Review: Neil Young & Crazy Horse strike heart of gold at tour-opening concert

At SDSU, Young and his longtime Crazy Horse compadres — bassist/singer Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina, both 80 — were focused and in sync from start to finish. They were joined by guitarist/singer Micah Nelson, 33, who on Monday had played a key role accompanying his father, Willie Nelson, at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park.

Micah Nelson was performing in place of Crazy Horse charter member Nils Lofgren, who is now on tour in the E Street Band with his other longtime employer, Bruce Springsteen. Those are big shoes to fill, but Nelson was so in sync with Young you'd think they had been musical partners for decades.

The stage was bedecked with the giant, faux Fender guitar amplifiers, speaker cabinets and road cases Young and Crazy Horse used on their 1978 Rust Never Sleeps Tour. There were no video screens on the stage, the better for the audience — which included basketball great Bill Walton and Las Vegas Raiders NFL team owner Mark Davis — to focus completely on the music at hand.

The SDSU concert — the start of Young and Crazy Horse's first major tour together in a decade — came a year after Young's mesmerizing solo concert here at the Shell. Wednesday's performance was even more mesmerizing, in large part because of the musical empathy between the four musicians.

When they locked into a groove, which was often, they seemed to be of one mind. And it's difficult to think of any other rock band of any vintage that can gain as much traction from so many slow-paced songs.

With few exceptions, Young's biting guitar solos contained a minimum of notes, but he made each one count, repeatedly going into a zone where feeling and intensity trump quantity. Or, to invoke the title of Young's 1988 album: "This Note's For You."

Apart from a heartfelt spoken tribute to the late David Briggs — the producer of many of Young's albums with (and without) Crazy Horse — Young's comments to the audience were along the lines of: "Thank you" and "How ya doin'?"

Otherwise, he let his music speak for him, and it spoke volumes.