The News According to Neil Young

You've been playing all of Greendale live onstage every night since April, as a solo act in Europe and here with Crazy Horse. Aren't you asking a lot of your fans — to deal with ten new songs and a complex family saga before the album is even out?

No. It's a breath of fresh air, after seeing the same thing over and over, hearing the same old songs, seeing the same guys getting older and older. OK, it's nice, it's a ritual. Is that the way you want to live your life? Great — there's a lot of other acts to do that with. But my audience is used to this. If they've been with me for a long time, they're real used to it.

That's true. You followed up the 1972 album Harvest, a Number One hit, with an arena tour of all new songs, which ended up on the live record Time Fades Away.

And when Comes a Time came out [in 1978], I went out and did the Rust Never Sleeps songs. People are watching giant amplifiers flying around, the "road-eyes" running around. Years later, people go, "Wow, how many of those shows were there? I've seen the movie. I wish I'd seen the show."

You wouldn't have asked this question in 1978. Our culture has become so rigid, with all of the little boxes of expectations. I wrote these songs, and I would be untrue to myself if I didn't go out and sing 'em.

Was the Green Famliy saga all worked out when you started writing the songs?

"Devil's Sidewalk" was the first lyric. You could tell it was describing a place. As the songs started to unravel, I saw the story, what happened next. I wrote the songs one at a time and recorded each one before I'd write the next one.

The songs just happened. First thing in the morning, I'd pick up a guitar, play two or three chords and go, "That's the blueprint. That's what my soul told me, so that's what it is." Then I'd go to the studio. I would write the words, without guitar, in my car. I'd keep stopping on the way — write two verses, go a hundred yards, stop, write some more. I kept moving, and writing, until I got to the studio. Whatever I had then, that was the song. "Devil's Sidewalk" — the recording is the first time I sang it, the first time the band had ever heard it.

Which characters do you most identify with? You speak through all of them, like a combination of God and the stage manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town.

These characters are all part of me, part of my family and my life — and part of the greater family, the American family. The beautiful thing about the Greendale show is that I'm standing there for an hour and a half, singing these new songs, and people are not looking at me. They're looking all over. And in the film, I play the music. I sing everything. I see images I want to see, because I filmed a lot of them myself. But I'm not lip-syncing. I'm not faking. I really hate that shit.

As a director, you have an aversion to polish. Your films, including Greendale, all have a fuzzy, home-movie quality — some would say amateurish.

The ambience is the message. That's what Journey Through the Past (1972) andHuman Highway (1982) were about. Well, Human Highway is just ridiculous [laughs]. But who gives a shit about moviemaking? My goal is not to be in a theater in Westwood following some big blockbuster.

The Greendale stage show has the low-budget earnestness of the movie, like a high-school production of The Fantasticks.

The girl who plays Sun Green — Sarah White — is a friend of my daughter's from high school. I watched her and my daughter Amber in productions all through high school, and I became very impressed with what could be done with a couple of pieces of plywood. I don't need anything more. It fit with my sketchiness of things.

What kinds of movies did you see and love as a boy?

Japanese horror and science-fiction movies — Invaders From Mars and stuff like that. I loved the fantasy. I also liked old Westerns, but I really liked the interplanetary stuff the best. It takes me away.

I'm very uneducated. I used to think Abbott and Costello were really funny. I loved Jerry Lewis movies. I thought they were fine art. But I also like the long shots and ambience of the early Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard pictures.

What I don't want to do is videos. Video got usurped. It was an art form with a lot of promise when it came along in the early Eighties and rapidly became a commercial. It became about how cool this person looked, how many dancers you had. It had nothing to do with anything except sell the image. I don't have an image I want to sell. I'd rather hide it [grins]. It's detrimental.

Describe your daily life as a songwriter. Do you try to write a new song every day?

I have other interests. When I become focused on writing songs and creating music, my first task is to get rid of the other interests, so they don't get in the way. I clear the decks for months. For this record, I discontinued all the physical-fitness training that I was doing — weightlifting, yoga, swimming. That opened up a couple of hours a day, when you take in travel and actual training.

What was the last song you wrote?

"Be the Rain."

Literally the final song on Greendale.

Yeah. It was about nine months ago.

Isn't that a long time between new songs?

No. You gotta give things a chance to settle down. There was a song at the beginning of Greendale, a hangover from Are You Passionate?, called "I Don't Want to Be Sorry." It's a cool song — me and the Horse. But I didn't use it. It was a transition song.

I'm not worried. I have a melody in my head and a guitar thing that I've been playing. But I don't want to have anything to do with new lyrics yet.

Which Greendale songs can you imagine playing a year or two from now, as part of a regular Neil Young show?

[Long pause] I don't know. Already, I've heard people saying, "This is worse than Trans."

That's cold.

Yeah, it is [grins]. But if I had the technology I have today when I did Tran, and the confidence in myself as a filmmaker, I could have told the whole Trans story the same way I've done this. I wanted to make videos for all of the songs, but the record company couldn't afford it. I should have done it myself. Then I could have taken better blame for Trans, because I would have presented it more fully.

In the Greendale song "Grandpa's Interview," you sing, "It ain't an honor to be on TV/It ain't a duty, either." Do you watch much TV? If so, what do you watch?

I sometimes watch TV, but I always end up getting narky, talking back to the screen, until I just turn it off. The Sci Fi Channel — I'll go to that. I watch Star Trek. But these reality shows — who are they kidding? What reality is that, with a camera on you all the time? How stupid are people?

Have you ever watched American Idol?

I got roped into watching it. I happened to be in a room where people were watching it one day. And that guy came on — he was in Rolling Stone, on the cover.

Clay Aiken --

Yeah, Clay. You want my opinion? When I saw Clay on the cover of Rolling Stone, I thought, "Well, it's not Jerry Garcia. Things have really changed." We went from music and a movement — people living the music and loving the message, the freedom.

Is there any current pop music that you like? What was the last record you bought?

A Jimmy Reed record. What I like to listen to is not pop music. I'm interested in the roots of the blues and folk music. I'm out of touch, a lost cause. You can write me off.

You take a few choice shots at yourself on Greendale like Grandpa's lines in "Falling From Above": "It seems like that guy singing this song/Has been doing it for a long time/Is there anything he knows/That he ain't said?" Do you worry that someday you'll run out of things to say or that people will just stop caring?

No. As long as I'm interested, I'll find a way to say things that is today instead of yesterday. My perspective on things is just the way I am. I'm not discouraged by what's going on in this country, because I can still speak out against it — make my little reflective pool for people to look in.

But how do you feel about the future of rock & roll — as music, as a weapon of expression and change — in an era of fierce conservatism and falling record sales?

Rock & roll has still got a lot of legs. But I consider rock & roll and rap to be the same. It's popular music with an edge. If the edge doesn't have a guitar, that doesn't mean it's not rock & roll.

I do know it's a huge business, and it's lost its idealism in the face of Internet downloading and the RIAA suing people for listening to music — people who get a couple of songs from my new album, or the whole album, because they never would have heard it on the radio.

The issue of not getting paid doesn't bother you?

I'm a very wealthy person. I've been managed very well. I'm not greedy to the point that I need to get paid for every little thing I do. I'm an artist. I should be fucking doing art, not standing up for artists' rights. We got Sheryl Crow and Don Henley — it's covered. I don't have to do it. When the copyright law is all over and I'm dead and gone, I'll have more songs. I'll have three or four more albums.

That's what I know how to do, and I do that OK. Sometimes I do it, and people really like it. Sometimes I do it, and they get pissed off at me [smiles]. Whatever.

[From Issue 930 — September 4, 2003]