Show up at any high school graduation ceremony this spring and a teenage speechmaker might tell you that time flies, heals all wounds, is money, is a flat circle, can’t be turned back. Show up at any Neil Young concert this summer and a 78-year-old carrying an electric guitar will remind you that time really is a river, and that his music is a huge granite boulder plunked square in the middle of it.
Instead of slipping into the future, Young’s songs shrug at time. Sorry, you’re gonna have to go around me. That stubbornness remains the fundamental generosity of his music, though, and it informed nearly every gesture of a staggering performance at Jiffy Lube Live on Saturday night. Alongside trusty collaborators — the band Crazy Horse: bassist Billy Talbot, drummer Ralph Molina, the young guitarist Micah Nelson (son of Willie) — Young opened with a 10-minute rendition of “Cortez the Killer,” unfolding the song like a temporal riddle, with everyone in the band somehow playing behind the beat, generating what felt like a continuous forestalling of time. How was this happening? No idea. But it felt purposeful, exhilarating and all the way alive, like an unbroken sequence of somersaults into the present moment. And now, and now, and now, and now, and now, and now.
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That euphoric tumbling sensation made the long songs feel short and the short songs feel long, as if everything had been plotted on a spiral instead of an arc — especially during “I’m the Ocean” and “Powderfinger,” where Young’s guitar solos were decisive, unhurried and bottomless. Aside from the exquisite micro-lags built into his music’s general architecture, there was zero drag on his playing or his singing voice. He sounded so intentional, so present. Who in the history of rock-and-roll has been this good at making music this loud at this age? I say nobody.
Naturally, things got quieter during the solo portion of the set, perhaps against Young’s will, as he clanged away at his acoustic guitar and blew into his harmonica as hard as a train whistle. The songs were tender, though. “Comes a Time,” “Heart of Gold,” “Human Highway,” “I Am a Child,” “Helpless,” “Love Earth.” As evidenced by an upright piano off to the side that nobody in the band ever touched, the set list was clearly being written in real time, and in one moment of wayward stage banter, Young said, “I thought of the perfect song, but now I can’t remember it.”
Maybe that was a joke on old age, or hippie spaciness, or both. But you couldn’t help but wonder whether Young was talking about “Ohio,” one of the most powerful American protest anthems ever penned and, this year, suddenly one of the most timely. Written in 1970 in response to the National Guard’s killing of four students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University, “Ohio” now sounds upsettingly fresh as police across our country brutalize college students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza.
So why didn’t he play it? Was it the mood (up)? Was it the crowd (older)? Maybe Young is making room for someone out there to write 2024’s version of “Ohio.” Either way, all of his political beliefs — which he didn’t discuss onstage — seemed to fit inside a couplet from “Love and Only Love”: “Hate is everything you think it is,” Young sang. “Love and only love will break it down.” The love part may have felt platitudinous on its own, but the hate part was worth burning into your permanent consciousness. If this fragile world of ours really is collapsing, let’s remember that the force destroying it is stupid, and simple, and easy to understand. It can still be defeated. We still have time.
