BEFORE: This is one of only TWO concert films in this year's documentary chain - I know I call it the "Summer Music Concert" series sometimes, but that's a little joke, I don't really program many concert films at all. It's a bit of a tricky thing, like when does a recording of a concert become a "concert film"? If I really swung the door wide open on this sort of thing, then there would be no shortage of films to watch, so I think I really need to be careful about what concert recordings get to be called "movies". Like there was a video released last week of a Paul McCartney concert at Glastonbury, but is that a MOVIE, or just a Paul McCartney concert? I think just the latter, though I could have found a spot for it, if I had been so inclined.
"Stop Making Sense" is obviously a concert MOVIE, and "The Last Waltz" is another obvious one, and I've counted Rolling Stones concerts before, like "Shine a Light" and "Havana Moon". I have to sort of play this by ear, though, and make some tough decisions about the parameters here. But since this one came from the same director as "Stop Making Sense" I'm inclined to treat this as more than just a concert, it seems to cross over into documentary territory. Neil Young carries over from "Jagged", where there was footage of him playing a concert on the same bill as Alanis.
THE PLOT: A film shot during a two-night performance by Neil Young at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.
AFTER: As with last night, I'm a little out of my element here - I'm not an ardent fan of Neil Young, but I do like some of his songs. If you're not a hardcore fan, as I'm not, it takes a while here to get to some material that I recognized. The first nine songs are called the "Prairie Wind" set, and they lean more into country than I realized. That's not a bad thing if you're a country music fan, but I'm not that either. The set is nice, but it's just not my thing. It's obviously very personal for Neil, as he was born in Toronto but grew up mostly in rural Ontario, and was influenced by rockabilly and country in addition to rock when learning music.
The set's a big hit with the Nashville audience, though - the Ryman Auditorium used to be the home of the Grand Ol' Opry before it moved out to a larger venue in 1974, though it returned for years during the winters, when the crowds tended to be smaller. And during one song, "This Old Guitar", Young points out that he's playing a guitar that used to belong to Hank Williams, and that endears him to the audience as well. (NITPICK POINT: Who even knows if this is true? For all we know, it's just a beat-up old guitar...)
Things picked up for me during the second set, when they got to "Harvest Moon", a song that I knew (and instead of brushes on the drums, the percussionist appears to use an actual sweeping-type broom to create the rhythm!) and this is followed by three more songs that I knew, "Heart of Gold", "Old Man" and "The Needle and the Damage Done". This is the real meat of the concert, the high point came in these four songs, and after that it was all downhill, unfortunately. I was hoping for something similar to "Stop Making Sense", I guess, where each song added somebody to the band and then the whole concert built up to a tremendous climax. By contrast, this one hits the crescendo with "Old Man" and then slows down again, but at that point there are still five songs to go, so it's a long, almost painful letdown.
All of the songs are fine, though, it's great music, and the interviews with band members before the concert footage let us know that the concert occurred just after Neil Young's surgery to correct an aneurysm, and then Young himself reveals during a song intro that his father passed away just a few months before, so this is all intensely personal and intimate, and we can really feel where Young is coming from as a result.
The director, Jonathan Demme, had a say in the second set, the Encore Set, which was a great idea. Now this makes some sense, the band was made up of the musicians who worked on Young's 2005 album "Prairie Wind", and then the director requested the second set of older Neil Young songs so that he'd have enough material for a longer movie. If the band had just played the songs from the recent album, the film would probably be less than an hour, and that's just not as marketable. Plus, people want to hear the songs they KNOW, just not the stuff from the new album - this is pretty standard in the world of live concerts.
Neil's second wife, Pegi Young appears on stage in the band, they met when she was a waitresss at a restaurant near Neil's ranch in northern California. They got married in 1978 and were together for 36 more years, but got divorced in 2014, then she died five years later. Again, we see there's an expiration date on everything, despite all the love songs they worked on together. I just learned that Neil Young's married to Daryl Hannah now, that happened in 2018 but I must have missed the news. I've got no right to judge another person's relationships or lifestyle, though - I think famous people have all different sorts of relationships, I don't know if money and fame helps or just gets in the way in the long run. Neil himself sings, "If you follow every dream, you might get lost" and I think that says more about it than I could.
Also starring Emmylou Harris (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice", Grant Boatwright, Larry Cragg, Anthony Crawford, Chad Cromwell, Diana DeWitt, Clinton Gregory, Karl Himmel, Wayne Jackson, Ben Keith, Tom McGinley, Spooner Oldham (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Gary W. Pigg, Rick Rosas (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Jimmy Sharp, Pegi Young,
RATING: 6 out of 10 changing backdrops
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