This is why Gregg Allman compared Neil Young to Michaelangelo.

Some thoughts on Neil Young's terrific performance at the Capitol Theatre. PLUS: A Brothers and Sisters excerpt on why Gregg Allman loved Neil so much.

This is a word of mouth operation, so if you enjoy my work, please share and subscribe. Also, the paperback edition of my NYT best seller Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the '70s was just released. Signed copies are available via my local Words Maplewood's Bookstore by clicking here. Or click here to order from Amazon.

I would have given almost anything to hear Neil Young play great versions of “Comes A Time,” “Harvest Moon,” “Powderfinger” and “Down By The River.” It only cost me a couple hundred bucks and a drive to Port Chester, NY.

Neil and Micah Nelson, 2019. Photo by Marc Millman

Neil Young has famously been a chameleon, tackling different styles, approaches, genres with almost every album throughout a career that is now pushing towards 60 years. (Buffalo Springfield’s first single was released in 1966, the year I was born.) After abruptly canceling a summer tour with Crazy Horse due to an illness, Neil re-remerged just last week at Farm Aid with a new band, the Chrome Hearts. Last night I saw what I believe is just his second performance with the band at the Capitol Theatre. It was, in a word, phenomenal.

I’ve been making sure to see the legends whenever I can ever since Gregg Allman died in 2017 and it sure has been rewarding: John Prine, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty on what became his final tour. It had been too long since I saw Neil and I was ready to accept and enjoy whatever version I got, but what I got was so much more than acceptable.

With an artist with as deep and varied a catalogue as Neil, the possibilities of what he might play, or feel like playing, is endless. The setlist was just about perfect to my taste. I mean, it could have been a few songs longer, and I could start a running, endless list of songs I’d love to hear, but he uncorked both his “godfather of grunge” persona with his trusty Les Paul, Old Black, on songs including “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” “Powderfinger” and “Down By the River” and his acoustic side with “Comes A Time” and four songs from 1992’s Harvest Moon – the title track, “From Hank to Hendrix,” “Unknown Legend” and “One Of These Days.”

Videos below shot by my friend Scott Gibson.

These are all peak songs, deeply meaningful to me. I listened to Neil’s double-album Greatest Hits Decade over and over, especially for a year or two in college. It’s not all great memories – some of the time listening to those sides were confusing, self destructive days seen through a cluster of empty brown longneck bottles, fetid bong water and hazy smoke. But that was all part of finding my way – I had to tread down that path a little before I got off. And I think Harvest Moon is one of the greatest post-prime albums any rock legend has ever made, and the songs, all about finding and losing love, getting older, taking stock, resonated with me as I settled into my relationship with Rebecca in 1992 and they sing to me now, with the perspective of years lived.

The Chrome Hearts are terrific, bringing something out in Neil that I don’t think I have ever experienced live – a great band that accompanies him and fleshes out songs, like a studio band. I’ve seen Neil with Crazy Horse and loved the rush, solo acoustic, which is gorgeous, and with Booker T and the MGs which was cool, but I never saw him with Promise of the Real. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him play acoustic in a band setting, as he has on so many great studio tracks.

The band – Muscle Shoals legend Spooner Oldham on organ, Micah Nelson on guitar and Promose of th eReal’s  Corey McCormick on bass and Anthony LoGerfo on drums – brought the Harvest Moon songs to life and provided appropriate eamount of push and sparking on the electric songs. Being in such a relatively small room, standing right behind the soundboard, with Neil’s electric guitar playing, was a fantastic experience, too He has as distinctive of a guitar tone as anyone ever had. It’s been oft-imitated, but there’s nothing quite like the real thing at the Cap it felt like it was three dimensional. Who knows how long Neil will stick with the Chrome Hearts, but I heartily recommend catching them if you can.

See below for some Gregg Allman insight into Neil.

The following is adapted from Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, copyright 2023, Alan Paul, and just now out in paperback!

The transformation of Gregg’s relationship to the acoustic guitar really began with Jackson Browne, who was Allman’s roommate in Los Angeles for a brief but important time. Watching Browne’s serious approach to songwriting had a huge impact on Allman. “He really influenced me to try my hand at writing more seriously,” Gregg said. “He was already so good at it.”

After writing and tossing away over 400 songs, Gregg said, he had penned the first song that maybe could stand up to the work of his peers, which he so admired. “Before that it was just ‘I wanna swoon with you/under the moon/in June,’” he said. Watching Browne work had completely altered his perspective. The Hour Glass recorded Browne’s “Cast Off All My Fears” on their debut album.

“I really admired the way he played and picked and wrote songs about shit that I think about and have gone through and stuff that hurts you, just different ways of saying it,” Allman said. “That’s what I learned from him.  It’s knockin’ 35 words down to four and having them really mean something.  That is part of being a poet.  Real poets might read this and laugh, but I think poetry is the art of saying something in a different way. Shakespeare said, ‘A rose by any other name is still a rose’  and people consider that profound; well, people like Jackson Browne have said things I consider just as profound. He really touched a soft side of me and I enjoyed every minute I ever spent with him.”

In Los Angeles, Gregg also became a huge fan of Buffalo Springfield, featuring Stills and Young. The Hour Glass opened up a three-show run for them at the Fillmore West in December, 1967. Young’s guitar playing did not much impress Duane, who thought he should “stick to rhythm work,” but his singing and songwriting made a huge  impression on Gregg, particularly “Expecting To Fly” and “Broken Arrow.” 

Decades later, he spoke about these songs like a swooning fan, revving up with excitement and exclaiming with a touch of awe in his voice, “God, I’m telling you how much that inspired me!”

“‘Expecting to Fly’ is a piece of art, like ‘The Lovers’ or ‘The Kiss’ or anything Remington or Michelangelo ever did,” Allman said. “That is certainly just as potent to me as Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

The paperback edition of my fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, was released last week by St. Martin’s Press. It was the third consecutive one to debut in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and  One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. My first book, Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about my experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band, was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions.  I am also a guitarist and singer with two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.