Brian Dolzani cut a convincing outline for a working musician, the kind of traveling troubadour that would fit right in with a line-up of legendary songwriters. The wide-brimmed, bone-white fedora and close-cropped, grey-flecked beard gave Dolzani a convincing road warrior grizzle, but he spoke with soft and sincere gratitude as he addressed his invisible audience.
Last Monday’s “BDNY” Facebook Live performance was not Dolzani’s first online performance since the Covid-19 outbreak changed everything we as a society know to be normal. But it was the first in a series of Neil Young cover performances that Dolzani plans to continue for the foreseeable future.
The “BDNY” name is play on CSNY, the quartet of legendary songwriters that helped launch Neil Young to super stardom. “BD”: Brian Dolzani; “NY”: Neil Young.
So why Neil Young, as opposed to anyone else?
“It’s hard to say why you like what you like,” Dolzani said. “I’ve always had a connection with Neil, I know his songs. I’ve been playing them for a long time. This was an opportunity to learn some of his songs I’ve never got around to before.”
This past Monday’s performance consisted entirely of NY convincingly filtered through BD. The set was a comfortable 45 minutes of Neil Young tunes, featuring relative hits and deep cuts alike, spanning from Young’s late ‘60s Buffalo Springfield days (“On My Way Home”) all the way through 2005’s Prairie Wind (“The Painter”). Dolzani hit Young’s slender, nasally timbre dead center while avoiding the tendency toward parody that often defines covers of distinctive-voiced performers.
Dolzani is planning a reprise of BDNY this evening, April 13. This time he suspects he may lean a little heavier on the BD side of things, mixing an all-new batch of Young covers with some original material.
Josh Wool Photo
The last month or so has involved a lot of adjustments for Dolzani, for whom music is both a passion and a trade. “I do photography too,” he said. “I sell prints here and there of photos I take on the road, but I don’t have a day job as such. Who knows what the next few months hold? Maybe I’ll need to find one.”
Dolzani hopes to avoid the nine-to-fiver’s fate by continuing with his online performances. But it’s uncharted territory — and he is in the same boat as a lot of other artists.
“We’re jumping online trying to scrape some tips together. The first few live streams I did were great. People were generous. Now I feel like it’s kind of evening out, because everyone realizes like, ‘hey, I don’t have an income either — I’m out of work,’ or, ‘I’m furloughed’ … plus, so many artists are doing things like this, obviously.”
Dolzani is a seasoned musician with decades of touring under his belt, but performing for Facebook and Zoom presented challenges he could scarcely have imagined — namely the lack of a visible audience to read and banter with, and an unexpected foray into set building.
“It’s a new world where ‘prep’ for the gig includes building the venue from scratch,” Dolzani said.
Zoom is seeming to suit him a tad better than Facebook; at least with Zoom he has eight or ten windows with faces in them to read.
“I feel like it puts more on the audience. If you get up to go to the bathroom I can see you,” Dolzani said. With Facebook, performers only have comments and ascending emojis to steer their perceptions of the audience and how the performance is going.
“You might go through a whole song and not see any comments, and you start to get a little nervous. But then at the end a compliment may pop into the box and you feel a little relieved,” Dolzani said. “You don’t really know if anyone is even out there, so it’s nice to know when someone is enjoying it.”
Though it is hardly a replacement for the tours that Dolzani is missing out on — “I was going down south next week and then a couple weeks later I had another tour planned,” Dolzani said — but for now the internet is all he and the rest of us have.
“It’s everything right now, it’s where everything has to happen these days.” Dolzani said. He remains cautiously optimistic that he and his family will survive, “doing what we have to do.”
Catch Dolzani’s next BDNY performance Monday, Aprill 13 at 7 p.m. on Facebook and be on the lookout for his forthcoming BDNY capstone and profound labor of love: a video of the Neil Young album Harvest performed live and solo in its entirety, which can be found on Dolzani’s YouTube channel sometime in the coming week.
