Neil Young delivers a gorgeous, intimate solo show in Los Angeles
Midway through Neil Young‘s lovely and sometimes shambling solo show on Friday June 30, he paused to chat with the audience again during the first of four sold out shows at The Ford in Los Angeles over the next week.
“Alright, I hope you’re not in a hurry,” the 77-year-old singer-songwriter told the 1,200 fans in sold-out amphitheater. “I feel bad for you. You have no idea.”
But that’s exactly the point of the Coastal Tour, which kicked off Friday night and also includes dates July 15 in Berkeley and July 23 in Napa. No one had any idea what Young would play – he’d previously announced this tour would feature mostly songs he’d rarely, if ever, played live – and at times it felt like Young himself wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to play next.
“Hmm. I have a list, you know,” he reassured fans as he contemplated his next number at one point. “I’m very organized. I don’t know if you can tell that.”
No one cared, for in a terrific set that offered 17 songs in 90 minutes, Young’s running commentary only added to the warm, casual nature of a night that saw the two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame play the unexpected – a handful of songs had live debuts on Friday – and the familiar – “Mother Earth (Natural Anthem),” “Ohio” and “Heart of Gold.”
The night opened with “I’m The Ocean,” a track off Young’s 1995 album “Mirror Ball,” for which members of Pearl Jam served as his band. “People my age, they don’t do the things I do,” he sang of the restless pull of music, accompanying himself on 12-string acoustic guitar and harmonica. “They go somewhere while I run away with you.”
“Homefires,” a song originally recorded in 1974, but not released until 2020 came next. It was followed by “Burned,” a Buffalo Springfield song from 1966 that Young noted was one of his first compositions after moving to Los Angeles. And the pattern of the night started taking shape.
“Nice place, huh?” he said of The Ford, one of the more unique venues in Los Angeles, tucked into a hillside in the Cahuenga Pass across the 101 Freeway from the Hollywood Bowl, from which screams from fans of former One Direction singer Louis Tomlinson could be heard during quiet moments in Young’s set. “We could have been at the Podunk coliseum tonight.”
Other highlights early in the set included “If You Got Love,” a song pulled at the last minute from Young’s 1982 album “Trans,” which brought him to the pump organ for the first time of the night, and “My Heart,” a gentle, fragile beauty he sang while playing his grand piano.
About that piano: Young introduced it as his “burnt piano,” a Steinway he was very pleased to get for just $1,500 some 50 years ago only to discover that it had been in a fire and the soundboard was so scorched that if you touched it your fingers would come away black.
This, though, was only part of his introduction of the instruments he’d brought on tour with him. An upright piano on the opposite side of the stage, on which someone had placed Post-It notes with messages such as “I adore you” before the show? He rented that one when he came to Hollywood in the ’60s and had played it off and on ever since.
As for the pump organ? “I got it in a junk shop in Redwood City,” Young said. “It was like 800 bucks. I’m a good shopper.”
Sometimes Young even shared stories about instruments that were not even there, such as when he introduced “A Dream That Can Last” with a story about the sessions for “Sleeps With Angels,” the 1994 album made with his longtime band Crazy Horse.
“I went out for a walk and bought a flute at a drugstore,” he said. (Note: His comments are best read in Neil’s laconic nasal drawl.) “It was a very funky little flute, two dollars and 49 cents or something.
“And, uh, I don’t use it on this song at all,” Young finished as the crowd cracked up with laughter.
The magic of the night, of course, was that this all fit together so well. The story was a little surreal; the song, played live for the first time ever on Friday, was sweet, vulnerable, the piano accompaniment beautiful beneath Young’s high, plaintive tenor.
The back half of the show finally delivered a handful of familiar songs. Standing at the organ, Young asked the crowd to pick whether he should play “Mother Earth” or “Mr. Soul,” deciding after a minute of shouted requests that he’d play the former. The song is a hymn-like anthem to protect the planet, a topic about which Young has long deeply cared.
“Ohio,” the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song he wrote in anger at the killing of four Kent State University students by National Guard soldiers during a war protest, rocked as hard as anything on Friday, Young playing electric guitar for one of a handful of songs in the show. He brought back out the acoustic guitar and harmonica for “Days That Used to Be,” a wistful elegy for the faded idealism of the ’60s, from 1990’s “Ragged Glory” album with Crazy Horse.
“Heart of Gold,” Young’s only No. 1 single ever, closed the main set with everyone in the crowd on their feet and singing along. It remains a perfect song.
“Here I am at the end of the show, just played my biggest hit of all time,” he said by way of introducing “Love Earth” as a song he didn’t expect anyone to know, his penultimate song before “Four Strong Winds” closed out the night.
He did expect them to be able to sing the chorus of “love earth,” though, and expressed his disappointment hilariously when not that many even tried.
“You suck,” Young scolded them after a test of the audience’s ability to sing just two words. “I gave you the simplest part and you can’t do that.” The crowd broke out in laughter again, tried again, and at the end of the song received high praise.
“Where were you when I recorded that?” Young asked. “We coulda had a hit.”