POP MUSIC REVIEW : Neil Young Takes His Audience in Unexpected Directions

You can’t keep a good man down--even when he’s got the blues.

For the first two-thirds of his opening set Wednesday night at the Palace, Neil Young seemed to be marooned in yet another of the curious musical sidesteps that have characterized his career over the last decade.

A man who steadfastly fights for his artistic independence, Young has surprised--or, in some cases, exasperated--his fans by going in as many unexpected directions as David Bowie.

While Bowie frequently altered his persona dramatically to excite pop imaginations, Young has tended to shift musical styles, presumably in search of new stimulation. The problem with his temporary flirtations with such genres as country and techno-rock is that the sidesteps have often been seen as more independent than artistic.

In his just-released album, “This Note’s for You,” Young sings the blues--and the results again are mixed. He seems alternately inspired and simply trying on some new musical clothes.

At the Palace, Young and the Bluenotes, the nine-piece band employed on the record, showcased material from the LP, supplementing its 10 tunes with other compositions in a similar bluesy vein.

It’s a credit to Young--who normally plays 15,000-seat arenas--that he would step on stage in such an intimate and informal setting as the 1,200-capacity Palace and play two hours of new songs.

It’s also a mark of the respect that he commands in rock that the audience not only accepted, but welcomed such a move. Normally, fans insist on an artist playing the hits.

Intentions aside, Young’s show started quite routinely. “Ten Men Workin’ ,” the opening track on the album, is a generic salute to all the neighborhood bar bands that tries to be a vigorous flipside to Willie Nelson’s classic “Night Life,” but lacks the individuality and detail.

While the band, featuring a six-piece brass section, played the subsequent material with considerably more sizzle and seduction than is found on the album, many of the tunes, on first listening, lacked the commanding or provocative edge of the best blues or the best Young. They seemed simply conventional tales of disappointment and desire, frequently cloaked in familiar blues symbolism.

One difficulty for Young in an all-blues setting is his voice. Rather than the power and authority of a great blues singer, Young sings in a delicate quiver that underscores the fragility of relationships and dreams.

Near the end of the first hour, however, he went into a series of songs from the album that seemed to fit more the Young tradition than the blues tradition: the delicate “Coupe de Ville”--a tale of regret and longing--and the strident “Life in the City”--about social indifference and neglect.

He closed the set with “This Note’s for You,” a frisky slap at corporate sponsorship that also could fit easily into any Young show, not simply a blues-oriented one. Sample lyric: Ain’t singing for Miller/Don’t sing for Bud/I won’t sing for politicians/Ain’t singing for Spuds.

Seeing Young repeat many of the same songs in the second hour, it seemed clear that the best of new “blues” songs are simply normal Young songs given a bit of a blues arrangement. If placed into the context of a regular Young rock show, they wouldn’t seem at all out of line with his normal creative flow--certainly not part of a curious musical sidestep.

This was true of the gently involving, “Twilight,” a statement of sweet innocence that includes the lines, Making love to you/While time stands still/I may be dreamin’/But I always will .

At the same time, the more overtly blues numbers again seemed little more than routine workouts--as if something assembled to fill out a blues set. Their effectiveness depended almost solely on the intensity of the musicianship.

Emphasizing shifts in style may be useful to Young in focusing his music, but it may be doing him a disservice in the long run by unnecessarily confusing fans.

Instead of centering attention on the excellence of his best new material, Young is tending in these shifts to make musical direction the issue.

Invariably, there is a tendency to measure our best artists--especially veterans like Young and Bob Dylan--against their best. And, it’s hard for them to live up to that inspection when they’re wearing clothes that don’t quite fit.