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Neil Young: A Bit Mellower But Still Shredding at Farm Aid 2026
Organization Co-Founder Supercharged His Set With "Rockin' in the Free World"
Neil Young has been widely acknowledged as one of rock music's greatest guitarists for 60 years. A co-founder of Farm Aid — the non-profit that has advocated for family farmers and a healthier, more sustainable food system since 1985 — Young played the penultimate set at the organization's Festival concert in Virginia Beach, Virginia on September 26.
Now 80, his song selection may have been a little more sedate than usual — but he and his band Chrome Hearts lit up the Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater crowd of 20,000 with their finale of "Rockin' in the Free World."
As a boomer teenager, I became infatuated with the music of Crosby, Stills and Nash with their first album in 1969. It continued when guitar hero Young joined the group at the Woodstock festival that year. The collaboration produced some of the performers' greatest hits and a lot of turmoil that produced breakups and occasional reunions.
Barb and I attended one of their reunion concerts, which took place in Washington, D.C. (my home from 1981 to 2011) in April 2000. It was the first time we'd seen Young in concert, and while David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash were their usual charming selves, Young tore the house down with his guitar shredding.
It had been no surprise to anyone who followed Young when he joined Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp in 1985 to create Farm Aid, Young has been outspoken on political, environmental and social issues since he emerged as a music star in the mid 60s.
He performed on Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," a keystone song about the social unrest of the 1960s. In 1970, he wrote and sang lead on "Ohio," a protest song about the killings of four students by National Guardsman at Kent State University; that same year, he released "After the Goldrush" with the lyric, "Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen-seventies."
Fast forward to 2015, when Young released an entire album lambasting Monsanto, the producer of agricultural chemicals and GMO seeds that is now owned by Bayer.. I had moved to Chicago and was starting to establish my credentials as a Good Food advocate working at a non-profit then known as FamilyFarmed, which enabled me to attend Farm Aid's 30th anniversary festival in my new hometown.
Jim Slama — for whom I worked at FamilyFarmed (and now at Naturally Chicago) — caught my attention and asked that I follow him backstage where he participated in an interview on Willie Nelson's Sirius XM channel. While there was security to get backstage, once we were there, no one told us we had to leave. So I settled in, just offstage, and photographed one of my few rock idols in concert.
At the time, this felt like a once-in-a-lifetime, not-even-on-my-bucket-list experience. But launching Local Food Forum enabled me to become a regular at the annual Farm Aid Festival, and because I do my own photography, I receive a photographer credential that enables me to spend time in pit below the stage.
It is quite a privilege. Virtually everyone else in the pit is a professional photographer, on assignment or doing gig work, and their telephoto lenses are about as long as my arm. But I think the following photos of Neil Young's set that I took on my modest Sony a6600 suggest that I wasn't out of place.
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