In the Van With Neil Young: An Exclusive Interview
Rolling Stone caught up with
Neil Young in St. Paul, Minnesota.
I was impressed with how well the new songs came off live -- the crowd really liked them. Do you get that sense from the stage?
On the stage, I'm mostly so into what I'm doing that I don't really realize what the crowd is up to, but I can hear them at the end, and each song, they seem to react more and more to, and there are some that they're kind of shocked at, like when we do "Families," and they see all of those soldiers over there and they see some of the images that go with it, it reminds them of what the songs are about. The songs are important songs, even though they're just folk songs. They're no big deal, but they're just talking about things that some people feel. When they hear what you say, what they think, it just frees them up, it's like someone having a voice for them
"Find the Cost of Freedom" was very powerful. I have rarely heard a crowd so still and quiet.
It's the real deal, it's not about entertainment. This is what's so funny about what's going on today. People make a record, I make a whole album about this war, and some people are still stupid enough to say that I just did it for the money because I'm an old fart. They're out of touch. It's not about the entertainment business, it's about a fucking war that people are getting killed in. Musicians, you can only ignore things for so long, and things that people say start soaking in on you, and it just reflects everything you hear on the street. There's nothing new in any of this.
I think that of all the upsetting things going on, not letting us see the caskets
If he went to a funeral, which he has never done, if he did, they're afraid it would cause more television coverage for the war. I'm pretty sure -- I would even go out on a limb and say that by the time this is printed, that he will finally go to a funeral, because he's slowly starting to do the things that are obvious that he's done that don't make any difference to anything other than people's feelings. Those are the things he can fix. The other things, where he screwed the country out of billions and billions of dollars, and thousands of lives, and ruined our reputation around the world, those things aren't going to change by going to a funeral.
They worked well with Crosby, Stills and Nash, they took the place of the choir, really. I felt that when they translated to stage, they sounded almost better.
Yeah, well, it's live, and I love to hear the choir singing along with us, too. In some cases, in the audience, you can hear the audience singing the songs, and time is going by, and they're getting to know them better. So it's the real thing, real people and their feelings.
How about the boxed set? It's been sixteen years
Yeah, it's been a long time. It's a lot of music. It's going to come out, and we get closer and closer to having it finished. I'm not exactly sure when it's coming out, but I don't think it's going to be a year from now when it will be out, I think it will be out before then. We have a lot of it finished now.
Will it be chronological?
Yeah, there will be a series of sets. There are four volumes, and each volume has a number of CDs in it. It's a big set, but it's a chronological thing. It's a trip from my first recording up through the most recent ones. That's how we can divide it up.
Are you thinking of something like Bob Dylan's Bootleg series one day?
That's kind of like what the archives are like, really. It's that kind of a thing. It will be similar to Bob's thing. It's going to be a series of live records -- there are live records over a period of about four years. That's a numbered set that will come out periodically. Some of them will be free; they will be on compilation records where there are new things in them. They're all new things, but some of them are things that have never been on record.
How about the unreleased albums?Those are all in the archives, and as you chronologically get to that period, if there was a finished album, it will be there, and it will also be possible to listen to the songs in the order they were recorded, so everything in the order it was recorded, that's the way the archive works. You can get to a certain period in time and you see, "Oh, four of these songs were in Homegrown, and that was released a year and a half later," and with the DVD and computers and everything, you can jump around and see how things are connected. It's good, the technology makes it real possible to develop all that. It's almost like a video game of music or something, where you can choose tracks, where they come from in chronology and what albums they were in, even though they're all spread out chronologically. Stuff like that. It's interesting for collectors.
!!!Δεν αναφέρω πουθενά οτι είναι Αμερικάνος.Απλά οτι κυριαρχεί στην Αμερικάνικη μουσική σκηνή!!!
