VIDEO: "Everything is Bullshit" by Neil Young + Promise of The Real - Indianapolis - 9/19/19

Here is a concert video of the Particle Kid song "Everything is Bullshit" by Neil Young + Promise of The Real at the Murat Theatre in Indianapolis, Indiana on 9/19/19 by the legendary REAL'r fan Candy Butterscotch.

For more, see Concert Review of the Moment: Neil Young + Promise of the Real - Indianapolis, IN, Sept 19, 2019 by "Keys Left Hangin" Brian.

"Road Dog" Mike & "Keys Left Hangin" Brian
Murat Theater at Old National Centre, Indianapolis, Indiana, on Sept 19, 2019

More on VIDEO: "Everything Is Bullshit" by Micah Nelson. Plus, Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real - Turn Off the News (Build a Garden).

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COMING SOON: Goin' To Greendale | Neil Young Archives | BENTLEY’S BANDSTAND

Goin' To Greendale | BENTLEY’S BANDSTAND | NYA

A preview of the upcoming concert film of the Greendale Tour by Neil Young & Crazy Horse is featured on Goin' To Greendale | BENTLEY’S BANDSTAND | NYA.

Music industry veteran Bill Bentley writes about his Greendale experience and seeing the film of the 2003 Toronto concert: ‘And that, dear listeners, is when the bells start ringing, the lights start flashing and the thrillometer heats up all the way to the top of the tube.'

Sun Green (Sara White) and Grandpa (Ben Keith)

"Greendale" on Neil Young Archives in the Hearse Theater

Neil Young calls "Greendale" on Times-Contrarian | NYA "one of the biggest highlights of my filming life".

Neil Young Filming Greendale Actors Grandpa & Jed

But back in 2003, "Greendale" was one of the most controversial and divisive albums and concert tours of Neil Young's career. The importance of "Greendale" can not be understated - either in terms of Neil Young's body of work, nor its impact on his fan base. This is how we memorialized "Greendale" on Thrasher's Wheat Home Page in June 2003:

With the arrival of Greendale in 2003 -- for us -- Greendale was like a sledgehammer to the anvil of truth and awakened this blog from it's post-9/11 dormancy. Because when Neil Young Sings Truth To Power, The World Listens.

So let that soak in for a moment.

This website was launched in 1996 -- about 24 years ago. It sort of languished with periodic updates until 2003. Then, with the theme of the "Greendale" songs coming into focus, we here were inspired to begin daily blog updates. At the time we said we would update the blog daily until the concert tours "Greendale" ended. But the tour kept going and going and going around the world, well into 2004, along with all the ancillary books, videos, films, etc.

So we can safely say that Thrasher's Wheat would not exist today if it had not been for "Greendale". Period. Full stop.



'She was welded to the eagle's beak
sun green leaned into that megaphone
and said, "truth is all i seek" '
"Sun Green" by Neil Young
As many of our long time readers here at Thrasher's Wheat know, we have long since declared: "The Inconvenient Truth of Greendale".

Mainly this observation centered on the album's environmental call to action and it's plea to respect Mother Nature and all of her creations. But environmentalism is but just one of the many themes of Neil Young's 2003 album Greendale, which we once boldly declared "the most important album of 2003, the musical equivalent of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring".


Greendale Graphic Novel
By Joshua Dysart/Cliff Chiang
The inconvenient truth of Neil Young's Greendale is that he was right -- and his message is even more relevant today than upon Greendale's original release.

For some, 2003's Greendale was an incomprehensible disaster. From The Washington Post's critic David Segal on Year 2003 CDs, who labeled Greendale as the year's "most baffling critical swoon", Segal writes: "Neil Young's 'Greendale' is "a droning mess of a concept album inexplicably hailed as ingenious" and "a vanity project gone stupefyingly wrong".

For others though, Greendale was hailed as a groundbreaking concept album similar to The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Who's Tommy or Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'.

Some critics went as far as saying that Young had broken new ground by creating an entirely unique art form -- the "audio novel". From New York Times article 'Have You Heard the New Neil Young Novel?' by Madison Smartt Bell:

"Mr. Young has always been remarkable for his creative resilience, and this time he really has done something new, rendering into this combination of print and audio a novel that is surprisingly sophisticated and satisfyingly complete."

Greendale @ Radio City Music Hall, New York City, March 18, 2004
Photo by thrashette
The inconvenient truth of Greendale is its uncomfortable confrontation with themes such as the power of mass media and global corporations, loss of personal freedoms and privacy, destruction of the environment, rampant fraud and corruption, an out of balance government and breakdown of the family. All of which we've detailed before here, here, and here.

Essential Greendale Links

2004 Concert Reviews

2003 Tour Reviews

Album Reviews

Lyrics Analysis

Concert Tour Photos 

DVD Reviews

Film Reviews

Making of Greendale

Interviews

Commentary

Controversy

Challenging Audiences

Poll

Comments on Greendale Guestbook

"Everything You're Looking For" - Bandit

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INTERVIEW: Patti Smith Chats w/ Neil Young @ BookExpo 2012

Patti Smith's cover of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon last week sparked quite a bit of interest in both Patti and Neil. (Watch video here.)

