Willie Nelson and Neil Young are old buddies who get together once a year to play Farm Aid, the annual benefit concert that takes place in Virginia Beach this Saturday.
But the two giants of North American song, who between them, have released over 150 albums, have never actually toured together.
Until this week, that is.
In the run-up to Farm Aid, which this year will include John Mellencamp, Margo Price, Sierra Ferrell, and Jesse Welles, Nelson and Young added a two-show warm-up trek.
They played one date in Bridgeport, Conn., before the two proudly unpolished songwriters pulled up to the TD Pavilion at the Highmark Mann in Fairmount Park on Thursday.
Teenage Texas country and blues songwriter Ty Meyers opened, followed by a clip of Nelson performing his welcoming, immigrant-friendly patriotic song “Living in the Promised Land,” singing of an America “where there’s room for everyone, livin’ in the promised land.”
Then the lights went up and there was a 93-year-old Nelson, seated and wearing a down jacket on a chilly September evening.
Along with him was his band Family, which in this iteration included his son Micah on guitar and vocals, longtime compadre Mickey Raphael on harmonica and accordion, and Waylon Payne, the son of Nelson’s late longtime band member Jody Payne, also on guitar and vocals.
Nelson is a marvel. For regular attendees of his Outlaw Music Festival — which cut back on its schedule and did not stop in Philly this year — his 70-minute set was familiar.
With his trusty, impossibly beat-up guitar, Trigger, on his lap, he opened as always with Johnny Bush’s “Whiskey River,” before segueing into a taste of western swing with Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys’ “Stay a Little Longer,” and then his own Zen masterpiece “Still Is Still Moving to Me.”
Early on, his spoken-sung vocals were a little rough and clotted, but he loosened up as the set progressed and by the time he got to “Georgia (On My Mind),” his singing was notable not only for his uncanny, conversational phrasing, but he also sounded relatively robust, even frisky.
He got a little help from his bandmates, easing his vocal burden.
Micah Nelson got plenty of chuckles with his songs “Die When I’m High (Halfway to Heaven),” which is written from the perspective of his famously weed-loving father, and “Everything Is [Expletive]” in which both Nelsons took a look at the world around them and found not much to recommend.
Payne, meanwhile, added gravitas with covers of Merle Haggard’s “Workingman’s Blues” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” To the lyric, “And it’s sad to be alone,” he added, “but it isn’t, because we’re up here singing with Willie Nelson!”
Then there were two special treats. Young came out and sang with Willie on a ragged but right “Are There Any More Real Cowboys?” from his 1985 album Old Ways, into which he dropped a new lyric expressing contempt for A.I. data centers.
The set closed in the traditional Willie way, with the country gospel medley of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and “I’ll Fly Away,” with a surprise guest joining in on the sing-along.
Who was that skinny dude with his hair tucked into a trucker’s cap? But of course, it was Philly’s own alt-rock star Kurt Vile, who guested with centenarian Marshall Allen earlier this year and now can add an appearance with nonagenarian Nelson to his resumé.
Before Young took the stage with his band the Chrome Hearts, which includes the hard-working Micah Nelson along with illustrious Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section keyboard player Spooner Oldham, the video screens issued a three-word written reminder to Americans: “Keep Freedom Free.”
The loose-limbed set that followed leaned toward the acoustic early on. Young, 80, ambled through the warm and wistful sentiments of “Long May You Run” and “Comes a Time,” and later rang out with the one-two punch of “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold,” bringing the packed house to its feet, where they stayed standing thereafter.
Young has just released Second Song, a collection that contemplates aging and mortality. It’s his 50th album and one of his better efforts this century. With a backdrop that read “LOVE EARTH,” he performed two songs from the album, including the sweet heartbreak tune, “Casting Me Away From You,” which he said, “I wrote in 1963 or ’64, but it was never released. That makes it a new song, right?”
The title is a sly reference to his remark “It’s all one song!” from his 1997 live album Year of the Horse, referring to the unifying, liberating squall he tends to lean into when turning the amplification all the way up.
On Thursday, Young revisited that idea: “You guys realize this all one song, don’t you?” He also poked fun at President Donald Trump by making repeated references to Lake Ontario — which the president has renamed “Lake America.”
And at one point, while wandering over to the piano where he would sit and play the environmental anthem “After the Gold Rush,” Young took a sip from a green bottle of beer that appeared to be a Molson and said: “How’d that get here? That’s Canadian!”
The show grew raucous down the stretch.
Two days earlier in Connecticut, Young had ended his pre-encore set with “Gold Rush.” In Philly, he apparently felt the need to rock out.
The packed house got the catharsis it had been hoping for with a ripping “Powderfinger,” which delivered classic 1970s Rust Never Sleeps-era power chord crunch in one of the most satisfying salvos from Young’s peak period.
And that was followed by “Roll Another Number (For the Road),” a song simpatico with Nelson if there ever was one, pulled from 1975’s Tonight’s the Night, the third album in his illustrious “Ditch Trilogy,” when the maverick songwriter decided he was spending too much time in the middle of the road “so I headed for the ditch.”
Young and the Chrome Hearts returned with “Living With War,” a song written in protest of the U.S.’ war with Iraq in 2006, now presented in opposition to the war on Iran.
The simultaneously combative and sorrowful thrust of the song hit home, timeless, but it’s lumbering in comparison to Young’s more unstoppable, on-target epic rockers.
No matter, it wasn’t a long wait for one of those. The inevitable closer was “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World,” still managing to deliver big rock show defiance 37 years after it was first recorded.
Fists were pumped, a one-of-a-kind night with two legends came to an emphatic conclusion, and the Canadian American rocker left the crowd with one last exhortation: “Keep America Free!”
