Last night my wife and I went to see Neil Young at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music. We got an invitation earlier this week from old friends. It was a great show: all acoustic, great sampling of all that’s great and even occasionally larger-than-life lousy about Neil (eg, a didactic, 2-song “Environmental Hymns” set that Neil of October 2014 clearly felt compelled to perform). His between-song banter was really funny. He played one of my favorite Buffalo Springfield songs (“On the Way Home”), surprisingly made a cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” (see clip, above, from his Boston show a few nights earlier) his own, and then some. The guy was all THERE: his songs, his performance of them, etc. We had some great laughs and bad pizza with our friends after the show. I went home feeling really good about the world.
That was pretty good. But isn’t that song like one verse too long?
I like his harmonimicrophone. Way to take the corny headset mic and twist it into something more authentic-like.
I was thinking the same thing when I saw him! As much as I liked the show, it would have been better if he’d been able to squeeze all of us into his electric 1953 Lincoln Continental and drive us around his ranch while we listened to a recording of the show through his car’s Pono soundsystem.