Sugar Mountain (song)
| Sugar Mountain | |
|---|---|
| Neil Young | |
| publication | 1969 |
| length | 6:16 |
| Genre (s) | Folk music |
| Author (s) | Neil Young |
| album | Decade (1977) |
Sugar Mountain is a song by Neil Young that he composed on November 12, 1964, his 19th birthday, in Fort William , where he toured with his band The Squires . The lyrics are reminiscent of his youth in Winnipeg .
Publications
The first known recording of the song was made on December 15, 1965 for a demo recording on Elektra Records in New York City; this version appeared on Early Years of The Archives Vol. 1 1963–1972 . The first official release was a live recording on November 10, 1968 at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor . This recording was released as the b-side of Young's single The Loner in 1969 and again as the b-side of " Cinnamon Girl " in 1970. The song was not found on an album until 1977, the 3-LP compilation Decade . A CD / DVD release The Canterbury House performance was released as part of Young's ongoing Archives Performance series with Sugar Mountain - Live at Canterbury House in 1968 in 1968. This recording contains Sugar Mountain's first stereo mix .
Young recorded the song again in February 1969 as part of a series of live shows on the Toronto Riverboat; this version is included in the Archive Performance Series Live at the Riverboat 1969 . Another live recording is the first track from the 1979 album Live Rust .
Lyrics
Joni Mitchell , who was friends with Neil Young, introduced her song The Circle Game in a concert at the Royal Albert Hall on October 29, 1970, with the words:
“In 1965 I was in Canada and there was a friend of mine who had just left a rock and roll band (...), who had just turned 21, and that meant he was no longer in Favorite bar, a kind of teeny bopper club, and if you're over 21 you couldn't go in there. He felt really awful because his girlfriends and anyone he wanted to date with, his band could still go there, you know, but it was one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer that he was couldn't play in this club anymore. (...) So he wrote this song called "Oh, to live on the Zuckerberg" which was a lament for his lost youth. (...) And I thought, God, you know, when we turn 21 and there's nothing left after that, it's a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him and for myself to give hope. It's called The Circle Game . "
On the bootleg album Live on Sugar Mountain , which was released a few days after the concert, Young speaks extensively about the lyrics:
“I originally wrote 126 stanzas. Well, you can imagine that I had great difficulty figuring out which four stanzas to use finally ... I was under the stairs ... Anyway, this verse that I wrote ... It was the worst of the 126 that I wrote. So I decided to include them in the song to give everyone a framework for what can happen. What I'm trying to say here by stopping in the middle of the song and when I explain it to you is this ... I think it's one of the lamest verses I've ever written. But when I'm done singing and you sing along the chorus 'Sugar Mountain' super loud, I'll forget and we can go on. "
