Neil Young and Crazy Horse didn't bring their Old Man or Heart of Gold to Voodoo Fest's final Friday set. Instead, the center of the quartet's two-hour tour was embedded between flurries of guitar wail in one of the band's latest songs, "Walk Like a Giant." "We saw the lights and spiritual shining/Getting closer every minute/Then we skipped the rails, and we started to fail/And we folded you, and it’s not enough," Young sang. "Think about how close we came." In those words, delivered as Young's face crinkled into a world-weary grimace, the man that wrote "Ohio" and had a hand in "For What It's Worth" comes to terms with all the promises that his generation never kept.

Beneath the Jolly Roger that flew above Ralph Molina's drum kit, the band caterwauled through classics like 'Love and Only Love,' "Powderfinger," "Hey Hey My My," with a plaid-wearing Young, guitarist Frank Sampedro and bassist Billy Talbot tightly clustered for easy conversation among their axes. As the band entered its closing run, Young cut in over the feedback for one of only a few moments of stage banter, telling the crowd that the closers would run together as "one long song."

Young said in a recent New York Times interview that "the Horse is very suspicious of tricks." But in his own particular diction, that apparently means stagecraft comes and goes without explanation. At one point, what appeared to be a pipe organ was wheeled onstage, only to disappear. Later, a large apparition was lowered to the stage, but was equally unaddressed. A long coda produced a feedback squall that was the result of Young laying his guitar on the stage, after criss-crossing the stage with workmanlike purpose in front of the band's beige stacks. Then, with no words uttered in the meantime, he stood alone on stage with an acoustic guitar. 

Young brought his extended solos and physical, defiant style to JazzFest in 2009, yet that performance was marked by the necessary turns into Harvest Gold-era hits that the older Fair Grounds crowd came to see. The Voodoo set had its share of plaintive reflection, as Young ran through a litany about his formative years in "Born in Ontario." But "Cinnamon Girl" popped up for what seemed like a few minutes, and the acoustic treatment was given to the heroin caution tale, "The Needle and the Damage Done," instead of "Helpless." Still, those songs seemed like afterthoughts to the lucid, 10-minute guitar runs that populated the majority of the set.

As the JazzFest turn was ending in 2009, afternoon storm clouds rolled in as Young closed out what could best be called a deconstructionist cover of The Beatles' "A Day in the Life." This year, Young and the Horse chose "Like a Hurricane" for their encore. With hurricanes heading for shore elsewhere, nature's participation was the fast-increasing breeze of the coming cold front. As lasers beamed overhead, the band blitzed through a final, extended solo, and Young eventually liberated his guitar of its strings. This time, there was no gong necessary to toll the end. 

Voodoo got a raw treatment of the very specific, if not altogether clear, place where the mind of Neil Young is located in this moment. If Young's career is any indication, he'll probably change in a few months. But, at 66 years old, it's always satisfying to know that a hero still wants to walk like a giant. 

As the song says:

"Whenever I see the big fire coming/Coming to burn down all my ideas/I try to hold down to my thinking, and remember how it feels."