Forever Young
Burris, Keith C.
a;;u~:xa,~:,x;unra~r,~~.un-,:axn~er.:~xemncur~ssas,~,c~'b~avtspw~uzawxvnarvYnxx-~-.xasuvatt~'~iaysa~a:~.~::~2er~;asaa?samax~tu,~un,.~an'sa~~za+~e-.^aes~mn~ r~.~.r.~cmf~s~± FOREVER YOUNG Keith...
...But the staged Greendale wins people over...
...Every family has its own rich history, and the sum of multiple family histories in a given place and time is what makes that place a community...
...I am fifty...
...But somehow it works...
...The Greendale stage show is something else entirely...
...Greendale is the story of a rural California family and its travails, but it is told as much didactically as in narrative form...
...Commonweal 3 8 August 13, 2004...
...He ails it Green-dale, and it exists in various permutations: an album...
...When Young began touring, almost all the critics said Greendale was just weird...
...It is not quite a song cycle and not quite a rock opera, and its author insists that it is definitely not a video...
...For her, Young is a rock icon...
...Young, being Young, wore this like a badge of honor...
...For me, he is a poet of my late youth—graduate school days...
...And the message...
...But its homemade documentary quality has a unique and strange beauty that lingers...
...I doubt he minds that the experiment is not entirely successful...
...Now he is a patriarch, but he doesn't perform like one...
...She is seventeen...
...On Greendale, he also sings: "Attention, shoppers...
...It achieves the authenticity, outrage, and hope Young had in mind...
...My roommate was a Young freak and introduced me to him, though I already knew Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, his earlier groups...
...Keith C. Burris is the editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut...
...It evoked a home movie, recording moments forever lost, with loved ones now forever gone...
...one family member makes a tragic choice...
...It was Green-dale that brought Young to Connecticut...
...The story of Greendale is not, as they say, "developed," nor are the characters...
...I hadn't thought about Young in a while, and then I read, a year or so ago, that he had a new project...
...No one knew what to make of it...
...a;;u~:xa,~:,x;unra~r,~~.un-,:axn~er.:~xemncur~ssas,~,c~'b~avtspw~uzawxvnarvYnxx-~-.xasuvatt~'~iaysa~a:~.~::~2er~;asaa?samax~tu,~un,.~an'sa~~za+~e-.^aes~mn~ r~.~.r.~cmf~s~± FOREVER YOUNG Keith C. Burris few months back, Neil Young and his band, Crazy Horse, came to the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford, Connecticut, and my daughter and I went to see him...
...Young may be angrier than most of the grungers and punkers coming up...
...the intrusiveness and crassness of the electronic media, for a third...
...Thirty years ago, Neil Young was an angry young rocker...
...Greendale seems like a work in progress...
...It is Grover's Corners with violence, drugs, aging hippies, corporate conglomerates, Vietnam vets, and righteous anger—the anger being Young's, as expressed though his characters...
...But for now, the merest story line and characterizations serve to carry the message...
...The theme is summed up in one line: "A little love and affection / in everything you do / will make the world a better place / with or without you...
...The Patriot Act, for one...
...Not long after attending the concert, I saw the movie Greendale in a theater in New York...
...Neil Young just keeps trying to make records that are new...
...Greendale is a sort of Our Town meets Hair...
...The homemade nature of Greendale binds message to presentation, text to tune, and musician to listener in a way totally foreign to the way we generally experience popular art and entertainment today...
...About what...
...I suspectthat nibbling at elusive truths is enough for him...
...Not by getting to bed early and eating his greens, that's for sure...
...and now a stage show...
...a movie...
...It has a precious, handmade quality that is almost unique in our time, and, because this is so rare, it is unexpectedly affecting...
...Buy with a con-science and save...
...He plays and sings with the fire of youth, though now he is an old man, or nearly so...
...and another observes it all as the story unfolds, offering wise and gnarled commentary...
...Thestory line is: Eccentric family in small-town California (time unspecified) is caught up in the state's economic "development...
...a DVD with Young singing the thing solo...
...How has he done it...
...And some people still come to the show expecting Crazy Horse—not a tragic tale about an American family...
...It is wonderful...
...the fact that much of his generation has given up on the environmental-ism movement, for another...
...You don't feel you are buying a concert experience or consuming rock music, but listening, really listening, to what Young calls "a musical novel...
...Young calls it "a record you can look at...
...That may change...
...thing...
...It has bad acting by roadies doubling as the lip-synching cast members, wonderful homespun sets, some great dancing ("by twelve dancers from your hometown"), and thundering music...
...It sounds hokey, I admit...
...For me it does not quite work as a film...
...He is still seeking the authentic—still stalking the truth...
...This is something of what I think Young was trying to get at in Green-dale...
...Partly this is be-cause Young has an edge, something he has never lost...
Vol. 131 • August 2004 • No. 14
