Neil Young Plays Favorites and Protest Songs at Hollywood Bowl: Review

Before Jesse Welles was Jesse Welles, Neil Young was Jesse Welles. Which is to say, the reigning paragon of protest music. He reminded his audience of that Monday night at the Hollywood Bowl with a four-song sequence of powerfully raging tunes about America that couldn’t possibly have been programmed into his set in that order accidentally. “Southern Man,” his early 1970s broadside against institutionalized racism, was followed by “Ohio,” a classic heart-tugger that cemented for all time how government can be turned against its people. Those two songs together were galvanizing enough, but Young quickly established that he is not just about resistance-as-nostalgia, following those with “Big Crime,” a brand new anti-Trump tune, and “Long Walk Home,” a ’90s number questioning America’s idealism, in which he now has replaced “Beirut” with “Ukraine” in the lyrics.

In some ways, the show would have ended satisfyingly right there, with Young connecting the then and the now in his ongoing concern for how the American dream could go sour. But it’s a good thing it didn’t, since this particular suite took place with more than half the concert still to go. And also since Young had something to offer besides conscience and topicality:

Hits.

Now, that might go without saying for just about any other boomer-era classic rocker out doing the circuit. Not necessarily for Neil, who can be as mercurial in the making of setlists as he is in other affairs. But this current tour, his first with a newish backing band, the Chrome Hearts, makes for a pretty ideal Neil Young show, so that everyone leaves satisfied, whether you’re coming for the neo-grunge or the acoustic stuff, and whether you’re hoping to hear deep cuts or a solid selection of the stuff that has been embedded in the entire rock generation’s heads for a half-century.

He isn’t playing exactly the same classics or relative obscurities each night, so your audience’s milage may vary on the particulars, if not the ratios. But on this particular balmy L.A. night: The lilting “Harvest Moon,” “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and “Old Man”? Check. The stormy “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)” and “Like a Hurricane”? Check. Two more CSNY cuts besides the aforementioned “Ohio” … aleit two from the very latter-day CSNY albums that no one really remembers? Check. An opening number culled from “On the Beach” (“Ambulance Blues”), plus two from the environmental concept album “Greendale”? Check, and check.

Perfection, that well-balanced a setlist… at least on paper. And, happily, in execution, too, although “perfect” seems like a heretical term to use in connection with any Neil Young show, where is meant to be characterized by ragged glory not just around the edges but at the performance’s very center.

Making their L.A. debut, the Chrome Hearts, Young’s “new” backing band, is essentially most of a group that backed him for years, Promise of the Real — guitarist Micah Nelson, bassist Corey McCormick and drummer Anthony LoGerfo — with the addition of a famous veteran organist, Spooner Oldham (and minus POTR members Lukas Nelson and Tato Melgar). The sound is a little sparer and less busy, without Lukas in the mix (Micah did one lead guitar solo toward the close, but otherwise stays out of Young’s way), and with Oldham’s added keyboard parts nearly subliminal for the bulk of the set.

This ensemble threads the needle nicely between Young’s electric and acoustic poles — and he has been a man of extremes, in those regards, like really no one else in his league, leading to a lot of years of shows where gigs could be counted to drift one way or the other. There was, obviously, a primal beauty to the raw power of Crazy Horse, which is apparently finally defunct after a tour in 2024 that was greeted with mixed reactions and was aborted three months before its planned end. But the band leader’s return to a crew that can so ably make the twain meet between his two sides makes for a show that satisfies fans who like having their Neil completism represented in a single concert.

You could almost be forgiven for mistaking the Chrome Hearts for the latter-day Crazy Horse from a distance — if only because Corey McCormick’s wiry, jump-up-and-down energy so resembles the stage presence that Nils Lofgren had in the other band’s final run. In any case, the configuration during the jammier moments remains consistent: Young and his fellow guitarist and bassist forming a circle where they play to each other, and not so much the audience, even if they aren’t doing anything so unmanly as making actual eye contact with one another. This perma-stance isn’t unfriendly to the audience; it just sends an eternally refreshing signal that these guys might be doing this together even if there weren’t 18,000 witnesses.

