Neil young

Tuesday

Bill Kauffman

A Neil Young concert in the waning days of summer

From our US edition

By the time we got to Woodstock… actually, we never got to Woodstock. Bethel, the town in which the fabled festival of mud and myth took place, is about 50 miles as the crow flies from the famous musical happening’s eponym, and it was at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts that we saw and heard Neil Young in the waning days of summer, when melancholy always spices the air. It boggles the mind that half a million kids – the youngest of whom are now hoary-headed septuagenarians – flooded Sullivan County on a rain-soaked weekend in August 1969, but it is almost as remarkable that despite the drugs and unhygienic conditions, only three concertgoers died.

Young

Saturday

John Sturgis

Now it’s getting late: on Neil Young, ageing and fatherhood

Neil Young once saved my life. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.  This was at an outdoor show in Finsbury Park in July 1993. I had pushed and squeezed my way almost to the front of a large crowd shortly after being passed something of dubious provenance to smoke. One moment everything was perfect: he was playing that romantic late career hit, ‘Harvest Moon’, the sun was setting, the moon, conveniently, rising, and I was swaying along, rapturous. But then, suddenly – bang… I fainted.  This is the only time in my 45-year gig-going career that this has happened. But I was gone. I was briefly unconscious, then I came to lying on my back on the grass, looking up at dozens of legs all around and above me, almost on top of me.

Sunday

Bill Kauffman

My biggest regrets

From our US edition

Regrets, I've had a few, but unlike Mr. "My Way," mine are enough to mention. (Didn’t Hoboken Frank at least regret slapping Ava Gardner or hanging out with Joey Bishop?) “When you see the end of things coming close and staring at you,” as Jason Robards tells his son in Ray Bradbury’s filmic adaptation of his own novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, “it’s not what you’ve done that you regret — it’s what you didn’t do.” (For good or ill, cataracts prevent me from seeing the coming end.) Surely some missed opportunities are worth missing. For instance, I doubt if any of the awestruck Lou Reed fans whom the rock’n’roll coprophage famously invited to defecate into his mouth regretted turning down the chance.

regrets

Thursday

Lou Perez

It’s not Joe Rogan who needs to apologize

From our US edition

We are spending too much time talking about Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan is spending too much time apologizing. “Whenever you're in a situation where you have to say, ‘I'm not racist,’ you fucked up,” Rogan apologized on February 5. “And I clearly have fucked up.” Rogan was addressing a montage that is circulating on social media, showing him saying the N-word on multiple episodes of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. When Joe describes the montage as “the most regretful and shameful thing that I've ever had to talk about publicly,” I believe him. And I don’t think Joe made a mistake apologizing. That was Joe expressing his authentic self.

joe rogan

Monday

Michael Warren Davis

Time for the baby boomers to grow up already

From our US edition

It was a nice neighborhood until those people moved in. Now you can’t even swim in the pool. By four in the afternoon, they’re all sitting around drinking Corona, smoking pot, and blasting their awful music. Oh, and the language! I used to love swimming in that pool when I was little. Now, I’m not sure I want my kids anywhere near it. Seriously, the retirement park has gone to the birds since all the boomers moved in. When my grandparents died, my mom and dad inherited their double-wide in this park near Sarasota. From what I remember growing up, it was a lot like the retirement park in Seinfeld, only with old WASPs instead of old Jews. There wasn’t as much shouting. Everything else was the same though. There were lots of pastel sweaters and Bermuda shorts.

boomers

Wednesday

Bill Zeiser

Joe Rogan and the risk of being unreasonable

From our US edition

In the mid-2000s, I was an avid fan of mixed martial arts. My friends and I would pool our money to order the pay-per-view events of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the combat sport’s largest promoter. One of the fixtures of UFC broadcasts was — and remains — the color commentary of Joe Rogan. Most people of that era would have been more likely to recognize Rogan as the host of Fear Factor, a hokey NBC gameshow in which contestants attempted to withstand such challenges as being covered in live insects or dropped into deep water while trapped in a car. But my buddies and I were more impressed with his UFC broadcast work. He was knowledgeable about the sport and infectiously enthusiastic, to the degree that we wondered whether he was coked out of his mind.

