Neil Young - Greendale (2003)

Neil Young has been on tour for a few months bringing songs from his new work Greendale to large audiences everywhere. The show is a theatrical production, a rock opera, with Neil and Crazy Horse playing the songs as performers act out the story line in the background. Unfortunately, nobody had heard Greendale yet, so common complaints were "I paid 65 dollars and only recognized three songs." This isn't the first time Neil has ditched expectations.

Luckily, Neil's independence is honorable and compels respect. Greendale is not an overwhelming success, but the endeavor is a welcome surprise. A rock opera with a small cast of characters, it's a throwback to the early seventies when bands like the Kinks, David Bowie and the Who were mixing extended plots with their music. The characters are Grandma and Grandpa Green, Granddaughter Sun Green, Sun's parents Edith and Earl Green, Cousin Jed, Captain Green, Officer Carmichael, Earth Brown, the Devil, and a few peripherals. Gramps, Grandma and Jed live in Greendale, a Northern California enclave near Highway 1, close to the water. Earl, a Vietnam veteran and a painter of psychedelic pictures that he can't sell, lives with his wife and daughter on the Double E Rancho outside of Greendale. Captain Green lives on a boat and doesn't like coming ashore; he's a cynic and sees the devil in Greendale - he gets one of the best songs ("Devil's Sidewalk").

There are only a few plot turns. Jed, with a car full of dope, is stopped by the CHP on Highway 1. He panics and kills Officer Carmichael. Earl sells his first painting to a local gallery, but it sends him into depression. The devil has interfered with Earl's work, making it suddenly accessible. On "Bandit," Earl ponders his past, while trying to hold on to his life. Elsewhere, upset over the situation with Jed and the media frenzy the murder has brought to Greendale, Grandpa and Grandma Green try escaping to the Double E, but are pursued by reporters. In a confrontation, Grandpa has a stroke and dies. His death gives a new sense of freedom to Sun Green and soon she is chained to a statue of an eagle in the lobby of Powerco, where she begins a defense of mother earth. She is subsequently hounded and smeared by the FBI, but that doesn't stop her from heading to Alaska to meet the devil in a fight over the wilderness.

The story may seem a little high-pitched, but that's why they call it opera. The story gives Neil plenty of room to ruminate on some important things. The rock opera format brings out the essayist in Neil; it allows him to digress, pontificate, and explore. The importance of family ties is a familiar theme. In this case the family is stressed by corporate intrusion and media corruption. At one point Neil calls the frazzled Grandpa "a hero fighting for the freedom of silence". Neil's depiction of environmental destruction is crafty and in some ways the album can be interpreted as a call to arms. Sun Green is prompted by Earth Brown to be " a goddess in the planet wars, tryin' to save the livin' things." Neil can't quite keep himself out of the story and he seems to be taken with Sun as well, succumbing to the kind of hippie dream he usually detests. But the dream becomes nightmare as Sun is set up in a drug bust, which leads to a few nice lines from Neil: "Next day Sun Green got busted for pot, and it made the headline news; but then the charges all got dropped and the story got confused. "Sun's cat also pops in and out of the story; we see it running from a flurry of helicopter noises before Grandpa dies. Later, while Sun is out dancing at what appears to be John Lee Hooker's Boom Boom Room in San Franciso, her cat is killed and the FBI leave the animal "lyin' in a puddle of blood at the foot of Sun Green's bed."

The most provocative ideas in Greendale revolve around its status as a post-9/11 work from an artist who was there. Neil played for the New York City fund-raiser after the tragedy and many of Young's digressions and intrusions comment on events since 9/11 in a roundabout way. One pretty clear idea can be found on "Leave the Driving" and its follow-up "Carmichael." As mentioned, Jed shoots Officer Carmichael when stopped for a traffic infraction. Jed motives are subtly depicted. Remorse isn't shown and "camouflage hung in his closet, guns all over the wall; plans for buildings and engineers, and a book with no numbers at all." A Greendale terrorist in the making? Quite possibly. Neil amplifies the story: "Meanwhile across the ocean, living in the Internet, is the sound of an explosion no one has heard yet." A different kind of terrorist is alluded to. "But there's no need to worry; there's no reason to fuss. Just go about your work now and leave the driving to us. We' ll be watching you, no matter what you do; and you can do your part by watching others too." So foreign terrorism leads to government crackdown, which instigates domestic terrorism.

Neil is distanced from Jed. But he is also distanced from the murdered Officer Carmichael, whose secret life is mentioned but not judged. Carmichael's possibly troubled relationship with his wife, and his quick remembrance by his CHP peers, is neither heroic nor unheroic. Neil paints a picture that is enigmatic. He refuses to elevate Officer Carmichael and refuses to denigrate him. Who is Officer Carmichael finally? Given the anti-corporate, pro-environmental stance elsewhere, Greendale ultimately suggests that nothing has changed much since 9/11. The chasm between the ideals of the left and right remain deep; the arguments have drifted right back to where they were before 9/11, but are amplified with a harsh edge by the current administration. One of Sun Green's statements as she is chained to the statue is "when the city is plunged into darkness by an unpredicted rolling blackout/the white house always blames the governor, sayin' the solution is to vote him out ."

If the story is compelling, the music is a bit of a bore. Greendale is a two-disc set. The first disc features a performance of Greendale by Neil Young and 2/3rds of Crazy Horse (Frank Sampedro's explosive buzz is missed). The second disc is a DVD featuring a live solo performance by Neil of the same material in front of an audience in Ireland. The solo take has a starker bent and Neil's voice seems more poignant by itself. He fills in plot details in between songs. These are helpful (we wouldn't have known the devil was much involved, for instance, or that Earl had sold a painting), but the stage chatter also gets tedious with repeated viewing. Neil is not the liveliest of narrators. The CD itself is essentially an adaptation by Neil and band of acoustic-based folk-blues music and the explosive freedom of expression Crazy Horse has displayed in the past is not much evident. Neil's recent interviews reveal that many of these songs are first takes. Which is what they sound like. Because of the stress the character sketches and intertwined plot put on song structure, it's hard to say which of the tunes will become classic Neil Young songs. My bets would be on "Devils Sidewalk," "Leave the Driving," "Sun Green," and "Be the Rain." True to form once again, Neil is compelling, if not quite masterful. At one point while Grandpa is on the ground dying, he seems to hear Neil singing and he remarks: "The guy that just keeps singin'/Can't somebody shut him up?/ I don't know for the life of me/where he comes up with this stuff."

Now that's a fine line.

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