By Tom Siebert
Rock icon Neil Young and his new band the Chrome Hearts performed classic songs and deep-cut gems, ranging from the reflective to the revolutionary, in a breathtaking two-hour concert in Chicago on Wednesday night.
More than 7,300 showed up at Huntington Bank Pavilion on gorgeous Northerly Island during the Windy City stop of their 28-date Love Earth Tour of the U.S., Europe, and Canada.
After the sun set along the shores of Chicago, Mr. Young, 79, opened with “Ambulance Blues,” a slow, stream-of-consciousness ballad from his 1974 album On the Beach.
“It’s hard to say the meaning of this song,” he sang in his still-strong, high-tenor voice, while strumming an acoustic guitar and intermittently playing a brooding harmonica.
But during the final verse, which originally alluded to a Watergate-plagued Richard Nixon, Young’s voice rose and so did the roars of the crowd as they realized that he was now referring to another president, Donald Trump, who makes Tricky Dick look like Honest Abe.
“I never knew a man could tell so many lies/He had a different story for every set of eyes/How can he remember who he's talking to?/’Cause I know it ain't me and hope it isn't you.”
And if anyone thought that the legendary musician wasn’t singing in the present tense, he left no doubt in his new song “Big Crime.”
“Don’t need no fascist rules/Don’t want no fascist school/Don’t want soldiers on our streets/There’s big crime in DC at the White House/No more money to the fascists/The billionaire fascists/Time to blackout the system.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Young sued Trump to stop him from playing “Rockin’ in the Free World” at his rallies, claiming copyright infringement and stating that he “cannot allow my music to be used as a ‘theme song’ for a divisive, un-American campaign of ignorance and hate.”
Moreover, on April 1 of this year, Neil wasn’t fooling when he expressed his fear that Trump would detain and deport him, despite his dual citizenships in the U.S. and his native Canada.
As he wrote on his website: "When I go to play music in Europe, if I talk about Donald J. Trump, I may be one of those returning to America who is barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor with an aluminum blanket."
Then, on April 12, Young performed at an anti-Trump rally in downtown Los Angeles. And on April 18, he and his wife, actress/activist Daryl Hannah, protested the president’s policies at another gathering in Thousand Oaks, CA.
But unlike Bruce Springsteen, who verbally excoriated Trump during his recent European dates, Young has let his music do most of the talking on this tour, which began in Sweden on June 10 and is scheduled to conclude in Minneapolis on Sept. 20 for the 40th anniversary of Farm Aid, the annual benefit concert that Neil founded with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp in 1985.
Current events were temporarily set aside during the Chicago show’s performance of the classic “Cowgirl in the Sand,” a bittersweet love jam from Young’s 1969 album Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere, his first gold record.
He seemed to be singing directly to his audience on Northerly Island, a 119-acre homemade peninsula, nature preserve, and site of Meigs Field airport until 2003.
“Is this place at your command?/Can I stay here for a while?”
I last saw Neil in Costa Mesa, CA, in 1986, and if he has lost a power chord or staccato note in his lead guitar playing, I could not tell.
And the Chrome Hearts are all virtuoso musicians. They are 35-year-old guitarist Micah Nelson (a son of Willie); bassist Corey McCormick, 48; drummer Anthony LoGerfo, 42; and 82-year-old organist Spooner Oldham, who has backed up such Motown greats as Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Percy Sledge.
Oldham was wheelchair-bound, having broken his pelvis playing basketball, Nelson explained to the audience.
Young was scheduled to perform at this very venue in May 2024, but two members of his longtime band Crazy Horse became ill, forcing a cancellation of 16 tour dates.
“How ya’ doin’ out there?” Neil asked the Baby Boomer-heavy crowd, much of whom cheered in response. Then he quipped, “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here the last time I couldn’t be here.”
Wednesday night’s 17-song set list included two of the most important ever written.
“Southern Man,” an epic Civil War-themed jam from 1970’s magnificent After the Gold Rush, has renewed resonance after Trump erased Black History from government websites, renamed military bases for Confederate generals, and said that the Smithsonian museum shouldn’t show “how bad slavery was.”
