Neil Young. Legend. Icon. Still crushing it in his eightieth year on planet Earth. The dude just keeps going and going and going. (See “Bunny, Energizer.”)

Mr. Young brought his band The Chrome Hearts to the Bay Area’s Shoreline Amphitheatre on Friday night for two hours of solid, butt-kickin’ American rock and roll. He may be an “Old Man,” but take a look at his life – he’s 79, and he’s doing just fine.

The Chrome Hearts are a worthy and erstwhile replacement for Young’s longtime ensemble Crazy Horse. After a few gigs in 2024, Young and Crazy Horse announced an “unplanned break” due to unnamed illnesses. In their stead for this year’s tour, Young called on some of his younger friends from Promise of the Real (POTR), which had backed the Hall of Famer on tour for several years in the pre-Covid decade.

Even before then, POTR was already well known as Lukas Nelson’s band. The family relationship between Young and the Nelsons (Lukas, his brother Micah, and of course their father Willie) goes way back. Lukas recently split with his band, and the remnants of POTR have been rebranded as The Chrome Hearts for this tour.

Specifically, the current lineup includes Micah on guitar (he was on board too in the Crazy Horse lineup for the abbreviated 2024 tour), Corey McCormick on bass, and Anthony LoGerfo on drums. In addition to the POTR lads, Spooner Oldham – who has been touring and recording with Young since the 1990s – plays Hammond organ. Oldham’s résumé goes back to the 1960s Muscle Shoals / Memphis soul scene, where he played keys on countless hits by luminaries including Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett.

But it’s a Neil Young show, so let’s talk about Neil Young. As a longtime fan, I’ve seen him play solo acoustic, checked him out in shows with his countrified lineups like the Stray Gators and the blues-based Bluenotes, and thrilled to his appearances with CSNY and a reboot a few years ago of Buffalo Springfield. I’ve seen him in venues as small as the 400-seat Palomino Club in Los Angeles and as large as the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

He’s always brilliant.

In fact, I’ve enjoyed some of those big audience shows every bit as much as the club gigs. He always brings a little something different to the table, and yet he always remains 100% pure Neil Young. He is as authentic as they come.

The Shoreline show was no different. Certainly some aging rock stars are no longer at the top of their game. (I won’t name any in particular, but I will hint that one who comes to mind IMHO rhymes with “Speven Spills.”) Neil Young though — well, let’s just say it’s the young’uns on stage who have to work hard to keep up with him rather than the other way around.

All that being said, there are two kinds of Neil Young shows: the kind he plays a lot of hits, and the kind where he doesn’t. The show tilted toward the latter.

The setlist interspersed Young’s hits like “Southern Man” and “Like a Hurricane” with less familiar cuts like “Silver Eagle,” an ode to his tour bus from his 2025 album Talkin’ to the Trees. Two relatively arcane CSNY tracks, “Looking Forward” and “Name of Love,” didn’t seem to strike a familiar chord with much of the audience, and the reception for those songs was clearly less enthusiastic than the applause for, for instance, “Powderfinger.”

There was a notable protest-song vibe in the mix too. One of those was Young’s 1970 song “Ohio,” written to memorialize the Kent State shooting of four anti-war student protesters by the Ohio National Guard. He also played his brand spanking new “Big Crime.” The latter debuted just two weeks ago in concert, and Young isn’t pulling any punches:

Got to get the fascists out
Got to clean the White House out
Don’t want no soldiers on our streets
Got big crime in DC at the White House

In the same light, the inclusion of “Southern Man” in the set list felt less coincidental and more a specific jab at the lamentable persistence of White supremacy in this nation. “Long Walk Home” (from 1987) remains salient with its lament of American pro-war jingoism. Two songs from the album Greendale bemoan the confluence of corporate greed and environmental abuse. “Be the Rain,” for example, pleads for us all to “save the planet for another day.”

For the faithful, many of these songs were deep cut treats, not unlike the experience at Young’s solo tour last year. That show featured few radio hits and the reception was mixed. Long-time, hardcore fans loved it. Some people who came for the hits walked away disappointed. (Count me in the former camp.) On Friday at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, many people sat through the songs they didn’t know and jumped to their feet for the ones they recognized.

Young wore his trademark flannel plaid shirt and faded Levi’s. A train conductor’s hat pulled down over his eyes kept much of his face in shadow. The low-lit stage was backed by a banner that read “Love Earth.” A giant Fender amp prop behind Young and Oldham stage left harkened back to the late-70s Rust Never Sleeps tour.

The venerable rocker frequently switched back and forth between acoustic and electric guitars and sat behind an upright piano for one song. (Not unlike Bob Dylan on his recent tours, Young nearly disappears behind the tall piano.) He addressed the audience from time to time. Midway through the show, he said, “Take care of yourself in this crazy world. And your friends too. I’m just glad to be here tonight.”

On this tour, as usual for Young, the song choices vary from night to night. On Friday, “Vampire Blues” and “Sail Away” made their first appearance in a Chrome Hearts set list. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and “Harvest Moon” gave Young a chance to showcase his iconic falsetto.

He shredded several guitar leads too, often huddling with Nelson and McCormick facing back toward the drum kit as they built the sonic energy. In general, the heavy rock songs didn’t jam on as long as they did in last year’s Crazy Horse tour, which featured several ten-minute episodes. The trade-off, of course, is a set list with more tunes.

During Young’s epic solo on “Like a Hurricane” near the end of the show, Nelson rocked out on a swinging organ that dropped from the light rig and then flew up and disappeared again as soon as the storm had passed. Soon after, Young sang “Old Man” to close the set. He took a bow with his bandmates and didn’t even leave the stage before launching into an encore.

The night had flown by – “Look at how the time goes past,” indeed!

The Bay Area crowd chimed in to sing the anthemic refrain of the final song, “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Perhaps some of them took a note from old man Young’s selection of songs to consider their next steps to help make the world a better place.

“Give me things that don’t get lost.”

A few final show notes:

• Earlier, a brief opening set by Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir set the tone for the evening with a few rousing funky, gospel-ish songs preaching the message of a life beyond consumerism.

• I’m willing to bet Young’s soundboard folks cranked the house volume up a few notches for “Hey Hey, My My.” That shit was loud!

• Those of us with photo passes were relegated to the wings several rows up from the stage. Dim lighting, bad angles, and that darn hat over Neil’s eyes made photography quite challenging. Fortunately, I also brought a small point-and-shoot camera I could use from my seat in the crowd after the allotted time to shoot with my professional gear.

SET LIST
Ambulance Blues
Cowgirl in the Sand
Vampire Blues
Powderfinger
Long Walk Home
Be the Rain
Southern Man
Ohio
Big Crime
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
Encore: Rockin’ in the Free World