This is another song that I wrote about my ranch. I'm going to sing mostly new songs tonight. Maybe only a couple more old ones. But I've written so many new ones that I can't think of anything else to with them other than sing them. It's been kind of interesting for me this tour. I've been out for two weeks and we've been at about, I don't know how many cities. But anyways, singing some of these songs has been like living them as well as singing them because I wrote three of the ones on the road while I was out here.
Neil Young
Massey Hall, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
January 19, 1971, Late Show
I'd like to do this song for you now that I wrote for my movie that I just finished doing for the last two and a half years. I sort of got into something else for a while. It should be coming to Chicago in maybe a month or so - hope you like it - something new, for me anyways. This is a song, the title song from the movie Journey Through The Past. Only we made up the movie as we went along and couldn't think of anything to do with this song, so it got left out.
Neil Young
Arie Crown Theater, Chicago, Illinois, USA
January 11, 1973
I don't know if you all noticed, but when I was playing that last song, about half way through the second piano solo I kind of lost my mind for a minute. Yeah, but it was good. I hit some kind of note and I saw my granny. She used to play piano in a place called Flin Flon. That's real far north. That's a mining town way up in northern Canada. Way up there. And she was the one who - she was in the little booth, when they'd go down in the mine and everybody would check in with her and she would give them their tags. They were hanging on nails there. So all the guys would come by in the morning ... all the kids and everything ... everybody she knew in the whole town ... everybody knew her. She'd give them the little brass tags with their names on it. And then at the end of the day, when it was all over, they'd come out of the mine and walk by Jean, and Jean would be sitting there, and they'd all give her the brass tags. So everybody knew everybody.
She was the music in the town. They used to have these productions at the local bar. It was like really a small company town and they had the bar and a little stage and they put on productions. People would act out these things that they wrote and my granny would be playing the piano. So everybody knew her. So she came and visited me in the middle of that song.
Neil Young
Keller Theater, Portland, Oregon, USA
October 22, 2007