Forever Young

His guitar gently weeps: Neil Young performs at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in Neil Young: Heart of Gold. Courtesy Paramount Classics.

News that Neil Young responded to the diagnosis of a brain aneurysm last spring by flying to Nashville to record a new album — weeks before life-saving surgery — couldn’t have surprised his followers. In the liner notes to his 1977 retrospective album, Decade, Young recalled that two of his finest flights of fancy — Cowgirl in the Sand and Down by the River — were written within hours of each other, “lying in bed sweating … with a temperature of 103.”

This impulse for escape and an obsession with time travel has been a constant for Young. In 1952, when polio stole a summer of his life, seven-year-old Neil brought a toy train to the hospital instead of a Teddy Bear. Three decades later, the millionaire musician built a fantasy world in his northern California ranch that includes houses for model cars and a labyrinthine train set. The latter came with 19th-century locomotive miniatures, antique scenery and computer gadgetry, which allowed his two young boys, both challenged by cerebral palsy, to disappear into the past whenever Dad was home.

The album that Young recorded last spring was Prairie Wind, and though the subject matter — mortality, post 9/11 global panic — was sombre, it was far from bleak. Indeed, the 10-song cycle was sweetened by many of the Nashville pickers that helped Young out on two of his biggest albums — Harvest (1972) and Harvest Moon (1992). Prairie Wind attracted favourable attention, including a phone call from filmmaker Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs), who wondered if Young was interested in doing a concert film together.

The result is Neil Young: Heart of Gold. Elegantly lit and handsomely staged in the neo-classical country style Young intended — no haystacks or sequins! — this concert film has the burnished glow of a Vincente Minnelli MGM Technicolor musical from the 1950s. And no one seems happier to be transported back in time than Young, decked out in a pewter swallowtail coat and wide-brimmed gaucho hat, as he sidles up to prim and pretty cowgirl Emmylou Harris for an old-fashioned duet.

Young apparently told Demme he was interested in redoing Prairie Wind live in Nashville at the Ryman Auditorium, once the home of country music’s mother church, the Grand Ole Opry. Growing excited, he explained that he saw all the musicians dressed in understated country and western garb, appearing before theatrical backdrops that conjured images of a comforting rural past. Young would be playing Hank Williams’s old guitar and he wanted those in attendance to believe they might have wandered into an Opry show Hank or Lefty Frizzell gave way back when.  

Prairie home companion: Young in Heart of Gold. Courtesy Paramount Classics.

That Young was intrigued by Demme’s idea of a film should come as no surprise: the lyrics for many of his best songs, from On the Way Home to Powderfinger, scan like screenplays, and Young has been slapping together his own frequently baffling home movies for years. (Why the filmmaker had his roadies dressed as Jawas in his 1979 guitar-arama, Rust Never Sleeps, is still anyone’s guess.) Anyone who has fought through Young’s own films — particularly the hippie-dippy Journey Through the Past (1974) — might wince at the thought of him ordering around Demme, director of the sublime Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense (1984). Nevertheless, the two artists, both now 61 years old, prove to be ideal collaborators.

Young is in fine voice and a wonderful mood throughout, eulogizing Hank, warmly reminiscing about his recently departed father and happily recalling the day as a Winnipeg teenager that he fed a jukebox all afternoon in order to hear Ian & Sylvia’s Four Strong Winds. Still, the success of Heart of Gold is as much Demme’s design as his subject’s beguiling performance. The filmmaker begins with lo-fi digi-cam interviews with Young and his Nashville accomplices on their way to the concert; we learn that the players on Harvest were musicians who happened to be passing the street outside a Nashville studio the day Young came to town to appear on the Johnny Cash TV show.

Demme then takes the famous 37 steps from Tootsie’s Orchard Lounge — where songwriters like Willie Nelson and Roger Miller once drank and auditioned songs for shopping singers — along the sidewalk to Ryman Auditorium for Young’s show. Once inside the country music landmark, the movie becomes something else again. The gold lights go up and the filmmaker switches to a probing, nine-camera set-up (including an unobtrusive Steadicam on-stage). At no point in the film do we see the audience or crew; Demme’s cameras seem to take the stage with the passing musicians, which include string and horn sections, a choir, fiddlers and an old guy playing a sawed-off broom.

The entire cast is on stage for the penultimate song, a spirited sing-along of One of These Days (from Harvest Moon). As the audience’s cheers die, Demme pulls back to an auditorium now empty except for Young, who sits alone in the middle of the stage with Hank’s guitar singing The Old Laughing Lady, a fragile reverie from his first solo album, way back in 1969. Only then do we understand that Demme has staged the film concert as a dream, with all of the characters in Young’s head, the audience and fellow musicians coming alive and then disappearing in the course of a single performance. Young himself has lauded his collaborator’s magic trick, commenting, “As you watch the movie, you’re a ghost, floating around, above, behind, and through the stage.”

Heart of Gold features performances of some vintage Young songs, including Old Man and The Needle and the Damage Done. The artist may have done more thoughtful work in a recording studio, but Jonathan Demme’s journey into Young’s past is an artful and rewarding account of contemporary music’s most intriguing time-traveller.

Heart of Gold opens in Toronto on Feb. 10, in Vancouver on Feb. 17. It opens in Montreal and Winnipeg on Feb. 24.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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