Neil Young – Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House, 1968
[MOJO review]
Classic acoustic concert from November 1968, recorded between the end of the Buffalo Springfield and the release of “Neil Young”
This set is something of a Holy Grail for Neil Young fans, who are rightly fascinated by the title track, “Sugar Mountain”. As one of the most acute songs ever written about adolescence from within, it has been issued on countless singles and the best-selling first volume of “Decade” – whetting the appetite for the full show.
Well, “Sugar Mountain” delivers to expectation. The set list, for starters, is inspired. It includes many of Young’s songs for Buffalo Springfield – “Out Of My Mind”, “Mr. Soul”, “Expecting To Fly” and “Broken Arrow” – and five from his first solo album, that unheralded masterpiece of West Coast Baroque.
The difference between the lavishly produced recordings and the minimal settings is stark, but Young inhabits the songs with his hypnotic, quavery non-voice and modal acoustic tunings. In the intimate setting of the Canterbury House, the pressure is off, and the result is a relaxed and empathetic performance.
If in Buffalo Springfield he had to fight for space, this period saw the first flowering of the distinctive and enduring Neil Young patch. His early solo material matches strong melodies and arresting images – ‘there’s a fever on the freeway, blacking out the night’ – with a pervasive, palpable sense of unease.
‘We are only what we feel’, Neil Young sings on the set opener, “On The Way Home”. His own sense of physical and cultural marginality gives a chilling empathy to “The Loner”, with its feral atmosphere: ‘he’s the perfect stranger, like a cross of himself and a fox; he’s a feeling arranger and a changer of the ways that he talks’.
At the same time, Young is comfortable enough to take requests for Buffalo Springfield classics and to indulge in several raps, some of which are droll, some of which are revealing. “Mr.Soul” ‘took only five minutes: sometimes things come to you. All you are is a sort of radio station: you send out and it comes to you’.
Young’s sly self-mockery and teasing self-revelation in his inter-song banter fuses into an inspired performance – simultaneously humorous and disturbing – of the eight-minute epic, “Last Trip To Tulsa”: a surreal shaggy-dog story with its shape-shifting lyrics – ‘I used to be a woman, you know’ – and its revenge-filled climax.
As well as an early version of “Birds”, there are some straight love songs from the first album, a precognition of the singer-songwriter boom that would follow in the early 1970′s. Both “If I Could Have Tonight” and “I’ve Been Waiting For You” eschew machismo and, in acknowledging his own frailty, offer another kind of strength.
“Sugar Mountain” slots right into the atmosphere, with its verse-by-verse progress through the telescoping stages of teen-hood: from childhood visits to the fair to the very first mating rituals, from the first cigarette to the moment of leaving home – ‘ain’t it funny how you feel when you’re finding out it’s real’.
The set climaxes with a seven minute version of “The Old Laughing Lady” which, shorn of Jack Nitzsche’s production, twists and turns like the moods of its author. This segues into “Broken Arrow”, which always returns back to the key absence in American life: ‘the empty quivered, brown-skinned Indian’.
Within two months of this show, Young was off on another path, in the studio recording “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” with Crazy Horse. But, like the “Neil Young” album, “Sugar Mountain” marks a key moment in American music when everything was up for grabs, just before rock became a huge industry.
Young’s mass success in the early seventies had its foundation in the artistic leaps and bounds of 1968. “Sugar Mountain” is Neil Young, unadorned, from when he was a true receptor, a feeling arranger capturing America’s secret heart: forty years in, it still has the capacity to draw you in and to stop time.