Two men who stayed true to themselves
The show: Neil Young: Home Town and David Bowie: The Last Five Years The moment: What an alien would see Sitting on a bare-bones stage in Coronation Hall in Omemee, Ont., in front of a fairy-light-covered tree hung with various hats, Neil Young, age 72, plays guitar and sings, “Old man, look at my life, I’m a lot like you were.”
The image on his black T-shirt is da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man; only the man is playing guitar. Young sports a red band on his right wrist that may be some sort of carpal tunnel guard. Scruffy hair hangs under his hat. His sideburns are white, his jowls prominent. When he gets to the chorus — “I need someone to love me the whole day through” — he hits the falsetto, but it’s a strain; his face is screwed up tight.
Over in the other doc, David Bowie, 69 and about to die of cancer, lies on a bed shooting his final video, for “Lazarus.” A tensor bandage decorated with two tiny, button eyes is wrapped around his face. The camera shoots him from above as he judders and reaches toward the sky.
I flipped between these two shows on Sunday night. I’ve been a lifelong fan of both musicians. But I found myself wondering, if aliens who knew nothing about Young or Bowie tuned into either one midshow, they might wonder why anyone was captivated by these grizzled, ghostly men with their clearly strained voices. If they stuck around, I think they’d see why. Young and Bowie took wildly different paths: Bowie was elegant, worldly, a shape-shifter; Young is unchanging, unconcerned with appearance. He plays a patched guitar. His piano was 100 years old when he bought it in 1970; it was burned in a fire and the bottom is charcoal.
But both men ended up at the same place: resilient authenticity. They stayed true to themselves. They meant everything they did and we could feel that they meant it.
“At a certain time in your life you get to a point where you do feel freer and you don’t really care what people think, and you can laugh at yourself,” Bowie’s bassist, Gail Ann Dorsey, says in Bowie’s doc. We’re lucky they shared/are sharing that time with us. Neil Young: Home Town aired on CTV. David Bowie: The Last Five Years aired on TMN, is available on demand and will be rebroadcast in January. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Tuesday and Thursday.
David Bowie and Neil Young meant everything they did and we could feel that they meant it