A disclaimer: The past seven days have included some of the most epic concert experiences of my life, each one getting successively better (last Tuesday=Roy Ayers; last Thursday=the Pogues; last night=Neil Young). Forgive me if I’m in superlative mode, but it’s a cumulative result.

Our seats at WaMu were outrageously good last night, proven by the fact that Paul Allen—aka the Guy That Owns the Joint—was sitting right behind me. We were in the bougie section, surrounded by dot-commers in sports coats and polar fleece as well as old schoolers with grizzled beards and tie-dyes. They may be an older crowd, but Neil Young fans are fan-freakin’-atic.

Young started the show by playing a solo acoustic set that was absolutely riveting. If you know Young, you know the songs, and you know the style, and you know that the solo delivery will prickle your neck hair. His voice was untarnished by age; if anything, age had bestowed a dignity and gravity to Young’s thin quiver that made every lyric resound that much deeper. The acoustic setting highlighted every nuance: He’s got a way of singing a verse with that creaky warble and then ending on a single word devoid of melody, just spoken plain and soft, and it kills.

Dressed in a tan suit and button-down shirt open at the collar, Young sat center stage, surrounded by five different guitars and a banjo and flanked by a baby grand piano to his far left and an upright piano to his far right. He meandered from instrument to instrument, seemingly deciding on songs to play then and there; with no band to confer with, the set was entirely of his own devising. Each song he played was more powerful than the next.

Moving from the well-loved “From Hank to Hendrix” to the more obscure “Ambulance Blues” was a serious way to begin the show, the latter earning a sardonic laugh from the crowd with the line “There ain’t nothin’ like a friend who can tell you you’re just pissin’ in the wind.” Moving from “Harvest” to “After the Gold Rush” turned me into one enormous goosebump, the most transcendent moment I’ve had in this week of transcendent moments.

I’m not sure what it was. Having chewed on the evocative, inscrutable lyrics to “After the Gold Rush” for so long, finally seeing Young sit down at a piano and constructing the chords, and singing it line by line, methodically, blowing into a rack harmonica… I thought back to the first time I heard the song in high school; I conjectured about Young’s own past and the impetus 35 years ago to write the line, amended last night for timeliness, “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century.” There was meaning in the song I’ve never been able to fully glean, and last night, the continued mystery of it made it all the more powerful.

Other writers, far better versed in Young’s canon than I, have expounded upon his brilliance, the way he bundles personal, pinpoint imagery with warped abstract poetry. It’s all right there in “After the Gold Rush”:

I was lying in a burned out basement
With the full moon in my eyes.
I was hoping for replacement
When the sun burst through the sky.
There was a band playing in my head
And I felt like getting high.
I was thinking about
What a friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie.

Young’s stoic command of the song—of each song—was regal. There’s tangible bond between him and the material—songs he’s sung for 30 years—and he possessed each song as much as they possessed him. He paced the stage as if indecisive about what to play next, going to the baby grand and plinking out a note but deciding to sit down with the banjo for “Mellow My Mind.” He finished with “Love Is a Rose,” another album cut with razor-sharp lyrics:

Love is a rose
But you better not pick it
It only grows when it’s on the vine.
A handful of thorns and
You’ll know you’ve missed it
You lose your love
When you say the word “mine.”

and then “Heart of Gold,” one of his most beloved classics. Alone, vulnerable and yet honed, vicious, Young made one of classic rock’s true classics count once more.

It’s been a great week, but nothing moved me like those 40 minutes with Young.

That includes the second, electrified set. Playing with a quartet—Rick Ross on bass, Ralph Molina on drums, and Ben Keith on pedal steel, plus occassional backup vocals—Young proved his iconic status as rock-guitar god. Dude’s 61 years old, but still manhandles his guitar like a wrestler, still grinds out one of the thickest, roughest tones imaginable, still flails and headbangs and stomps. He began the set with “Loner,” a song from his first solo album that I didn’t recognize, and then dwelled for the rest of the set in songs from his just-released Chrome Dreams II.

They’re good songs and, with age, potentially great songs, but it was tough to measure up to the chilling intimacy of the first set. In the middle of the third song, the crowd began to trickle down from the back bleachers and dance in front of our bougie seated section, between the front row and the stage. The trickle became a deluge, with hundreds of people swarming down in front. Eventually the show moved from well-behaved sit-down to raucous, fist-pumping dance party. I wonder what, from his prime seat, Paul Allen thought.

The big highlight of the electric set was “No Hidden Path,” a number from Chrome Dreams II that Young et al blew up into a 20-minute guitart-tastic orgy. Young stalked the stage, slamming pedals, quiverying with righteous rock rage, guitar-facing like an ecstatic demon. Two solos. Then three. Then four. The rest of the band almost looked tired, but stayed locked in as Young blazed on. They wrapped the song up after another grunge-laden lead, collapsing under its own weight.

The encore of “Cinnamon Girl” and “Like a Hurricane” offered the anthemic singalongs the crowd was thirsty for. They were huge, and the band hammered them out dutifully. The lights came up, the crowd wanted more, but in those two hours Young had given us everything he had to give.