Neil Young and “Crazy Horse”
Brooklyn’s Barclays Center has announced that Neil Young and Crazy Horse will perform at the arena on December 3rd, about a week after their show at Madison Square Garden.
Tickets will go on sale June 25th through Ticketmaster.
If the new “Americana,” with its renditions of folks standards, isn’t exactly what you expected from Neil Young first new album with Crazy Horse in nine years, then stick around. Something more familiar is on the way.
Guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro tells Billboard.com that after Young and company wrapped “Americana,” “Neil just started playing a couple chords and jammed. I think we played for about 30 minutes, a whole bunch of stuff… And we’ve been recording since then.” The upshot, Sampedro says, is that “we have another record coming out behind it, and that one is more like a ‘real’ Crazy Horse album. It’s Neil’s songs — that’s the major thing lacking on ‘Americana,’ right?”
Neil Young & Crazy Horse Announce Tour
The album is expected in the fall, but no release date or title have been announced. Sampedro, who resides in Hawaii, says he’s been back and forth to Young’s ranch and studio for more sessions when the moon is full, which is Young’s preferred time to record. “We’ll work five or six, seven days, then I’ll just fly home,” he explains, with Young, drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot handling “production stuff” between sessions. “Every time when I go back to work some more, everybody says, ‘Everything sounds great. This sounds fantastic,’ so we really seem to be onto something,” Sampedro reports.
The guitarist — who spent 18 years working for NBC’s “Tonight” show and as former bandleader Kevin Eubanks’ assistant between Crazy Horse stints — acknowledges that he was surprised and initially “a little disappointed” when Young pulled out songs such as “Tom Dula,” “Clementine” and “Oh Susannah” for the “Americana” sessions, as well as the Silhouettes’ “Get a Job,” which he felt “was a stretch” for the Crazy Horse. “At first it didn’t really go down that well,” Sampedro says of the “Americana” songs. “I wasn’t bummed or anything. I just thought, ‘Here we are playing. He’ll pull out some of his songs or some other songs,’ and the next time we came it was more folk songs and then the next time it was more folk songs… for about five or six months in a row.”
Ultimately, however, Sampedro feels that Young and the group turned the selections into Crazy Horse material. “I was jumping up and down and screaming and singing parts that I probably shouldn’t be singing and just having a good time — which is what we do,” he says. “In my mind there’s a little part of me that knows it’s not Neil and it’s not us. It’s something else. But at the same time, when I listen to it, I like it.”
Young and Crazy Horse celebrate “Americana’s” launch on tonight [June 8] with a show at New York’s Kaufmann Concert Hall. The group has a pair of shows Aug. 5-6 at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside of Denver and begins touring in earnest on Oct. 3 in Windsor, Ontario, with an Oct. 13 stop at the Austin City Limits Music Festival.
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what happened to this show?
Tahoe date confirmed.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse confirm Tahoe date
Neil Young and Crazy Horse will perform Aug. 9 as part of the 2012 Lake Tahoe Summer Concert Series, it was announced today.
Young, formerly a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and a solo performer in his own right for the better part of five decades, will perform at 8 p.m. at Harveys Outdoor Arena on the south shore of Lake Tahoe.
This will mark the first time since 2004 Young has toured with Crazy Horse, which also consists of Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot.
The band is known for hits such as “Down By The River,” “Powderfinger,” “Cinnamon Girl,” “Cortez the Killer” and “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” The band’s latest album is titled “Americana.”
Tickets, which will cost $59.50, $89.50, $125.50 and $150.50, will go on sale Friday, June 22 at 10 a.m.
Neil Young’s first album with Crazy Horse in nine years – Protesters dissect Neil Young’s new album of protest songs
Ben Kaplan Jun 4, 2012 – 4:16 PM ET
Illustration by Mike Faille, from Kiim Kong photo
Americana, Neil Young’s first album with Crazy Horse in nine years, is a collection of classic folk covers that describes an outsider’s America populated with travellers searching for the idea of a country they can’t find.
The activists listening to Neil Young’s new protest album think, by and large, the protests don’t go far enough. The album’s called Americana, it’s Young’s first with Crazy Horse in nine years and the songs — 11 classic folk covers such as This Land is Your Land and Travel On — describe an outsider’s America populated with death-row inmates, share croppers and out-of-sorts travellers searching for the idea of a country they can’t find.
“Living with War, which had Let’s Impeach the President, now that was a protest record,” says Ryan Peck, executive director of HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario, and host of our listening session this past Friday. “Here’s this Canadian reminding Americans what they’re really about — the good America, which of course is the idea of freedom.”
Young’s new record is above all else a Crazy Horse album, which means almost every tune contains a crunchy wall of harmony, wallop, feedback and guitar. Opening with Oh Susanna, a minstrel tune from the 1840s, and then bleeding into a threatening-sounding Clementine (a reworking of Oh My Darling, Clementine), the record doesn’t barnstorm so much as strike a note of curiosity.