Young has certainly done more jam-oriented shows in his career than this tour offers, yet anyone who came hoping to hear them kicked out had that itch scratched right away, as the mellow opening of “Ambulance Blues” was immediately followed by an 11-minute version of “Cowgirl in the Sand.” No need to wait to get right to the yin and the yang of it. I did hear one complaint that the star was doing too much new stuff, which made me wonder if people consider “Greendale” “new.” In fact, the tour is spotlighting only one song from the new “Talkin (sic) to the Trees” album, “Silver Wheels” — an ode to tour buses and their drivers — and then one song that’s even newer than that, the Trump tune, “Big Crime.”

If there was a running theme through the evening, besides those protest songs, it was moons — the “moon on the rise” in “Sail Away” directly setting up “Harvest Moon” — and other natural forces. You could make a drinking game out of how many songs in the set mentioned either the earth, Mother Nature, or both, but this would be a game that would surely get you ejected from the Hollywood Bowl long before the encore was nigh.

This was a show where the special effects came in the form of cameos by two very eclectic keyboards. A modest but mighty pipe organ at the rear of the stage was put to use by Young on one number, “Do It in the Name of Love” (one of those previously mentioned lesser-known CSNY catalog songs). Meanwhile, a synthesizer with angel wings descended from the rafters for Micah Nelson to play on “Like a Hurricane,” hilariously swaying in the breeze that kept the locks of long hair that peeked out from under Young’s conductor’s hat blowing in the wind.

One other aural FX moment arrived when Young sang into a special microphone that filtered through to a megaphone during the verses of the two “Greendale” numbers, “Be the Rain” and “Sun Green.” (This literally twitching megaphone got its own closeups on the big screens; you take the production design flourishes in a Neil Young show where you get them.)

In some ways, attending a Young gig isn’t just going to a concert — it’s signing up, at least for one night, for a whole belief system: the religion of stubborn conscientiousness. If there really were such a thing as a sliding spectrum for this sort of thing, Neil Young would still surely count as the least compromised person in rock ‘n’ roll. He didn’t perform his classic “This Note’s for You” at the Bowl Monday night, as he has a couple of other times on the current tour. But he’s stuck to his no-commercial-endorsements guns over the decades, and the only banners on the Bowl grounds were atop social-activism booths, not for corporate sponsors. The tone was set by his choice of opening act, a group that does nothing but anti-materialism message music: Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. We didn’t check out the concession stands ourselves, but there have been reports of Young bringing in locally sourced foods and beers for the night.

These are the sorts of things that might invite mockery as “woke” if even MAGA adherents didn’t mostly have a sense that Neil Young is nobody’s snowflake. He has a way of always seeming like he might go either completely surly or altogether sweet on us, without ever really landing squarely in any fixed attitude. But without patronizing his audience with anything but a few “glad to see you”-type greetings, Young can still foster a sense of community just through bringing a crowd together in admiration of his rugged individualism — and with some peace and love talk that seems deeply felt, not platitudinal.

If this all culminated in one transcendent moment, it was in an extended version of “Like a Hurricane” that had Young, in his eternal-choirboy voice, singing a single phrase over and over and over like a desperate mantra: “somewhere safer where the feeling stays.” Listen to those bittersweet words repeated over a minute’s time had a way of conveying what Young represents to his audience, 50 and 60 years later: a safe space where rock ‘n’ roll will never die, and neither will the passion that we’ve all collectively put into it.

Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts setlist, Hollywood Bowl, Sept. 15, 2025:

Ambulance Blues
Cowgirl in the Sand
Be the Rain
Southern Man
Ohio
Big Crime
Long Walk Home
Silver Eagle
Sail Away
Harvest Moon
Looking Forward
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Sun Green
Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)
Like a Hurricane
Name of Love
Old Man
Roll Another Number (for the Road)