CD/DVD Review: "Live at Massey Hall" - Neil Young (2007)

After last year's silly "Living with War", I had pretty much written Neil Young off, but he has completely, absolutely redeemed himself in my eyes with this release.

Recorded in stripped-down fashion in January 1971 at Toronto's venerable Massey Hall, a 25-year old Young, accompanied by only an acoustic guitar and piano, plays a number of new tracks from the as-yet-unreleased "Harvest" album like "Old Man" and "Needle and the Damage Done" along with older tunes from his burgeoning solo career and also a couple from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Neil also puts it out there with the stage banter, talking about how he recently bought a ranch, giving the patrons a hard time for taking pictures when he's trying to play, and talking about how when you move to the States, you start noticing that one by one, people you know start dying off because of heroin overdoses. I haven't heard something as intimate as this in a very long time.

The DVD is full of grainy footage of the performance interspersed with home videos and the like, along with newspaper clippings, FM radio interviews taken from Neil years later, looking back on the era (his observations about how the women's libbers never got after him about "A Man Needs a Maid are gold), and other memorabilia that fans like myself who weren't even born at the time really appreciate.

Absolutely beautiful and about as real as it possibly gets.

Overall rating: 9.5/10