Search and destroy: Neil Young

the first time i saw neil the openers were stone temple pilots and blind melon. boooooooooo!

Los Lobos are opening at the show we're going to see. can't express an opinion one way or the other.

xp they didn't tour together, just did the one show (and Chuck D didn't join them on "Kool Thing," weirdly). It was immediately pre-Gulf War, and there was a demonstration on the street right after the show that the cops tried to shut down. John Cusack wrote about it in the Sun-Times the next day.

Ah, that explains why I haven't heard of this (non-existent) tour.

Reading about Sleeps with Angels and it talks about how Neil tried to contact Kurt Cobain before he died.

I wonder what would have come of a possible Young-Cobain collaboration?

if the audience shots from the Weld video prove anything, neil young has a very wide audience base -- even dudes who love his loudest stuff might find sonic youth overly abrasive.

^^^^^ this. the camera captures many cosby sweater-wearing yuppies in the crowd.

I see much more of a connection between NY and Nirvanna than I do btw NY and SY.

I wonder what would have come of a possible Young-Cobain collaboration?
it would've been called On The Bleach that is for sure

hahaha

In the Kim Gordon feature in the latest New Yorker (available online only for subscribers right now) she expresses her unhappiness with the tour when Sonic Youth and Social Distortion opened for Neil Young. The author Alex Halberstadt, says he recalls watching Neil Yong fans boo and scream insults at Sonic Youth at the Ohio stop on the tour. Gordon recalls the sound people turning down the volume on Sonic Youth and says Young's crew were disrespectful.

I saw this tour in Mpls and I don't recall the crowd being disrespectful (in fact I seem recall a handful of SY fans up front), mostly just ignoring them. I mean the place probably wasn't even half-full when they started. Of course, we had just sat through Social Distortion who were really awful, so SY by comparison might have seemed like aural balm to even the most hardened classic rocker.

But, Gordon was having issues with her gear & I vividly recall her walking offstage several times and it seemed like she was having words with who ever was running stage sound. I had only been to a handful of concerts at that point and never seen anything like it, it all seemed very tense onstage. Eventually she stormed off & the set was cut short. They were pretty great when they were playing.

hahaha @ on the bleach
i can hear neil chiming in to sing polly and then segueing into a 30 min down by the river mega jam

with bonus murder ~subtext~

then there would be a _____blues medley and kurt would sing the part about going to the interview
not sure how i feel about this tbh

The Capital Centre was huge -- where I sat at the Weld show, I saw old druggie hippies into SY and non-ironic trucker cao wearing folks screaming at them to get off. Everybody (but me) loved Social Distortion, though.

Ugh, fucking Social Distortion were interminable.

I saw the tour in Philly and no one was booing Sonic Youth. There were hippies twirling, sure, but I don't recall any booing. Really broad crowd: yuppies, bikers, hippies, scuzzy punk kids ...

I really fucking hate Social Distortion, like I don't get what their appeal is to anyone

is the weld tour the only time neil's done an entirely electric set? not sure i can think of any other tour where there weren't at least a handful of acoustic numbers...

Good question. When even "Blowin' in the Wind" is electric, you know they're committed.

I was thinking maybe the '86 Rusted Out Garage tour was all-electric, but then I see by the setlists that they did "After the Gold Rush" and "Heart of Gold" (unless those were electric, in which case, wow).

yeah afaik, on that tour, he'd do a few of the acoustic hits. maybe some of the blue notes gigs were all electric, though i don't know if that really counts.

Looks like Arc/Weld was recorded on that early '91 tour.

Certainly claiming that Sonic Youth made midwesterners 'boo' them adds to their brand of being provocative punk rockers.

maybe, although it also kind of contributes to their image as an effete, coastal band. Punk has a strong working class strain.

it worked out ok for everyone, neil young got to look cool to rock critics, sonic youth got to have a brush w/ mainstream america, social d got to continue sucking.

I really fucking hate Social Distortion, like I don't get what their appeal is to anyone

― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Thursday, May 30, 2013 8:28 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes you do.

Once upon a time pre-91 they were part of the LA punk scene and so some folks liked 'em for that; they also had a Stones/roots/country aspect to their sound so that appealed to others, and later they got on commercial rock radio which made them appealing to some, even if most of us hated how they did it and hated the singer's mannerisms. I liked 'em circa '82 and got tired of 'em later, and understand you not liking 'em at all, but c'mon, compared to much of the rock on the radio they were arguably more interesting (while that alone should not have gotten them a slot on a Neil Young tour it does explain that some folks like them). I don't like PearlJam btw.

