Young and Restless

For the past 30 years, Neil Young has been a patron of the Mountain House, a logger’s roadhouse hidden away in a redwood grove at the pinnacle of Kings Mountain, 40 minutes south of San Francisco. He immortalized the place in his Greendale DVD and “Unknown Legend” video, and today he’s in the rustic dining room moving a small mound of couscous around a plate with a salad fork.

He’s discussing the movie he made of the grueling 2006 Freedom of Speech Tour, which he mounted with his old compatriots and sometime sparring partners Crosby, Stills and Nash. “I was so exhausted and so burned [afterward] that I actually went to Hawaii for three months. Just stayed there for three months trying to wash myself off,” he says quietly, as if the idea still surprises him.

The tour ran the same year that Young released Living with War, an album recorded in just five days and released an unprecedented three weeks later—a single-minded effort intent on dismantling presidential hegemony and appropriation of the truth. The weapons? A set of political songs harkening back to Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” through 1970’s “Ohio,” including Young’s “Let’s Impeach the President,” a vituperative rocker that caused some concertgoers to leave the arena in angry droves—their middle fingers extended high. All of this was captured on film.

Paste: Did the idea for the film come from the same impulse that inspired Living With War?  
Neil Young: Well, when the record came out and then we got the reaction that we got for the record, which was kind of violently good and violently bad at the same time … I figured it’d be interesting to take it on the road, but I didn’t know who to take it on the road [with] in a way that it would have the most impact. I chose Crosby, Stills and Nash because they have a history of doing this kind of thing, what with “Ohio,” “Military Madness,” “For What It’s Worth,” so it would have a lot of roots.

Paste: You have lowered your guard a little. You’ve always been so remote and really detached, but here you are hugging wounded veterans on film. What gives?
Young: I don’t know. I just got caught up with telling the story. That’s what happened. That’s what happens when you let people film everything. Then you’re going to catch those moments.

Paste: You certainly gave Stephen Stills his voice. At first, he was the most resistant of CSN about joining you on this tour.
Young: Well, despite his exterior, Stephen doesn’t like people not to like him. He’s much more sensitive than you’d think. He’s a very important part of the movie. He’s the most articulate one of all of us. He speaks the best and he has the most depth.

Paste: He shows his human side more than anyone else in this film. Not only by what he says, but when he fell onstage. It must have been humiliating for him, but you chose to put it in the film. Why?
Young: It’s not as if I didn’t warn him. I showed it to him and he seemed OK with it. I mean, the more uncool we were, the more real we seemed. And we were very real. I’m more myself with these guys than I am with anyone.

Paste: Do you think your film will help end the war?
Young: Ideally, we do want to end the war. I just am pragmatic, and this war has a cause. The cause of the war is energy. So that’s what my program is now. I’ve reacted to the war, and wrote these songs, and it stimulated a conversation, but it’s not going to end the war. I think people should start focusing on a solution, and how to eliminate the root causes of war and the energy problem. That’s why I’m doing my thing building this car [an electrified 1959 Lincoln with onboard generator] because it’s an illustration of what we can do. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. A lot of other people feel this way. I’m just one of a crowd of people, but I’m going to do it, because I think it can make more difference than any song I’m going to write.