Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Ryan Flynn
We’ve heard it said that sometimes it’s the quiet one that should be feared the most. It’s not always true, but it is in the case of living legend Neil Young, whose reserve and the subtle way he carries himself as a musical shaman—an audio medicine man – can succumb to an upheaval that turns into a monumental squall that could rock a mountain down into a valley of pebbles or rip a hole into a battle-ready tank. That isn’t what makes him scary. What makes him scary is that he most often is the man searching for a heart of gold and singing with that angel voice of his that must have been deferred down to Earth by Aoede, the Greek muse of song, so as to give everything he sings the living sweetness of a crystal clear Canadian boundary waters lake. He’s hates George W. (not many people don’t) and he got ruffled up at a Chicago Tribune writer recently when the paper questioned where the funds for Farm Aid were being funneled to, but other than that, the man keeps his aggression in-check. When he’s mad, you might know it, but it still comes out of his mouth with a mostly benevolent tone and an insistence that the right solution is the least bloody one. He gets angry when peace and happiness are threatened and when people selfishly hurt themselves without having to. He gets peeved about bad choices that affect more than just one solitary person and he’d rather there was a way to always bring love into the picture.

Jonathan Demme’s desire to document this fascinatingly complex/simple (yes, both) man at his most fragile moment – after having been operated on to fix a brain aneurysm he was diagnosed with just before the recording session for “Prairie Wind” took place – results in a portrait of a man with more compassion than anything else in the world. Young’s touch with the inner workings of a human heart is set on display as he debuts his new record at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tenn., the original home of the Grand Ole Opry. The old building, with the stained glass windows acting almost as a halo, was already hallowed, but it was transformed into a site for one of its most unique services, one where young told stories that were what the words precious and nostalgic were invented for.

The film starts off with Demme taking individual rides with each of the member;s of Young’s backing band, asking questions about their bandleader and the city of Nashville, where most of them first met Young to help record “Harvest.” With raindrop speckles tacking themselves to the rear windshield as they drove, Young spoke of the “progress” of erecting a mini skyscraper next door to the Ryman that would block any light from reflecting through the historic buildings stained glass windows. One of his moist poignant moments of the film came when he thought about how he wishes he could go back to the days when the Ryman was Nashville’s prime jewel and the liveliest spot in town, but that there will be people 20 years from now wistfully thinking the same thing about the current time and recent past when such presumed monstrosities were being built even at the cost of history. He said, with a disappointed, but hopefully strength, “They’ll say, ‘I wish we could have seen what it was like in 2000.’”

And so is most of the feeling in Young’s songs on “Prairie Wind” – a hope for the way things used to be to return, but also a knowing that most things can’t go back to the way they were because it just doesn’t work like that. The shots that Demme captured show the calmness in Young as he’s coated in a golden light to fit the theme and the simplistic set does well to give the sense of wide-open prairie land and the onset of dusk. What it must have felt like that night to be the first person to hear “When God Made Me” for the first time in-person. Young tells stories about his father’s dementia in his later years and his recent passing at the time of this taping. He tells stories of how his father sang to him for the first time and of how a song he wrote about his 21-year-old daughter used to be the kind of song he wrote to girls his own age when he was younger. He appears moved more times than can be counted and Demme always seems to be there for the close-up. Young tells the story about how he purchased his first house off of the success of “Harvest” and how the old man that sold him the place he lives in to this day asked him how a kid so young came into all that money and the sly songwriter simply replied, “I got lucky. I got really lucky.” The most touching piece of banter comes when he tells about the guitar he’s playing and how it used to be Hank Williams own. It was the guitar that the country star played the last time he performed in the Ryman in 1951 before being fired. He was happy he could bring the instrument back into the building one more time and then his solemnly pointed to the ceiling as he started playing “This Old Guitar” with Emmylou Harris.

A bonus disc contains interviews and footage from Young’s 1971 appearance on The Johnny Cash Show in Nashville, where he performed “The Needle and the Damage Done” looking like the late Phil Hartman as the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. Before he played and received a standing ovation, Young explained the song about drug abuse this way, “A lot of great artists get affected by it. A lot of art goes down a drain” A lot of great artists have also been affected by Neil Young and every second of this brilliant document should be studied by those who make music for the money or the broads just so that they can feel ashamed of their pettiness.