Forever Young

The next night, though, at an actual Neil Young concert in front of actual Neil Young fans, there are quite a few ties in the house. Their owners are seated next to kids in frayed flannel shirts, next to preppie types in Docksiders, next to rockers in leather jackets. Garth Brooks listeners mingle with Nirvana-heads. Woodstock meets Lollapalooza, an aging hipster in a linen jacket shares a joint in the men's room with a fresh-scrubbed teen.

"Can we get it together, can we still stand side by side?" Young sings in Harvest Moon's "From Hank Hendrix." With the continuing fragmentation of the pop-music audience, a Neil Young solo concert is as close to a rock & roll consensus as you're going find.

"They come from everywhere for the acoustic thing," Young says. "They won't meet anywhere else. But once I define it with a band, I lose half of them and bring in a bunch more extremists from one place or another."

The acoustic thing. Young has been touring off and on for the past year with just a fleet of guitars, a couple of pianos and a banjo or two, hitting two or three cities at a time and then retreating — vampirelike — to his ranch in California for a few weeks. The one consistent element in these shows is his refusal to use a set list at any time — much to the chagrin of the Center Stage film crew, which scrambles to shoot Young as he wanders from instrument to instrument, scratching his head and figuring out what he wants to play next.

"There's a lot I get out of doing this acoustic thing that I don't get any other way," Young says. "It opens up the music and the songs and what they're about. Being able to pick things out and change them around. A band can cover that stuff up. There's nothing worse than walking out and knowing exactly what you're going to do. At this time of my life, I don't need that."

The flip side of that, of course, is not knowing what the audience is going to make of any given Neil Young show. The Center Stage taping is spectacular, with Young compensating for his concerns about the bright lights of TV by delving even deeper into the songs. He ends up playing twenty songs almost two hours, for a show that will run only a half-hour (an hour-long version will appear on PBS next summer). A painfully intense rendition of 1977's "Like a Hurricane" on the pipe organ is the highlight — Young would later refer to it as "the Transylvania version," though it actually felt closer to Phantom of the Opera. (Too lunatic for VH-1, apparently: The song didn't make the cut for the show.)

The following night's concert at the gorgeously restored, turn-of-the-century Chicago Theater, however, is not such a pretty sight. The crowd is boisterous and vocal from the opening minutes. Several times, Young starts to play a song only to cut it short, claiming that he can't hear himself. "Don't think I'm fucking with you, okay?" he pleads from the stage. "But some of you guys who drink a lot of beer, you know how loud you can be compared to this."

Finally, Young delivers a brief, good-natured greatest-hits set, cutting off after about seventy-five minutes. "Tonight was the opposite of what I like to do on a musical level — tonight was survival," he says after the show. "But you have to be able to read it and roll with it. I don't have to play a sensitive song while people are yelling. I play the songs for myself, and if I'm distracted by the audience, I'll just stop."

Young bears no malice for this segment of his following, the beer-swilling guys in Allman Brothers T-shirts who turned last winter's performances at New York's Beacon Theater into a nasty, heated battle between his desire to play unreleased new songs and their calls for his familiar rock & roll raveups. "Don't you have a lot of friends like that?" he asks. "Big outgoing guys who have a few drinks and just get blown out, but if they aren't drinking, their soulful side comes out and they're actually real sensitive? They just get so high, they feel it so much, that they think they're alone in their van listening to the songs."