Hey remember when Neil Young wrote that awful song Let’s Roll? Holy shit, it’s hard to believe that was the same guy who wrote Rocking in the Free World. By the way, I thought for about six weeks that he had written a song about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
But now that "Let’s roll" has been put on the shelf of Short-Lived Catchphrases (just place it right next to "I’m Rick James, Bitch!"), and now that we’ve rolled into a lovely little war that won’t end in Iraq, does Neil play that song in his latest concerts? I know for sure that he won’t be playing it at two upcoming shows in Nashville.
The two Nashville concerts, on August 18 and 19, will be filled only with material from his next album, Prairie Wind, and will be filmed by Jonathan Demme for a concert film of the same name. What’s notable here is that Paramount Classics has signed onto the film without hearing so much as a note from any of the songs. Of course the fact that Demme has made what is considered one of the best rock performance films of all time, Stop Making Sense.
The idea here is to get the movie released at the same time as the album. Young tried similar hijinks with his last album, Greendale, which had a tie-in movie. Both people who bought the album saw the movie.