Request Line.(The Talk of the Town)(Neil Young at the Christ United Church's Palace Cathedral)(Concert review)

The Christ United Church's Palace Cathedral, a gilded Moorish-rococo fortress in Washington Heights, started life, in 1930, as a movie house but found fame and longevity under the dominion of the Right Reverend Dr. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter, better known as Reverend Ike. For thirty-eight years, Ike has used it as a home base for the dissemination of a prosperity gospel that relies on a spirited set of rituals (e.g., the Blessing of the Cadillacs) and precepts (e.g., "When you discover who you are, it doesn't matter what you've been"), a few of which he has inscribed on banners that hang in the church's grand entrance hall. Lately, for nights at a time, various guests--rock stars, mainly--have taken over the United's auditorium for semi-intimate gigging. Just before Christmas, Neil Young, like Ike an indefatigable aphorist, settled in for six extremely sold-out shows. Each evening, he said a thing or two about Ike, whose peak as a preacher, in the seventies, coincided with Young's as a songwriter, but whose feelings about such assessments would probably jibe with Young's. As one of Ike's banners reads, "I am NOT other people's opinions." Young has labored hard to live that way, although he might accept the widely held opinion of him as a kick-ass dude, pure of spirit and tone. Still, the acceptance would likely be grudging. As he sang, in "From Hank to Hendrix," his show-starter, "The same thing that makes you live can kill you in the end."

Young's song selection was nearly identical from night to night, and by the last show even people who hadn't attended any of the others knew the drill: let Neil do his thing. An announcement declared, prior to his taking the stage, that he had preselected his set list: "Please help him to concentrate by trying to pay attention to the songs." In the first set, Young performed alone, flanked by a semicircle of guitars and two pianos. Between songs, he shambled among his instruments, pretending to be thinking about which of them, and what song, to play next--a kind of doddering game of duck-duck-goose. Then he sat down and played whatever it was he had been going to play all along, his knees wagging back and forth, his ...