We have been chronicling the mutual admiration of Patti Smith and Neil Young now for awhile and this is a good time to re-post this complete video of the lunch conversation at BookExpo America 2012 with Neil Young and Patti Smith , who sat down to discuss their processes for writing songs and writing a book.

Patti Smith & Neil Young - BookExpo 2012

During the interview -- where they both seem unusually nervous initially -- Patti makes a number of observations like what an Angel sounds like versus what an Angel feels like -- and the importance of both, or the recognition that Neil delivers feelings to people rather than product. At the conclusion, Patti is heart warming when she encapsulates "Wayfarin' Stranger" where the arc of a career delivers hope in the face of pain and cataclysms: "I know dark clouds will gather over me. I know my way, my way is rough and steep. Yet beautiful fields lie just before me." (Thanks for recollections Greg M.!)

Back in 2012, Neil Young had just released his latest album, Americana. They also discussed Neil's upcoming memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, which he described as more of a diary than a memoir. Patti says to Neil about WHP, “It’s not chronological, but memory is not chronological.”

“When were you aware of the impact that the song [Ohio] made?” Smith asked, referring to the Viet Nam protesters of that era who took up “Ohio” as their anthem. The question prompted Young to reveal his discomfort that he had profited financially from the upheaval, declaring, “You didn’t want to become that which you were separating yourself from.” Smith, who recalled working at a New York City bookstore at the time the song was released, praised him for “translating that picture,” and for “making us more aware of what was going on in our world.”

Neil revealed that he was reading Smith’s memoir about her relationship to Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. “I’m the highway and landscapes. You are cities,” Young said, praising her book as effusively as she had previously praised his. “We’re on similar paths, but in different geographic places. Our [books] represent that.”

Neil Young: “If a song happens, it happens.

If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t matter. That’s why I will write a lot of material, and why I’ll suddenly not write any material — because there is no reason to write it. It has to come to me — and if it doesn’t come to me, I don’t want it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to look for it.”

...

"I really hate things that people work on.

There’s nothing about music that should be working on it, nothing about lyrics that should be working on it — trying to be something that you’re not, trying to act like somebody that you think is good.”

...

“I had to avoid all Dylan records, because I am such a sponge.

If I listen to it too much, I would start being that. I knew that that would disturb what I was doing. I admired what he did so much — the lyrics, and the way he sang, and the melodies, and the groove and the band that he played with — especially (the late guitarist Mike) Bloomfield. There were all of these great musicians that supported him. I had to ignore it. I just had to stay away from it.”

...

"Writing a song is like catching a rabbit. You hang out by the rabbit hole, waiting for it to come. "

...

"Guitars talk. If you really want to write a song, ask a guitar."

Patti Smith & Neil Young
Photo by The New Yorker
More on Patti Smith Interviews Neil Young at BookExpo America in New York City.

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Film Review of the Moment: MOUNTAINTOP by Neil Young & Crazy Horse

MOUNTAINTOP - Neil Young & Crazy Horse

The Film Review of the Moment on MOUNTAINTOP by Neil Young & Crazy Horse by Scotsman, commenting on "How Neil Young's Eccentric Online Home Was Born | Fortune":

I've been to the Mountaintop and I have come back down again (apologies, to those who would have been quite happy for me to stay there indefinitely). And here are my traditional "long-winded", "pompous" comments.

This film might as well have been purpose-made for me. This sort of thing is right up my street. Rarely have I enjoyed a Neil Young project so much in recent years, which is a bold statement in a period that has included gems such as Earth. I'm not *always* a fan of studio documentaries, but sometimes, they are an essential part of the story. Mountaintop has its own story to tell.

This is one of those great documentaries where Neil just sets up the cameras and captures everything, and so, of course, everyone forgets they are being filmed and just acts naturally; or as naturally as you can expect in an environment that seems best described as "disorganised chaos", occasionally threatening to careen into "hostile".

Of course, our director Bernard Shakey (who looks both younger and significantly slimmer following his recent move towards an environmentally-friendly vegetarian diet) is still well aware he is being filmed, and as with Muddy Track, you do get the sense from time-to-time that the old rascal might just be encouraging a little bit of drama for filming purposes.

Regardless, there's an avalanche of natural drama occurring without any provocation from Neil. There's the cringe-worthy moment Neil puts his ear against a monitor speaker just as an ear-piercing squeal decides to emit from it, with the (hilariously) on-edge studio crew becoming increasingly frantic in trying to keep the chaotic studio under control. Or the moment an apoplectic John Hanlon (Neil's head engineer) orders the cameras removed from the studio so his x-rated ranting isn't included in the film (of course, it is). Then there's the beautiful moment where the camera continues picking up sound as it is removed from the studio, and someone see the bright side of the situation: "it's mayhem in there...but the moon's out and the mountain looks beautiful". I found it to be both moving and funny.