“This is a song people thought was dead and buried. Something so stupid it was generally assumed no one would ever sing it again,” Kenneth Hale, director of Advocacy and Legal Services for Tenants Ontario, says of Clementine. The song, written during the California Gold Rush of 1848, is about the drowned daughter of a miner who takes up with his lover’s kid sister.
“Neil had an album called Freedom,” continues Hale, “but I still see him as a song-and-dance man.”
Covering folk tunes has been a fruitful pastime for aging lefties. In 1992, Bob Dylan released Good As I Been to You, an album of rearranged call-to-arms songs, and the record was widely seen as fuel for the re-emergence still driving him forward today. Likewise, Bruce Springsteen made The Seeger Sessions in 2006, which was sandwiched between the lesser albums Magic (2007) and Devils & Dust (2005).
This record’s a bunch of angry hippies in their garage playing songs that they loved when they were four
For Young, Americana follows Le Noise, which scored the 66-year-old a Grammy Award for best rock song in 2011. Clearly, this record is a chance for Young to flaunt his influences and make a statement, something achieved on the album’s wild version of the Silhouettes’ Get a Job, a ’50s-era ditty about joblessness.
“In an era of massive unemployment, Get a Job speaks to a reality that so many people are facing and it’s what every activist hears when we’re out on the streets with a picket sign,” says Yutaka Dirks, who contributes to the new book Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. “Many of us do have work, and we’re often out on the streets protesting the loss of good, stable, union jobs. You have to let the insult slide off your back.”
Crazy Horse, whose members backed Young on his first solo album, is a band best known for their thunder, but when the group formed in 1963, they were an a capella doo wop group in Los Angeles. It’s not lost on our activists that the band’s named for a Native American hero who went to war against the United States.
“Neil’s the kind of hippie who mixes his marijuana with tequila,” says Peck, “and this record’s a bunch of angry hippies in their garage playing songs that they loved when they were four.”
On Americana, the Crazy Horse harmonies stand out almost as much as their guitar sludge, and Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, perhaps the ultimate folk song, steers the album back into political territory. Young’s version also contains the oft-deleted lyrics that address the country’s property laws.
“Given the Occupy movement, I think he’s explicitly addressing inequality,” Dirks says. “This record’s about using music to keep hope. It’s saying, collectively, ‘We all have a voice.’ ”
In the end, the new Young album is modestly activist-approved, catchy and a tip-of-the-hat to the bygone days of America’s ragged early years, which seem to be resurfacing now. Young’s 35th solo album concludes with God Save the Queen, the British national anthem, which fades into America the Beautiful and a children’s choir for its final note.
“If this is a political record, it’s a subtle political record, but I like what Neil does to these songs,” Peck says. “In a way, he does sort of what lawyers do — we slightly change the law and adapt them slowly to the times.”
Americana by Neil Young is available June 5 from Warner Music.
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thanks go to sharry w.
Neil Young And Crazy Horse Set U.S. Tour Dates
After brief warm-up in August, tour kicks off in early October
Neil Young performs with Crazy Horse at the MusicCares Person of the Year Tribute to Paul McCartney event in Los Angeles.
By Andy Greene
June 4, 2012 6:35 PM ET
Neil Young and Crazy Horse will launch an American arena tour in early October that will run through early December, according to tour dates that appeared on Ticketmaster on Monday evening. There are some gaps between shows at the moment, and it’s highly likely that the complete itinerary will be announced shortly. Ticket prices range from $47.00 to over $255 and go on sale this Friday at 10 a.m.
Young and Crazy Horse haven’t performed a full concert together since their Greendale tour wrapped in March of 2004, making this their longest hiatus since forming in 1969. The group reformed last year to record a series of folk covers for the disc Americana, which hits shelves tomorrow. They have also recorded an album of original material, which should surface sometime later this year. “There are lots of instrumentals, lots of excursions,” Young says in the next issue of Rolling Stone, on stands this Friday. “But they’re real songs. It has one that’s 26 minutes long … [the tour] is going to be [songs from] the past, the present and the future.”
Though the bulk of their tour dates are in October and November, Young and Crazy Horse will play the Red Rock’s Ampitheater in Morrison, Colorado, and the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco in August.
Here are all of the known dates for Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s U.S. tour:
8/5 Morrison, CO – Red Rocks
8/6 Morrison, CO – Red Rocks
10/08 Cleveland, OH – Wolstein Center
10/09 Pittsburgh, PA – Petersen Center
10/11 Chicago, IL – United Center
10/17 Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Bowl
10/25 Dallas, TX – Verizon Theatre at Grand Prairie
11/10 Seattle, WA – Key Arena
11/11 Vancouver, BC – Rogers Arena
11/13 Calgary, AB – Scotiabank Saddledome
11/14 Saskatoon, SK – Credit Union Centre
11/16 Winnipeg, MB – MTS Centre
11/19 Toronto, ONT – Air Canada Centre
11/26 Boston, MA – TD Garden
11/27 New York, NY – Madison Square Garden
11/30 Fairfax, VA – Patriot Center
12/04 Bridgeport, CT – Webster Bank Arena
Read more: www.rollingstone.com/music/news/neil-young-and-crazy-horse-set-u-s-tour-dates-20120604
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