INTERVIEW: Neil Young: All Alone the Captain Stands - Flood Magazine

Neil Young: All Alone the Captain Stands
Photo by Michael Muller | Flood Magazine
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An interview from Flood Magazine - Neil Young: All Alone the Captain Stands by Pat McGuire:

Q: In [your 2012 memoir] Waging Heavy Peace, you wrote a passage about walking with your dog and always sending a warning as you walk so as to avoid startling anything you might be approaching. How drastically have we ignored our planet’s warnings? Is that to some degree what EARTH is about?

NEIL: We don’t even pay attention to what’s going on. We’re so distracted, we don’t see. You can experience the whole [new record] as an ear movie. Close your eyes and listen to it with no stops for an hour and a half. The [message] is that with all the creatures, there’s a relief. There’s no politics with animals, they don’t have an agenda. There’s a war going on and the crickets are still singing. Where they’re allowed to sing, they sing. Every once in a while they get wiped out by what we’re doing, but if they’re not being wiped out, they’re being themselves. They’re not campaigning; they’re living.

Is there an implied chronology to the nature sounds on the record?

One thing leads to another. [The original] running order started with a war, and then there was silence, then nature, and then the record happened. But that just didn’t work for me. So the second running order was this one. It’s all one big song—everything relates to everything else. It was quite a monumental undertaking to put this together. [Neither the co-producer] John Hanlon, who I made the record with, [nor] I had ever worked on anything like it before. It got completely out of control.

Do you mean with making the field recordings?

Field recordings, editing, putting the transitions together, crossfading, going from one place to another, [figuring out] where you introduce the animals [and on] which song. A lot of the field recording I did myself around my home, because my home is surrounded by animals. A crow lives [there], I see the crow every morning, and he has his girlfriend.

Did you tell them they’re guest stars on a Neil Young album?

Yeah! I talk to them all the time, and they talk back. They know me, and they’re not just there, they’re aware; if you pay attention to them, you can see that they’re just as there as you are. My girlfriend has a hummingbird that comes out in the morning and [hovers] right in front of her face and looks at her. It’s interesting; they’re forms of life, and to me it’s a very simple thing: I would like to make sure they have a place to live.

Full interview from Flood Magazine - Neil Young: All Alone the Captain Stands by Pat McGuire.

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7 Camera Edit: "Words" Neil Young + Promise Of The Real, Amsterdam 2016 07 09

Here is a 7 audience camera video of "Words" by Neil Young + Promise Of The Real at the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam on 2016 07 09.

(Thanks Milu! Awesome editing! Love that ranch clip at beginning. Nice transition.)

More on Neil Young + Promise Of The Real concert in Netherlands, Amsterdam, Ziggo Dome, July 9.

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Comment of the Moment: "Everybody Knows This is Tucson"

Neil Young + Promise of the REAL
July 15 - Italy, Rome, Bath of Caracalla
Photo by Roberto Winkler
(Click photo to enlarge)

The Comment of the Moment is from the post announcing a new concert date in Tucson, Arizona (October 6) of Neil Young + POTR by Chris:

Here's a doozey story. I ordered 3 tix this a.m. and after I hit "Place Order", a message came up saying something or other about how it was misdirected, so I assumed it didn't go through, especially since I was at work, and wasn't sure if that was an issue. Dammit! So I try and again, go all the way through...same thing. I did this 4 times. My bank notifies me that my card has had some "unusual activity" and shut it down. I look at my bank statement and see $1,200+ in concert tix charges! Yikes! So I call the Ticket agency, leave a message and tell them that I'm not sure if I got tickets and about the charges and to please call me back. A fellow named Jason calls me and tells me I've ordered 12 tickets! (3 at a time x 4 attempts!) So it DID work! Whew.

Then he asked me if I wanted all 12. I only needed 3. I thought about Desert Trip and all of the scam artists who bought up banks of tickets leaving schlubs like me (and many of you I assume) in the cold. So I said no...release them to the loyal Neil fans who were trying for tickets like I was. I apologized for the issues I had created though my frenzied attempts to see my idol. Jason was very gracious and said he understood.

Listen, I'm a 60 year old teacher in Tucson who got goosebumps when I saw he was coming to the Old Pueblo. It has been 30 years since he's performed here the "3rd Best Garage Band in the World tour" w/ Crazy Horse...it was the first time I met him on his birthday at the Viscount Suites Inn in November of 1986. I bought him his favorite drink (or so I thought) a "Salty Dog" grapefruit and tequila with some hot tea on the side as he had lost his voice in New Mexico a few nights earlier. He was gracious and seemed surprised that I knew it was his birthday. My friend and I had printed some shirts for the occasion of his show "Everybody Knows This is Tucson" and gave it to him...Elliot wanted to be sure I wasn't going to sell them at the show. No way. Never rip off the man who has given me so much pleasure and joy through many ups and down over 5 decades, and done so much for so many for so long.

