The denims. The flannel shirt. The silvery mutton chops peeking out from beneath a weather-beaten prepare engineer’s cap.
Neil Younger had dressed completely for the a part of Neil Younger on Monday night time on the Hollywood Bowl, and he’d introduced simply the appropriate songs too, amongst them “Harvest Moon,” “Ohio,” “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” each “Southern Man” and “Old Man,” in addition to “Cowgirl in the Sand,” the final of which he punctuated by telling the viewers that he’d first performed the hillside amphitheater with Buffalo Springfield in 1966.
“Finally made it back here,” he added with somewhat grin.
Contemplating how ambivalently Younger has pursued conventional rock stardom over the intervening many years, you would have a look at his Love Earth tour — which the 79-year-old wrapped with Monday’s two-hour present after three months on the street — because the work of a crank in his dotage giving in to well-liked demand and doing the hits everyone needs to listen to.
However take heed to what these hits are saying.
Neil Younger on the Hollywood Bowl.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Occasions)
“I heard screaming and bullwhips cracking,” he sang in “Southern Man,” concerning the significance of remembering slavery’s brutality; “Soldiers are gunning us down,” he sang in “Ohio,” about Individuals below the rule of their very own navy.
About midway by way of the gig, Younger sat down behind a piano and performed “Long Walk Home,” an elegiac ballad from the early ’70s that he initially wrote about troopers returning house from Vietnam earlier than updating it within the late ’80s to absorb that decade’s wars within the Center East; right here, he tweaked the tune’s lyrics once more to marvel why we “broke our word” to Ukraine and requested, “America, where have we gone?”
Fairly bleak stuff for a boomer icon in his crowd-pleasing period.
The Love Earth tour follows this summer time’s “Talkin to the Trees” LP, for which Younger convened a brand new band referred to as the Chrome Hearts that includes guitarist Micah Nelson, bassist Corey McCormick and drummer Anthony LoGerfo — all of them play in Promise of the Actual, which has beforehand backed Younger — in addition to organist Spooner Oldham, who’s identified for the Southern soul classics he helped create as a part of the mid-’60s music scene in Muscle Shoals, Ala.
On the Bowl, Oldham got here onstage in a wheelchair, which prompted Nelson to elucidate that the 82-year-old had cracked his pelvis in a “freak basketball accident” the opposite day.
“I just didn’t want you mistaking him for a frail old man or something,” Nelson added.
Younger supplied a single tune from “Talkin to the Trees” in “Silver Eagle,” a folky riff on “This Land Is Your Land” that he stated he wrote after his bus driver prompt he write a tune about his bus. He additionally performed a stomping fuzz-rock jam he and the Chrome Hearts dropped simply this month referred to as “Big Crime,” which takes particular intention at President Trump with a chant of “No more great again.” (Not his sharpest critique, maybe, although the gang on the Bowl appeared duly moved by the sentiment.)
Micah Nelson, from left, Corey McCormick and Anthony LoGerfo of the Chrome Hearts carry out with Neil Younger on Monday night time.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Occasions)
But what lifted the present was the urgency Younger was nonetheless discovering within the oldies: the squalling interaction between his and Nelson’s guitars in “Cowgirl in the Sand,” the driving tempo of “Like a Hurricane,” his sneering contempt for environmental abusers in “Be the Rain” and “Sun Green.”
No one would say the Chrome Hearts have been as gloriously crusty as Loopy Horse, and at occasions you needed to smile on the band’s intergenerational presentation, with Nelson wanting like Kurt Cobain, Oldham evoking a kindly church elder and McCormick bopping round in saggy denims like anyone from 311. However after they all bore down on the doomy grandeur of “Hey Hey, My My,” they gave the impression of a freight prepare barreling in a single route.
Younger closed the present with “Roll Another Number (For the Road),” his ragged nation lope from the famously haunted “Tonight’s the Night” LP he launched half a century in the past. In the summertime of 1975, Younger was determining the right way to transfer on from the disillusionment that adopted the collapse of the hippie dream; on Monday, he sang the tune with the weary abandon of a man who’s found how a lot disillusionment was but to return.
