There's room for you in Neil Young's world

Constant change, unmistakable guitar and voice, hop on...

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hey, kids! I made the big time. Thanks to Judy Greenberg, this post made the Neil Young Archives Members page! Exciting!!!

Calling them “entry points” seems way too tech-ey for me. But what else to call a song, a program, whatever it is that moves you into the “fan” category?

In the case of Bruce Springsteen, all it took was hearing an advance tape of “Born To Run” on WBCN months before the album came out. With Roxy Music, it was hearing “Out Of The Blue,” getting out of work and getting the album, then realizing there were three Roxy Music records that preceded “Country Life.” So you go out and get the rest and dig in. Wow, what a gold mine of sound!

With U2, while I liked “I Will Follow” it was their tricky “11 O’Clock, Tick Tock” that I couldn’t get out of my ears, couldn’t stop playing it. I bought in, got their albums, have been with them ever since.

Neil Young's "Austin City Limits" show brought me under his tent,

Though I’d actually seen Neil Young in concert once, my “entry point” came later. The first time I saw Neil was a David Crosby/Graham Nash show at the Boston Music Hall in October of 1975 — where Stephen Stills and an absolutely out-of-it Neil joined the two of them for a couple of songs near the end of the show, sort of.

Neil sat there holding a guitar on some other planet. My date, our final date by the way, kept on saying how excited she was that Neil had the same shoes as she did. I told her I was sure that was why he bought them.

While I certainly knew Neil Young’s music a bit —you could hardly miss it — it wasn’t until nine years later that we really connected. My former brother-in-law, recognizing that I had a passion (some might say obsession) for music, gave me an old guitar of his, not quite a Willie Nelson cracked front type but close. He showed me how to play chords.

So as I was struggling to go from “G” to “D” on the guitar one Saturday night, here’s Neil Young on the terrific Austin City Limits show with his then-band The International Harvesters, playing a sort of countrified set of originals with fiddle and steel guitar, hardly standard Neil Young acoustic OR electric.

But he was so quirkily charming, funny and warm — and I found that I could more-or-less play some of these songs. And while, in retrospect, that show ended up being about 20% of what I’d come to love about Neil Young, it got me started.

Once you’re under the Neil Young tent, what’s wonderful is there is SO MUCH MUSIC, you’ll never run out of things to listen to, particularly if you sign up for his Neil Young Archives, which I did for a couple of years. There are his “regular” record releases — “Comes A Time,” “Rust Never Sleeps,” “Freedom” — and everything else, live concerts, outtakes, films, complete albums that he yanked at the last minute, all sorts of stuff to dig into if you’ve a mind to. You will never run out. And he keeps adding to the stash.

For me, its the sonic wonders of his idiosyncratic and somehow emotional guitar work is what I love more than anything. Listening to “Down In The Rust Bucket” as I write this, a quickie live album recorded at a small club date in Santa Cruz in 1990 (There’s a grainy video version of this show on his archives) it’s raw, immediate Neil, backed by Crazy Horse veterans of the Tour Wars and it’s one of those nights he caught fire and they got it all down on tape.

Over the years, I’ve had a chance to see him in concert in several incarnations. I saw the “Rust Never Sleeps” tour, the “Rusted Out Garage” tour with comedian Sam Kinison stepping out and screaming at the band between songs as if he was an annoyed neighbor, the “Weld” tour which happened during the Gulf War and I found myself choking up when Neil rumbled into Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind” — his anti-war protest — in mid-concert, the Blue Notes’ tour when he had horns and a blues-based set of rockers and several other shows, acoustic and electric, always changing, always pushing somewhere, wondering what’s around the corner.

The moment that will always stick with me, though, came at the close of an outdoor Neil Young and Crazy Horse show down at Suwannee, about an hour from here. I was watching him closely and from the start of the show — yet another date on what must seem a life of endless dates — he was dead-on focused, trying to find his way into his own music, not talking to the audience or the band, just tuned into the sound, trying to find his place.

Finally, about halfway through the show, he got there, looked up at the audience and asked, at last, “How you all doing?” A roar went up from the crowd. He noticed we were here, after all.

He rocked on into the night, wound down the set with “Love To Burn,” a rocker from “Ragged Glory,” a perfect title for his work with Crazy Horse and it began to rain. He waved to the crowd and walked off. We headed for our car.

To get there, though, we had to walk through the woods, an almost cathedral-like grotto of campfires, tents, lawn chairs, people stretched out on blankets. You could smell the wood burning, other things burning, too (wink) and there was a warmth and a genuine sense of community in that little space. It was as if Neil and his music had created a magical, safe spot for them out in the world. We’d just taken a few steps in the darkened place and then came the unmistakable opening notes of his encore, “Like A Hurricane” — soaring over all of us in that pine grotto, almost like a benediction, “here’s something to take home with you, friends.”

And it made me think, for a moment that Neil Young had truly built his own little world for all of us — and him — to go to, to escape, to listen to him find his way on “Old Black” his epic, classic guitar and discover our own path — like we did through the woods — to make it through this life.

Somehow, it seemed a perfect moment. We couldn’t see him or Crazy Horse. All we could do was hear his music, triumphantly soaring through the night. Here we were walking in the dark amidst campfires, couples snuggling on blankets, out in the woods, out in the real world, not some concert setting. Just letting Neil Young’s music carry us home. Again.

This Austin City Limits show from 1984 got me started.

“Country Home” the opening song from “Way Down In The Rust Bucket”