So good luck to you all in getting to the show...thanks again to Thrasher for this great site!

Chris

Thanks Chris. Great story and glad you didn't end up with 12 extra tickets. If that had been TicketMaster, you probably would have been screwed. Always nice to hear good customer service is being offered on non-TicketMaster sites. Power to the People.

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Pearl Jam w/ J Mascis Cover Neil Young's “Rockin’ in the Free World” at Fenway Park, Boston, MA - 8/7/16

Pearl Jam brought out local Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis for last night's (August 7, 2016) encore at Fenway Park in Boston for Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World”.

enjoy!

ps - we post these covers on occasion by PJ. But if nothing else check out the 360 pan @ about ~3:20 to fully comprehend the massive magnitude of the RITFW encore @ Fenway.

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NEW CONCERT DATE: Neil Young + POTR, Tucson, Arizona - October 6

Another new concert date has been added!

Neil Young + Promise Of The Real will perform a concert in Tucson, Arizona on Oct. 6.

Pre-sale tickets go on sale on Wednesday, Aug 10.

These concerts are warm ups for the big Desert Trip Festival in October when Neil Young + Promise Of The Real will open for Paul McCartney.

More on the recent tour of Neil Young + Promise Of The Real in Europe 2016.

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American Way Inflight Magazine: "Oh Hello, Mr. Soul" - Neil Young Cover, August 2016

"Oh Hello, Mr. Soul" - Neil Young Cover
American Way Inflight Magazine, August 2016

(Click photo to enlarge)
Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of American Way Inflight Magazine.

In a rare interview with Neil Young, ADAM PITLUK (author of Standing Eight and Damned to Eternity. The last musicians he profiled for American Way were Dave Grohl and Michael Stipe) takes us for a ride somewhere on a desert highway.

Oh Hello, Mr. Soul.

"I have a truck that travels with me when I’m on the road, and it has a Pilates Reformer in it,” Young says of his training regimen. “I’m a trained Pilates instructor. I keep doing stuff like that. It keeps me fit.” If you’ve seen Neil Young in concert before, you know that his performance is quite the aerobic workout in itself, what with the stomping around and rocking back and forth and playing his guitar solos as if doing so was a form of strength training. “I can actually do it better now than I’ve been able to for years because Pilates has opened my body up. I feel much better about my ability to react physically to what I’m doing.”

...
“It’s amazing that the bees occupy the same space in the sonic frequency spectrum as cymbals,” he says, growing animated as he elaborates. “So usually where you’d have a cymbal crash, you just bring in the bees and all you have is kick drum and bass and bees. And it’s insane. There’s one bird in ‘Seed Justice’ that sounds like a vinyl scratch. That’s just a real bird.”

...
“When I’m creating things, I don’t much listen to anything,” he says. “I’m writing a book right now and I just finished this record, which was a draining experience: four months of postproduction to turn out 98 minutes. Every transition: every fade from one thing to another; every piece of sound; the placement of it; the volume of it; it wore me out.”
...

“Remember Bram Stoker’s Dracula?” Young asks. “Remember the bat in the city, flying down? That’s where this record is coming from. That’s what I was thinking of for the whole record was the bat. The bat couldn’t see. It could only hear. It heard where it was going. That’s what this record is.”
...

“I go to truck stops, and then I’ll sleep on my bus,” he says. “I don’t go to any cities. I don’t stay in hotels. I don’t have any trappings of going in and out of hotels. As much as I can, I try to not do that anymore.”
...

“When you’re at a truck stop, you’re not reclusive,” Roberts explains. “Neil likes that life of being solitary and still meeting people that you ordinarily wouldn’t meet. I don’t think he’s trying to be reclusive. It’s the other way around.”
...

“The longer I live, the more I see and the more I think injustice needs to be eliminated for people. And people are actually becoming aware. They don’t like it, but they are becoming aware of it.”
...

“The young kids are just like they were back in the ’60s,” Young says. “The young groups, they really get it. They know that the corporations are taking over our democracy. They know that food supplies are being [screwed] up by big food. They know that drugs are bad and that big pharma is perpetrating these things on us and that doctors are being paid extra by the pharmaceutical companies to prescribe certain drugs. And it’s out of control. Look at what happened to Prince. He was taking a prescribed drug, a drug that was made. It wasn’t an illegal drug. There should be a responsibility for that, but there’s no politician who will fight big pharma. Except Bernie.”
...

“I tell you what, it sure has felt like 50 years,” Elliot Roberts says through a chuckle. “Now that he’s getting older, he’s conscious of leaving a legacy. That’s how he started out with the hippy generation, yet the hippy generation lost its way somewhere along the way. Neil is still very, very much about activism. But he has so much heart, and he has so much soul.”

Neil Young and Elliot Roberts, Manager

Complete interview with Neil Young in the latest issue of American Way Inflight Magazine.

Also, for more interview transcripts with Neil Young, see Please Take My Advice: Interviews with the Godfather of Grunge.

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