Neil Young has made some major left turns in his career, like that whole Trans thing in the ’80s. But his eccentricities have always centered on music. It’s no coincidence that, until now, his most memorable stage set was the Rust Never Sleep backdrop of huge Fender speaker cabinets; they seemed to be his way of saying that it really is all about the music. That had at least as much to do with his being christened the godfather of grunge as did his fondness for flannel.

Unfortunately, the stage set for his current extravaganza — "The Greendale Tour" — doesn’t feature any oversized amplifiers. Instead, it’s outfitted with what look to be leftovers from a summer-stock production of Our Town: a nice little white house on his left, a jail cell flanking him and Crazy Horse to the right, and a platform behind the band that served multiple purposes during his storytelling cycle of songs about the fine folk who populate the fictional town of Greendale. Those people — a grandma and grandpa with two sons, a good one who’d done his duty in Vietnam and a bad one who turned to a life of crime and ended up behind those bars at stage right — were brought to life on stage by actors who mimed the details described in each tune. By the end of the cycle, a couple dozen of these actors had graced the stage at one point or another. And they all returned for the hopeful finale, which had the look of an Up with People encore.

There were other problems. Crazy Horse guitarist Frank Sampedro was relegated to a keyboard that was barely audible, so though every one of the Greendale songs was based on a patented Crazy Horse chord progression, they all lacked the crucial two-fisted guitar attack that he and Young would otherwise have provided. This was especially apparent whenever Young took a solo and the bottom dropped out from under him.

But the real difficulty was Young’s lyrics, which amounted to what you’d expect from show tunes. When grandpa yelled at the press who’d encroached on his property, Young did his best to find words to rhyme with "press." And when Young set the Devil loose on the streets of Greendale, some slickster in shiny red shoes danced among the town’s residents while lip-synching the words coming out of Young’s mouth. It was, in a word, embarrassing. And it was topped off with a big dose of irony: footage of the Rust Never Sleeps tour was screened before the band returned for an encore of classics from that era. Alas, not even a healthy blast of "Like a Hurricane" could wash away the bad memories of Greendale.