Neil Young

"The Reinvention of Neil Young, Part 6


The folk-country-grunge dinosaur is reborn (again) as an Internet-friendly, biodiesel-driven, multimedia machine.


By Ted Greenwald


Neil Young flips genres so often that his record company once sued him for failing to release "Neil Young music." He experimented with orchestral accompaniment in the '60s and techno in the '80s. But the folk-country-grunge rocker's latest project makes those early forays look like adolescent angst. The 58-year-old has transformed the songs on his latest album, Greendale, into an opera that plays in every medium but PowerPoint (so far): There's a CD and bonus DVD; a live concert tour, which boasts three stages filled with 30 lip-synching actors; a Web site that streams every song on the album; and finally, a movie opening in Los Angeles February 27. Taken together, they tell the Faulkneresque tale of a fictional rural California family, the Greens, who get caught up in a media frenzy. Given Young's penchant for simple statements, Greendale's scope may seem like overkill. But that might be just what it takes for an aging rocker to survive in the MP3 era.


WIRED: You're a music legend. Why be a director and an Internet entrepreneur, too?
YOUNG: I don't have mainstream radio to count on anymore - they won't play my stuff. The Internet is the new radio. To tell the stories I want to tell, I have to use everything that's available and use it all at once. I have to go through a lot to make sure people won't perceive it as just a Neil Young record, because everybody thinks they know what that is. The challenge is to remind them that they have no idea what the hell that is.


In the CD's liner notes, you write that you'll be "corrected on the Internet" if you flub some detail telling the Greendale story on stage. Sounds like the Net is a pain in your ass.
When I play a new song in concert, it's immediately uploaded. Everyone has heard it before I put the record out. For a while, that was a negative thing for me. But with Greendale, I started using it deliberately.


How do you mean?
During the acoustic tour in Europe, when I performed the show that's on the bonus DVD, I was aware that everything I said would be recorded, transcribed, and circulated. So every night I dumped in different information about different parts of Greendale. If you say something in one town, and the next night you add a little more, the Internet brings together these separate occasions. It makes you look at things as not being separate.


Don't you want to control the use of your material?
I can't control what people do. I don't want to. If they want to sell my music to someone else or send it to their friends, they can just as easily tape it off the radio as the Net. MP3 quality sucks. If they want quality, they can purchase a DVD-A.


Fans were baffled by your last film, Human Highway. It's a fair bet that moviegoers will find Greendale just as puzzling. Is the multimedia blitz a way of filling in the movie's gaps?
Yeah, there are many ways of getting information about this story. One of the key elements is the Net. Go to the Web site to trace the family's history and see why people are the way they are. Look at Earl Green's artwork in the gallery, follow the events in the story on a map of the town.


How involved were you in putting together the Web site?
Completely.


Did you code the HTML?
No, but I give directions about what ought to be there, where it shows up, how it's introduced, how hard it is to find, how it unfolds.


The movie has a distinctive look. "Real life" has texture, but the world presented by the media is hard-edged and sharply defined.
We shot in Super 8 and blew it up to 35 millimeter. That Super 8 grain looks like my music sounds. When you blow it up, it's like a magnifying glass that's not clear, or a looking glass that's distorted. There's something mystical about it. The mainstream media [within the movie] uses state-of-the-art video. That can be scary as hell because suddenly you can really see everything.


For a multimedia project it's pretty ambivalent about media. Print is relatively benign; electronic media is sinister. Television reporters hound Grandpa Green literally to death.
Grandpa trusts the newspaper, and he likes to start off the day holding something in his hands that he can read. But he's lost. A lot of what he reads about - the Patriot Act and all this stuff - he doesn't understand. Also, he's been told by the government that terrorists are communicating on the Internet. The whole problem of dealing with terrorism and corruption, tracking it with all this media and communications, is too much for Grandpa.


Where do you stand on all this?
I'm in the middle. There's not a big opinion coming out of Greendale. There's no conclusion. Just a bunch of people going through something.


You sing that Grandpa died fighting for "freedom of silence." What does that mean?
Today entertainment and news are being blended together so you can't tell the difference. You'll have a shot of Saddam being pulled out of his hole, followed by some country singer's new record on CNN's Music Room. In Greendale, the family suffers a personal tragedy when Jed kills a policeman. After that, the Greens are a human interest story. The media wants to know how it feels to have a cop killer in the family. Why is it OK to ask that question? The TV guys think everybody has a right to know, but the fact is, nobody has a right to know anything other than whether Jed is guilty or innocent.


But Grandpa's teenage granddaughter, Sun Green, sees the media differently.
Sun has taught me how to use the media to do something positive. One of my pet projects is to run the next Greendale tour on biodiesel. It gives off 80 percent less emissions. I'll drive the hugest SUV and 90 percent of the people who are yelling at me will be polluting more than I am. We'll show everyone that we can move in this capitalist system, deliver the goods, and not pollute. If we travel with a giant thermos-bottle truck with biofuel written on the side, the TV people will come. Then I'll be able to prostitute myself for something positive, instead of just selling a record."