Sitting in a suite at the Regency Hotel in black jeans and a matching T-shirt, Neil Young is discussing the complexities of ordering fish, from an environmental standpoint, with his longtime friend, Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme.
But as he points out in his new concert film, “Neil Young Journeys,” which hits theaters Friday, he wasn’t always such a friend to nature’s more vulnerable creatures. For instance, the time he stuck a firecracker up a turtle’s behind to see what would happen.
“I was very experimental, and I was curious. I was 5 years old,” Young, 66, tells The Post. “It wasn’t like there was blood and guts everywhere and the turtle was dead. It was on the steps of a bank.”
“Neil Young Journeys,” Young and Demme’s third concert film collaboration following 2006’s “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” and 2009’s “Neil Young Trunk Show,” features the legend performing songs from his 2010 album, “Le Noise,” as well as classics like “Down By the River,” “After the Gold Rush,” and “Ohio.”
The insightful treat for Neil Young die-hards, though, comes in between the tunes. As the Canadian-born rocker drives the two hours to Toronto’s Massey Hall for the gig, following behind his brother Bob in a 1956 Crown Victoria, he tells stories and tours places where he spent time as a child, illustrating just how much has changed since his days as a turtle torturer.
At one point, they stop at a spot in Pickering, Ontario, where Young lived for a time in his youth, and where he’d camp out in a pup tent in his yard during the summer so he could be closer to his chickens. The house itself has burned down, just one of the many changes that force Young to acknowledge the passage of time.
“The house was gone, my mom and dad were gone, and it’s just Bob and I. There was nothing left,” he says. “The school I used to go to — I’d seen it five or 10 years ago, it was a great old stone building, an incredible school with a big oak tree out in front of it — they just leveled it. And they built this four-lane road [where there] used to be a two-lane highway that I used to hitchhike on past these apple orchards. It was like, f - - k. What happened here?”
If the locations themselves have changed, their emotional relevance has not.
“We’re going down these country roads, and I’m following my brother. He knows all these places,” he says. “We’re all Youngs. We all go on the back roads all the time, and we all have houses at the end of roads with nothing at the end of the road. That’s just the way it is. My dad was that way, and my brother’s that way.”
The intimacy of Young’s homecoming is matched by his performance. Unlike his last two films with Demme, both of which featured the singer with his band, “Journeys” shows Young, in a light jacket and beat-up straw hat, alone onstage, playing songs that convey stark emotional revelations about his life.
“The show was designed for me to tell a story with guitars and instruments,” says Young of his heavily autobiographical set list. “It was basically a release from two years of touring with an electric band. It was designed as a show — more like a play — than it was like a concert.”