Neil Young + Promise Of The Real

Watched over by the seventeenth-century Villa Contarini, one of the most scenic villas in the Veneto, facing the Anfiteatro Camerini in the pleasant town of Piazzola sul Brenta (Padua), and blessed with excellent organization and a breezy climate that never hurts, here is the first date of Neil Young's short Italian tour (next up: Friday the 15th in Rome at the Terme di Caracalla, the 16th in Lucca and the 17th in Milan). Backed by his new sidemen Promise Of The Real (the two Nelson brothers, Lukas and Micah, bassist Corey McCormick, percussionist Tato Melgar, drummer Anthony Logerfo), this is - as widely foreshadowed by the live album "Earth" (2016) - a concert-sermon on the health of the planet, the rediscovery of green technologies and biodiversity, and opposition to genetic modification, pollution and unhealthy living. Beside the stage, then, there's room for a "Neil Young Global Village" hosting international and local charities (Lipu, No GMO, Fairtrade, Organic, etc.).

And so the show by the Loner (battered black hat and crumpled T-shirt), which opens acoustically with extras dressed as farm women sowing seeds and watering the stage while he strums "After The Gold Rush", and closes with pest-control workers spraying fake herbicides, has all the air of a warning, a weighty ceremony that, not by chance, culminates solemnly in the organ-altar of "Mother Earth". And yet, Young dishes out the country-folk warhorses of "Harvest" ("The Needle And The Damage Done", "Heart Of Gold") one after another, greeted by collective-party ovations and even a few hints of dancing.

When Promise Of The Real take the stage, though, a progression toward the most extreme guitar distortion begins. The start is still mild and welcoming, with Young still firmly planted in the folk of his happiest years in the '70s, from the immediate post-Buffalo Springfield period ("Hold Back The Tears") to CSN&Y ("Helpless") to his own personal glory ("Old Man"). At this stage it's mostly a matter of testing the mettle of Willie Nelson's sons' band. For now, Young hands lead guitar duties to Lukas: the kid responds by emulating the tone and phrasing of the old crazy horse himself. The steady hand is there, but effect and personality are still missing.

Then, though, introduced by "now a hit that came out before you were born... I don't even know if you remember it..." (the only words from the Loner all evening, aside from the formality of "thanks for coming to see us tonight"), Lukas surprises everyone by sitting down at the - out-of-tune - piano to sing Modugno's "Nel blu dipinto di blu" in passable Italian. But it's Young, as ever, who draws the biggest smiles, when he improvises as a backing singer, amused in mood yet with his usual scowl stamped on his face.

Having accepted the little symbolic gift and set it quickly aside, it's time to get down to business. Young finally straps on "Old Black" and the atmosphere heats up: a slow but furious "Alabama", an anguished "Words", a simply flawless "Powderfinger", and the two eminently singable, contagious gems from "Ragged Glory" (1990), "Mansion On The Hill" and "Country Home".

This is the heart of the concert, leading up to the most epic moment of the whole set: the fifteen minutes of "Like A Hurricane". Opened, as per the rule of the historic Crazy Horse live shows, by the synth descending from above, and pounded by electrification, the Canadian bard's supreme anthem goes out in glory with a tail of chaotic improvisation, shared between his piercing feedback (Young even getting annoyed with a monitor speaker that apparently wasn't spewing out enough noise), his faltering vocals, the whip-cracks of his bandmates, with Hendrix watching over from above. In a word, a small slice of "Arc" (1990) that, incidentally, could have gone on much longer had Lukas not signaled to a Young lost in trance, adrift in a thin thread of distortion, that such daring was more than enough.

The urge to unleash solos and electric jams continues, though, with another glorious number, "Down By The River", also stretched well past the ten-minute mark through fake reprises and raw, flayed phrasing. These marathons are broken up by a few smaller acoustic episodes and even a little comic interlude (Young handing out cherries to bandmates and bystanders below the stage), giving the concert just the right balance.

In any case, a sprawling "Rockin' In The Free World" - naturally sung in chorus by the whole amphitheater - and a "Like An Inca" (the first of two encores) which isn't "Cortez The Killer" but does feature an interesting tribal variation, voices-and-percussion only, in the chorus (a good showcase for the congas of a low-key but pulsing Melgar), take back control to whip the crowd into sheer exhaustion.

There remains the matter of the songs from "Monsanto Years" (2015), supposedly the most important moments given the evening's whole concept, yet relegated instead to a sorry second tier. However cleverly and nonchalantly Young slots them in between one classic and another, the drop in the audience's emotional response is drastic, palpable. There is, however, a "Seed Justice", never before recorded in the studio, probably the only moment in which Promise finally let go of their young apprentices' hesitation and rock out hard alongside the Loner. The seed is starting to bear fruit.

This too is part of the three-hour show, an up-and-down affair that - it goes without saying - won't achieve the great environmental-awareness results perhaps intended, but which nonetheless remains a powerful testament (first and foremost for the artist himself) to a form that's practically unchanged, to physical and artistic stamina - there's even a final hand-in-hand circle with the band, mimicking the Earth's rotation - vocal, instrumental, human.

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