By Howard Cohen
hcohen@MiamiHerald.com
Years ago Mick Jagger asked what could satisfy a fan’s insatiable need to know everything about the rock god up there on stage. “If I could stick my pen in my heart and spill it all over the stage, would it satisfy ya . . . ” he wondered in song.
Fellow veteran rocker Neil Young is too polite to go to such extremes — he’s Canadian, after all — but he and ardent fan, film director Jonathan Demme ( Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia), seem on a mission to expose every other facet of the singer-songwriter.
For Neil Young Journeys, the pair’s third concert/documentary film together in six years, Young doesn’t quite stick writing utensils into his heart. But thanks to a remote camera the size of a Chiclets chewing gum box affixed to the microphone, Young’s grizzled chin juts right off the screen on Down by the River and Hitchhiker, jabbing at the frame until a great gob of spit splashes onto and obscures the lens and bathes viewers for a good portion of the two songs.
Journeys finds the 66-year-old rock icon cruising around the back roads of his hometown Omemee, Ontario, in a 1956 Crown Victoria enroute to his solo concert at Toronto’s famed Massey Hall, home to Young concerts since the late 1960s. Young casually points out favorite spots like the school named for his Canadian journalist father Scott Young, the woods by his old house, the street where he ate tar on the dare of some neighborhood kid. These fleeting glimpses of the rock star acting as a tour guide are the most endearing and revealing aspects of the film. We learn that Young, like his music, is straight to the point and unsentimental. “That’s why you don’t have to worry when you lose friends; they are still in your head and in your heart,” he says matter-of-factly.
We also learn he prefers listening to music in his car, no matter the size of the speaker, so long as the music was recorded properly. A stickler for fidelity, Young insisted that Journeys be filmed in 96kHz resolution, twice the industry audio standard.
Fellow veteran rocker Neil Young is too polite to go to such extremes — he’s Canadian, after all — but he and ardent fan, film director Jonathan Demme ( Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia), seem on a mission to expose every other facet of the singer-songwriter.
For Neil Young Journeys, the pair’s third concert/documentary film together in six years, Young doesn’t quite stick writing utensils into his heart. But thanks to a remote camera the size of a Chiclets chewing gum box affixed to the microphone, Young’s grizzled chin juts right off the screen on Down by the River and Hitchhiker, jabbing at the frame until a great gob of spit splashes onto and obscures the lens and bathes viewers for a good portion of the two songs.
Journeys finds the 66-year-old rock icon cruising around the back roads of his hometown Omemee, Ontario, in a 1956 Crown Victoria enroute to his solo concert at Toronto’s famed Massey Hall, home to Young concerts since the late 1960s. Young casually points out favorite spots like the school named for his Canadian journalist father Scott Young, the woods by his old house, the street where he ate tar on the dare of some neighborhood kid. These fleeting glimpses of the rock star acting as a tour guide are the most endearing and revealing aspects of the film. We learn that Young, like his music, is straight to the point and unsentimental. “That’s why you don’t have to worry when you lose friends; they are still in your head and in your heart,” he says matter-of-factly.
We also learn he prefers listening to music in his car, no matter the size of the speaker, so long as the music was recorded properly. A stickler for fidelity, Young insisted that Journeys be filmed in 96kHz resolution, twice the industry audio standard.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/25/2913755/neil-young-journeys-right-into.html#storylink=cpy
Follow @HowardCohen on Twitter.
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