VIDEO - "The Unforgettable Concert": HORDE Festival 1997 Highlights

Neil Young and Crazy Horse's setlist at the World Music Theatre in Tinley Park (Chicago), Illinois on the HORDE Festival tour on August 3rd, 1997 has been called "The Unforgettable Concert".

The video above is a MTV News segment by Music Correspondent Kurt Loder on the HORDE Festival in 1997 featured Neil Young, Beck, Primus, Toad the Wet Sprocket and many other bands. It is known as the "The Unforgettable Concert" because by the time Neil Young and Crazy Horse completed an all time tour de force performance of "Like A Hurricane", a hurricane like storm had just blown through the amphitheater, leaving the audience in the pit up to their knees in water. and the band plays on.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse
World Music Theatre in Tinley Park (Chicago), Illinois on the HORDE Festival tour on August 3rd, 1997

The 1997 HORDE festival started on July 11th at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA and finished at the Suwannee Music Park in Jacksonville, FL on August 23rd. Only a handful of artists played all 28 days of the festival; Toad was one of those artists. Their set tended to run about 40 minutes and were typically filled with their chart hits. The show chronicled on this overview was played at the World Music Theater in Chicago on August 3rd.

Neil Young @ 1997 Horde Festival
Photo by Jay Blakesberg
(Click photo to enlarge)
We always love to hear a great Neil Young concert story.

So here's a story that we recall from years ago that folks who were there say it was a most incredible memory. Last year, Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot wrote about "The concert I won't forget: The night Neil Young rocked like a hurricane":

Fans who attend rock concerts expect the performers to give their all. But they usually don’t expect them to defy death. So when the editors of the Tribune's Sunday magazine asked me to weigh in on my most surprising moment as a concertgoer, there really was only one choice.

On a muggy midsummer day in 1997, Neil Young and Crazy Horse took the stage at what was then known as the World Music Theatre in Tinley Park. They were part of the H.O.R.D.E. festival on what had so far been a pleasant if hardly transcendent day of music. But as the scruffy quartet took the stage, things got ugly.

A storm was blowing in, a nasty one. A roof covered the stage and part of the audience, but it offered little protection. Lightning creased the sky, thunder crashed, wind howled, and rain whipped sideways through the amphitheater, soaking everyone --- including the band. The Jolly Roger flag on Ralph Molina’s drum kit ripped in the wind, conjuring visions of a sinking galleon. Young and the band plowed ahead anyway, but then the lights, public address system and amplifiers gave out. The concrete aisles sloping toward the stage resembled white-water rapids as rainwater gushed through the pavilion. Panic was in the air. You could feel it, and hundreds of people started to sprint toward the parking lot. I was tempted to join them. I’d never really felt fear at a rock concert before --- until that moment.

It was foregone conclusion that the concert was over. It had to be. Any musician with a lick of sense would’ve been in his dressing room by now drinking a beer and toweling off --- a far better option than death by electrocution.

But Young and the band never stopped.

More of Greg Kot's memories of Neil Young in 1997.

More recollections of the "The Unforgettable Concert" @ World Music Theatre in Tinley Park (Chicago), Illinois, HORDE Festival on August 3rd, 1997.

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