During last evening’s performance of the classic song, Young’s guitar screamed and wailed, echoing the horrific sounds of slaves crying out while their masters beat and whipped them.
Then he longed for the last gasp of racism in America: “Southern man, better keep your head/Don’t forget what your Good Book said/Southern change gonna come at last/Now your crosses are burning fast.”
“Ohio” is a sacred protest anthem that Neil quickly wrote and recorded in May 1970 with folk-rock royalty David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash (CSNY) in the aftermath of the Kent State Massacre.
That national tragedy is just waiting to happen again after Trump sent National Guard troops to Los
Angeles and Washington, DC.
So when LoGerfo kicked off the military-style drumbeat of “Ohio,” it was as chilling as the late-summer breeze coming in from Lake Michigan.
“What if you knew her and/Found her dead on the ground?” Young sang in a high-pitched howl, memorializing one of the four killed by Ohio state guardsmen at a campus rally protesting Nixon’s expansion of the Viet Nam War into Cambodia.
“Some songs sound just like they were written yesterday,” Young told the audience.
And in the wake of Trump rolling back clean air and water laws and adopting a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy that expands oil exploration into national parks and forests, Neil and his band performed two tunes from his 2003 environmental concept-album Greenville.
“There’s corruption on the highest floor,” he shouted into a spinning stage-floor megaphone on “Sun Green.” And during the hard-rocking, save-the-planet “Be the Rain,” Young, Nelson, and McCormick put on a blazing guitar show at center stage.
Watching a man pushing 80 match energy and enthusiasm with the younger musicians, I couldn’t help but think about the serious health issues that have beset Young and his family.
He is a survivor of childhood polio and later overcame epilepsy, Type 1 diabetes, drug addiction, and in 2005 a near-fatal brain aneurysm.
In 1972, Young and his then-partner, actress Carrie Snodgrass, had a son, Zeke, who was born with a mild form of cerebral palsy. And in 1978, Neil had another son, Ben, with Pegi Morton, whom he later married.
Ben was born with debilitating cerebral palsy, inspiring Pegi to found the Bridge School for children with severe speech and physical impairments in Hillsborough, California.
The couple also had a daughter, Amber, now 40 and an interdisciplinary artist, who has been diagnosed with epilepsy.
Snodgrass, who captured Neil’s heart of gold in the 1969 movie Diary of a Mad Housewife, and for whom he wrote the song “A Man Needs a Maid” for his album Harvest, was 57 when she died of liver failure in 2004.
Pegi Young died of cancer at 66 in 2019. And since 2018, Neil has been married to Hannah, who struggles with Asperger syndrome, a form of autism.
Despite his personal challenges, Young has written 1,180 songs, has sold an estimated 92 million records, and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame both as a solo artist and with the pioneering rock-band Buffalo Springfield.
Chicago fans were treated to a cut from 1967’s Buffalo Springfield Again, “Mr. Soul,” a frenzied-stanza rocker that Neil wrote while he was recovering from epilepsy and dismissing his burgeoning celebrity status.
Backed by the younger guitar duo, LoGerfo’s propulsive drumming, and Spooner’s high-speed organ playing, Young sang:
“I was down on a frown when the messenger brought me a letter/I was raised by the praise of a fan who said I upset her/Any girl in the world could have easily known me better/She said, ‘You’re strange, but don’t change,’ and I let her.”
Always inventive in his words and melodies, Young is also an actual inventor. He has patented several devices to make model trains accessible to special-needs kids; helped build a hybrid engine for a 1959 Lincoln Continental; and developed Pono, a music download service and player focused on high-quality uncompressed digital audio.
Well, the audio was just fine on Northerly Island as Neil and his band performed “Harvest Moon,” a 1992 bayou beauty of a song and the title track of one of his many “comeback” albums.
He played his harmonica as richly as ever and strummed the chords on an acoustic guitar once owned by country-music visionary Hank Williams. The tender love ballad prompted some in the outdoor amphitheater to slow-dance with a sweetheart.
