As well as generating a ceaseless stream of albums, whether live, studio or culled from his copious archives, Neil Young has also amassed a fairly hefty body of film work, either as director, star or both. Like his music, his movies are created with a kind of confrontational spontaneity, grabbed on the run with rough edges and non-sequiturs still intact. His directorial debut, 1973’s only fleetingly coherent Journey Through the Past, gave early warning of what to expect.
In the case of Coastal, there’s a directorial hand behind the camera, belonging to Young’s wife Daryl Hannah. She also directed two films about Young working with Crazy Horse, Mountaintop (2019) and Barn (2021), but Coastal is a document of Young’s solo tour of the US West Coast in 2023, where he played outdoor arenas.
Thanks to the Covid nightmare, it was his first batch of live engagements in four years, and Young exhibits a palpable degree of apprehension about getting back in front of an audience. But as Hannah has pointed out, “even though he was nervous, it was very second nature once he got onstage and started to play. It’s hard for him to not be playing music in some way, shape, or form.”
It’s been shot in black and white, apart from a concluding landscape scene as the titles roll, with plenty of shots of Young and his small crew travelling on his bus or preparing the stage set-up. There’s ongoing banter between Young and his driver, Jerry Don Borden, as they while away the hours on the freeway groaning about traffic jams, reminiscing about Howard Hughes or discussing the phenomenon of mice on tour buses.
Hannah filmed most of this stuff on an iPhone, and Young occasionally addresses a few remarks to her while she’s working, with the onstage performances captured from fixed camera positions. This caused some problems, since the cameras would be set up in advance to cover songs played on a particular piano or organ, but Young, who didn’t bother with a set list, often wouldn’t use them that night.
But anyhow, the finished product seems to have caught the flavour of the shows as Young dipped back and forth in time to pull out a mixture of the very old, the new and the little-heard. It irks him that “everybody wants to hear the hits”, but you can hardly blame them. Neil is very keen to impress audiences with the eco-aware attitude of “Love Earth” (from 2022), and determinedly gets the crowd to sing along, while the painfully earnest “Throw Your Hatred Down” has been retrieved from 1995. “Vampire Blues”, played solo on electric guitar, is an anti-oil industry diatribe illustrated by shots of “nodding donkey” oil pumps dotting the California landscape. Young does at least put his money where his mouth is, since he has a 1959 Lincoln converted to electrical power and had a Mercedes that could run on used vegetable oil salvaged from a local restaurant.
But there’s a sense of melancholy hovering over Coastal. Young has always been known to be eccentric and cantankerous, but seeing this ramshackle figure in a paint-splattered jacket with a stripey cap on top of his raggedy hair wandering out onstage you feel like asking “are you sure you’re OK, Neil?” There’s a touching little moment when he looks back at the camera and tells Hannah “I missed you”. When the 79-year-old performer sings the lines “I feel like I died and went to heaven / The cupboards are bare but the streets are paved with gold”, it feels positively spooky.
The sense that Young is taking stock and contemplating the infinite is reinforced by the way he looks back over the decades. He picks up a Martin D45 acoustic guitar and says “Steve Stills gave me this guitar… I wrote a whole bunch of songs on this sucker.” Then he plays “On The Way Home”, from their Buffalo Springfield days – “I won’t be back till later on, if I do come back at all”. From the same era, he also does a rather good “Mr Soul”, which he plays on a wheezy old organ.
Coastal isn’t going to convert a bunch of new fans to the ways of Neil, and even long-time supporters might wish for a bit more action and possibly a few different songs. Some hits, perhaps. But he ain’t that guy. You take him as he is, or let him go.
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