![]() ![]() Later in that same scene comes the film’s non-musical highlight: Young is interviewed by a remarkably precocious kid - boy-wonder Nashville radio and TV personality Gil Gilliam, 12 years old at the time - who asks some very on-point questions and pretty much steals this film even though he’s on camera for less than five minutes. To wit: “I feel more free now than I’ve ever felt before,” Young says. In the Nashville studio, the camera pans across a room in the Nashville studio with dark wood paneling, an electric typewriter and paper datebook on the desk and Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” playing on the radio - it just doesn’t get more peak 1971 than that. On that note, simply seeing the clothes - the flared jeans, patterned shirts, boots and big belt buckles - the (non-) haircuts and the attitudes is a head-spinning throwback: They’re drinking beer in the middle of the day and smoking weed out of some insane contraption (Nitzsche declines twice) at one point Young calls himself a “rich hippie,” which he probably still does. Conversely, we see the bro-chemistry between him, Crosby, Stills and Nash and watch him interact with the unexpectedly hip conductor of a rather fussy-looking London Symphony Orchestra - a reminder of how much of the 1971 world was still, in the parlance of the era, “square.” ![]() We see many of the classic songs from the album come to life, with plenty of closeups on the 25-year-old, stringy-haired Young, who seems impossibly young and earnest, yet still iconic and iconoclastic. ![]() He also performs some contemporaneous songs that didn’t make the album, like “Journey Through the Past” and “Bad Fog of Loneliness” (a 50th anniversary boxed set of the album, due Friday, includes three outtakes and Young’s fantastic 1971 solo concert for the BBC - marking a fifth 1971 solo concert release.)Īlso appearing are Young’s partner at the time, actor Carrie Snodgress musicians Jack Nitzsche (who would later take up with Snodgress and be arrested for threatening her), Tim Drummond, Ben Keith and Kenny Buttrey managers Elliott Roberts and Ron Stone photographer Joel Bernstein, roadie Bruce Berry (who would die of a drug overdose within a few months and be immortalized in Young’s song “Tonight’s the Night”) even the old man who inspired “Old Man.” A sobering number of them are now deceased. While much of the footage is fascinating, the admitted absence of a plan comes across in the final product: It’s two full hours of Young rehearsing, recording and hanging out for long stretches of time with the newly formed Stray Gators backing band, along with vignettes of him recording backing vocals with sometime-bandmates Stephen Stills and David Crosby in California and Stills and Graham Nash in New York working up “A Man Needs a Maid” with the London Symphony Orchestra (Glyn Johns, of “Get Back” fame, appears in several scenes) giving stellar solo performances of “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man” and working through several songs with the band in the legendary barn at the ranch, surrounded by bales of hay and the dry, dry hills of Northern California, complete with grazing cows. ![]()
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