Saturday in the Park with Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Neil Young & Crazy Horse
Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on Saturday Sept. 29, 2012, New York
(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP) - Bakersfield Now
(Click photo to enlarge)
Last Saturday, Neil Young & Crazy Horse headlined a free concert for the Global Poverty Project in Central Park, New York City.

Here's a nice review Neil Young's Global Poverty Project Concert in Central Park : The New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg:

Neil Young, sixty-seven years old next month, is a wonder. His voice is rougher and lower than it was when I first heard it, forty-six years ago, at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. But it’s as strong as it was in his Buffalo Springfield days, and as distinctive, and as clear, with those emphatic Canadian “r”s. Even against the cacophony of Crazy Horse’s tsunami of sound, you don’t need a lyric sheet to understand the words he sings the first time you hear them. You get the music and you get the meaning.

Back then he was a diffident young buck. Now he’s a lion, thrashing and roaring. He’s a buffalo in an autumn field, snorting and pawing the plain of the stage. For more than an hour, every minute of it intense, he sang and played, loped and ducked and stomped. This is not an oldies act. There was no “Everybody Knows,” no “Heart of Gold,” no “Old Man” (except the ones on the stage). From the long-ago past, only “The Needle and the Damage Done,” which he sang accompanied solely by his own acoustic guitar. (The set was beautifully paced.)

The shortage of “greatest hits” mattered not at all. In his late sixties Young is a volcano of creativity. The song about hearing “Like a Rolling Stone” for the first time was proof enough of that. For me, though, the night’s high point was another new composition of his, “Walk Like a Giant.” The lyrics are about disillusionment ("I used to walk like a giant on the land / Now I feel like a leaf floating on the stream"), but the music, its thunderous, feedback-rich electric guitars set off by a jaunty whistled bridge, is about defiance. Its stunning conclusion was a long series of stomps: Neil in his thick farmer’s boots slamming the floor—thud! thud! thud!—and putting his whole body into it, with every thud augmented by a bone-rattling guitar chord. It was as if we were being stalked by a tyrannosaur as big as the Beresford.

The concert ended the only way it properly could, with everyone on stage with the master, “Rockin’ in the Free World.” The last note faded at exactly 10 P.M.

More on Neil Young & Crazy Horse in concert for the Global Poverty Project in Central Park, New York City.

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