http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com...ard-time.html/
Neil Young gave his ‘Heart’ and ‘Soul’ Thursday, and some folks just gave him a hard time.
I would love to share with you the story Neil Young told Thursday night about his Martin D-28, which once belonged to Hank Williams and shared the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center stage with him on what was for the most part a very special night.
But I can’t, because Young wasn’t allowed the opportunity to share the tale. He tried. He held “Hank” in his hands and began recalling that trip to Nashville, when, from the balcony, to Young’s left, a man began shouting: “Play it! Play it!” At which point the 68-year-old who’s been making music since high school reminded the crowd that no one tells Neil Young what to do.
“I don’t think I’m gonna play it,” he said. Beneath his black wide-brimmed hat, he grinned a little. But you could tell: He was not pleased. The heckling continued, because this is just what some people do: spend hundreds of dollars to see their heroes, only to steal their spotlight.
“What, do I work?” Young said, the good humor now completely gone from his voice. “Is this a job? I’m trying to recall the last time I did something expressly because someone told me to do it.” The rest of the crowd cheered, almost as though it were trying to distract Young or jolt him back into the jovial mood he’d been in moments earlier, following a version of “Mr. Soul” played on a pump organ. Instead he just played the next song: “Harvest Moon,” one of the more beautiful entries in a canon filled with tenderhearted melodies. But Young strummed the guitar a little harder than usual, and didn’t so much sing its simple, sentimental lyrics (“When we were lovers/I loved you with all my heart”) as he did spit them out.
And when it was done, even Young seemed taken aback by the performance. “Funny — that song is not supposed to be angry,” he said, almost to himself. “There was a little anger in that one.” Then, glaring toward the balcony, he said to his heckler, “You get what you demand.”
This has been the refrain throughout this solo sojourn, which began at Carnegie Hall in January and stopped at Los Angeles’ Dolby Theater last month: Neil Young is a guest in the audience’s house, and not the other way around. He gives the crowd exactly what it wants: gorgeous, stripped-down versions of beloved songs, among them the oft-covered “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” “Mr. Soul,” “Mellow My Mind,” “Heart of Gold” (“my hit,” Young called it), “Pocahontas,” “After the Gold Rush,” “Thrasher” and a particularly wrenching “Old Man” in which the roles have been reversed. And he is repaid in heckles and commands.
It doesn’t ruin the occasion; little could. But it is embarrassing. Neil Young really doesn’t need you to tell him what to play or that he rocks.
Young, at 68, still sounds as has since the very beginning: His voice is high, sweet, gentle, cracked like soft leather even when snarling through a version of “Ohio” nearly marred by some audience members’ clumsy clapalong. The man who roars when riding a Crazy Horse sings like an angel when seated behind one of his two pianos or strumming one of the eight guitars with which he surrounded himself. His take on Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind,” now a set regular, rescues it from the soft-rock abyss; it sounds like one of Young’s own offerings. So too does his version of Phil Ochs’ “Changes,” which Young said Thursday night served as the template for much of his own work.
He was actually in a merry mood for most of the night. Young told elliptical tales about catching snapping turtles in the old mill stream when he was 5. He shared a story about Pete Seeger and an unnamed folk singer booed off the Carnegie Hall stage for wearing a gold lamé jacket. He marveled at the Meyerson, where he’d played in 2010. (Four years ago, he said, the venue “blew my mind.”) He knocked the Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis for being untruthful. And he offered a close-to-best-of set like a man who still enjoys singing songs written several lifetimes ago.
He also put up with the audience’s nonsense, but only for so long, excising from the set a few songs he’s played elsewhere. And why should he pardon the interruptions? He’s Neil Young. And he doesn’t work. He plays — better than almost anyone ever, even when you’re shouting at him. But if you’re going Friday night, one favor: don’t. Just don’t.