Hippy Dreamer's report from the show|
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Direct bookmark: http://HyperRust.org/Tour97/?R46
(updated Tuesday, 14-Aug-2018 17:55:59 AEST) |
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Hippy Dreamer's report from the show
The Jon Morning Son Neal Review
(more to come)
The show details.
A lousy review on the Reuters News Wire.
Hello,
This is Hippie Dreamer, live from the Irvine HORDE. I'm here along with the
Banner, which I've laid out on the grass. Many Rusties and other folks
have admired and signed it.
When I left the banner for a few minutes, my wife Kathy said Zeke came over and was studying it. So now we know that he has seen it up close.
Neil played his acoustic set very early, so I missed it. He was finished by around 2:30 with Long May You Run. A couple Rusties made it, including Cinnamon Girl, but I didn't get here until just after 3.
Neil was in the Lionel Tent surrounded by folks about 4:30, but just waiting through the other bands until he makes his formal appearance.
Well, I don't want to hog this HORDE MSN terminal so, I'll give y'all a full review when I get home.
Eric Hippie Dreamer
Well, I am pleased to report the results of my experiment (where I didn't look at Rust at all the past week, thus not knowing the setlist). First of all, when I sat in my seat before Neil's evening set, I was informed about the acoustic set which he has performed to open the festival each day. AIGH!!! I had no idea about this, and am extremely disappointed about missing it, especially when I heard that he played Out on the Weekend. If I had read Rust the past week, I would have known about this and could have gotten to the show early enough to see more Neil acoustic. So, I have to say that the disappointment of missing a whole Neil set outweighed the added thrill of not knowing the setlist. I'll never make that mistake again.
I arrived at the festival at 4:00. One of the first things I saw was the
Banner, unfolded on a grassy area about thirty feet to the left of the
Lionel Trains booth. There was a man standing to the
right side of the banner, examining our creation. I did a double take
when I realized that this man was none other than Zeke Young! He was in
the process of looking at the banner as I arrived, and he continued to
admire it for about thirty seconds after I got there. He seemed just as
interested in reading what had been written on it as any fan would be. I
didn't try to say anything to him, but it wouldn't have been hard. Now
that I think about it, just about every time this afternoon that I passed
by the Lionel booth, he was hanging out there.
After about five minutes of my own looking at the banner, I noticed a larger than usual crowd at the Lionel booth. I walked over and saw Neil himself, only about ten feet away from me, giving a TV interview as a crowd of perhaps thirty people surrounded him. I couldn't hear what he had to say, but it was cool to see him up close. He spent five minutes talking with the camera crew and then "slipped away" towards backstage with his bodyguards .
I really like the Neil T-shirts for this tour. I bought a cream colored one which has a drawing of a human skeleton riding a skeleton of a horse, holding a long spear. Below this it says Neil Young / Con El Caballo Loco. Below that are the words Year of the Horse / 1997. I can't remember buying a better concert t-shirt.
Alright, now for a discussion of some noteworthy aspects of the performance, this being the third Neil show I have witnessed.
I'm the Ocean was superb. He repeated one stanza accidentally, but you can't blame him for messing the lyrics up once in such a long, chorus-less song. It was great in concert. Crazy Horse more than adequately fills in for Pearl Jam on this one.
I had never heard the song Hippie Dream before. The lines "take my advice -- don't listen to me" provided great amusement, especially when one considers that it's a bit of self-humility from the headliner of a large rock festival tour. He gave some good guitar solos on this one.
His playing Powderfinger was probably the high point of the concert for me. Once again, Neil flubbed the lyrics and repeated a stanza, this time the "Daddy's gone, my brother's out hunting...." stanza.
After the band left him alone on stage, he changed to an acoustic and dedicated the next song to someone in the audience (I don't remember the name), and said that "this note's for you." I had not heard the song before, but it dealt with how his band broke up, and how how he wanted to reexperience the music he once had with them, saying that he wanted to go back to Buffalo Springfield Again.
He began the next song (still on solo guitar) playing what sounded to me (and to a lot of others, judging from the loud reaction from much of the audience) like the harmonica intro to Helpless. No matter, I like FHTH better. Before I forget, let me note that he has made a fair amount of lyrical changes to some of his songs , such as this one and I'm the Ocean.
I loved Crime in the City. It sounded a great deal like the Weld version, except that for some reason Neil didn't sing what for me is that climax of the song, the lines "there's still crime in the city/but it's good to be free."
Those are my observations about the interesting parts of the show. If I have time in the next week, I will post more of a thorough review, where I try to describe my emotions about the show and try to critique it. But I must sleep.
-Jon Neal
morning son
(lots more to be added when I can... --RE*AC*TOR)