Fans who have been following Neil Young’s current tour on-line knew what to expect, but it didn’t make it any less exhilarating to hear him play the fuck out of Old Black when his Electric Band landed at GM Place on Wednesday. If 2006’s autumnal Heart of Gold movie suggested that Shakey was embracing old age, he is clearly taking up the heroic battle against rust once again, something the crazy old bastard announced right off the top with a shit-spattered solo through the first couple of minutes of “Love and Only Love”.

This was the pattern for the first half of a show that comprehensively exorcised the stink left behind by Céline Dion two nights earlier. An outrageously violent “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” followed, with overdriven amps belching broken signals and Young conspicuously pushing the band as he snarled, “It’s better to burn out than fade away.” Two songs later—following his grinning madly through a raucous “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”—he was again emphasizing the words “fade away” in the last verse of “Powderfinger”, delivered every bit as frayed and ugly-pretty as its parent version from Rust Never Sleeps.

This early blowout continued through “Spirit Road”, a take on “Cortez the Killer” that seemed to scale new heights of scarred beauty with each passing verse, and finally “Cinnamon Girl”, which gave Young the chance to purge his ’50s-vintage Fender Tweed Deluxe of any remaining breath as he loped, grimacing, across a typically goofy stage setup. This included a wooden Indian with a pulsating belt buckle, a mysterious red phone, some fella with his back to the crowd painting a large canvas beside a platform where Pegi Young and sometime guitarist-pianist Anthony Crawford delivered the patented Neil Young “ooohs”, and even one of the gigantic prop amps from the 1979 Rust tour lurking in the shadows.

Notably, there was nothing remotely new up there. No automated lighting rig, no new gear, no nothing. Scratch that. There were a handful of new songs—the unreleased “Sea Change” was the most intriguing—which were showcased once Young stepped everything down for a gorgeous “Oh, Lonesome Me”, and some Decade-minted faves that peaked with a loose “Heart of Gold”.

A continuous rumble of crowd approval marked the night, from a capacity audience that was both about as close to a cross section of Canadian life as you’re likely to find anywhere and surprisingly young. “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Rockin’ in the Free World” closed things, save for a demented take on the Beatles’ “Day in the Life” for the encore, and it all ended with Young flagellating Old Black’s pickups with five broken strings. Guitarist Ben Keith, bassist Rick Rosas, and drummer Chad Cromwell are the same guys who brought such taste and precision to Heart of Gold, but they do sloppy just as beautifully. They nailed that weird pocket Young thrives in—bum notes, dropped beats and all—rocking just as stupidly as a certain other bunch of deadbeats that Shakey turns to whenever he needs to let rip. Crazy Horse might be “the third-best garage band in the world”, as Young likes to say, but given the cue from their raggedly glorious leader, the Electric Band now comes in a very, very close fourth.

Georgia Straight, October 2008