Back in the day, Roger Daltry of the WHO, sang “I hope I die b

Back in the day, Roger Daltry of the WHO, sang “I hope I die before I get old.” Well, he didn’t. In fact the Who did one final, final tour not long ago. It has become commonplace for old rock bands to come back for one last tour. Jay Leno dubbed the resent Rolling Stones outing as the “We’re Grateful We’re Not Dead Tour.”

It is pretty tough for an artist to stay on the cutting edge and not grow tired as the decades come and go. While I still love many of the old songs, only a few of the old rockers have continued to produce fresh, relevant material that is appropriate for their age and ours.

Neil Young, the sixty year old, Grandfather of grunge, has managed to keep rockin. Neil has remained incredibly honest, his poetry and music show a personal wrestling with the trial of each new era of his life and ours.

Young became famous back in the sixties and early seventies with driving rock commentary, writing and singing with the Buffalo Springfield, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. He threw his two cents in on the civil rights movement with:

Southern man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast
Southern man

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio

Never one directional, he also sang out in grief against the loss of so many friends and young people to heroin in “The Needle and the Damage Done.”

And seeing the goodness in all, even the President he blamed for continuation of an unjust war and violently cracking down on student demonstrators, he sang “Even Richard Nixon has got soul. Even Richard Nixon’s got it. Soul."

Always the artist doing his own thing Young switched genres in the eighties doing everything from industrial syntho-pop to rockabilly. His own record label sued Young for failing to deliver a commercial release.

It was about the same time that rock and pop artists, sports teams and the like were beginning to sell out to corporate sponsorship. Young wrote a song called “This Note’s For You.”:

Don’t want no cash, don’t need no money,
ain’t got not stash, this notes for you.
Ain’t singin for Pepsi, Ain’t singin for Coke,

The video of the song was banned from MTV for a while in 1989, only to come back with a vengeance to be nominated as the MTV video of the year.

He did a couple of other odd stints with the punk group Devo, and the alternative grunge set, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. He also did more than one stint in the country genre, playing with, among others, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.

His song "Keep on Rockin in the Free World" came out in the early nineties, and was a comment on the shallow political talk, materialism, and Reagan’s supply-side/ trickle down economics, which involved massive tax cuts for the wealthy. We experienced rising social problems such as the cocaine epidemic and homelessness. The Christian Right was on the rise and so was the SUV. Social activism and critical art had just about dropped out of sight. President Bush coined the slogan a “Thousand points of light” to symbolize American citizens caring for one another. Bush also spoke of a “kinder, gentler hand,” in foreign policy. You may remember we were coming off the war with Nicaragua and the Iran/ Contra scandal. Also fresh is the vision of the time were the young Chinese standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square. And as the Berlin Wall fell, Neil’s song blared on loud speakers in Germany.

Still, "Keep on Rockin in the Free World" was primarily a commentary on America:

There’s colors on the street, red, white and blue,
People shufflin’ their feet, people sleepin in their shoes
But there’s a warning sign on the road ahead
There’s a lot of people say we’d be better off dead
Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it any way I can.

We’ve got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We’ve got a kindler, gentler Machine gun hand
We’ve got department stores and toilet paper
Got Styrofoam boxes for the Ozone Layer
Got a man of the people says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive

Last year, his CD " Prairie Wind" was prompted by the dementia and death of his father and discovery that Neil had a brain aneurysm. Faced with mortality like a man in his late fifties about to undergo brain surgery, Young makes a reflective trip through his long life, from childhood on, singing to or about his relationship with his childhood home, his father, his wife, his son and daughter, his old guitar, his dog, and God.

It is such a simple thing, but you mean the world to me.
It’s such a precious thing, the time we shared together.
I must apologize for the troubled times.
I feel like I’m fallin, fallin off the face of the earth.

In the song "Prairie Wind" he takes us back to his childhood home in Canada:

Prairie Wind, tryin to remember what my daddy said,
before too much time took away his head.
Late at night, lights dancing in the northern sky,
like the Indian spirits tryin to show my how to fly.
You can see into the future but it may be a mirage.
Like a new care sittin there in your old garage.
Prairie Wind blowin through my head.
Trying to remember what daddy said,

In “I’m Here for You,” he writes to his daughter who has left for college. An empty nester song he calls it:

then you can come back and be with me.
Just close your eyes, and I’ll be there.
Just listen to this old heart, beating for you.
Yes I miss you, but I never want to hold you down.

This week I viewed the performance of these songs in the video “Heart of Gold” and was touched by how present tense and honest Neil is.

I am always pleasantly surprised to find another Neil Young fan. His nasal, twangy tenor voice, and his grinding guitar are not for everyone. My father upon hearing Neil Young blaring from my room said, “Is there something wrong with that guy? He sounds sick.”

Regardless of whether or not we like his music, I believe God would love it if we could tap into our own personal and social situation so honestly, with such integrity and humility. If we are saved by grace, then perhaps we can approach life a bit like Neil, and risk trying new things, risk making mistakes in attempts at creating something beautiful and fresh, and allow beauty to be defined by our God given spirit and not by traditional wisdom, money or popularity. Maybe we could stand to take time and give thanks for the blessings and love around us. Maybe, whether we agree or disagree with Neil’s politics, we could honor our democracy and freedom by speaking out.

Just in case we thought old age was only a time for personal introspection, Neil just got together with his old friends Crosby, Stills and Nash and is now on tour ripping his electric guitar to sing about “Living with War.”

He is as critical and blatant as ever with song titles such as The Restless Consumer, Shock and Awe , Let’s Impeach the President :

Let’s impeach the President for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government’s protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Let’s impeach the president for hijacking
Our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected

Thank god he’s cracking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There’s lots of people looking at big trouble
But of course our president is clean.
Thank God."

The Gospel According to Neil Young