YOUNG AND RESTLESS
Neil Young on tech giants (‘jerks’), audio quality (‘bad’) and his new movie with Daryl Hannah
“The man in the black hat, steer clear of him,” says one of the crusty characters in a new movie, “Paradox,” directed and scripted by actress Daryl Hannah.
He’s talking about Neil Young, who happens to be Hannah’s life partner and also the movie’s ostensible “star.”
“The characters we play, they’re our alter egos in a way,” says one of the actors, Lukas Nelson, son of Willie Nelson and a guitarist in Young’s band, Promise of the Real. “Neil has always been that intimidating cowboy, with a sweet side. We all know that guy.”
Hannah, Nelson and a couple of his bandmates, Anthony LoGerfo and Tato Melgar, share a laugh. They’re gathered in an Austin, Texas, hotel suite overlooking the Colorado River, discussing what is essentially a modest art movie about a motley gang of outlaws hiding out in the Rocky Mountains, scavenging for a living in a setting saturated with broken tech toys (cellphones, laptops) buried by some unidentified apocalypse. Music and the clan of women who keep them at arm’s length are their sole salvation, their way of escaping their purgatory and their path to transcendence. The movie debuted at the South by Southwest Music Conference and will begin airing on Netflix on Friday. It will also be shown Saturday at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, followed by a question-and-answer session with Hannah and Young.
The movie’s themes serve as a metaphor of sorts for Young’s deepest beliefs, the principles that have guided him through a 50-year career mostly spent in one-guy-vs.The-Man mode. And Young, though he has the movie, two albums and a massive digital archive to promote, is happy to embrace the role in a separate interview. Young is indeed the man in the black hat, gray hair spilling past his ears, and he breaks into a grin as a question is posed:
Can one guy make a dent in the way the tech-dominated power players (Spotify, Facebook, Apple, Google, YouTube, various multinational record labels) dominate the music world?
“Sure, because they’re stupid,” he says. “The tech giants are jerks, they’re all losers. They operate to give us ‘content’ that sounds like crap, they want to take away our privacy and they want to monopolize music. For them, art is not art, it’s content. It’s an algorithm.”
Young once could be reticent and vague in interviews, but those days are long gone. He has sold tens of millions of albums as a solo artist and as a member of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but he still carries a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood.
“Tech companies miss the essence of life,” he says. “People have a right to change their minds, and they often do. But algorithms can only track your past and give you more of the same. It’s an insult to the human mind and the human soul, because it takes away a universe of possibilities.”
Young is proselytizing about, among other things, the lack of fidelity in digital music. It has been an ongoing mission and has included at least one outright failure: Young’s digital playback device, Pono, which never gained traction or business backers. “I hated musical streaming, as a disservice to artists and fans, because the sound is so bad,” he says. “So I introduced a player based on downloading hi-res files that would sound a lot better than anything else out there, but streaming took over” and made Pono an anachronism.
Now, he says, streaming technology has improved enough where he is rolling out a massive archive (neilyoungarchives.com), designed to hold all of the artist’s recordings and films, with explanatory text and images. It’s already loaded with obscure treasures, but it contains less than 10 percent of his archive, Young says. He plans to continually update it until his trove of music is all made public.
The archive's most compelling feature, according to its maker: The “master-quality” audio far exceeds what's available on most streaming sites. After I auditioned the music on the site for a few days, it's apparent that it offers a more multidimensional listening experience than most streaming services, particularly if pushed through a decent set of speakers. At the moment, it's free, and will bump to a $1.99 a month subscription rate over the summer, he says, though most of his mainstream releases will still be free to stream.
He hopes wider exposure for the website will force record companies and streaming services to match that audio standard. “If I can do it, why can't everyone else?” he says. “Now we can have quality and convenience, so why aren't the tech companies making that widely available? How long are they going to keep selling the history of music down the tubes with flattened-out, watered-down sound?”
Ornery but strangely idealistic Neil Young haunts “Paradox,” a retro-futuristic art film about the way a group of outsiders — in this case, Young's band — interact. The pacing and largely plotfree impressionism echoes Young's many underground films spanning the decades, including “Journey Through the Past” (1974), “Human Highway” (1982) and “Greendale” (2003).
“I think of it as a palate cleanser between action hero movies,” Young says of the film that was pieced together in three days with a $125,000 budget.
Hannah sighs when the film is described as her “directorial debut.”
“It was about the vibe these guys have, the playfulness, and I hope people take it that way,” she says. “We're not trying to win any award. It was about people having a good time, doing something that made us laugh.”
It includes a priceless scene in which Young and his Farm Aid comrade Willie Nelson square off like gunfighters in a sleepy Western town, with a weird twist. The soundtrack saturates the movie, and as music washes over them, the characters appear as weightless as angels in a Wim Wenders movie. The surrealism suits Young, an artist who makes up his own rules as he moves through a career characterized by brilliance, constant movement and seemingly self-sabotaging decisions. In contrast to many of his classic-rock peers, he has never succumbed to becoming a greatest-hits jukebox while on tour.
“This is not a job, this is our lives,” he says. “I won't make the gig if I'm not totally into what I'm doing at the moment. I only play for me. I'm not going to play what they (the people in the audience) want. I believe that if we are in the groove, that the audience will groove too. And if they leave and don't come back, we won't miss 'em.”