CONCERT REVIEW: Neil Young @ Tower Theatre, 4/30

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CONCERT REVIEW: Neil Young @ Tower Theatre, 4/30

POSTED: Sunday, May 1, 2011, 1:43 PM

Filed Under: Music Show

What the fuck.

At the Tower Theatre Saturday night, Neil Young wandered the stage between songs, and sometimes during them, as if looking for something he’d lost. Although he had only a cigar-store Indian — with whom he conferred as roadies replace an out-of-tune guitar — keeping him company, Young occupied all of the Tower’s substantial stage, switching between acoustic and electric guitars, upright and grand pianos, and the towering organ he occupied for “After the Gold Rush.” (T-shirts for the 2010 leg of his ongoing Twisted Road tour read, “I said solo. They said acoustic.”) As he demonstrated on last year’s Le Noise, Young doesn’t need a band to fill a room, especially when he cranks his electric loud enough to coax overtones out of the echoing canyons of sound.

Clad in a white linen jacket and Panama hat, Young opened with the Greatest Hits trio of “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue),” “Tell Me Why” and “Helpless,” but that proved to be something of a (doubtless purposeful) misdirection for a set half composed of lesser-known songs, including six of Le Noise’s eight tracks and the unreleased “Leia” and “You Never Call.” That previous audiences might not have welcomed the approach could be gleaned from the laminated signs posted in the lobby, which read in part, “The artists respectfully request that you refrain from whistling or yelling out during the performance,” which loosely translates as, “I played ‘Cinnamon Girl.’ Now shut the fuck up.”

That didn’t stop one beefy dude from repeatedly yelling “What the fuck?!” as the crowd streamed out after Young’s single encore, but then he’s spent decades perfectly the delicate art of getting classic-rock fans to turn out whether he’s playing the hits or a rock opera about environmental revolution. Saturday’s show might not have been what the audience was expecting — and chances are Sunday’s will be much the same — but those who came with open ears heard Young finding new ways into well-worn classics and forging onward with characteristic eccentricity. At times, the show recalled Young’s defense of his scattershot run of 1980’s releases: “You can call me erratic, but I’ve always been consistent about it — consistently erratic.”

On “You Never Call,” his response to the death last year of his longtime friend and associate L.A. Johnson, Young let the bass notes on his acoustic ring out, conjuring an ominous rumble offset by the song’s disarmingly plainspoken sentiment. “Leia,” introduced as “a song for the all the little people — the tiny little people who don’t yell their ass off,” was a bouncy piano ditty with lyrics about “catching falling leaves from the branches of the music tree,” less evocative of Young’s back catalogue than a lost B.J. Thomas outtake. Even a song as (over)familiar as “Down by the River” was freed from decades of accumulated rust, blasted clean by the stuttering single notes of Young’s electric guitar.

Le Noise’s “Walk With Me” might have been an off-kilter encore choice, but Young pulled out all the stops, singing into the miniature microphone attached to his harmonica and dragging his wailing guitar around the stage as if performing a final exorcism. Notwithstanding the show’s relatively brevity, it was hard to feel Neil Young had held anything back.

Setlist:

My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)

Tell Me Why

Helpless

You Never Call

Peaceful Valley Boulevard

Love and War

Down by the River

Hitchhiker

Ohio

Sign of Love

Leia

After the Gold Rush

I Believe in You

Rumblin’

Cortez the Killer

Cinnamon Girl

Encore:

Walk With Me

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