Culture Rover

from mockumentary to best rockumentary ever: young@heart.

For the comic perspective, which sees us all as ineluctably enmeshed in history, ultimately subsumes the revolutionary utopian perspective simply by locating it in the ebb and flow of history’s tides. After all, tomorrow never knows. …It remembers. – Nick Bromell

The documentary Young@Heart seems to be about old age, but as the film unfolds, it turns out that it is really about rock ‘n’ roll.

At first, you think the film is a gag. Is it mocking these retirees who dare to sing rock songs and other pop hits? It sure seems like it when director Walker George intersperses silly MTV-style videos of the chorus members in between his cinéma vérité.

But slowly, you start to realize that a deeper, more substantive comedy is at work in this film as it moves between the brink of death and the absurdity of life.

The film begins to display precisely the comedic perspective that Nick Bromell argues rock music acquired in the 1950s and 60s. Bromell contends that rock became the crucial cultural medium in which baby boomers developed a particular structure of feeling: an adolescent “double consciousness” that drew upon African-American expressive traditions to transform alienation into a deeper understanding of history and struggle. Rock, for Bromell, was not only about the tragically-messianic utopianism of 60s anti-authoritarianism, but also about a more profound “comic vision of reconciliation.”

Recovering his memories of coming of age to the sounds of Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan, and the whole rock tradition, Bromell writes about how the music awakened a consciousness of time, mortality, fluidity, and (with a nod to William James) all the implications of lifting the veil on the radically destabilizing pluralism of human experience.

From a later moment in the life cycle, trying to remember the 60s and why they were important in ways that are so easy to forget, Bromell writes that, “It is as if these songs’ own consciousness of the brevity of their vision and the futility of adolescence created a genie who could fly forward through time and greet me when I arrived here.” The music in Young@Heart shows how the awareness of “brevity” and “futility” that rock revealed to Bromell can even reappear later in life than middle age. In this case, it reappears for retirees who are older than the baby boomers themselves.

Reinvigorating what Lawrence Grossberg has called the rock formation when they sing everything from the Rolling Stones to James Brown to the Ramones to Cold Play to Sonic Youth, the members of this retiree chorus reverse the famous dictum from the Who: to rock is to in fact hoping to get old before you die. But you can only do this by embracing an adolescent defiance that, as Bromell contends, is busy being born precisely from the realization that it will fade, like the last notes of a song, into the flow of history itself.

a gun that shoots & a tree with roots: dylan vs. young in old age.

The concert film Neil Young: Heart of Gold reminded me of the differences between Bob Dylan and Neil Young. While Dylan has responded to old age by becoming a ghost, a spook, a wraith, a shadowy riverboat gambler, a will-o’-the-wisp, melting into some murky myth and vanishing into history, Young has managed to grow evermore solid and present.

Dylan rolls with no direction home, but Young has been able to rock his way to something more stable. In the concert film, a quiet, regal affair filmed in 2005 by Jonathan Demme at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, home of the Grand Old Opry, the rocker leans over the stage like a tree, hulking and gnarled, spreading his limbs, timeworn and sturdy, in it for the long run.

Neil Young in Heart of Gold.

While Dylan’s recent songs are evasive, referential, lost in the shards of an old-timey blues past, Young’s songs in Heart of Gold, mostly drawn from the album Prairie Wind, are simple and direct, reduced to their grainy essences by Young’s confrontation with a brain aneurysm that year.

It’s as if Dylan, facing old age and mortality, wants to explore absence—how far one might disappear into the light itself, saturated by a history beyond history, time out of mind. Young, by contrast, has embraced presence, trying to tell it like it is from his own little corner of the redwood forest, where the 1960s dream is still alive, cobbled together out of creaky bones, grandkids, and a faded glory.

The songs from Prairie Wind use every trick in the Neil Young songwriting book: perfectly-placed major-seven chords, little passing notes in the open guitar chords, a bit of steel-guitar crying out, a harmonica note bending, a delayed backbeat on the drums, haunting backup vocals from the usual crew (Emmylou Harris, Peggy Young, etc.), Young’s strained-yet-celestial-yet-strained falsetto, and lots of lyrics about dreams, love, loss, appreciation, memory, and hope. You’d think this would get old, but somehow it doesn’t. Instead, Young finds a way to get old.

The music—and Demme’s classy camera work in Heart of Gold really brings this out—discovers grace, sadness, elegance, truth, weariness, and renewed energy where one would think there could only be cringes and cliches. It reminds me of a brief exchange between Young and a fan at the start of the live album Year of the Horse, which went something like this. Fan: “It all sounds the same.” Young: “It’s all one song.”

What makes the film so moving is precisely that you think you’re headed toward the familiar, and indeed you find yourself in the familiar, only to find yourself crying and moved at how new it all feels. One little cracked vocal note electro-shocks nostalgia into catharsis (Young singing the word “heart” in his parental message to his daughter headed off to adulthood in the song “Here For You,” for instance).

You can see the differences between Dylan and Young in the films that each artist made during the 2000s. Dylan’s Masked and Anonymous, as the title suggests, is elusive, fragmentary, slippery, at the edge of coherence: things don’t quite add up; you’d piece together a story only to see it crumble in the earthquake rumble of an electric-guitar chord on “Cold Irons Bound.” We’re somewhere between the Civil War and a nightmarish noir murder mystery from the 1940s. We’ve left the building and entered some other realm of surreal myth.

By contrast, Young’s Greendale was homemade, in place, rickety, and splintered: a little allegorical tale about hippies in their golden years, an alternative history of America channeled through one town’s struggles. It was amateurish, like a summer-camp drama. But as only Neil Young can do, it linked the close-by to something transcendent: the film’s songs connected its zany crew of locals to bigger stories; a spotlight shined on life outside the limelight.

Bringing the grounded into the electronosphere of mass culture is Young’s special skill. He plugs in, but never gets lost. His roots spread as the wind shivers his timbers. Searching, he lifts us up his trunk to glimpse that elusive place where we all might gather on the hillside, somewhere between Hollywood and Redwood.