SONG OF THE DAY

“Sugar Moun­tain” by Neil Young (Sugar Moun­tain — Live At Can­ter­bury House 1968, Reprise Records, 2008). Writ­ten by Neil Young.

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- Young com­posed the song on his 19th birth­day in 1964, and its lyrics are rem­i­nis­cences about his youth in Win­nipeg, Manitoba.

- In her album You Can Close Your Eyes, Joni Mitchell, who was already friends with Neil Young by the time he wrote this song, opened her song “Cir­cle Game” with this speech:

“In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock’n’roll band (…) he had just newly turned 21, and that meant he was no longer allowed into his favorite hang­out, which was kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you’re over 21 you couldn’t get in there any­more; so he was really feel­ing ter­ri­ble because his girl­friends and every­body that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it’s one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn’t play in this club any­more. But he was over the hill. So he wrote this song that was called “Oh to live on sugar moun­tain” which was a lament for his lost youth. (…) And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there’s noth­ing after that, that’s a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It’s called The Cir­cle Game.”

- Young first recorded the song on Novem­ber 10, 1968, as part of a live per­for­mance at Can­ter­bury House in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

- This record­ing was released as the B-side of Young’s 1969 sin­gle “The Loner” (and again as the B-side of the “Cin­na­mon Girl” sin­gle later that year), but was not col­lected on an album until the 3-record com­pi­la­tion Decade was released in 1977.

- A 2-CD release of record­ings from the Can­ter­bury House per­for­mance, Sugar Moun­tain — Live at Can­ter­bury House 1968, was released Novem­ber 25, 2008 as part of Young’s ongo­ing Archives Per­for­mance Series.

- A live acoustic ren­di­tion is included as the first track of Young’s 1979 album Live Rust.

- On the boot­leg album Live on Sugar Moun­tain, released just days after the con­cert at which it was recorded (on Feb­ru­ary 1, 1972, at the Dorothy Chan­dler Pavil­ion in Los Ange­les), Young talks at length about the lyrics. He says that when he first wrote the song, he

“wrote 126 verses to it. Now, you can imag­ine that I had a lot of trou­ble fig­ur­ing out what four verses to use… I was under­neath the stairs… Any­way, this verse that I wrote… It was the worst verse of the 126 that I wrote. So, I decided to put it in the song, to just to give every­body a frame of ref­er­ence as to, you know, what can hap­pen. What I’m try­ing to say here, by stop­ping in the mid­dle of the song, and explain­ing this to you, is that… I think it’s one of the lamest verses I ever wrote. And it takes a lotta nerve for me to get up here and sing it in front of you peo­ple. But, if when I’m fin­ished singing, you sing the cho­rus ‘Sugar Moun­tain’ super loud, I’ll just for­get about it right away and we can con­tinue.”

Then he sings this verse:

Now you’re under­neath the stairs

And you’re givin’ back some glares

To the peo­ple who you met

And it’s your first cigarette

VIDEO OF THE DAY