If Van Morrison and Neil Young share anything, it's nothing much deeper than time, talent, and peculiarity. They've been around for the same stretch of years. Both began in other people's bands, and had their first hits in the same era. Both went solo early, while maintaining long-term affiliations with other artists. Both stood out at The Band's Last Waltz concert. Both have traveled the genre map, ranging widely and sometimes alarmingly over styles. Both are older now, and seldom perform hatless. Both remain creative and interesting to watch. Aside from all that, their fortunes are their own.
With his new album, Pay the Devil -- a collection of country and honky-tonk ballads, some classic, some obscure -- Morrison may be attempting the sort of transformation other pop and R&B performers have achieved by going country. Or he may just enjoy singing the songs of Hank Williams, George Jones, and Webb Pierce. He certainly hasn't gone native or anything: Despite its steel-guitar keenings and upper-octave piano tinklings straight out of Nashville, Pay the Devil was recorded in Ireland with Irish musicians. In fact, publicity tells us that Morrison has never been to the capital of country music -- though he will be playing his first Nashville concerts in early March.
You might expect, given this, a more intriguing relationship between performer and material -- the kind of weirdness that can result when indigenous music is interpreted by an artist-fan without direct experience of the atmosphere that breeds it. (Like, say, Japanese surf music or Irish soul.) Instead the distance just sits there, gaping and inert, and Morrison does nothing to leap it.
He's comfortable with these songs, but comfort doesn't suit him: It can't free him to do what he does best, which is to swing on an improvised vocal like Tarzan on the vine. What frees Morrison is a sense of questing, with eyes shut, toward some consummation of feeling, some raw mysticism embodied in an inner or outer landscape only he is seeing. Lacking that fixation -- who can say what its object is? Who needs to? -- Pay the Devil is not an enraptured search or even a jaunty excursion, but a vague stroll through an undefined elsewhere.
The album's best track is a version of the 1958 Chuck Willis hit “What Am I Living For” in which ease approximates grace. Its best moment altogether is Morrison's commentary as the song's last chord fades: “That was worth it. That was worth it.” Just there, yes it was. But with only a couple of other exceptions (“There Stands the Glass,” “Till I Gain Control Again”), the worth of the album as a whole must rest in Morrison's private satisfaction. If “worth it” has anything to do with “memorable,” Pay the Devil needn't have been made.
Which is something you'd never say about other country crossover moves. On Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962), Ray Charles contrasted his harsh voice with the smoothest of Hollywood backings for a sensually eerie, sandpaper-on-velvet effect. On The Blue Ridge Rangers (1973), John Fogerty sang naively, with romantic aspiration and without irony, as if the sentiments in his chosen country standards had never been expressed before. On Almost Blue (1981), Elvis Costello brought a vocal thickness and menace common in punk but largely alien to country -- slugged, suspicious, on the verge of either tears or obscenities. Each of these experiments clarified and emboldened something in the performer, some essence only implicit before.
Morrison, though, neither reconceives himself in country terms nor bends the genre to serve him. If country is white soul music, “soul” may be an overabundant commodity to a singer who defines the word by merely expanding his chest and opening his mouth. There is no effort to his soulfulness here -- and “effortless” in this case means not just ease and professionalism: It means lack of effort. It's not that Morrison doesn't bring himself to these songs; it's that these songs bring nothing to Morrison's self. Both songs and self go out unchanged, and the experience dies before it lives.
Expecting an artist's every issuance to be a statement of purpose is foolish; wanting it to be a living experience is not. But does an artist always need to be fixated? Can his comfort resonate? Of course -- if his sense of comfort is rich enough to tremble with life, and if there's fire in his warmth. Neil Young is not more gifted than Van Morrison, nor is he deeper in his visions, but as an artist he is less reducible to a set of consistent strengths. He's done weighty, exhilarating work in the softest folkie modes, and in the harshest rock styles. Morrison's mastery has always had a center; Young is indefinable without his extremes.
