Neil Young performs in a benefit concert at Lakefield College School in Lakefield, Ont., on Friday. The event raised funds to restore the property’s historic farmhouse and adjacent cabins.Sam Riches/The Globe and Mail
Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You actually can go home again.
At a solo acoustic concert on a soggy Friday evening on a farm in Lakefield, Ont., Neil Young journeyed deep into the past, paying particular attention to songs that reflected upon his youth.
After greeting his audience with “Hey, folks,” he strummed the opening chords on a 12-string Taylor acoustic guitar to 1978’s Comes a Time, a pleasant ballad about settling down after years of drifting. Throughout the night he used harmonicas, on a holder hanging on his neck, in a number of keys.
On the coming-of-age Sugar Mountain, the 79-year-old icon’s straining voice broke at “Ain’t it funny how you feel, when you’re findin’ out it’s real.” His Buffalo Springfield number I Am a Child was a father-son reminiscence.
The concert for more than 2,000 cheerful people in boots and rain gear was in benefit of a historic 160-acre farm that belongs to Lakefield College School, a boarding school in the Kawartha Lakes region founded in 1879. Tickets ranged from $550 to $1,550.
Despite steady rain, more than 2,000 concertgoers gathered to see Neil Young perform.Sam Riches/The Globe and Mail
The farm is not far from a cottage Young shares with his actress wife Daryl Hannah on Stony Lake. Lakefield is also near his childhood home of Omemee, some 75 years away, as the time flies.
From the stage, Young could see the farmhouse he is helping to restore. Proceeds from the concert will be used for that project and more. “There’s a beautiful old house from 1900,” he told the audience. (It actually dates to 1878.) Young said he liked the idea that people from around the world could come and look at it and think, “Yep, that’s Canada.”
Some of us were thinking the same thing looking at Young.
Under a jacket and a flannel shirt, he wore a another shirt emblazoned with a small Canadian maple leaf. His dogs, Moon and Mo, sat sidestage. He wore a ball cap that said, “Human Made.” Young enjoyed a causal rapport with his fans.
In a solo acoustic performance, Neil Young journeyed deep into the past, playing songs reminiscent of his youth.Sam Riches/The Globe and Mail
When he asked, “What’s goin’ on?” a woman responded with, “That’s a good question, Neil.” When someone yelled for Down by the River, Young wondered if he should play rock ‘n’ roll with his “imaginary band,” as he motioned behind him to a stage filled with a grand piano, pump organ and a stand-up piano but no other musicians.
Later, Young joked that he’d forgotten all his songs. “We remember them,” a man quickly shouted back.
Before the concert, I spoke with Donald Ross, the Toronto investment banker and philanthropist who with his wife purchased the farm to save it from development, with the purpose of donating it to his alma mater.
There were many alumni at the concert, but Ross, arriving on a golf cart, was a bit of a celebrity. Born more than 90 years ago, he is the oldest of the old boys, class of 1948. He remembers skiing with his two brothers on the farm as a child.
“The drop was minimal,” he said of the modest slope, “but we were rather minimal ourselves.”
Ross said he was a fan of Young in a “backward way,” through his daughters and grandchildren. He knew Young’s father, the author and Globe and Mail sportswriter Scott Young, through E.P. Taylor and the Canadian thoroughbred horse racing scene.
Hours before his concert, Young posted a note on his website saying he was practising the rarely performed song My Boy and “thinking about my dad.” On stage, he said the song reminded him of Omemee. He played it on a banjo, as he did with Mellow My Mind, which references the railway tracks and fishing spots of his youth.
The benefit for farm was a natural for Young, who raised chickens as a boy and who had aspirations of attending the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, Ont. In Lakefield, the Farm Aid co-founder played Homegrown and Field of Opportunity: “There ain’t no way of telling, where these seeds will rise or when.”
More than two decades ago, Young spoke to biographer Jimmy McDonough about the yearning to return to Omemee. “In some fantasy world, I think, ‘Okay, I can go back there.’ But I really couldn’t. It’s not possible. At least not for the next several years. But to be able to come and go − just drop in a pull out − that’s gonna work. It’s funny, maybe because I’m getting older, I feel a kind of pulling from the area where I remember things as a kid, It’s an interesting sensation.”
Young played Helpless, which is associated with Omemee: “There is a town in north Ontario, with dream comfort memory to spare/ And in my mind I still need a place to go…”
The song seems superfluous now. Young’s dream comfort has been realized, and he has returned (part-time, anyway) to the place he has longed to be.
More fitting was Long May You Run, about the hope and promise of youth. Young sang the penultimate line, “with your chrome heart shining in the sun,” but left the final, titular line to the audience.
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