Neil Young
Farm Aid
Walnut Creek Amphitheatre
Raleigh, NC
September 13, 2014

Setlist:

Intro by John Mellencamp
Heart Of Gold
Comes A Time
talk 1
Pocahontas
Standing In The Light Of Love
talk 2
Mother Earth (Natural Anthem) – with Mickey Raphael
Who’s Gonna Stand Up And Save The Earth?
Rockin’ In The Free World – with Lukas and Micah Nelson

Source:

Lineage: YouTube webcast audio (192 kbps AAC) > Audacity > WAV > TLH > FLAC 6 > foobar2000 > FLAC tags

Review:

In July of 1985, while performing with Keith Richards and Ron Wood at the Live Aid concert designed to help those suffering from famine in Ethiopia, Bob Dylan said something about how he hoped that maybe someone could help out American farmers. Small farms were getting eaten up by large corporations. They were losing their farms to banks.

Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young took that message to heart, and they organized the first Farm Aid benefit. On September 22, 1985, those three and a host of others performed before a crowd of 80,000 people in Champaign, IL, and raised over $9 million for family-owned farms.

They originally thought it was going to be a one-off. They’d do this concert, help the farmers, and move on. But quickly they realized it was a much bigger problem. They’ve held a concert nearly every year since, raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

I’ve got a lot of copies of various performers performing at various Farm Aids over the years. I more or less randomly pulled this particular show out of a hat.

Since Farm Aid is a big show with a lot of performers, each act doesn’t usually get that long of a time slot to play. This year there were the usual performances by Young, Mellencamp, and Nelson, plus the Preservation Jazz Hall Band, Dave Matthews, Todd Snider, Gary Clark Jr and others. Neil only plays for about half an hour. I don’t have recordings of any of the other performers from this night. I don’t think I’ve ever watched an entire Farm Aid concert. I presume there is some kind of all-star jam at the end, but I may be wrong. Anyway, this is what I’ve got.

Neil mostly plays acoustic and solo. He is in fine form. I mentioned in my last Neil Young review that I don’t really know how to review him when he plays acoustic and solo. He’s fiery and chatty here. He goes on a couple of long rants about politics, voting, how commercial interests are ruining farming, and even names a specific politician from North Carolina. It’s one of those things that works well for this crowd, but after listening to it once, I imagine I’ll be skipping them from here on out.

After a nice intro by John Mellencamp, Neil does some lovely renditions of “Heart of Gold” and “Comes a Time.” Then he has a little chat and moves into what I’d call his Mother Earth section of the show. This begins with a very nice version of “Pocahontas.” Next comes “Standing in the Light of Love,” which is off of Toast, an album I’ve never listened to, was apparently shelved after it was recorded in 2000-2001 for being too sad, and finally came out in 2022 as part of Neil’s Archive series. Listening to it now on YouTube, it seems like a pretty good rocker – not amazing, but definitely enjoyable. But here it just kind of drones on and on.

After that, it’s another rant, and then “Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)” with Mickey Raphael from Willie Nelson’s band helping out on harmonica, and Neil on organ. It isn’t a bad version, but it seems like a strange choice for this crowd. Obviously, it falls neatly into the whole conservation movement theme of Farm Aid, but it is hard to imagine this crowd of thousands who, standing in the weather for hours, and may not be superfans being super pumped to hear a soft ballad with Neil Young playing the organ. But hey, we can hear it in the comfort of our own home, and it sounds pretty good.

“Who’s Gonna Stand Up?” is another odd choice. On his 2014 album Storytone, the song is played with a full orchestra; naturally, here it is completely stripped down. It is another Earthy song with Neil in full rant mode. Coming from a recent album, it does make sense that he’d play it live, but again it seems so strange to me that he’d do it at Farm Aid, when most folks would be pining for his hits. But Neil has always played by his own rules. The crowd does get into it at the end, doing a bit of a sing-a-long with Neil singing “Who’s Gonna Stand Up,” with the crowd finishing the lyric, singing “And Save the Earth.”

The Nelson brothers come out for the last song, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” and it rocks. Neil is a very good guitar player, obviously, but solo acoustic, there is only so much he can do. With more guitars on stage, one person can play rhythm while others solo. A very nice way to end the performance, indeed.

The more I listen to and review these Neil Young shows, the more I realize how much I don’t know about the man or his music. I’ve listened to quite a lot of Neil Young in my day, but the man is so prolific that there is still tons of stuff I’ve never heard. This is a perfectly fine performance. It is mostly Neil and his acoustic guitars, sometimes playing relatively obscure songs. Sometimes he is accompanied by his friends. You gotta dig it.