Neil Young: Heart of Gold is a surpassingly simple documentary drawn from Young's concerts last August at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, where he premiered the songs from his album Prairie Wind. Among the support musicians were Young's wife, Pegi; his long-time steel guitarist, Ben Keith; country singer Emmylou Harris; a string section; the Fisk University Jubilee Singers; and the Memphis Horns. The shows were low-key, but shadowed by heavy events. Young had undergone surgery for a brain aneurysm the previous spring, and had written and recorded the Prairie Wind songs knowing they could be his last. Additionally, his father died two months before the filming of the Nashville concerts. (In the movie, Young speaks movingly of the old man, to whom he was close.)
Prairie Wind was not Young's most exciting album, but it had weight because you felt its comfort had been earned by worry; you sensed the darkness beyond the hearthlight. Not one of its songs isn't improved upon in Heart of Gold. That's partly because you're not merely listening to but watching the weathered faces and measured moves of the (largely middle-aged) musicians as they play, but that needn't matter at all: Here, the musical and the visual are sympathetic in the best sense. A weak or one-dimensional song will be carried along by the pleasure of watching professionals do pleasurable work; while finer songs (“Prairie Wind,” “No Wonder,” “When God Made Me”) are made more dramatic by the self-effacing camera and invisible editing, which allow quiet beginnings to build into intense choruses from a stageful of people taking each moment seriously.
The director, Jonathan Demme, an expert in small-scale performance films (Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, Spalding Grey's Swimming to Cambodia), is nothing if not attentive to those moments that may go unseen by live audiences: small glances, spontaneous smiles, tight winces. Heart of Gold is filled with memorable physiognomies of age -- for example, a montage of leonine guitarist Grant Boatwright smiling through the oldster's lament “It's a Dream” (“It's fading now, fading away . . . just a memory without anywhere to stay”). Demme and his cinematographer, Ellen Kuras, maintain a placid palette of tones in the black-and-butterscotch range. The shots are mostly fixed and medium-close, though often layered -- horn players in foreground, Young in the middle distance, guitarist to the rear -- and the angles seem to cover every inch of the deceptively expansive stage.
Prairie Wind comprises the concert's first half. When Young reappears after a black-out intermission, standing solo and singing “I Am a Child,” the film moves into its climactic stage, and its thematic undertow -- aging, death, fear, acceptance, all the golden oldies -- rises to enfold and unify the experience. The star performs the essentials from his great Harvest album of 1972 -- “Heart of Gold,” “Old Man,” “Needle and the Damage Done” -- and they sound as good as they ever have, maybe better. They're followed by “Comes a Time,” that full-hearted ode to a long-lived romance, and though the stage is crowded with players, Demme's directing makes the song a sweet duet between Neil and Pegi Young.
The concert ends, and blooms to fullness, with Ian Tyson's “Four Strong Winds,” the venerable folk standard Young first recorded in 1977. Young -- whose between-song talk is laconic, humorous, and disarmingly truthful throughout -- recalls hearing the record back in rural Canada all those years ago, stuffing the jukebox with quarters to listen to it again and again. Even now, he says, “It's the most beautiful record I've ever heard.” Then comes a version of the song that tries to honor that memory, and comes as near as anyone could ask.
Thus the realization takes hold -- if it hasn't already -- that, in the present case, age, death, fear, etc. are not old standbys grasped at twilight time by an over-the-hill artist empty of ideas. These themes have always consumed Neil Young's thoughts, have always scarred or beautified his sound. He's spent his career venturing into the mind of age and slashing away with the blade of youth; he's sounded washed up and cutting-edge; he's ignored the passing moment while seeming acutely conscious of moments passing. He has, since the beginning, sounded timelessly old, and agelessly youthful.
“Gonna go out there,” Young says in voice-over, as he and his players take the stage. “Let the muse have us. Take a shot. Send it out.” Few could utter such spare fragments without sounding romantic, even ridiculous. Neil Young sounds like what he is -- an old campaigner hoping to make it happen one more time. Heart of Gold, a film of noble sweetness, is what he came up with.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Harvard). His essay on novelist Colin MacInnes is in the latest issue of The Believer.
