Neil Young – Trunk Show – Nuart 5-19-10

We are cruising down Santa Monica Blvd. past my old haunts like the Troubadour and Dan Tana’s and many of the decaying rock clubs of the 80’s that I used to frequent when I worked at KTTV on Sunset Blvd.  Those days are distant memories now. It’s been almost 40 years since the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and the southern california country rock scene was born at the Troubadour.  It’s been almost 20 years since I hit these venues  on a nightly basis. I did catch Wilco there about a year ago, and dined next door at the infamous Dan Tana’s (the small, dimly lit old school Italian restaurant where John Lennon had his famous drinking binge in the early 70’s and Phil Spector dined the night he picked up a waitress at the House of Blues before taking her home for the last night of her life).   However, tonight, i am a passenger in my son’s car with another young friend of the family’s in the backseat. We are in route to the NuArt theatre much further down the street where Santa Monica meets the 405 freeway. We are making the pilgrimage to see Neil Young’s Trunk Show.. the live concert film from Jonathan Demme that captured Neil and his band during the Chrome Dreams tour in 2008 at the Tower Theatre in Upper Darby, Pa.

Demme, of course, directed another Neil Young film, Heart of Gold, several years back, from the legendary Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Demme, a long time rock music connisseur, also directed one of the greatest rock films of all time, Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads. I worked on that film as a young twenty-something,  new to Hollywood, and was fortunate enough to observe Demme and David Byrne at the height of their creative collaboration from a very up close vantage point. I was later hired to produce a small video feature on Byrne interviewing himself in his “Big Suit”. This video launched my first venture into private outside production work and it can still be found (un-credited ) on the re-released DVD of Stop Making Sense. That concert was filmed over several nights at the Palladium in Hollywood and provided some of the most memorable times of my career.  Anyway, i digress… (as usual in these blogs)

Back to Neil. You have to be a Neil fan to even understand this film or want to attend in the first place. You either get it .. or you don’t. Which has always been Neil’s approach to his music, his albums, his concerts and just about anything else that he becomes involved in. Young is a true iconoclast, pioneer, and troubadour who has always done things his way. He has been part of one of the largest super groups of all time, while at the same time maintained perhaps one of the most intriguing solo careers of any musician. Himself a filmmaker, Neil has shot and archived a number of groundbreaking films and shorts through his almost 50 year career, many included in his innovative Archive set on Blue Ray DVD that spans his career from the early 60’s through the early 70’s. I got that box set for my birthday last year.. and have spent the better part of the year picking my way through the hundreds of menus and options as you are able to interactively explore his amazing career and enormous music catalogue.

The Nuart Theatre is a real treat in this day and age of soul-less, mass produced shopping mall venues. The Nuart is funky, with a cool old marquee that still has the hand placed plastic letters with magnets on the back. They specialize in old classic films, new indie documentaries, and  international films. They still play Rocky Horror picture show on Saturday nights. The popcorn machine only makes about 4 bags at a time, and the guys who work there look like they spent far too much time indoors in the library stacks. The seats are huge, musty smelling recliners with about 3 feet in front of the aisles.. .you can actually walk in front of people without anyone having to get up.. or have someone’s crotch rubbed in your face.

The Tower Theatre  in Upper Darby, PA is also a perfect venue for the stripped down version of Neil’s Chrome Dreams tour. Appearing in paint splattered kakis, and white shirt, he at first seems like  a mad scientist or your crazy uncle who is out tinkering in the garage. The barren stage at the tower has no set, or backdrops, just exposed cinder block walls and old theatrical stage equipment. This is a common theme for Young and Demme (who used the same concept for the above mentioned Stop Making Sense, where Byrne comes on stage alone with a boom box for the first song, and the band and sets appear one by one on subsequent songs until the entire band, instruments and backdrops build before the audience eyes and during the performance). Young plays both solo acoustic and with his band that includes old pals Ben Keith on guitar and steel, Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina, and Rick (the bass player) Rojas,(who i saw standing backstage at the Eagles concert last night)…   the perfect mix for Young’s sparse arrangements. A painter sets his easel up in the background and furiously paints during the entire show under one lone bare light bulb. Thus the paint splattered clothing adorning Neil.

Demme smartly intercuts between Neil’s acoustic and piano solo moments with the hard-rock-thrashin of the band in full force. A small army of cameras of all types, from high end film cameras to small hand held DV cameras provide a multi-faceted canvas of images of Young and his band as they move through the material. Demme also mounted many cameras in some unusual places giving the viewer a unique perspective… from the drummer’s POV, the audience POV, Neil’s POV, etc… and at times uses a unique split screen effect with 16 boxes at a time on the screen, each representing a different camera view.

Neil has the look of a well traveled and weather worn leather jacket… craggly & cracked but strong and comfortable at the same time. Young was 62 years old when this film was made and had recently recuperated from a life-threatening brain aneurysm that struck him on the night he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Buffalo Springfield. It is amazing to see him still rock and play guitar as hard as he does. He is not considered the godfather of grunge rock for nothing.

This film is not for everybody and certainly not the casual fan. Like a Hurricane clocks in at about 17 minutes and his ragged but beautiful renditions of Cinnamon Girl and Cowgirl in the Sand are rare gems. Here is a guy who literally can pull from hundreds of songs from soft, achingly beautiful ballads of heartache and loneliness to earth scorching rockers of angst and anger.

Watching Neil move from acoustic to electric guitar, and back to piano and even banjo is a real treat and captures those rare moments that we have all witnessed at one time or another through the years, when you stumble upon a show that truly mesmerizes you by the artists’ prolific musicianship and songwriting skills. I don’t see this much anymore… and I probably am guilty of over-longing for those shows where an artist honestly lays his songs out for the audience to interpret as they wish.. without a lot of props, or over done special effects. Just a guy and his guitar and his imagination. Neil once wrote.. “Its better to burn out than fade away”…   We are still not burned out on Neil. Great songwriting and great musicianship just don’t fade away.