Tuesday

Stephen L. Miller

The hippies have become the cops

From our US edition

You either die a rebel or live long enough to see yourself turn into a snowflake. The generation of free love and free expression have gradually transformed into the baton-wielders. I’m referring to Neil Young’s demand that Spotify either pull his entire catalog or do away with Joe Rogan’s podcast. Spotify reportedly paid $100 million to acquire Rogan’s podcast in 2020. You'd imagine their contract includes legal bulwarks against such demands. Young is reportedly upset with Covid “misinformation” (the media’s new favorite vague term) and is no longer willing to abide by a streaming service that plays host to Rogan. It took Spotify about three seconds to make their decision: Neil Young is no longer on their platform.

neil young

Saturday

Toby Young

Why Neil Young’s Spotify boycott is a mistake

When Neil Young issued his threat to Spotify – get rid of Joe Rogan’s podcast or remove my music from your platform – he was probably hoping a chorus of other musical artists would weigh in behind him. After all, Spotify paid a reported $100 million to Rogan for the exclusive rights to host his podcast and, given that each episode attracts 11 million listeners, it must be quite a money spinner for the music streaming service. I’m sure Young’s music does alright on Spotify, but from a purely commercial point of view it was a no-brainer. Thankfully, only Joni Mitchell seems to have joined Young’s boycott so far, and that’s the most significant thing about this episode, not Spotify’s decision to side with Rogan.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Lovely and wistful: Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Barn reviewed

 Grade: A I have persisted in buying everything Neil Young releases since I first heard On the Beach as a callow but pretentious 13-year-old. To tell you the truth, the past 27 years have somewhat tested this commitment. There has been a fatal laziness in the songwriting, lyrically and melodically, since 1994’s Sleeps with Angels and the preaching has become ever more tiresome. But I continued forking out in the increasingly forlorn hope that he’d turn out something if not wonderful, then at least reminiscent of wonderful things past. And for lo, the grizzled old troubadour has done exactly that. This is a subtler incarnation of Crazy Horse, helped incalculably by the presence of Nils Lofgren on flowery bar-room piano and sweet guitar.

Thursday

Michael Hann

A soulful man with a blistering voice: Sipho, at Studio 9294, reviewed

When I were a lad — back when you could buy the entire back catalogue of the Fall for thruppence and still have change to get into a New Order show on the way home — record labels mattered. Well, a cohort of independent labels mattered, because their imprints stood for something. There was Creation, with its dedication to a twin axis of 1977 and 1967 as the only years that counted; 4AD, with its arty sleeves and its wafty, diaphanous music; there was Factory, somewhere between an elaborate practical joke and home to the most forward-thinking musicians in the country. You don’t get many labels like that any longer. The new economics of the music industry militate against the model of the record label as an aesthetic statement, rather than purveyor of vulgar commerce.

Thursday

Michael Hann

The problem with livestreaming heavy metal? No moshpits

There was only so long anyone could put up with the live musical performances of the early days of lockdown: musicians in their living rooms, performing stripped-back versions of their songs in broadcasts that froze or stuttered. The time would come, inevitably, when everyone wanted more. Viewers would want something more closely approximating a full show; musicians would want to be paid. Laura Marling was early through the gates: last month, she promoted her latest album with two concerts at the Union Chapel in London, played to an empty hall but streamed for UK and US audiences.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Ranges from the slight to the first-rate: Neil Young’s Homegrown reviewed

Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly endless catalogue of stuff which, at the time it was recorded, failed to see the light of day. And people like me fork out each time. I remember looking forward to this album in 1975 — but just before the release date he shelved it in favour of Tonight’s the Night, easily the finest rock album of the 1970s (or, to my mind, since). This doesn’t come close but, as it’s from Young’s most rewarding period, it holds a certain interest. Five songs have been released elsewhere, including the lovely ‘Star of Bethlehem’ (on Young’s underrated American Stars ’n’ Bars).