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Musicians Rock and Roll

Heart of Gold Is Neil Young's "Prairie Wind" show on DVD. It's impeccably put together and nicely presented. It's shot at the Ryman {Grand Ole Opry {Country's "Hallowed Halls"}} Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee so you get a nifty setting as well as some great acoustics.

After a fairly long set up, in which we meet the huge number of musicians that will be performing, the announcer introduces Neil, the curtains part and applause ushers us in. Strangely, Neil sounds just like he always has and the band sounds as good as any band ever has.

The sound on this disk is as good as any of your albums, the performers are the best and the song selection is pretty wonderful. This is all of the Prairie Wind album as well as several "greatest hits": top notch {though short} versions of "Heart of Gold", "Old Man", "Damage Done", "Comes a Time" and so on. In addition to the really incredible band, Emmylou Harris sits in on a bit of this and adds another large helping of talent as well as a bit of eye candy.

There's an amazing amount of talent on stage for slightly less than a hundred minutes and the filmmakers have done a nifty job of capturing it all. Neil provides a goodly number of short biographical stories to tie the songs together so, in addition to the career long retrospective, you get a few of those details that add a bit of depth to things.

Disk two includes all sorts of supplements: a film called "Fellow Travelers", a collection of interviews with Young and Demme that gives you the details and premise behind the show, "Cruising with Neil", a discussion between Demme and Young as they ride around Nashville, "These Old Guitars", in which we explore the world of Neil's guitars, a lot of "making of" stuff and a clip called "Blast From the Past", which is a clip from Neil's 1971 performance on the Johnny Cash show.