Album: Neil Young - Live At Massey Hall, 1971
Track: “Journey Through The Past”
Buy: Amazon // iTunes

A pristine moment in time, for a rainy day.

On January 19, 1971, Neil Young performed an acoustic set in Toronto, a Canadian-homecoming of sorts, debuting now-legendary songs to an enraptured crowd who consumed every word, every chord, every note he played. It’s not often that an atmosphere or mood at a live performance can show through in a recording - much less one that was released over 35 years after the show (2007) - but Massey Hall is magical in that sense. Listen to it and you’re there, man.

“Its been kind of interesting for me on this tour. We’ve been on it for two weeks and we’ve been to I don’t know how many cities.. singing some of these songs has been like living them as well as singing them.”

The Canadian crowd hangs on every second of the show. Boisterous applause follows the last note of every song, the immediate thunder in Young’s storm. The singer/songwriter does some dialogue throughout, a lot of it having to do with places and travel. His newly purchased ranch in California is the subject of songs like “Old Man” and “Journey Through The Past.” “Love In Mind” was written “in Detroit. Or Chicago. Maybe it was Detroit and Chicago.”

Every mention of Canada get the crowd in a tizzy. Whether it’s in a lyric or in between songs, it’s their native son returning home. “Needle And The Damage Done” is prefaced with a sobering story of Young’s experience with the heroin junkie geniuses he once knew. No applause when the familiar chords begin. The crowd has never heard it before. You can sense his pain with each strum transferred into the drop-dead silent audience. I don’t know how the sound of silence can transpose time and from a recording, but this is deafening. The song finishes midway through a measure, unfinished like the lives of his muses.

He switches between piano and guitar effortlessly throughout the show. By the end, the crowd is just there. In the moment. Frenzied. Shocked. Amazed. They start shouting out requests before he plays “Down By The River,” a sublime performance.

And then, of all things, he starts a good ol-fashioned country-stomp party with “Dance Dance Dance.” The crowd clapping along, never having felt or heard anything like what they just participated. “Everybody make noise on that” he says. The crowd starts to whistle, yell, yee-haw, and EVERYBODY claps. “Dance, dance, feel it all around you.” And they do. Unadulterated exhilaration.

The build up that Young creates with that one song is juxtaposed by the final track of the set, “I Am A Child.” Some in the crowd need to “shhhh” the excitable Canadians in attendance who can’t help but to yell out their feelings. The song finishes with a tense chord, and a quick “thank you” by the star of the evening.

You were there and you experienced it first hand.

Tracklist:

01. On the Way Home
02. Tell Me Why
03. Old Man
04. Journey Through the Past
05. Helpless
06. Love In Mind
07. A Man Needs a Maid / Heart of Gold Suite
08. Cowgirl in the Sand
09. Don’t Let It Bring You Down
10. There’s a World
11. Bad Fog of Loneliness
12. The Needle and the Damage Done
13. Ohio
14. See the Sky About to Rain
15. Down by the River
16. Dance Dance Dance
17. I Am a Child