Neil Young: Heart of Gold

First, I will say: I recommend seeing the movie without reading anything about it. Just go, sit yourself down, and open your eyes and ears.

Without being heavy-handed the film takes you into the music and the unique energy of a live show. One of my favorite details was seeing a singer in the Fisk University choir getting into the music.

Groups of musicians would step on and off stage: the Fisk University choir (local to Nashville?), a small string orchestra, and a horn section. The backup singers including Emmylou Harris and Pegi Young were fixtures (sorry, don't know the third singer). Some of the best scenes, I thought, were of the backup singers crooning into a single mic. Neil Young crooning with a choir of black voices is an unexpected aural delight.

Though I have long been a fan of Neil Young, this film was the first time I saw what a formidable performer he is. He owns the stage and the hall. He and his band are more precise and polished -- even in their grittiness and "rustiness" -- than I would have expected.

The film is gorgeous to look at. You get to look in detail at the band members -- their clothes, their faces, their hair, one with a bulbous nose. And the pedal steel player's fingers and restrained soulfulness. My heart leapt when I heard the banjo player come in on "Old Man." It was interesting to hear some of the newer Prairie Wind material towards the top of the show. The second song absolutely knocked my socks off. Still, hearing the well-known older songs (Old Man, Heart of Gold) was like encountering an old friend unexpectedly.

I was wondering how the sound quality was achieved. This was a major factor in the film's success: at peak moments the ensemble works up to an incredible momentum and texture. Seeing the chemistry of the band members at these points is exhilarating. Demme captures that very well -- but again, without forcing it on you.

Some of the backdrops for the band were surprisingly cheesy. I have to think there's a whisper of irony in the hearth scenery with the easy chair (and antlers, as I recall).

I thought of Christopher Guest's "A Mighty Wind" more than once. One song in particular about his dog, in which Neil starts snuffling into the mic, could have come straight out of "Mighty Wind."

Make no mistake: Neil Young is a philosopher-king of rock and roll. His band and the dedicated people around him seem essential to what he achieves.

When Neil Young breaks from singing his own lyrical compositions in Neil Young: Heart of Gold to sing what he calls the most beautiful song ever composed, I knew exactly which Canadian piece it would be, for it was mine too. I listened as a young man to Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds" for an entire evening, over and over, as Young did emptying his pockets for a juke box at i6 years old in Calgary. Young had my heart for this performance and a lifetime.

At this point in Jonathan Demme's two days of filming Young and friends at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, weeks before his operation for a brain aneurysm, I also knew this was the best concert film I had seen in recent memory.

Young's singing Tyson's song symbolized the real heart of gold he so obviously has calling someone else's work the best. In this film, however, no one could be better than Young. His voice seems to have lost none of its resonance and feeling since his searching for a heart of gold song made him almost iconic; his stories, such as one about his guitar coming from Hank Williams and then set to song in The Old Guitar, make the only bridges necessary among songs in a concert of songs. When he duets with Emmylou Harris on that song, her delivery seems consciously stoic in order to let Young's understated performance be the gold standard that night.

Demme, who has successes with Stop Making Sense and Storefront Hitchcock, concentrates most of his shots on close-ups of Young, whose low-key style demands the audience get as close as possible. The backgrounds change on the theme of his new album, Prairie Wind, so that a new mural of the southwest is brought across as the songs change.

Concert gold.

I am a Neil Young fan for over 25 years. I love most of his work. I hate some of it. Neil likes to experiment. He is never afraid of failure. This boils down to 'You can't please everybody'. I have attended about 8 of his concerts plus his previous movie 'Rust Never Sleeps'. I took my son on his 20th birthday to the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood to see this movie. I also took my my wife, my 11 year-old daughter, and my son's 18 year-old girlfriend. Everyone of us loved the movie. The theatre was completely silent during the entire program. The lady next to me actually clapped after several songs. It was easy to forget we were at a movie. It felt so much like a live performance, except the acoustics were better and we could see every performer. Maybe I can identify with many of the songs he sang. My son has left home and come back. My father is in the early stages of 'Dementia'. This made the performance very personal for me. I had to remind myself that Neil was performing for millions of fans, not just myself. The movie is beautiful in its simplicity. It does not rely on sets or props or special effects. Just a bunch of very talented musicians. The lighting and camera work truly complete the mood. The day after we saw the movie, my 11 year-old daughter told me she understood the song Neil sang about his daughter. She understood the line 'I miss you, but I won't hold you down'. Yes, I loved this movie. I only wished I was at the Ryman during filming. Go see this movie. Take your wives, your kids, your friends, and anyone else you can think of.

At South By Southwest today, I saw the excellent new Jonathan Demme film on Neil Young performing in Nashville, Neil Young: Heart of Gold. Good to see the Demme style applied to a great artist. Neil had just gotten over his aneurysm surgery and the loss of his father, so it was an emotional show. It's worth it to see it on the big screen.

As in Stop Making Sense, there were no shots of the audience. When asked about that in Q & A, Demme said "If there isn't one thing up on stage more interesting than the audience, you shouldn't be up there performing." Piece of trivia: When Neil first became a rich hippie, he bought a large ranch that he still has. An old caretaker took him by Jeep around the property and they came to an overlook. The man asked "How can a young guy like you afford a place like this?" Neil wrote Old Man for him.

I've seen this film twice and must say that, with Heart of Gold, Jonathan Demme has created the definitive Neil Young concert - this is as good as Neil Young gets and Demme has captured him perfectly. Neil Young fans and those who are turned on to him by this film will probably want to buy the DVD when it comes out. But see it in a theater if you can - production values are extremely high (this is no amateurish production), camera work (particularly the close up camera work) is among the best I have ever seen, the editing is superb, and the content is as good as it gets for a film of this genre.

Although I've been a Demme fan for years, I was lukewarm about Neil Young before seeing this film - count me as a big Neil Young fan now too. Jonathan, if you are reading this - any chance you could capture Stephen Stills one of these days?