Mommy's Little Monster album > any Pearl Jam

hell no

Never understood Social D. hate. The band is fine.

If you've got access, here's a new Kim Gordon profile. She confirms that those Neil Young shows were rough on the band.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/06/03/130603fa_fact_halberstadt

I saw the Meadowlands stop of that NY/SY/SD tour. I went with my best friend (dead now), my mom and my aunt. Both my friend and I were big into all three bands, but Social Distortion were dwarfed by the arena stage and made basically no impression at all, and Sonic Youth were just bad. A noisy (but not in a good way), boring and underpowered set. And it seemed obvious to me that things were tense backstage too, as during Neil's set, he said something like "Hey, I can do that, too!" and ripped out a huge burst of very Thurston Moore-ish guitar noise mid-song. He did this more than once, in fact, as I recall, and it definitely didn't feel like affectionate teasing - it felt like "Hey, fuck you, kid."

is the weld tour the only time neil's done an entirely electric set? not sure i can think of any other tour where there weren't at least a handful of acoustic numbers...

― tylerw, Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:29 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, just remembered their 1970 tour was probably all-electric, if the Fillmore set is an accurate representation. (I used to have a boot of either a Cleveland or Cincinnati stop on that tour that was also all-electric)

Mommy's Little Monster album > any Pearl Jam

― curmudgeon, Thursday, May 30, 2013 2:54 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hell no

― A deeper shade of lol (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, May 30, 2013

hell yes! great, great album.

xp, neil would do an opening acoustic set for those 1970 crazy horse shows

Ah, didn't know that. I also thought about the Time Fades Away tour, but remembered "Journey Through The Past."

"Till the Morning Comes" off After the Gold Rush: contender for the best 1 minute song ever?

It's great, but Wire owns that category

http://www.magnetmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/1996/05/bobpollard378.jpg
*ahem*

I saw the Meadowlands stop of that NY/SY/SD tour. I went with my best friend (dead now), my mom and my aunt. Both my friend and I were big into all three bands, but Social Distortion were dwarfed by the arena stage and made basically no impression at all, and Sonic Youth were just bad. A noisy (but not in a good way), boring and underpowered set. And it seemed obvious to me that things were tense backstage too, as during Neil's set, he said something like "Hey, I can do that, too!" and ripped out a huge burst of very Thurston Moore-ish guitar noise mid-song. He did this more than once, in fact, as I recall, and it definitely didn't feel like affectionate teasing - it felt like "Hey, fuck you, kid."

― 誤訳侮辱, Saturday, 1 June 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well at least he was driven to do something else. Weld is the only thing I bother with.

Going to see NY and Crazy Horse this evening. Really stoked. Only my second NY gig and first with Crazy Horse.

"Till the Morning Comes" off After the Gold Rush: contender for the best 1 minute song ever?

― arctic mindbath (President of the People's Republic of Antarctica), Saturday, June 1, 2013 9:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's great, but Wire owns that category

― Z S, Saturday, June 1, 2013 11:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just dissed Moby Grape in another thread, but "Naked If I Want" might be the correct answer here. The revelation of something like "Field Day for the Sundays"--the fact that 1/5th of a full punk song is still a full punk song--is p profound, but I'm not sure it matches "I ain't got no money now, but I will pay you before I die"

Was there really that much musical difference between NY and Sonic Youth in the 90s though? Why the OTT hate? Were these gigs attended by a bunch of Harvest nostalgics?

yes!!! for a very long time (and maybe still; i haven't seen him in a long time) neil's gigs were very very heavily attended by harvest nostalgics who didn't have a lot of interest in hearing neil play feedback for five minutes, never mind hearing sonic youth play feedback for a lot longer.

and whether there was much musical difference between ny and sy -- and there was -- is somewhat beside the point. his audience was very much a classic-rock audience. and theirs was not.

!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=doPtRvVPlhY#!

i mean:

!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=doPtRvVPlhY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doPtRvVPlhY

haha, yeah i'd only seen a clip or two of that, never the whole thing. strange! hal asbhy directed!

neil jamming on the synth drums and then coming out w/ the shocking pinks...such a weird era.

...after starting out singing "heart of gold" on acoustic guitar. i think it was even weirder then than it looks now.

it is funny -- in these internet days, we can know all about what an artist is going to be doing during a tour, but back then people probably saw an ad in the paper that said neil young was playing in their town and that was all they knew. and then they got ... this.

excited to watch this

lol'ing at interminable length of opening credits....

I've seen video footage of Trans stuff being performed on the European tour (Nils Lofgren does some interpretive dancing) that is just amazing