Sugar Mountain
Every Neil Young song reviewed! #11: Sugar Mountain. Album: Sugar Mountain - Live at Canterbury House 1968
Has someone ever had as much faith in a song as Neil Young did in Sugar Mountain? Sugar Mountain would go on to serve as the B-Side to at least five singles, four of which were released between 1969 to 1971, and only served as an A-Side once, when it was released as a single for Neil Young’s Decade compilation album. Throughout its countless appearances on retrospective live recordings released as albums and through the Neil Young Archives service, Neil Young does everything in his power to try and get the crowd to sing along, which they only start doing once Neil Young’s a superstar. It’s almost painful, Neil trying so hard to get the crowd to sing the chorus.
To describe the song in a word, it would be; Juvenile. This isn’t as a derogatory or negative descriptor, but youth is the essence of the song itself. It was written by a 19 year old Neil who was afraid to 20 because it would mean he couldn’t play in an under-20 coffee house he frequented in Canada. This is well known now, but Joni Mitchell wrote The Circle Game as an optimistic response to Neil’s fear. Neil wrote the song in a kind of desperation, claiming to have written over 100 hundred verses, but in all likelihood, writing about 20. The thing is though, I completely understand where he’s coming from.
It’s this kind of fevered mania, full of energy and yet apprehensive of time moving forward. It’s a song that only gets more poignant the further Neil gets away from it. There’s a version of this he plays at a Bridge School Benefit concert that he did in 1998 (with a rare beard), that might be my favourite version of the song.
The lyric that he himself has derided:
‘Now you’re underneath the stairs,
And you’re giving back some glares
To the people that you met,
And it’s your first cigarette.’
It is poorly written, it is cringeworthy, but I think it works in the songs favour. It sounds like something written by a much younger person, it’s this time capsule of innocence that only gets more painful as we all get older, because we miss a time without responsibility and when we thought we knew everything.
It’s a very simple song, a few chords, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus and onwards, but it’s an absolute monster of a chorus. I can see why he saw so much in it. It doesn’t have the fluke profundity of Jackson Browne’s These Days, but it does capture what so much art is about, and that’s youth.