http://www.neilyoung.com/prairiewind.html Neil Young Goes Nashville Rocker debuts songs for Jonathan Demme documentary
As Neil Young was wrapping up work in Nashville on his new album, Prairie Wind, he got a call from film director Jonathan Demme. "He told me he had a year off," says Young, who wrote a song for Demme's 1993 film, Philadelphia. "He asked if there was anything we could do together."
Young, who wrote and recorded many of the songs on Prairie Wind while being treated for a potentially deadly brain aneurysm, sent his lyrics to Demme, and the director was floored. "It's just astonishing -- this stuff comes from a particularly unique place in his soul and in his life, and the lyrics come from an extra-special personal dimension," says Demme, a lifelong Young fan who won an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs and also directed the Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense. "As a unified body of work, Prairie Wind is an extraordinary event."
Prairie Wind completes a trilogy of acoustic-driven albums Young has recorded in Nashville, beginning with 1972's Harvest and then Harvest Moon twenty years later. To honor the album's Nashville flavor, Demme decided to shoot a concert film at the historic Ryman Auditorium, former home of the Grand Ole Opry. In addition to the ten songs from Prairie Wind, Demme suggested that Young perform a second set of classic acoustic material. "I'll always have the place mat that Neil wrote on, in his own handwriting, the songs from his various Nashville albums that he thought might be appropriate," says Demme. Among the songs Young chose are "Old Man," "The Needle and the Damage Done," "Heart of Gold" and "One of These Days." "How lucky can one music-loving filmmaker get?" says Demme. "It's crazy!"
Young and Demme took the Nashville theme further. Onstage, Young wore a silver-gray suit, pointed black boots and a white hat. He played an acoustic guitar that once belonged to Hank Williams. Surrounding him, in equally elegant outfits -- all the clothes were designed by Manuel, who dressed Johnny Cash -- were Prairie Wind's core musicians, including Ben Keith on pedal steel, Spooner Oldham on B3 organ and Chad Cromwell on drums. At times the band swelled to more than twenty-five members, with horn and string sections, as well as backing vocalists Emmylou Harris, Pegi Young (Neil's wife) and the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, a gospel choir.
"We'll start the movie with about ten minutes that create a very vivid sense of Nashville, of the Ryman, and of the musicians," says Demme, whose film, also titled Prairie Wind, will be released next year. "Then we're going to surrender completely to the music and transport the viewer right into the show."
Even though the concerts marked the public debut of songs from Prairie Wind, the material was as compelling as the crowd-pleasing hits that followed. The band was beautifully restrained on mellow new tunes like "The Painter" and "No Wonder"; a three-piece Memphis horn section lifted up "Far From Home" and "He Was the King," an ode to Elvis. Young prefaced each song with personal descriptions of why he wrote them. Before the album's title track --which begins, "Tryin' to remember what my daddy said/Before too much time took away his head" -- Young spoke about the dementia his father suffered before his death in June.
After two nights of filming, Demme still felt there was one song needed: vintage track "Old Laughing Lady," which he calls "the missing link.
"The last night, after they closed the auditorium," Demme says, "Neil got onstage and sang that song to an empty Ryman. After he finished, we kept cameras rolling and he calmly picked up his guitar case, put on his hat and walked out to the edge of the stage. He glanced around the empty house, turned in profile to us, then strode off."
