Young, center, performs with bassist Billy Talbot, left, and guitarist Frank Sampedro while making a music video at the Cat N Fiddle bar in Hollywood. Hilburn covered the Hollywood moment:
The impression as Neil Young strolled onto the set of his video shoot in Hollywood wearing tattered jeans, an old baseball cap and a ragged leather jacket was that here was a man who was dressing down for the occasion.
Young, who refers to himself good-naturedly as “the oldest guy on MTV,” was collecting royalty checks for gold albums before many of today’s youthful rock mavericks were in grade school. But he’s competing with them for record sales and he wants to look like he fits in. Right?
In fact, Young was dressing up for the shoot.
Minutes before, as he surveyed the site, Young’s clothes were even funkier: the same tattered jeans, but an even older baseball cap worn unceremoniously backwards and a wrinkled shirt that looked as if it had been on a closet floor for months.
“Got to look good for TV,” Young responded later with a broad smile when a visitor on the set pointed out the change of clothes. “Those young bands dress pretty well these days.”
Even with the accompanying wink, the line sounded like yet another jab at the video emphasis on today’s pop world. The impression that Young, 45, is aligned with other veteran rock artists--and quite a few young ones--who hate promotional videos was reinforced a few moments later.
There wasn’t a trace of a breeze in the air as Young and the three members of Crazy Horse, the trio with which he has done some of his finest work over the years, moved in place behind the microphones on a small wooden stage in the courtyard of the Cat & Fiddle restaurant on Sunset Boulevard.
However, the script called for a balmy, tropical atmosphere, so a wind machine was switched on as soon as Young began playing. The gusts were so strong that they not only blew away Young’s baseball cap, but also almost knocked the musicians over.
As Young struggled to maintain his balance, he started laughing even though the song, a tale of obsessive love called “Over and Over,” was not meant to be funny.
To anyone who argues that videos ruin the integrity of a song by forcing a single interpretation on a viewer, the laughter was a commentary by Young on the ridiculousness of the whole situation.
But Young was laughing because he was having fun.
“All that wind felt great,” he said during a break in the shooting. “It kind of pushed us around and made us battle back, and added a spirit to the whole thing.
“That’s the secret of making a good video. You’ve got to tap some real emotions . . . the same way you have find real emotions when you are writing and recording a song.” (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)