Leonard Cohen put on a fabulous 2.5-hour concert in Vancouver on Monday. The night before, Neil Young played the same venue — two icons of Canadian music who put on completely different shows, but both are extremely talented and passionate, putting everything they’ve got into a performance. L. Cohen put on a dazzling show for a man who’s 78. Ditto for Neil Young.  Lenny is the better poet, Neil the better guitarist. The crowd sang Neil happy birthday at the end of his Vancouver show (he just turned 67) and his band mates gave him a b-day scarf (see video below).

Here are a few photos I took at the Lenny show in Vancouver. The Neil pic was taken by Jay Blakesberg in Seattle the night before. Kinda captures the onstage energy of Neil & Crazy Horse. I’ve also included two new videos of Neil’s songs – one was recorded live.

Here is a video of the Vancouver crowd singing Happy Birthday to Neil:

And if you haven’t seen Neil on his latest tour, he’s doing long extended versions of songs, often ending in feedback interplay that sounds like Philip Glass on acid. Here’s an example of one of the new songs he’s doing on the tour: Walk Like a Giant…
Here’s another new song – the official Neil Young video for Ramada Inn with some great archival footage:

And lastly, here’s Neil & Pearl Jam doing Rockin’ in the Free World.

This is out of context. but this is: