ON THE TOWN ON TOUR: Neil Young...

ON THE TOWN ON TOUR: Neil Young is in the midst of a 40-city concert swing that will bring him to L.A. next month (Nov. 15 at the Pacific Amphitheatre, Nov. 17-18 at the Universal Amphitheatre). The tour reunites Young with his old bandmates, Crazy Horse, in a show that bills them as “the third best garage band in the world.” The performance is something of a career retrospective, with Young performing old hits like “Mr. Soul” and “Cinnamon Girl,” as well as songs from his current album, “Landing on Water,” and four new, unreleased tunes. But the most unusual part of the show is the set that deposits the band in a massive replica of a garage, complete with oversized lawn mowers, tires, sagging beams, a basketball hoop, cobwebs and a clump of amplifiers, some of which are disguised as a washer-and-dryer set.

According to Young, who checked in with us from New York, the whole setup is designed as a “living” theater. “It’s pretty fantastic,” he said. “We’ve put it together as if you’re seeing a day in the life of a garage band. We have mechanical cockroaches which go zooming around the stage at up to 35 m.p.h., while some of the road crew are dressed as huge mice. We have one rigger who’s a real Academy Award mouse. Wherever we go, he climbs way up in the rafters. I guess he’s a high-strung kind of guy.”

Later into the show, the band has a typical set of visitors, including an exterminator, an A&R; man and some angry neighbors who complain about the noise and eventually call the cops. Young said he’s been recruiting members of local theater groups to play various characters in the show, even borrowing a couple of cast members from “Saturday Night Live” for his Madison Square Garden dates.

“I think MTV has had a big influence on all this,” explained Young, who said he put together the set with his lighting expert, Steve Cohen. “It’s made the audience open to a lot more things. Back in the ‘60s, if you did something real theatrical, people would say you’d lost your musical integrity or that you were just doing a Vegas act. But MTV has made everyone a lot less inhibited. Now it’s OK to do some theater. In fact, everyone has got so caught up in it, that I’m trying to figure out ways to make this even weirder.”