The food court at Huntington Bank Pavilion reflected Young's homegrown, eco-friendly ethos. Served up by smiling staff were organic pizza and locally sourced hot dogs as well as water, soft drinks, and crafted beer in cans––not plastic bottles that damage the environment.
And then there was the Love Earth Village of tents, chairs, and tables where local social justice, voting rights, green energy, and organic farming groups met with interested concertgoers.
Young crooned another lovely song from Harvest Moon called “One of These Days,” which almost every older person could relate to:
“I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter/To all the good friends I've known/And I'm gonna try and thank them all/For the good times together.”
“Name Of Love” is a song that Young contributed to 1988’s American Dream, the second of three studio albums that he made with Nash, brother-in-arms Stills, and Crosby, who died at 81 in January 2023.
Neil played his trusty pump organ on “Name of Love,” while the other musicians sang backup in perfect four-part harmony, sounding uncannily like CSNY.
In June, Young and the Chrome Hearts released Talkin’ to the Trees, Neil's 49th studio effort. And from that album, they played a new song, “Silver Eagle,” an elegy to Young’s old tour bus.
“We hit big traffic, we saw big things/As we remember and the roadway sings/You carried my friends, you carried me/Silver eagle, I'm feeling free.”
“Like A Hurricane” is the standout track on 1977’s American Stars ‘n Bars and it was introduced last night with great fanfare: a swinging angel-winged piano dropped down onto the stage and Nelson took to its keys to start the hypnotic rhythm of the long elegant jam.
Young’s guitar work and lyrics were altogether magical: “Once I thought I saw you/In a crowded hazy bar/Dancing on the light from star to star/Far across the moonbeam/I know that's who you are/I saw your brown eyes turning once to fire.”
No doubt Neil can afford to buy a new electric guitar. But most of his playing is done on two ancient ones: a 1953 Gibson Les Paul named “Old Black,” which he acquired in a trade with his Buffalo Springfield bandmate Jim Messina; and an orange Gretsch 6021 that he sold in 1965 and recently retrieved on eBay with the help of fellow Canadian rock-legend Randy Bachman.
Throughout the years, Young has reinvented his musical style many times over, encompassing such genres as jazz, rockabilly, punk rock, synth pop, and electronica.
Plus, his amped-up, fed-back, heavily distorted guitar playing earned him the moniker Godfather of Grunge by groups such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
Just before the final song of the main set, Neil addressed the concertgoers: “Thanks for coming out. I really appreciate it. We love you. Take care of one another.”
Then he and the band launched into “Old Man,” a fabled folk song from his masterpiece Harvest, the best-selling album of 1972.
Neil sang it beautifully from the other end of the generation gap. “Love lost, such a cost/Give me things that don't get lost/Like a coin that won't get tossed/Rolling home to you.”
And for those struggling with people-pleasing, “Old Man” contains one of the most clever lines ever written: “Doesn’t mean that much to me/To mean that much to you.”
The encore was the thunderous three-chord rock-anthem "My, My, Hey, Hey (Into the Black)" off the critically acclaimed 1979 LP Rust Never Sleeps.
The scorched-earth version of the famed song was propelled by LoGerfo’s booming drums and McCormick’s slam-bang fuzz bass. And when Young loudly snarled, “Rock and roll will never die,” much of the crowd responded with cheers, fist pumps, and peace signs.
Neil then took a final jab at the president by inserting his name in a key verse:
“The king is gone but he’s not forgotten/Is this the story of Donald Trump?/It’s better to burn out/’Cause rust never sleeps.”
Despite Young’s deep concerns about the state of the country, he remains an eternal optimist. As he sang earlier in the concert on “Looking Forward,” title track of his final album with CSNY in 1998:
“Looking forward/All that I can see/Is good things happening/To you and to me/I'm not waiting/For times to change/I want to live/Like a free-roamin' soul/On the highway of our love.”
Sixty years into his incandescent career, Neil Young shows no signs of rusting, fading away, nor burning out.
He is in fact lighting a path for us during these new Dark Ages.
