Neil Young / Pegi Young – Fox Theater (St. Louis, MO)
“When you’ve sung a song so many times, you have to take care of it,” Neil Young explained to the capacity crowd. A fan had just wrecked Young’s concentration during “After The Gold Rush”, yelling “Neil for president!” and causing him to stop and then struggle through the rest of the song.
“If you sing a song too much, it’s gone, and then everybody starts yellin’,” Young continued. “Well…you saw what happened.”
Stating a preference for obscure songs that force fans to listen intently and process what they’re hearing, Young proved his point by peppering his acoustic opening set with the unreleased gems “Sad Movies”, “No One Seems To Know” and “Love Art Blues”.
Young sat amid old theater props and stage lights, surrounded by guitars. He had opened the show with the deeply nostalgic “From Hank To Hendrix”, wondering, “Can we get it together/Can we still stand side by side?” The rambling epic “Ambulance Blues”, a song full of accusations and betrayal, followed, providing a grim answer.
Moving to a tie-dye-painted grand piano, Young sang “A Man Needs A Maid”, providing the orchestral parts on a synthesizer. For “Mellow My Mind”, he plucked and strummed a banjo, his voice straining to hit the songs’ anguished upper notes.
There were catcalls and requests from the audience, which Young seemed to ignore, until he said, “I always have trouble figuring out what to say between songs, but you people are taking care of it for me.” But he reversed himself during “Love Is A Rose”, stopping the song briefly to tell the crowd, “You should be clapping your ass off.”
The solo set, which also included “Harvest” and “Heart Of Gold”, hit enough highlights to keep the most casual fan involved while longtimers thrilled to the rarities and rearrangements and smiled at Young’s irascible comments.
During the electric set, a pirate flag flew from drummer Ralph Molina’s kit, and Young — also backed by multi-instrumentalist Ben Keith, bassist Rick Rosas and occasionally, vocalists Anthony Crawford and Pegi Young — came out with cannons blazing on “The Loner”, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, and two songs from Chrome Dreams II, “Dirty Old Man” and “Spirit Road”. The arrangements surged and sagged, with the guitars and harmonies straining against Molina’s deliberate drumming.
The mood shifted to melancholy for the country-leaning obscurity “Bad Fog Of Loneliness” and Young’s mournful take on Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me”. “The Believer”, a soulful, optimistic tune, seemed out of place, but it was soon blown to the side by the guitar showcase “No Hidden Path”, which unwound over the course of 20 minutes or more. The band stood in a circle, facing each other as Young reeled off one jaw-dropping solo after another.
Unlikely as it seemed that anything could follow that, Young obliged with an encore of “Cinnamon Girl” and “Cortez The Killer” before closing with “The Sultan”, an ancient instrumental Young recorded with his long-ago outfit the Squires. It came complete with a roadie dressed in full Aladdin gear, banging a gong.
Pegi Young’s brief opening set featured songs from her self-titled debut album. Her performance was pleasant but at times seemed tentative. She joked with her band — Crawford, Rosas and Keith, pulling double duty for the night — and sometimes seemed to be singing to them, too. Her performance felt more like a casual rehearsal in front of friends, which, in a sense, is just what it was.