I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NEIL YOUNG AND CRAZY HORSE-Rust Never Sleeps (DVD) (1979).

Back in 1979, Neil Young had a huge hit on his hands with “Hey Hey My My” and the album Rust Never Sleeps.  This is a film of that concert (in the Cow Palace, San Francisco).

The set sounds great and the selection of songs is top notch.  On a technical note, some of the darks don’t hold up well and get terribly pixellated, but what do you expect from (what I assume is a) cheapie film from the 70s.

The weird thing about the film (and the concert as well) is the “extras” that he built into the show.  I’m curious what the audiences thought back then, because now, it’s kind of funny, but also more than a little weird.  Throughout the set he has his roadies (who he calls “road eyes”) “setting up” the stage.  The roadies are wearing robes and look an awful lot like the Jawas from Star Wars (which had just come out, so I assume they are meant to look like them).  The stage is a backdrop of oversized amplifiers and the road eyes are scrambling around carrying an oversized microphone and harmonica and other silly things.  The road eyes are having a great time dropping the mic (they even hit Neil in the head with it accidentally).   Another road eye comes out with an oversized tuning fork while the band is tuning.

There’s also some guys in lab coats and another professorial-looking guy who makes an announcement that everyone should put on their rust-o-vision glasses to see the band rust on stage (no idea what happened/how this worked/if there were even glasses, but during the song, they shine a rust colored light on the band).

These moments in the movie are weird.  They certainly break up the flow of the show.  But at the same time, at most concerts, the roadies setting up the show is dull or put behind a curtain so you don’t have to see it.  I think it was cool of Neil to give the audience something to watch during the transition stages (even of they do go on for a while). During all of the roadeye moments, he plays snippets of audio from Woodstock–we hear Hendrix’ “Star Spangled Banner”–and The Beatles (!) (Did they have to pay rights for things like that in 1979?).  We also hear a lot of the announcements from Woodstock (brown acid, no rain! no rain!–strangely, it appears that he has set up the stage to actually rain on the audience.  It’s not filmed very closely so it’s a little unclear, but it does appear that water is actually coming from the ceiling.

As for the arc of the movie (because it is a movie after all), the fist part of the show stars with Neil solo–he wakes up in a sleeping bag and wanders around in overalls singing and playing.   I gather there are wireless microphones attached to his harmonica (!)–I didn’t know they had wireless mics back in 1979).  After he plays a few songs, the roadeyes set up and Crazy Horse comes out (including what to me is an iconic outfit–Frank “Poncho” Sampedro in his Canadiens jersey (#19, Larry Robinson)).

The band bashes through a number of great songs and they all sound great (there’s a few flubbed notes so you know it’s all live but the harmonies are spot on).  It’s odd to me that the band leaves briefly and Neil does one or two more solo songs (none on piano though) before the band comes back again.

The major weird thing about the set is Neil’s almost total lack of interaction with the crowd.  At the end of the show he even seems a bit angry (although he does have a naturally scowly expression), so he doesn’t engage much with anyone.  This seems especially weird given the lightheartedness of the stage show (they lower an organ from the rafters and it has wings on it).  But then again, not everyone has to be nice, right?

The DVD is comprised mostly of songs that appear on the Young’s Live Rust album (confusingly, not the Rust Never Sleeps album) although the album has recordings from different shows.

It’s a strange artifact, definitely an item of the late 70s.  It doesn’t hold up especially well, but you can always fast forward over the slow bits.

[READ: April 11, 2011] “Big Ticket”

The Walrus has published two Two Act plays over its existence.  This is the second one.  Act one appeared in the magazine but you have to go online to see the end.  Unlike with the previous play, both Acts One and Two are online.

Act One of the play is terribly exciting. It starts out in a weird way with a woman looking to pay a man to abduct and terrify her husband.  The man (a garage mechanic) shows her the “cage” that he’s going to lock her husband in.  And then things start to get all Penthouse-y.  The woman (Annie) starts asking the mechanic (Dave) if he’s ever done anything, you know, naughty, in the cage (she’s obviously an unhappy wife).  Dave does the metaphorical look around the room and then climbs in the cage with her.

Once she gets his clothes off, the real purpose of her visit comes to light.  She locks him in the cage and explains that he towed her car away (with her son’s birthday cake in the back seat).  And she proceeds to explain in vague but painful detail all the things she wants to do to him for revenge for not only her towing experience, but for everyone’s towing experience and all of the hardship that he and the government have caused citizens for towing their cars.

It’s an intense scene and very exciting.

Act two changes things quite a lot.  It is several hours later and there is car honking and police calls and all sorts of chaos outside.  But inside things are different.  Not only is Dave naked, but Annie is too, and they are quite affectionate.

I found this turn of events to be unsettling to say the least and, in fact, I was more than a little disappointed because Act I was pretty exciting.  Of course, if things had gone on as they were going, it really couldn’t have ended very well (and would likely have ended in an explicitly violent scene).  But the capitulation was disappointing.

Nevertheless, when the mayor gets involved things turn in yet another direction (and the story becomes rather funny).

As I said I didn’t expect it to go where it went (I kept picturing Chuck, and imagined a cool smackdown coming).  I can’t decide if Annie’s giving in to Dave is a ragingly anti-feminist twist (which is what it seems to be) or if there’s something else at work.  The dialogue was sharp and funny, and the tension was very credible.