Forever Young
Jonathan Demme’s concert film captures the timeless nature of Neil Young’s classics
John Kendle

In his 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, director Jonathan Demme took viewers onstage with Talking Heads and showed them just how good the New York band really was.

Some 21 years later, Demme is back onstage, this time with Neil Young, and the result is much the same. In a better-than-front-row experience, Demme and his cameras get in amongst Young and his band, making the music live and breathe as it’s being played during Neil Young: Heart of Gold.

There’s a crucial difference between Heart of Gold and Stop Making Sense, however, and it has to do with the artists.

In 1984, Talking Heads were at the height of their success and David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison and Chris Franz had grown fully confident — as both musicians and performers. There was no stopping them at this point, to the extent that even when Byrne became a giant, dancing suit, the surreality of the moment was stupefying.

Neil Young in 2005 was a different story. His year began with the discovery of a brain aneurysm that required surgery and then a further procedure after post-operative complications. His father, sportswriter Scott Young, died in June at age 87.

Faced with the death of a parent and a threat to his own mortality, Young quickly wrote and recorded a country album, Prairie Wind, in Nashville with the core group of country players he has always worked with when his muse brings him to the idiom.

Given Young’s mood, Prairie Wind is a sentimental, ruminative album that tugs at heartstrings at times. But most of these songs, with a couple of notable exceptions, don’t rank with Young’s best work. He has been over this musical territory before with much better results, as the second half of Heart of Gold emphatically underscores.

But it’s the new songs that make up the first hour or so of Heart of Gold, which was shot over two nights in August 2005 at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium (former home of the Grand Ole Opry).

Accordingly, it takes a while for Heart of Gold, as a collection of music, to really get going.

As a film, this is a first-class piece of work. Demme’s cameras are all over Young and his band, which includes stalwarts such as pedal-steel/dobro player Ben Keith, Muscle Shoals keyboardist Spooner Oldham and singer/songwriter Emmylou Harris, as well as brass, string and choral sections that join the group at various times.

Thus it is that all the facial tics, careful concentration and eyebrow-arched interplay of a band in action is captured.

So, when Young and his band finally let loose on all his classic material — from Old Man to Heart of Gold to Harvest Moon and more — in the second half of this film, it’s truly impressive to see what a master filmmaker and a master songwriter can create when they’re working with all the right tools.

After watching the movie, I noticed I had written song titles one on top of the other in my notebook, so transfixed was I by the film’s second half.

Funnily enough, I could read all the Prairie Wind titles clearly.