throat, and even in the shifting of mucus, the preterhuman timbre of his voice was evident. Those were moments when the experience of live music squared up to its billing and delivered something almost supernatural. At its crudest, it's a question of belief in something bigger than the self; a belief in belief.

Mid-way through a stellar set at the SECC, Neil Young offers another such moment. It comes not during Helpless, which was merely the most moving musical performance I have encountered for six Years (the last was hearing the Proclaimers Play Letter From America for the first time). It comes when Young leans back on the heels of his sneakers, chops down on the neck his guitar and sings the opening lines of Like a Hurricane. It happens again during a version of All along the Watchtower, in which the riff moves past the purple of Hendrix to something thunderous and black. And it happens a third time during an excoriating rendition Of Rockin' in the Free World, in which Young explodes hippie ideology about the transformative power of pop. The song is more bitter, twisted, and generally misunderstood than Springsteen's Born in the USA, and packs its punch with an Empire State riff. It's about guilt. The guiltier Young gets, the harder he hits his guitar;the harder he hits it, the more people punch the air. You have the odd spectacle of both Performer and audience engaging in an uneasy celebration. Young, more. than the audience, is aware of the contradiction, and the guitar solo is a kind of aural suicide, the sound of pain and powerlessness. The effect in total is the idiocy of We Are The World in reverse. Instead of offering a bleeding heart, Young blows your head off, and makes it feel fun.

What else? The pairing with Booker T and the MGs proved less strange than it sounded. Apart from the odd bleep of the organ they were in keeping with Young's earlier bands, capable of ferocity and sensitivity, often in the same song. At times they could do nothing but stand back and watch. In other hands Young's solos might have been self-indulgent, but his work maintains a forward momentum which flatters the song, not the player.

The set was drawn from throughout Young's career, the only constants being the themes of uncertainty and regret which Pepper his work ("I want to love you but I get so blown away").

Unlike most dinosaur acts, Young turns his seniority to his advantage. A tribute to the MGs came with a weirdly affecting version of (Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay (co-written by guitarist Steve Cropper) in which the opening line was changed to "I left my home in Canada, headed for the Frisco bay." In the verses, Young buried the notion that he has a limited singing voice, matching Otis Redding for tenderness, and reverting in the chorus to his trademark whine, which nevertheless conveys emotion with piercing intensity.

Admittedly, things sagged in the middle notably during an execrable Motorcycle Mama. There were also problems with tuning which led Young to observe that he'd rather be playing in tune than out, but if it was a contest between playing out of tune and not playing, he'd take out of tune. "Uh what do you think?" he said .in his curiously deep speaking voice. "Is this unprofessional or untogether or what? Or so what?"

By the close, the MGs were spectators on the watchtower. That might just have been an amused shrug from bass player Donald'Duck' Dunn as the Paint blistered with the singer spot lit and intoning the mantra "There must be some way out of here."

It sounds, in the end, like a hurricane. Young does not play Unknown Legend, but when he cooks, he fries. Neil Young played the SECC, Glasgow, last Monday.