Young bends strings, audience to his will

By Craig S. Semon TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

WORCESTER — Not only will rock ’n’ roll never die, if Neil Young’s sold-out performance Friday night at the Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts is any indication, it gets better with age.

As part of his solo “Twisted Road Tour,” and following opener Bert Jansch, Young gave the lucky Neilophiles and Rusties who packed the place a no-frills, passionate performance that was one part retrospective, one part reinvention and one part relaxed rehearsal. His 18-song, hour-and-45-minute set (which included a two-song encore) consisted of seven new songs, eight gems from the ’70s, two nuggets from the ’60s and one unreleased song that before his current tour hadn’t been played for 18 years.

There are few veteran rockers who can capture an audience solely with the grace of their words on the intimate issues of relationships, romance, personal redemption, hopes and regrets, and Young is certainly one of them.

Showing no signs of rust or any danger of putting an audience to sleep, the Ragged Glory from the Great White North opened with an acoustic version of “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” followed by the twangy crowd-pleaser “Tell Me Why” (from “After the Gold Rush”) and the priceless “Helpless” (from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “DéjÀ Vu”).

During numbers like “Helpless,” Young showed his uncanny ability to convey the hopes and dreams of an idealistic youth and the triumphs and tragedies of a hardened adult without reverting to cheap embellishment, cheesy melodrama or clumsy bombast. Peppered with melancholy harmonica playing meshing with his chime-y acoustic strums, Young’s youthful yearnings resonated with the same intimacy, urgency and grace that they did 40 years ago when he first recorded them.

The relaxed, living room-like set served the stripped-down classic and, especially, new tunes well. The 64-year-old, two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer got out of his chair, traded his acoustic guitar for another acoustic (with an electric pickup) and delivered three new songs that stacked up nicely with gems from his catalog.

On the offbeat “You Never Call,” Young depicted God as a loafer, daydreamed about “the ultimate vacation with no back pain” and pontificated on the great Canadian pastime of hockey. It was hard to tell if the song was meant to be funny or profound. Either way, it worked.

There was no question what Young’s intentions were on the far-from-peaceful “Peaceful Valley.” With a cigar store Indian watching over him (and casting stone-cold judgment on us all), Young chastised the white man for raping and pillaging the Native American’s land and, as the song progressed, all humanity for ignorance of what they have done to Mother Earth. With his ominous acoustic guitar bellowing as if it were in agony, Young cried out, “Who will be the one who leads the nations and protect God’s creations?” Powerful stuff.

Proving to be the eternal hippie and strengthening the notion that this was certainly a thinking man’s concert, Young sang about two of life’s absolutes on the anti-war lament aptly titled, “Love and War.” Young crooned, “I sang for justice and hit a bad chord/But I’m still trying to sing about love and war,” and the crowd clapped and roared with approval.

Showing why he is considered to be the Godfather of Grunge, Young strapped on “Old Black” (his trusty 1953 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop) and made a racket on the explosive rockers “Down By the River,” from 1969’s “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” and the unreleased, rare track “Hitchhiker.”

With his Gretsch White Falcon from his Buffalo Springfield days, Young sang about Kent State as if it happened last week. Arguably the greatest Vietnam War-era protest song ever recorded, “Ohio” resonated with a raw, riveting intensity, as if Young was telling the crowd that we haven’t learned anything from the days of Nixon and Vietnam.

Young got intimate singing about himself and his wife having “silver hair and a little less time” on “Sign of Love,” a straightforward love ditty with a dark undercurrent and sense of uncertainty, courtesy of the jagged guitar line. He followed it up with the tender piano lullaby, “Leia,” inspired by his baby granddaughter. However, Young’s most elegant and tender moment came a few numbers later with “I Believe in You,” which he sang in a tortured, borderline falsetto while playing a grand piano.

Behind a curious looking and equally curious sounding pipe organ, Young prophesied how Mother Nature is going to pack up her bags some day and take the first silver space ship out of here on “After the Gold Rush.” In the guise of possessed preacher/demented doomsayer, Young gave the song a crowd-pleasing update, crooning, “Look at Mother Nature on the run/in the 21st century” instead of the original “In the nineteen seventies.”

In case someone in the audience didn’t get their fill of musical tales about raping and pillaging, Young delivered the dissidence-drenched death march “Cortez the Killer” (sung from the perspective of the Aztecs butchered and beaten by the famed Spanish conqueror). In songs such as “Cortez the Killer,” “Peaceful Valley” and “Rumblin’ ” (a new song about Mother Nature suffering a bad case of acid reflux because of man), Young gave the audience plenty to ponder and feel guilty about. It seemed as if the only thing he didn’t make us feel guilty about was the mistreatment of the Na’vi people on Pandora.

His voice in fine form and never sounding better, Young ended the main set with the timeless hippie anthem “Cinnamon Girl” and came back with the catchy new tune, “Walk with Me” and the No. 1 classic, “Heart of Gold,” in which he crooned, “And I’m getting old.”

Old? Maybe.

Irrelevant? Never.