A Neil Young concert in the waning days of summer

By the time we got to Woodstock… actually, we never got to Woodstock. Bethel, the town in which the fabled festival of mud and myth took place, is about 50 miles as the crow flies from the famous musical happening’s eponym, and it was at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts that we saw and heard Neil Young in the waning days of summer, when melancholy always spices the air.

It boggles the mind that half a million kids – the youngest of whom are now hoary-headed septuagenarians – flooded Sullivan County on a rain-soaked weekend in August 1969, but it is almost as remarkable that despite the drugs and unhygienic conditions, only three concertgoers died. (Meanwhile, more than 500 US soldiers and an untold number of Vietnamese were killed in action that month on the other side of the world.)

Ole Neil has become something of a scold ever since he dumped Pegi, his late wife, trading in the earthy waitress for the spacey actress Daryl Hannah, but anyone who creates “Powderfinger,” “Pocahontas” and “Like a Hurricane” has earned a lifetime of free passes.

We’d seen Young last summer in Toronto, where he bashed it out with his longtime backing band Crazy Horse, but this summer he was accompanied by the Chrome Hearts. Alas, he hadn’t changed his opening act, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, whose anti-consumerist hectoring is so heavy-handed that a ten–minute exposure thereto would send Greta Thunberg running to Prada, Oscar de la Renta or maybe just to the nearest Victoria’s Secret to splurge on a sealskin halter top.

Reverend Billy is a mock preacher, a sort of Jimmy Swaggart without the sense of mischief, and though I agree with much of his critique I’d rather throw an empty beer can from a gas guzzler than join in his chant of “Earthalujah.”

The stop-shopping shtick is especially rich given the $50 Neil Young T‑shirts and $16 beers on sale. What ideologues lack in self-awareness and humor, they sure make up for in fervor. This sour note’s for you, Neil. (To be fair, Young insists on the presence of local concessionaires and vendors at his concerts. He is not indifferent to place.)

Neil Young’s politics, as explicated in Jimmy McDonough’s superb biography Shakey, are far from the caricature you might imagine. I’m not just referring to his pro-Reagan noises in the 1980s and his consistent support of America’s small farmers. His loyal manager, the late Elliot Roberts, gave this marvelous description of his client’s orientation: “Neil is more American than anyone, even though he’s Canadian… Neil’s an isolationist. I mean, if it were up to him, we’d have no foreign aid, we’d talk to no one, we’d really deal with no one else – ‘If they can’t cut it, fuck ’em.’ Neil is extreme…. One minute he’s a leftist Democrat, and the next minute he’s a conservative.”

C’mon: the guy’s father was a Canadian hockey writer. Do you really think he posts “In This House We Believe…” signs on his ranch? Admittedly, Young has a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome – those who thought Trump might offer something other than the usual rancid diet of perpetual war and centralized control are no longer quite so dismissive of that condition – and this year’s show had a political tinge.

Highlights included two songs (“Be the Rain” and “Sun Green”) off his excellent album Greendale, a family-values Earth First! saga, and a blistering “Ohio,” his 1970 response to the killings at Kent State. I still puzzle over the line “Soldiers are cutting us down / Shoulda been done long ago.” What the hell does that mean? Ah, well, I do like an ambiguous lyric.

Neil’s stage patter is mostly limited to periodic ejaculations of “How ya’ doin’ out there?” He did exhort the crowd to “take America back!” and who doesn’t agree with that? But when Young launched into “Southern Man,” his safely anachronistic denunciation of slavery, lynching and the Ku Klux Klan, I got up to take a piss. It would have taken balls for Stephen Foster to sing this song to an audience in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1858, or for Faron Young to warble it in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1957, but Neil Young on the Woodstock festival grounds in 2025? Gimme a break, Old Man.

A brilliant meteor – a fireball, perhaps – blazed through the Summer Triangle early in the show, eliciting oohs and aahs and apolitical cheers. The heavens understand that we must accept people as they are, even when they exasperate.

Neil Young calls this his “Love Earth” tour, and for all the petty annoyances and out-of-the-blue gut punches in our lives, this really is a wonderful world, isn’t it?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.