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TORONTO - The two faces of Neil Young -- fragile and ferocious-- showed themselves last night at Massey Hall as the 62-year-old Canadian folk-rock icon returned to the scene of his breakthrough concert some 36 years ago.
Appropriately enough, Neil Young: Live At Massey Hall 1971 Toronto, was officially released earlier this year but it's a just released new album, Chrome Dreams II (a sequel to a never released 1977 album), that Young is actually touring in support of with the blistering, marathon set highlight, No Hidden Path, representing the best of the four new songs he played.
Although, judging from his eclectic set list of many rarities and unreleased tracks over the course of an acoustic solo first half followed by electric band second half, the ever mercurial Young wasn't going to let a little thing like a new album dictate what he played.
Nor did the crowd's incessant, loud and annoying requests seem to sway him.
As an announcer cautioned before the concert even began, "the songs have been pre-selected."
Young, dressed in a carmel coloured suit and pink dress shirt, initially plopped himself down on a chair surrounded by acoustic guitars arranged in a circle around him and opened the evening with From Hank to Hendrix.
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And whenever he got up to play another instrument, whether it was an upright piano to one side or a piano with built in synthesizer to the other, the crowd stirred, either proclaiming their love outright or just breaking into spontaneous applause. (Among those spotted in audience were such respected Toronto area musicians as Gord Downie, Kathleen Edwards and Tomi Swick).
At times, it seemed as if Young was unsure of where he was going to go next but then he would find his place and blow the audience away with his tender, heart-heavy music on such acoustic folk standouts as A Man Needs a Maid, No One Seems to Know, Harvest, Journey Through the Past, Mellow My Mind, Cowgirl in the Sand and Old Man.
"It's good to be back," he said at one point, saying his mind had earlier wandered to thinking about his grandmother, whose purse now hung on his piano at home.
If the first part of Young's show was intimate and absorbing, the second set was a powerful eye-opener about Young's continuing prowess as a mesmerizing electric guitar player.
He was joined by pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith, bassist Rick Rosas, Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina, and backing vocalists Anthony Crawford and his wife Pegi Young -- who opened the show with a folksy 45-minute set -- but all eyes were on Young as he stomped around the stage during such plugged-in highlights as The Loner, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, Cinnamon Girl, and new tunes Dirty Old Man, Spirit Road and The Believer.
There were plenty of other distractions too, such as a painter who would put a new painting up at an easel near the front of the stage to correspond with each new song, a strand of random letters and numbers that formed a backdrop and an old wooden carving of an Native chief.
Young's three night stand at Massey Hall continues tonight and again Thursday night.