Now, the studio they are recording in looks very pleasant to me, but the emphasis throughout from Neil and Hanlon is that they are working in something much like a First World War trench. And just like the finished album, Mountaintop is full of this sense of sometimes-uneasy contrast between beauty and ugliness, chaos and control, focused attitude and light-hearted humour. Tender piano melodies paired with squealing speakers and gratuitous use of the F-bomb. It's just a really typical Neil Young project, full of character, and as such it feels completely timeless: squint a little, and it could have been shot 30 years ago.

At the heart of this film is the relationship between Neil and Hanlon. Crazy Horse are, as always, a little bit in the shadows: which of course is where they are most at home. As for Neil's relationship with Hanlon, it comes across as not entirely unlike that of Laurel and Hardy. Hanlon gets his fair share of Neil's wrath (rather mild, by rock star standards) in this film, but it's telling that when Hanlon asserts himself Neil quickly changes tact. You can easily imagine how the personalities of producer David Briggs and Neil balanced each other out in previous years. In this instance, It's all just a bit of studio banter among brothers, the long-established rituals of making a Crazy Horse album.

There are so many memorable bits, but I loved the section where Neil is prancing around the control room listening to Olden Days and suddenly breaks out into a Cheshire Cat grin: enjoying the music and tambourine overdubs, no doubt, but I suspect also impressed at his ability to (just about) hit a sequence of high notes that probably would have been out of his range at age 18, let alone 73. I loved all the creative touches, the tap dancing on Eternity, the glass harmonica, Ralph's typically dead-pan humour, Neil's little comments (e.g "it doesn't have to be good, it just has to be great") followed again by that familiar Cheshire Cat grin. And "One of the worst f*!#in' monitor systems known to man", delivered in the voice of a man who has seen his fair share of substandard audio equipment, I thought was hilarious.

The bottom line is it is infinitely more entertaining to watch Neil actively battling to make a great record in a dysfunctional studio in the middle of nowhere with a rough-around-the-edges Crazy Horse than it is when he steps into some technically-perfect Hollywood studio and tries to buy his way to artistic greatness with hired orchestras or celebrity producers. Sometimes, in recent years, I get the sense he's not really applying himself in the studio, particularly as a songwriter: full of great ideas but ultimately settling for the low hanging fruit. But I did not get this impression on most of Colorado. It's an album (and especially a film) that has both soul and substance, and that's what we are all here for.

Mountaintop has now disappeared back into the Archives, but I think it deserves a more permanent spot somewhere: either on NYA, or preferably as a Blu-Ray release. Actually, scratch that: I think it's best suited to being passed around as a 3rd generation bootleg, old-school-style. We'll see what happens, but in the meantime I am pleased Neil made this film. It might not be the best Crazy Horse album ever, but it's certainly one with a lot of special moments, and Mountaintop has a lot of additional special moments, too. I found it to be artistically moving, revealing, and genuinely very funny.

And, as a bonus, it's confirmed that my decision not to become a sound engineer was in fact a very lucky escape.

Scotsman.

Thank you Scotsman. Your comments are invaluable and we never find them to be "long-winded" or "pompous". Freedom of speech, just one's opinion is always welcome here at TW.

We did have the pleasure of viewing MOUNTAINTOP in an actual theater on opening night. The film really does offer a pretty unfiltered view on the creative process. Certainly about as close as an outsider will ever get so we're all lucky for that. And it is nice to see the unsung heroes get their moment in the spotlight. Although John Hanlon may not have found the finished edit quite to his liking, it does demonstrate the dedication necessary on the smallest details to achieve success in the studio.

"I want it up as loud as it can go!" - Neil
Neil Young & Crazy Horse in the Studio
(Frame via film Mountaintop)

More on the film MOUNTAINTOP by Neil Young & Crazy Horse.

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The Everly Brothers Cover Neil Young's Buffalo Springfield Song "Mr Soul"

We posted this YouTube video the other day on our Twitter account and heard from a few folks that they had never heard this cover before.

Well, we had forgotten* also, so we thought we would share here on TW. So, here is The Everly Brothers cover of Neil Young's Buffalo Springfield song "Mr Soul". Produced By Jack Nitzche in 1968.

enjoy!

*UPDATE: Turns out we posted this back in 2014. The track can be found on The Everly Brothers Bear Family Box Set. Also, on "Hard Workin' Man: The Jack Nitzsche Story, Vol 2", a CD put together for Ace Records. (Thanks Leigh!)

UPDATE #2: Shortly after posting this cover of Buffalo Springfield's song "Mr Soul", Neil tweets "Mr Soul" from Hollywood Palace with Buffalo Springfield.

Movietone: MR. SOUL from Hollywood Palace with Buffalo Springfield
One of the very first TV appearances for Buffalo Springfield on April 8, 1967. We were jacked to be there! Life was exciting during our first days of success in Hollywood. https://t.co/XJPtHLRoq8 pic.twitter.com/umSGxsjAKz

— Neil Young Archives (@NeilYoungNYA) January 13, 2020

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