“I haven’t played this in like 100 years,” Neil Young told the crowd Tuesday evening at the very beginning of his show at Drafbaan Stadspark in Groningen, The Netherlands. “We’ll see what happens.”
He was talking about “Ambulance Blues,” the stunning, nine-minute On The Beach classic that many Young aficionados consider one of his finest achievements. (Rolling Stone placed it #2 on our 2021 list of Young’s 100 best songs, topped only by “Powderfinger.”)
To be fair, it hadn’t quite been 100 years since the song surfaced in concert. He last played it January 26, 2019, at the Pantages Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But like the vast majority of live renditions of “Ambulance Blues” in history, going all the way back to the Bottom Line in 1974, that one was solo acoustic. He didn’t do it with a band until R.E.M convinced him to play it with them at the 1998 Bridge School Benefit.
“I don’t know how we did that,” R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills told Rolling Stone in 2023. “Neil was just into it. I think he was glad to have an outlet where he felt like he could play it and do it justice, which is of course a really nice thing to credit our band with, if I dare go that far…It was a super fun thing and really great for [guitarist] Peter [Buck] and [touring guitarist] Scott McCaughey, who are Neil Young fans to the bone, even more so than myself and Michael [Stipe]. It was a real thrill.”
“Ambulance Blues” was regularly played at solo acoustic shows in 1999 and 2007/08, but Young didn’t perform it with a band again until January 25, 2016, at a private show in Paris for Carmignac CEO Édouard Carmignac. That means this newest one in the Netherlands is just the third time in history he’s done it with a band. (And it was a different group every time: R.E.M., Promise of the Real, and now the Chrome Hearts.)
Trending Stories
Young largely stuck to his standard summer setlist for the rest of the Groningen show, which completely ignores his new LP Talkin’ To The Trees, and instead centers around hits like “Old Man,” “Like a Hurricane,” and “Cinnamon Girl” in addition to a smattering of rarities like “Name of Love,” “Sun Green,” and “Looking Forward.”
The European run wraps up July 13 in Paris and then heads over to the States for a run of outdoor shows that kick off August 8 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The last show on the calendar is the Farm Aid 40th anniversary celebration at Huntington Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on September 20.
