Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir has paired back its normal 30-plus size as the opening act for Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Love Earth Tour.Bucky Baldwin/Supplied
Opening up for Neil Young and Crazy Horse, earlier this week, Reverend Billy & the Church of Stop Shopping literally preached to the choir. The New York-based anti-consumerists and climate-change crusaders have significantly pared down their normal 30-plus size while travelling North America on Young’s eco-activist Love Earth Tour. As such, there were familiar faces in the crowd at its two hometown shows at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.
“Our choir members who couldn’t come on the road with us were in the audience in good numbers,” says Reverend Billy, an outlandish, non-ordained performance artist whose real name is Bill Talen. “As well, New York is a liberal city, in agreement with the Love Earth theme.”
On the other hand, the Church was booed in Atlanta. The group had shouted “Stop Cop City,” in reference to the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a controversial instructional campus for police under construction. Apparently, Cop City (as it is known among its opponents) had some support among the crowd.
“I wasn’t surprised to get booed,” says Savitri D., who is Talen’s wife and the group’s director. “Law enforcement has reach in many communities, and I’m sure there were many police present at that show.”
The two are speaking from their New York home via video conference. The tour, Young’s first with his long-time on-and-off band in a decade, plays Toronto’s Budweiser Stage on Monday, with a string of seven more Canadian dates in July. It’s a tough gig being an unknown opening act. The bulk of the audience is there for the headliners, not the support artists. Engagement isn’t easy.
On the Love Earth Tour, Reverend Billy & the Church of Stop Shopping aren’t even billed. They show up on stage at 7:30 or so and start their unusual, evangelistic musical activism. In a review of the tour’s concert last week in Alabama, AL.com’s Matt Wake described them as a “bizarre opening act.”
Talen calls it hard work: “We walk out on stage, and find the audience staring at us, like a stare down.”
But when they play a plaintive song such as The Great Outdoors, the more attentive members of the crowd will understand what is happening. The song asks “What did you do to the great outdoors and to our children’s children – why and what for?” The best fans of Young will know he raised a similar question on the 2014 environmentalist song Who’s Gonna Stand Up?, and that he has been writing and recording such material for more than 50 years, starting with After the Gold Rush in 1970 and Vampire Blues – “I’m a vampire, babe, suckin’ blood from the earth” – in 1974.
Reverend Billy & the Church’s association with Young and his actress-wife Daryl Hannah goes back more than a decade. E-mail correspondence between them began around the time of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. Hannah had been arrested in 2009 in West Virginia for protesting mountaintop removal mining. The Church has a song called Mountain Top.
They are united in what Talen calls the “long struggle against the toxins of the Monsanto Company.” Young and the group the Promise of the Real released the 2015 album The Monsanto Years in protest against the mega agrichemical corporation.
And they bond over anti-consumerism. On Young’s website the Toronto venue for the tour is listed as “Sponsored By Nobody Stage,” instead of its proper name, Budweiser Stage. Clearly, this Bud is not for Young.
There are many variables when it comes to pairing headliners with opening acts: box-office synergy, shared record companies or management, geographical concerns, musical compatibility. None of those things had anything to do with this tour bill.
“An ecocide energy is absolutely at hand,” says Talen, who started protesting in character as the pompadoured preacher in Times Square in 1998. “It’s called Love Earth Tour – that’s the name of the tour. We were chosen because that’s our message, and it has been for years.”
Playing to unreceptive audiences is nothing new for the Church, which has played bank lobbies and police lines. “We spend a lot of time in unasked-for places,” says Savitri D.
Their performances have not been tailored for a classic rock audience, except for a short 30-minute set. “The only limitation we have,” she says, “is time.”
As it happens, running out of time is exactly what the tour’s message is all about.
July 8, Budweiser Stage, Toronto; July 11, Ottawa Bluesfest; July 13, Rock the Park, London, Ont.; July 17, Blue Cross Park, Winnipeg; July 20, Fort Calgary; July 22-23, Deer Lake Park, Burnaby, B.C.