A surprise opening act for Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts is preaching the gospel of climate change and anti-consumerism during this year’s Love Earth tour. The American leg of their tour started last week in Charlotte.
Billy Talen sat at a picnic table near the Village at PNC’s Music Pavilion. His group, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, is the opening act for Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts’ Love Earth Tour. Young and the band have already started soundcheck on stage — Talen and his choir are up next. He may not really be in ministry, but tonight, he’s going to preach.
“We try to get people to shout, ‘Earth-allelujah!’” he said. For a moment, he assumed the persona of Reverend Billy. “Somebody give me an Earth-allelujah here today. Earth-allelujah!”
Talen, who’s in his mid-70s, has a mane of gray and white hair that streaks back from his face. He’s friendly — stopping to offer facts about Abraham Lincoln or Neil Young’s discography to passing workers. In particular, he was quick to point out that Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” was written in response to Young’s “Southern Man,” a song that references, among other things, the reparations owed to the families of the formerly enslaved.
Talen is also passionate about the planet. He met Daryl Hannah, Young’s partner and a fellow environmental activist, while organizing against mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. They later met again while protesting Monsanto, the agricultural goliath that invented the pesticide Roundup.
“They asked us to open for them back in 2016,” Talen said.
Talen said he parodies televangelists. Much of his work involves interrupting the “retail experience” — “We try to catch people in that low-grade hypnosis of shopping,” he said — because so many of the drivers of climate change are linked to what people buy. That includes plastics made from fossil fuels, gas for cars and even the foods we purchase.
Sometimes those impromptu performances end in arrest. Other times, Talen said, the message really hits its mark. He said, an “unasked-for Earth concert” in a Starbucks ended in the choir recruiting a new member.
“She took off her Starbucks apron, jumped over the counter, left with us and stayed with us for 10 years,” Talen said.
For most concertgoers, the sermon will be unexpected. Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir aren’t billed as the opening act, and most folks didn’t seem to think there even was an opener.
“I wear my gospel whites while Neil's playing. When we're done, I go out into the audience and people see my costume,” he said.
“How are you gauging the reaction of the crowd?” I asked.
“The ferocity of the hugging — that's a good indication.”
Climate news often errs on the side of fatalistic — big corporations that pollute more than some countries are warming the planet, polluting the oceans and making it unsafe to breathe.
The scope of the problem can rob people of a sense of agency, even making some folks deny there’s a problem at all. But Talen’s message, even though it deals directly with looming catastrophe, seems fundamentally optimistic.
“I preach about how when I was I lived in South Dakota, and I was like, 9 or 10 years old, and I would go out under the night stars,” Talen said. On a clear night, he said, he would “just imagine the impossibility of nature. How, if you look at anything long enough, you encounter miracles.”
When he talks about climate solutions, Talen preaches about building community.
“The only way to get through this is by sharing, forming our beliefs together, confessing, making declarations,” he said during one of his sermons.
The Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts Love Earth tour runs through mid-September. Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir’s latest album, “The Sun Is a Star That Keeps Me Warm,” is out now.
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