Standing at the organ, Young asked the crowd to pick whether he should play “Mother Earth” or “Mr. The back half of the show finally delivered a handful of familiar songs. The story was a little surreal the song, played live for the first time ever on Friday, was sweet, vulnerable, the piano accompaniment beautiful beneath Young’s high, plaintive tenor. The magic of the night, of course, was that this all fit together so well. “And, uh, I don’t use it on this song at all,” Young finished as the crowd cracked up with laughter.

(Note: His comments are best read in Neil’s laconic nasal drawl.) “It was a very funky little flute, two dollars and 49 cents or something. “I went out for a walk and bought a flute at a drugstore,” he said. Sometimes Young even shared stories about instruments that were not even there, such as when he introduced “A Dream That Can Last” with a story about the sessions for “Sleeps With Angels,” the 1994 album made with his longtime band Crazy Horse. An upright piano on the opposite side of the stage, on which someone had placed Post-It notes with messages such as “I adore you” before the show? He rented that one when he came to Hollywood in the ’60s and had played it off and on ever since.Īs for the pump organ? “I got it in a junk shop in Redwood City,” Young said. This, though, was only part of his introduction of the instruments he’d brought on tour with him.

Other highlights early in the set included “If You Got Love,” a song pulled at the last minute from Young’s 1982 album “Trans,” which brought him to the pump organ for the first time of the night, and “My Heart,” a gentle, fragile beauty he sang while playing his grand piano.Ībout that piano: Young introduced it as his “burnt piano,” a Steinway he was very pleased to get for just $1,500 some 50 years ago only to discover that it had been in a fire and the soundboard was so scorched that if you touched it your fingers would come away black.

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