Forever young

A few months back, Neil Young and his band, Crazy Horse, came to the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford, Connecticut, and my daughter and I went to see him. She is seventeen. I am fifty. For her, Young is a rock icon. For me, he is a poet of my late youth--graduate school days. My roommate was a Young freak and introduced me to him, though I already knew Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, his earlier groups.

I hadn't thought about Young in a while, and then I read, a year or so ago, that he had a new project. He calls it Greendale, and it exists in various permutations: an album; a movie; a DVD with Young singing the thing solo; and now a stage show.

Greendale is the story of a rural California family and its travails, but it is told as much didactically as in narrative form. It is not quite a song cycle and not quite a rock opera, and its author insists that it is definitely not a video. Young calls it "a record you can look at." It was Greendale that brought Young to Connecticut.

Greendale is a sort of Our Town meets Hair. It is Grover's Corners with violence, drugs, aging hippies, corporate conglomerates, Vietnam vets, and righteous anger--the anger being Young's, as expressed though his characters. Young may be angrier than most of the grungers and punkers coming up.

About what? The Patriot Act, for one thing; the fact that much of his generation has given up on the environmentalism movement, for another; the intrusiveness and crassness of the electronic media, for a third.

The story of Greendale is not, as they say, "developed," nor are the characters. (That may change. Greendale seems like a work in progress.) But for now, the merest story line and characterizations serve to carry the message. The story line is: Eccentric family in small-town California (time unspecified) is caught up in the state's economic "development"; one family member makes a tragic choice; and another observes it all as the story unfolds, offering wise and gnarled commentary.

And the message? The theme is summed up in one line: "A little love and affection / in everything you do / will make the world a better place / with or without you." It sounds hokey, I admit. But somehow it works. Partly this is because Young has an edge, something he has never lost. On Greendale, he also sings: "Attention, shoppers! Buy with a conscience and save."

Not long after attending the concert, I saw the movie Greendale in a theater in New York. For me it does not quite work as a film. But its homemade documentary quality has a unique and strange beauty that lingers. It evoked a home movie, recording moments forever lost, with loved ones now forever gone. Every family has its own rich history, and the sum of multiple family histories in a given place and time is what makes that place a community. This is something of what I think Young was trying to get at in Greendale. I doubt he minds that the experiment is not entirely successful. I suspect that nibbling at elusive truths is enough for him.

The Greendale stage show is something else entirely. It has bad acting by roadies doubling as the lip-synching cast members, wonderful homespun sets, some great dancing ("by twelve dancers from your hometown"), and thundering music. It is wonderful. It achieves the authenticity, outrage, and hope Young had in mind.

When Young began touring, almost all the critics said Greendale was just weird. No one knew what to make of it. Young, being Young, wore this like a badge of honor. And some people still come to the show expecting Crazy Horse--not a tragic tale about an American family.

But the staged Greendale wins people over. It has a precious, handmade quality that is almost unique in our time, and, because this is so rare, it is unexpectedly affecting. The homemade nature of Greendale binds message to presentation, text to tune, and musician to listener in a way totally foreign to the way we generally experience popular art and entertainment today. You don't feel you are buying a concert experience or consuming rock music, but listening, really listening, to what Young calls "a musical novel."

Thirty years ago, Neil Young was an angry young rocker. Now he is a patriarch, but he doesn't perform like one. He plays and sings with the fire of youth, though now he is an old man, or nearly so. How has he done it? Not by getting to bed early and eating his greens, that's for sure. Neil Young just keeps trying to make records that are new. He is still seeking the authentic--still stalking the truth.

Keith C. Burris is the editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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