Neil Young found his Heart Of Gold

Sunday was a very grey day in Paris compare to Saturday (see Matmos post). I was supposed to spend the afternoon outside in the sun for the second day of Villette Sonique to see Faust, but it rained all day long and the show was postponed. I stayed home. Luckily, I bought a DVD a week ago so it was the perfect time to watch it between two football games.

Almost 10 years after Jim Jarmusch shot Year Of The Horse during the Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 1996 concert tour, an other great movie director, Jonathan Demme, gave his talent to the music of Neil Young for a film shot during a two-night performance by the Canadian and his friends at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in August 2005 called Heart Of Gold.

I am a long time Neil Young fan! So, it’s a movie for me. I really enjoyed watching my old friend and hearing those wonderful songs from Prairie Wind and, maybe more, the old ones in the second part of the set. But my feeling was a bit confused because Neil Young gave a show about the passage of time and mortality and it gave me the blues. The lost of his father, Scott Young (Prairie Wind), the memory of Hank Williams (This Old Guitar) and a tribute to Nicolette Larson (Comes A Time), all those wonderful peoples now dead shadowed his music and that movie. Of course, Neil Young is now 60 and he saw a lot of close friends living this world (Tonight’s The Night). I know that he is no more in the mood of writing songs about love and loneliness like he did in his early years when he was a young boy. So I must see him now as a watcher, a philosopher, a "keeper of the key to the locks" like he wrote in The Loner in 1969.

I wish you could see this movie/DVD who is not one of the best musical movies ever but who is pure as a crystal gem and very well directed. Also I hope you’ll wait for the last song that is for me one his best, The Old Laughing Lady, which he plays alone on the stage of that famous Auditorium, filled with ghosts.

And the sun came up in Paris at the end of the song when he sang “Everything is alright”.

Heart Of Gold (2006)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Original music by Neil Young
With Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Pegi Young, Diana Dewitt, Ben Keith, Chad Cromwell, Rick Rosas…
Cinematography by Ellen Kuras
Produced by Tom Hanks, Jonathan Demme, Neil Young

• http://www.heartofgoldmovie.com/indexflash.html
• http://www.neilyoung.com/